The Way You Make Me Feel
I was hyper-aware of how the people around me were feeling, but not in a way that made me a better friend or partner. I was hyper-aware in the way that made me better prepared to deploy emergency mechanisms to stop people from having feelings, get rid of them as fast as possible or get away from them before they become my problem.
I didn’t say just negative feelings even though those were the ones I was most afraid of. Because I also experienced positive feelings - my own and others - as the inevitability of the drop rather than their enjoyment of the moment.
I experienced a “return to baseline” in my own internal state as a collapse, not as a comfortable balance. The escape from baseline - whatever it may have been at any given time, however fleeting it may have been - was my head being above water.
My baseline was drowning. So to me, when somebody around me went from demonstrably happy to their baseline, I saw them as drowning too.
But it wasn’t (just) that I didn’t want them to drown. That wasn’t it.
As a result of my decade long experience of terror as a child, I saw any volatility or pain in others, as a signal that it would be taken out on me. Like watching the bullets being loaded into the gun and knowing when the trigger is pulled the gun is going to be aiming at you.
I’m not trying to be dramatic. I actually think I would have experienced a real gun less intensely. At least if the trigger on a real gun gets pulled, I get relief or get to feel something in my own senses that exceeds the intensity of the feelings coming from the people in my life.
It didn’t matter who it was. The same conditions applied in every relationship, whether it was Kelly or anybody else. The relationship stakes just determined the intensity.
It wasn’t them loading and firing the gun anyways. Once the bullets were being loaded into the gun, the face always looked the same. It was the ghost from the past taking aim at my echo child in his hiding spot.
Hey, Are you ok? Oh ok, good you just had a look on your face so I wasn’t sure
My primary methods of managing the feelings of others in advance were over-achievement, extreme loyalty, and the anticipation and fulfillment of needs I recognized as ones that had led to emotional volatility when that had previously gone unmet.
Then I would act (become?) busy, or tired, or not feeling well, or distracted, or find some other reason to not be present - hiding out of sight, hoping to stay out of mind in my physical form so that all my anticipatory fawning efforts could speak for themselves without me accidentally knocking over the backdrop of the set, and undermining my externalized empathy.
We’ve exhausted our gas tank, burned out all our candles, engaged our hide protocol and externally redirected all the dissonance as bolts of frustration, anger, self-deprecation or existential exasperation with the state of the world.
We’ve done anything and everything to demonstrate that everything HERE is ok. That any frustration we express out loud or in our body language and face, is just reaction to the external world encroaching and attempting to disturb our peace. It’s these other very serious things I’m struggling with that have me feeling on edge. Not you.
So that means you should never express emotions if I seem tense or upset or disappointed or decimated. None of that has anything to do with you, it’s all me protecting and fighting for us, I swear.
Those were all unspoken words that my internal world treated as unbreakable contracts. When the contractual clauses that nobody agreed to started to be violated by people with no ill intentions at all, that triggered my system to enter an immediately defensive posture, or to retreat or to retaliate.
In face to face combat (otherwise known as talking to people), I would be doing the same hyper-vigilance routine without the ability to hide. Parts fighting for the mic, performing sleight of hand and costume changes right there in front of the audience.
I was experiencing the ebbs and flows of their emotions the way a bull experiences the blade when it grazes them just barely deep enough to send pain signals to their brain. The accumulation and anticipation almost making me beg for the final blow to arrive.
Performance Improvement Pains
The fawning instincts made receiving compliments, praise and apologies feel like being burdened with debt. Not gratitude, DEBT.
It felt tangibly negative to receive praise that I didn’t deserve, compliments about someone I didn’t even like, or apologies directed at someone that I happened to know wasn’t even sure was telling the truth about his own intentions.
That was like receiving a Performance Improvement Plan saying “ahh we caught you being momentary likable and now we expect that all the time or we’ll unfortunately have to terminate your position in our lives.”.
That raised the stakes and made the desire to fawn even stronger - to not to fuck that up and make them regret having positive feelings about my existence in their lives. It made human connection into an even more existentially terrifying fear to face. Every moment of being appreciated drove me deeper into hiding.
Why didn’t you switch the laundry from the washer to the dryer like I asked you before I left?
It almost seems, even writing this, like fawning should be incompatible with forgetting direct requests.
How can I be hyper-aware of trying to manage somebody’s emotions and simultaneously not do the one thing they requested?
