Publications

Position Paper (summary)– Working with the Fawn Response in Somatic Experiencing–Informed Trauma Therapy

After the well know Flight, Fight, Freeze response, we now often find Fawn (also called please and appease, or tend and befriend). It is a more sophisticated survival style that can be somewhat resistant to change and can effectively be addressed with Somatic Experiencing using a triune brain approach: working with cognitions, emotions/relations and autonomic nervous system activity tracking. 

The Fawn response can be understood within Somatic Experiencing as a survival strategy organized around attachment threat rather than physical danger. It combines sympathetic appeasement with partial dorsal withdrawal and is strongly supported by prefrontal cognition. Clients often present as highly reflective and relationally skilled, yet disconnected from bodily impulses, emotions, and boundaries.

Because cognition plays a central regulatory role, insight-oriented approaches alone are insufficient and may reinforce adaptation. Effective treatment requires bottom-up, titrated interventions that restore interoceptive awareness, complete interrupted defensive responses (particularly fight), and rebuild trust in embodied signals.

Clinical work focuses on tracking somatic markers of appeasement, interrupting automatic adaptation, supporting completion of defensive responses, and cultivating the capacity to remain connected without self-suppression. The outcome is not reduced relational sensitivity, but increased agency, boundary clarity, and embodied choice.

Full article available on request: please mail to info@traumahealing . nu