The Fawn Response for Writers

Friends!

I just finished reading Meg Josephson's ARE YOU MAD AT ME? How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You, which the lovely people at Gallery sent me and I bought at Libro.fm because this is the perfect audiobook listen for me. I am going to be relistening to this and flipping back through the pages over and over. It's great. But I regret to inform basically all writers out there that you need to read this book. The subtitle alone should tell you why. Lol/sob, we I say.

We all know the fight or flight response. But there's also this thing called the Fawn Response, which in my brain is both

and

Psychology Today says that the signs of a Fawn Response are:

• Difficulty saying “no” or setting boundaries
• Chronic self-abandonment in relationships
• Hyper-attunement to others’ emotions, often at the cost of one’s own
• Feeling responsible for others’ moods or actions
• A sense of identity, rooted in being helpful, kind, or agreeable
• Shame or guilt when asserting needs or preferences

Yeahhhhhhh, did any of that resonate with you? Yep, me too. How does this relate to writing, though? In more ways than you probably think.

Here are some things I hear authors say that I think are the Fawn Response, keeping in mind that I am not a psychologist or mental health professional and am instead just some particularly self-attuned writer and agent who listens to a lot of self-help and has done a good deal of therapy.

Is this agent going to be mad at me if I send a follow up email?

I don't want to tell my writing buddy that I just got a full request because it feels like bragging and I know she hasn't gotten a full request in a long time.

If I send this query to an agent at midnight on a Saturday night, even though that's my prime writing time, she's going to think I'm unprofessional and am demanding a non-working hours response.

I don't want to tell this agent I'm talking to that I really prefer email than talking on the phone because they might think I'm weird.

I am going to beta read everything everyone asks me to, even at the expense of my own writing time, because I want people to think I'm nice.