The primary reason I’ve identified, is a feeling of instant, premature accomplishment. Usually it takes real effort to predict all possible futures and simulate all the scenarios that could trigger the look that could shame a thousand Tophs.
When it’s something as easy as drying (and bonus points for folding) clothes that offers a direct opportunity to show “I hear you, I love you and I care”, it gets crossed off the list before it even gets added.
Not because of confidence in my memory, but because there are other people waiting to use the whiteboard for other fawns or different projects entirely. Why add milk to the shopping list when obviously you aren’t going to forget the milk?
Forgotten requests, unexpected requests, or any unrecognized unmet needs that would catch me off-balance also became cluster munitions that felt like they were exploding and invalidating all of my previous fawning efforts.
The bed being made, the dishes being clean, the vacuuming - it’s all now nothing more than another way to remind them that I didn’t do the one thing I was asked to do.
The punishment is swift, ongoing and self-delivered. The shame-driven retaliation follows immediately after. Not, “I’m sorry, you’re right. I dropped the ball there.”, but instead…
“Sorry! I forgot, what am I supposed to do if I forget something… remember to not forget? I didn’t do it on purpose. Why does it matter if we need to run the washer again, who cares, it’s just laundry detergent. Are you going to eat the dinner I made before it’s cold or do we have to stand here and make me feel bad for unintentionally forgetting to switch the laundry for a few more minutes first?”
“So, in the spirit of ‘Yes, and…’---when the Echo Child gets startled, the protectors jump into ready position, the DPDR fog threatens to roll in, what does the next five minutes actually look like for you?
How do you keep the ‘Yes, and’ going without the system defaulting back to a ‘No, but’ override?”
“I don’t have the answers for that at all really yet. Not well. My dog peed on the floor the other morning and it took me 5 hours and 30 minutes to feel myself start to calm down”
“It’s Not About the Pee For a ‘content’ nervous system, a dog peeing on the floor is a 10-minute annoyance. But for your system, the trigger isn’t the mess. The trigger is unpredictability.”
“Yes unpredictability but the trigger was actually SHAME. I had JUST gone to the laundromat 2 days earlier and cleaned the other stuff I had that he had peed on. All of it nice, clean, folded. Feeling like a goooood adult.
Now I have a bag full of pissed on stuff including a smaller bed I have to replace rather than wash and a pillow I have to throw away again. That’s how I knew I had started to come down actually, because I said ‘ohhhh I was feeling SHAME like he just shattered the illusion that I’m being a responsible adult.
If that happened and say KELLY had been mad at it, I would have had the INVERSE reaction. Actually, now it would probably just be like ‘oh jesus christ, I’ll take care of it. I would have the normal reaction with her relationship offset in the picture, not fawning, but not all the sudden alone and incompetent because I have to be in the REAL not performed role of got your back as well.
But for the last 10 years I would have experienced it as an extreme drive to fawn, to get her to stop feeling the emotion. Just, please, I’ll fix it so you don’t have to think about it because I would rather bathe in piss than feel the discomfort of your emotions”
“Since you can now clearly differentiate the internal feeling of the Fawn response (‘I’ll bathe in piss to stop your feelings’) from the Mature ‘Me’ response (‘I’ve got your back’), would you like to build a quick diagnostic checklist for those moments?
A way to instantly check which ‘engine’ is driving your urge to fix a situation when a partner or friend is upset?”
“Buddy I don’t use diagnostic checklists when the rage part takes over, lol. That’s like building a fire extinguisher inside the fireplace, made of wood”
“I would rather bathe in piss than feel your emotions” is quite literally what it felt like. Nothing more valuable in the universe than plugging that hole in the emotional hull of her ship before her water starts getting on my feet. Somehow piss bath is better than wet feet. That’s the insanity of it though. It doesn’t even make sense in the moment even while it’s undeniably viscerally what is true.
To be honest, there’s not a lot more to say about fawning that doesn’t become self-indulgent, repetitive or bend towards trying to hedge on its own malformed shape. It was one of the most destructive forces in my life - yet notably one of the fastest to seemingly disappear from my expressed tendencies. It’s one I’ve already shined the spotlight of understanding on and spoke to my parts about in their own unique tongues.
They don’t really like to introduce themselves as themselves, but there were contributions from the calculated part (kind of like The Stig from Top Gear though in the sense that even I’m not sure if it’s one part of many different parts acting in sync), and caught a glimpse of the rage part. He’s the only one of us that would rather us take a bath in piss than get our feet wet.