If you’re dealing with an abuser, you learn to recognize the warning signs that indicate an impending explosion — the tone of voice, the look in the eye, the clenched fists. In response, you may quickly become soothing, reassuring, and pleasant.

Your goal is to defuse the situation before it becomes dangerous. This is called in the psychology literature ingratiation.

The fawn response (also called the “buddy” response) is one of four reactions that people should instinctively fear. Other reactions are fight, flight, and freeze. These are biological and physiological responses of the autonomic nervous system.

You cannot control these reactions.

When you sense danger, your body immediately moves to one of them. Fawn means that you are trying to please or appease the one who arouses your fear to prevent him from harming you. In other words, the fawn’s response is a self-preservation strategy.

Ingratiation does not mean that you are weak or dependent on others. It also does not mean that you agree to the abuse.

Women in danger may “incline and befriend”

Many people in abusive relationships — especially women — unconsciously act out when they feel threatened. You try to keep the abuser as happy as possible and comply with his demands to reduce the risk of physical harm.

It’s scary enough to deal with someone who is or is capable of violence. But in responding to danger, women often need to care not only for themselves but also for their children.

Because of this need to consider your safety and the safety of the people who depend on you, Shelley E. Taylor and her colleagues at the University of California, California, suggest that the female stress response may be “attention and friendship.”

They explain that when a woman faces a threat, such as an abusive partner, she may be unable to fight or flee due to pregnancy or the need to care for her children. So her safest option may be to placate and “take care” of her partner – getting the children out of the way, calming them down, and protecting them from further threats.

Another part of the stress response is to “befriend” others, that is, building social networks for support when needed, usually with other women.

Some therapists may define this excessive caregiving, self-sacrificing, and submissive behavior as codependency. But it may be a symptom of painful interdependence.

Trauma bonds may create confusing loyalties between the abuser and the victim

Trauma bonds are strong emotional bonds between two people in which one intermittently harasses and abuses the other. This concept was developed in the early 1980s by psychology researchers Donald J. Dutton and Susan Lee Painter.

The researchers noted examples of this unlikely association:

People who are held hostage are known to show positive regard for their captors, as in Stockholm syndrome or trauma bonding.
Prisoners are known to absorb the opinions of their guards.
Former cult followers are often loyal to malevolent cult leaders.
Children who have been abused have strong attachments to their abusive parents.
Victims of intimate partner abuse often run away — and then return to their abusers.

This connection develops from two characteristics of abusive relationships: power imbalances and intermittent good and bad treatment.

A power imbalance in a relationship means that one person in the relationship has much more social power than the other. Dutton and Pinter note that unequal power relations can become increasingly unbalanced over time, to the point that the power dynamic itself produces pathology in individuals.

As the power imbalance worsens, oppressed people view themselves more negatively, believing they are unable to stand up for themselves and need a controller. This cycle of relationship dependency and low self-esteem is repeated, eventually creating a strong emotional bond from the low-power person to the high-power person.

Intermittent good and bad treatment creates victims who want the approval of their abusers

Another factor that contributes to the creation of a trauma bond is that the dominant partner mistreats the subjugated partner and later becomes remorseful and loving.

Dutton and Pinter note that this pattern of aversive, and then pleasant, treatment is consistent with the learning theory of intermittent reinforcement. This means that sometimes the behavior is rewarded, and sometimes it is not. Because you never know when you’ll get your reward—a loving, caring partner—you keep trying to get approval.

Intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful type of psychological conditioning. Each time you go through this cycle of good and bad treatment, the emotional connection you feel with your partner becomes stronger. This makes it difficult for you to leave.

An abusive relationship is usually a social trap. By the time you find out what’s happening, the trauma bond is already strong and difficult to break.

Then, when you sense that the attacker may become angry or violent, quickly try to calm the tension with a fidgeting response.

But this fake response does not mean that you are weak. It means protecting yourself and your children. You did the best you could in a scary and potentially dangerous situation, and that did not constitute consent to the abuse – and did not cause the abuse you suffered.

You may have fawned over it, but it wasn’t your fault. He might have saved you.

Women in danger may “incline and befriend”

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