After talking here about the PTSD 4th F "fawning" here and learning more from the thread splitscreen spun off from it, I put a lot of thought into it and decided it may not be too late.  I could say something about the "fawning" I felt I was pressured to do on my visit to Minnesota last week.  I may have lost a friend because I did it, but I wrote an email to the people I visited about it.  Here's what I wrote:

"I write you both because this is about a conversation with you both last Sunday.  After church, in your back yard you asked me to talk about where I grew up without the 'revolution,' that is, as I clarified then, my growing up years in its civil war and the dictatorship after it.  

I had just gone to church and, at your invitation, to a meeting to talk about the violence that had happened in your neighborhood, the police involved shooting of Philando Castile and all of the protests following it. But I was being asked to talk about my neighborhood in turn without mentioning the violence that had happened in mine.

It didn't seem fair to me, but I was  guest in your home, and so I complied as best I could to live by your house rules until my visit was over.  However, a week later and now back in my own home, it still seems like an unfair request.  Especially feeling at home in the home of an old friend who actually went to where it all happened with me, which is why I felt safe to speak openly until that moment.  I won't go on about how I wrote a book about it that others valued, got tenure as a professor on the basis of it, and all of that because all of that was professional.  

This was personal.

Sincerely,

Muji"

I kept it brief and to one point.  I know I may have lost a friend over this, but I have to grow as a person somehow and face this "fawning" issue I have.  So I may lose a friend but I want to look at myself in the mirror and respect who I see there, which is hard to do for me with"fawning."  Thanks for your support.

(For anyone who doesn't know what is meant by "fawning," in the earlier thread about it I posted therapist Pete Walker's definition:  In addition to the 3 famous PTSD responses to abuse, fight/flight/freeze, it's a fourth:

"A fourth type...a disorder of assertiveness that causes the individual to attract and accept exploitation, abuse and/or neglect.) I have named it the fawn response...the fourth ‘f’ in the fight/flight/ freeze/fawn repertoire of instinctive responses to trauma. Fawn, according to Webster’s, means: 'to act servilely; cringe and flatter', and I believe it is this response that is at the core of many codependents’ behavior."

http://pete-walker.com/codependencyFawnResponse.htm)