Muji, the fourth F is, or I should say was, Me all day long my whole life. For me, my abuse happened at a very tender age, atleast the sexual part of it. The verbal abuse, lack of affection and much more took place my entire childhood. So I believe that when these abuses take place at the tender age that they did, then the concept of self was obliterated because all my normal boundaries were violated.

So I spent every waking moment trying to gain love from both of my parents who, unfortunately had no love to give. So from my perspective as a child, if I could not gain love from the very people who should have given it freely, then there was no chance of being accepted as a peer from classmates and children my age. So I did not even try. As a matter of fact, I ostracized myself from them. They would pick on me all of the time. Not because they didn't like me. I think they did so because they wanted me to join them and be a part of the group.

Fast forward to my adulthood, I had no relationships with girls at all probably because of the sexual abuse dealt out by my mother. I lost my virginity at the age of 29. And I married this creature. If they would as much as have a date with them, then in my mind, they owned me. There were red flags everywhere saying, "No, don't get involved with this one." I couldn't help it. She owned me, lock, stock, and barrel. I did whatever she said and wanted with absolutely no consideration for myself. And I paid for it dearly. 7 years of hell, divorce, and 13 years of child support and being separated from my son. Pure, unadulterated hell.

Then came the second marriage. The red flags were popping all over the place. It didn't matter. She was gracious enough to go out on a date with me, so she owned me. I was her slave. And that was exactly what I was. I did all of the housework, all of the poop scooping after 4 dogs, cleaning the litter boxes for 2 cats, all of the outside work, everything. For her part, she was loving life, but after a while, it is hard to really love someone who has no respect for themselves. So after 9 years of marriage, all of the signs were there that she decided to look for love outside of the marriage. She just doesn't realize how hyper-vigilance works. When the name, Jamal, Jamal, Jamal keeps coming up in conversations out of context, us abused folks pick up on that quickly. She is a Chemist and he worked out in the warehouse doing receiving. Warehouse people start early and she started leaving much earlier for work. It is what it is. Sucks because I worshiped the ground she walked on.

The most fascinating thing that I have ever witnessed in my life, even above the birth of my son, is the day I called my mother and told her, "I need you to do me a favor. I need a month to sort things out so I do not want any contact with you, ok." This was the first time in my entire life that I set a boundary. I mattered. I have a sense of self.

And the minute I ended that call, all of what I call the puzzle pieces started putting themselves together on the puzzle board in my mind. Take a bullet rather than being held down on your back......Boy in the plastic bubble.....apart from kids at school......no friends.....mom shoving me out of the way when shooter was in yard......mom every day telling me what a rotten SOB dad was.....dad no attention at all.....brother fondling sister......wouldn't allow 1st wife to allow me at home with son alone.....mom saying, "Your brother always said there was something wrong with him and he realized it when he was 8", Virgin until 29, mom always the victim and always had a male bad guy, Mom's father abused her..... mom stayed home while me, brother and sister flew dad to University of Pa. for last ditch effort for mesothelioma procedure.....dad died 1 day later.....mom together with dad's best friend.......mom restraining order on brother for calls and e-mails......mom went behind order and visited brother and used Bible to give him the out for suicide.......months later, brother suicide via shotgun.........mom taunts her live-in boyfriend, dad's friend, to make him next male bad guy, screws an 81 year old man out of his home......mom wearing see through blouses in front of me and making sexual moans while eating in front of me. I am sure there is more, but that is enough.

And all of that was there all along, but until I set that boundary, it would have stayed just a box of unrecognizable puzzle pieces. Now I have found myself. I have a self. My self has lived a very clean, wholesome life despite what others have done to me and treated me. I have self worth for the first time in my life. And I am looking forward to approximately the last third of my life with hope and optimism. And it will be a cold day in hell before I let anybody take this away from me, believe me.

This would be the first I have heard of it. I haven't been reading much self-help genre lately and confess I only surfed over there long enough to get the gist. My biology passions can even bless it for a pack animal attempting to return to the pack. A whole lot of groveling goes into that process for just about all gregarious species. I think, those same biology passions would want it in a separate discussion from Freeze/Flight/Fight response, though. Returning to the pack is an entirely different response sequence from surviving a specific threat to life and limb. I am not sure I can call it, "The Fourth F."

In my personal, highly co-dependent family dynamics terms, it could be what I have been calling the "Gift wrapped Bullshit." Girl, howdy, I have me some experience with gift wrapped bullshit. This would be the unsustainable list of promises and plans for the perfect behavior and accomplishments. It always seems to accompany the attempts at reconciliation. Again, that is a separate event from the initial blowout which triggered the established 3Fs.

