Narcissism, Rejection & Betrayal: Fight or Fawn Response

Written by Roland Bal

When you are a kid and are growing up, you need sufficient validation from your parents or a prime caregiver to develop a healthy sense of self and build emotional resilience.

When sufficient love and validation — as in not too little and also not excessively — is provided in childhood, you are less likely to be constantly on the lookout for validation when you are an adult.

Child Abuse and How Your Sense of Self Gets Compromised

When you have been subjected to psychological, physical, or sexual abuse as a child, that sense of belonging, feeling loved, feeling safe, and validated goes out of the window. Even more so when the abuse happened at home or within the family, which is very often the case.

Being abused and having your sense of belonging compromised will either make you guard your emotional space very tightly, through a fight response, or you might channel your actions into a fawn response.

When you are a kid and are growing up, you need sufficient validation from your parents or a prime caregiver to develop a healthy sense of self and build emotional resilience.

The fawn response makes you overly invest your energy in others, in order to get a sense of validation either from them or through your actions.

Both the fight and fawn response are a set of compensatory reactions that attempt to make up for a lack of belonging, feeling loved, and validated.

Survival Patterns of Anger-Fight, or Anxious-Fawn

That hurt of rejection, lack of validation and not belonging, compounded by the abuse you endured, sets in motion a set of reactive survival patterns of either fight, flight, or fawn that will become habitual and to which you will default over time.

Our minds move in opposites. When on a core level you feel unloved or not validated, you will instinctively seek for its opposite, which is validation, to compensate for that lack of validation.

You might go about that in different ways. You might make yourself submissive or subservient to others, and through pleasing attempt to make up for that lack of belonging.

On the other hand, you might become hyper-ambitious, controlling, and perhaps have narcissistic traits, in order to prove to yourself and to others that you are worthy; this as an attempt to compensate for feeling unworthy, on a core and often unconscious level.

The Core Wound: Sadness, Rejection, and the Need for Validation

On that core level, the emotion related to the hurt of being unloved, lack of belonging, and lack of validation is sadness. How you further react to that core level pain shapes your character.

So far, we have laid out the anxious-fawn response and the anger-fight response.

Let's go a bit deeper into what the possible consequences are:

The Fawn Response: Why You Keep Seeking Validation and Getting Betrayed

The anxious-fawn response, as a coping reaction to a breach of your boundaries, acts out by being too invested in other's opinions about you. As a result, you burn yourself out by giving too much of yourself, and in doing so, you set yourself up for being hurt once again.

That giving too much comes with an emotional expectation, which is to want validation for your efforts; and when the expectation isn't met, you will feel rejected or even betrayed.

Also, you more easily fall prey to a charmer or a narcissist who plays on your need for validation for the sake of his or her own seeking of validation through control and manipulation.

It gets messy!

When love, attention, and bonding is taken away from you, either through natural circumstances or deceitful intent, you are left hurt and feeling betrayed.

This re-experiencing of the hurt of disconnection, lack of validation, and lack of belonging further compounds your core-wound, and will possibly keep cycling you through the extremes of reaction: from depression, isolation, lack of self-esteem, and fatigue, back into people-pleasing, being overly expectant, and taking on too much that isn't yours.

The Anger-Fight Response: How Trauma Creates Narcissistic Patterns

The second type of coping reaction and character forming is the anger-fight response. You might act that out through having very tight boundaries and keeping others away from yourself, or you act that out through wanting to control and dominate the environment, circumstances, and people around you.

The latter turns out to be the more destructive response, and many of those in power and business, unfortunately, act out of that compensatory emotional pattern.

The anger-fight response is prime material for becoming a psychopath and/or narcissist when taken to further extremes.

The anger-fight response similarly rests on compensation. It differs in that you "choose" an anger-fight response in order to cope and survive with feeling overwhelmed, as opposed to choosing an anxious-fawn response.

The compensation is that you seek validation through either isolation or success, prestige, control, and domination to make up for lack of validation, not belonging, feeling unworthy or unloved.

To understand how unresolved trauma creates narcissistic patterns at a deeper level, read what makes someone a narcissist. For the full framework on recovery, explore the narcissistic abuse recovery article.