Belonging and Self-Betrayal

Humans are hard-wired for belonging. Our communities are created from collaboration. We require each other to thrive.

Our urge for belonging is built into our nervous systems. We are primed to feel safest with others. We are soothed by the presence of people who care about us.

Even the experience of emotions is often shared. Someone's joy or grief easily extends outwards through a tightly knit group, as if contagious. This emotional resonance happens in the nervous system, below the level of conscious awareness, where we mirror others' emotions and experience them as our own.

Without the care of others, human infants and children cannot survive. Without the care of community, our experience of consciousness and ourselves unravels.

For most of human history, not belonging meant death. Exile equaled exposure to the elements, and without community, an individual could not survive. Our nervous systems know this and require others to feel safe.

Infants and young children are aware of their dependence and will do anything to avoid abandonment. Abandonment means suffering and annihilation.

When our sense of belonging is threatened, it's easier to give up our values and needs than risk abandonment. It's easier to sacrifice personal values and needs to remain connected, rather than face the terror of being cast out, alone.

Integrity and Belonging

In our modern world, not belonging is no longer a life-threatening risk. As adults, we can survive without the support of our communities or our families. It might be painful, but it's possible.

We don't need to make the compromises that previous generations did, to appease a rigid community, an authoritative family, or an uncompromising state.

We can choose to live by our values, from internal alignment with who we are and what is important to us.

But still, when the threat of not belonging arises, it's easy to collapse into groupthink and betray ourselves. We might not speak up for our values. We might stay silent about our needs.

It’s easy to sacrifice our integrity and betray ourselves, out of instinct, when we no longer need to. Especially if we have experienced relational trauma, and other people feel risky or unsafe, we might give up our power and voice to keep the peace.

Giving up our needs to appease the group (or another person) is a Fawn stress response, the most socially adapted of the stress responses (the others being Fight, Flight, or Freeze).

We often allow the erosion of our own personal power because it feels safer to abdicate it to another. Again, this often happens without conscious awareness, at the level of neuroception and the nervous system.

Shame and the Fawn Response

When we act out of alignment with our needs and values, to appease others, we diminish our self-esteem. We experience shame. Our integrity suffers.

But the Fawn response is unconscious. It's an automatic stress response that is focused on maintaining belonging for our survival.

It’s still easy to treat our neurobiology like a personal failure, berating ourselves for abdicating our needs, when doing so is a survival response. How do we reconcile our need to belong with our need to be in alignment with our values?

Wherever we learned to self-betray, our Fawn response was activated by life experiences during which we believed that fawning would help us survive.

Now that those experiences are in the past, we get to show ourselves that other choices are possible. And even though they feel risky and uncomfortable, they end with a strengthened sense of self-worth.

To heal, we learn to work with the Fawn response and support our nervous systems through risk of not belonging. We care for systems by speaking up for ourselves. We slowly learn that it's safe to take a stand.

Here are some ways to navigate how to shift gently away from a Fawn stress response...

How to Move Out of Self-Betrayal (and the Fawn Response)

1. Notice the nervous system.

Self-betrayal, or Fawn, is a stress response happening at the level of the nervous system. It means we don't feel safe — nothing more. It's not an indicator of our personal strength, potential, or character. Once we understand this, we can choose powerful ways to support ourselves and move through it.

2. Observe where you don't feel safe.

The nervous system reads safety and danger cues below the level of conscious awareness. We often don’t know what made it feel unsafe enough to initiate Fawn response. Often, it's a trigger from an earlier, unresolved experience that lingers in the nervous system, continuing to cue a high threat level when the real danger has long passed.

3. Go easy on yourself.

When we shame ourselves for the self-betrayal of a Fawn response, we are only perpetuating the stress cycle. Accepting the neurobiological nature of what's happening creates more space for empowered choices.

4. Down-regulate the nervous system.

A Fawn response creates an open stress cycle that needs to complete, so we can return to a state of wellbeing. Until the cycle completes, it maintains us in a state of high alert, exhausting our physical, mental, and emotional resources. When we notice we’re in a Fawn response, we need to support our nervous systems to feel safe again. We need to down regulate and navigate the stress cycle to completion.

 5. Trust your instincts.

The body gives us clear signs when we are acting out of alignment with our needs and values. When we are out of alignment, incongruence often manifests as physical discomfort. We feel where our boundaries are overstepped and our needs unmet. We can allow our instincts to warn us when we feel the internal turmoil of self-betrayal.

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Learning how to move out of Fawn and self-betrayal is not easy. We may feel we will no longer belong. But when we act in integrity with our values and needs, we are being authentic.

Only through authenticity will we find others who are similarly aligned.

It might be a risk to speak up, voice our needs, and stand up for our values. But only then will we find out who will stand with us.

I wish you courage on your journey.

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