Good chew, muji. Thank you.

I read that article on the 4Fs and in fact I was so taken with it that I printed it out for my therapist and copied it to my online journal. Like others who have commented here, my version of fawning is not really what I normally think of fawning, which would be some kind of "kissing up". But, trained by my narcissistic mother, I learned to believe my only value in a relationship was taking care of the other person's needs.

At this point in my life, I am looking for reciprocity in my relationships. It's sometimes tempting to me to fall into the role of caretaker, but I catch myself and make sure I allow my friends to give to me. If they don't show an interest in me and don't make any effort to give to me, I feel that the relationship falls into a pattern I have outgrown. I am also anxious to reciprocate when someone gives to me, to maintain equality and reciprocity in the relationship.

I still have a hard time believing I have intrinsic value. When people hang out with me, I wonder how I am earning their time. If I am not "helping" them, am I interesting enough? Entertaining enough? It's hard to feel that I am "enough".

Me me me me me.

My sis Fawned herself into becomingthe abuser. The price of admission to safety was copying our dad early and often. She was a gifted toddler who by age seven could torment an infant, because in part of the experiences she had, and because Fawning meant Dad became Safe. till her death at 26, her first considerations were how to become what those around her were. I believe to this day she died never having been a true Self.

In a more strict PTSD sense, yeah, Fawning was part of my MO earlier in life. Then it helped twost up my marriage, we separated, and I realized Hubby had to do his share and so did I, but me erasing myself did no good long term. We learned, we broke our patterns, we thrive eighty percent of the time, and another five percent is the usual day to day snappy tired stressy stuff, and the rest is solid if not thriving.... not bad for a guy whose parents had a cold war marriage before divorcing, and for me coming out of my dads "care".

I still have the urge..l witness this in my mama drama.... but awareness is halfway to victory for me. Trying to cope and compensate safely is the rest.

Thanks for the great comments. It was a hard pattern for me to break, too, in my case because my parents presented it as missionary service in God's name. For control purposes they claimed that to have one's own identity apart from their 4th F script was the road to hell.

It sure has been nice to break THAT pattern. Not hell at all. Not anti-God, either. Quite to the contrary.

Wow, Leo, I really admire how you dealt with it in your marriage. As you said about your sister, so it is with mine. She's a chameleon that morphs into what those around her are like with no identity of her own. For 18 years she was married to a Miami Cuban and lived down there, putting on a Cuban accent though we were both raised in Uruguay. It was as jarring as meeting someone speaking English from Scotland who put on an Alabama Southern drawl.

Now that he divorced her to marry a nurse of his who is a real Cuban, she's mimicking me. I taught college since 1988, even doing it part time when I was a hospital chaplain. Now she signed on to the staff of a small college and is falsifying her resume with items from mine, assuming parts of my identity because she has none.

I guess that's why going back home to Uruguay is so satisfying to me every year. I broke that pattern and like to touch base with my identity's roots. Sure do look forward to retiring there in 5 years or so to make up for lost time just being myself.

Oh, Muji, ouch. The Chameleon is so hard to be around---because not even she knows---I remember it too well. It made me absolutely unbendingly rigid about "Who You Are Better Be Who You Really Are"... yeah, that and trying to not be me went *reallllly* well. Two things: marriage therapy, and Marriage for Dummies. Love that book. Still have our 20-year-old copy. It really took me out of the "Oh if he would..." mode and made me realize, "Oh sh*t, wait, I can do something different?" A novel concept at the time. Hubby still tended to push the Fawning button when he felt stressed, and we'd often haggle (argue), with me saying, "I'm not your therapist and a housekeeper with a vagina!" because I'd be struggling so hard to be Me and not allow that Self to be consumed subsumed and generally inhumed.

Simple to say, difficult to do, we put in our hard time, but so worth it to know my best friend is my spouse, and vice versa. And to realize that as much as I need him, I have to step back and let him go have time doing whatever else, so he doesn't get "eaten alive" by the PTSD or the physical stuff I experience. My dad's sh*t ran our lives. I don't want that for me or mine, soooo....

Sorry to ramble, but yeah, this Fawning thing is deeply resonant.

OMG, that reminds me---my sister pretended we weren't half-Polish. Came as a he** of a shock at her funeral, for her fianc to hear all that Polish and/or Polish-accented English. Why? He was Irish-German, so she had to be Irish-German....

Sometimes I think I am still me only from pure contrariness. If so, first time it came in that handy.

Soft hugs on the sister front. I know the tragedy of being part of that family dynamic and seeing family do that. *shiver*

Big hugs and a great thread, Muji. Helping me a lot with my Mom situation, actually, which is interesting and will take time to digest but.... Good to remember and keep on the table with the other tools and how-to guides.

It's so great to hear that you worked this out in your marriage. I didn't in 2 of them. My Fawning was in full force. I became whatever my in-laws wanted me to be, without being myself. I took my 2nd wife to Uruguay with me and she didn't like it, so we never went back the whole 10 years we were married which, since you know me, nearly killed me.

Wow, your sister denied she was half Polish?? Knowing you as I do and how big a piece of your identity that was, that's a significant and telling fact about her Fawning. I've heard other cases in which people faked being German to hide being Polish. Sometimes Uruguayans will pass themselves off as Argentines, since Uruguay is such a tiny country. It doesn't play well back home.

Congrats on building a good marriage and working through this Fawning stuff, Leo.

Yep, she tried to not be Polish. Freaky. Yet she had a phase where she became very Polish---because it was how to fit in at her college, which was funded by the Polish National Alliance (college is long since defunct), and it was very Polish-culture-centric on campus. She did, however, only date non-Poles and once off-campus was anything *but* that Polish.... It was very hard to keep up with who she was being at any given week....

I dislike Fawning. People get used to us Fawning, and then when we stop, they get upset. Hubby certainly was, till I explained how horrible I felt when I did it, and now we have a code phrase for when either of us is trying to "out-nice" the other. I have that Fawning thing, and he has the "I work long hours guilt" thing. We know how to catch it and stop it, but, whew, there's still our days!

If anything about Fawning terrifies me, it's that potential loss of Selfhood that was so difficult to find and keep in the first place. Add in a dash of enabling codependency from my mom's drinking days and my Mama Drama is all the more tangled.

I know about it, and I am a freeze-fawner. I identify very much with both (and he has a whole section in his 2nd book about us freeze-fawners). If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading his full length books.

We( in-head we ) tried really hard to get mom's approval, and couldn't.

We co-operated with what dad wanted, because we got some comforting that way.

So fawning was only moderately successful.

Mostly, we were alone.

I'm realizing Fawning played a larger role in my adult life, too, than I realized until now. I was aware that I had tried and failed to solve my dysfunctional family's problems by "people pleasing," as you say you did, too, blue. But I didn't connect it to PTSD like Pete Walker does by making it the 4th F.

I think I'm going to read that book as you suggest, sadie.

Leo, I really liked it when you wrote "we have a code phrase for when either of us is trying to "out-nice" the other. I have that Fawning thing, and he has the "I work long hours guilt" thing. We know how to catch it and stop it." To "out-nice," yeah, I get it. I've done that, too, to no positive effect--just to find myself depleted of my Self. Good stuff. Thanks for sharing that.

There is an "Everybody Loves Raymond" episode which has become my family icon for what I am reading as that "out-nice" thing. In this episode, Debra and Raymond take a romantic weekend cruise. Each of them is so determined to make the other happy that they both end up thoroughly miserable. Both are guessing wrong what the other wants and both are going along with the wrong guesses in the attempt to make the other happy. The episode does a good job of taking it from there to the two of them trusting each other and meeting with new stories at the dinner table.

I think that what you are calling, "out-nice" is what I call, "The Debra and Raymond Syndrome" when hubs is trying to out-nice me. I think I am far too pragmatic to be good at it. Quit wasting my time and just say what is on your mind, would ya? My mind reading skills suck and yours ain't looking too hot, either.

Sigh. . . I think plain-speaking can be rougher on a social life than shyness. If I am understanding the concept well, fawning is nowhere to be found in my psycho-baggage car. Balance in all things? Maybe I should learn some?

I have reached a nice, peaceful point in my life since undergoing treatment, therapy and dealing with the truths of the past. And I have released my fawn out in the woods and happily so. It has come back a few times looking at me with those big brown eyes begging to be a part of me again. I just pointed at it and said,"Your home is in the woods, now go."

My fawn, although extremely cute on the outside, had no good redeeming qualities about it at all. It led me to beg for love from people who had none to give. It gave me 2 broken marriages and made me a weekend warrior father with not enough time with my son. My fawn caused me nothing but heartache. I am glad it is out in the woods running free away from me.