NICE won’t get us there….spiritual bypassing, the fawn response and covid 19.
Spiritual bypassing and the fawn response and COVID19.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could hold ourselves still enough, meditate enough, ignore our own feelings enough and take enough vitamins to reach spiritual purity or at least a sense of peace in these chaotic and uncertain times?
Wouldn’t it be great to think that if we could only eliminate negativity from our lives, from our very cells even? Maybe if we eradicate all negative people, ideas, memories and experiences, all virus and political turmoil from our lives we could live a peaceful and sweet life with no conflict or sorrow?
Spiritual meaning.
The seductive idea of wanting a spiritual existence, of finding the holy and staying with it has engaged humans for millennia. To engage with a life full of meaning and a wish to escape the mundane is part of the human experience. In times of great stress this longing is potentised.
Jung says that the impulse for meaning making is as natural as the drive for sex or shelter or food. “Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable-perhaps everything.”1.
With this urge intact, we become seekers of experience, teaching, religion or philosophies that help us find a pathway to the Holy. With a sense of meaning we can feel less like a tiny cork on the ocean and more like the ocean itself. Connected to something greater, we have meaning and we belong.
In times of struggle and uncertainty this urge for connection, for belonging is heightened. Faith and spiritual practice has served us as anchor and inspiration. Spiritual development is a process that requires persistence and passing thresholds. For example, Depak Chopra talks about the following stages: Innocence, Fear Ego, Power, Giving, the Seeker, the Sage and then Spirit. The last phase includes the knowledge of the “Oneness” with no separation and a spiritual practice of joy. This is the ultimate belonging — union with the divine and with the state of bliss here on earth.
Polyvagal Theory and belonging.
This urge to belong and to have connection is, according to polyvagal theory, hardwired into our nervous system. The polyvagal theory is a way of understanding the human response to threat. In this model, we are equipped with a variety of responses that enable us to engage with and navigate threat. Navigating threat successfully means we function well. If, for a myriad of reasons, this navigation is unsuccessful, we develop trauma.
In this model, the part of the neurobiology that supports our response to threat is the Ventral Vagal Complex (VVC). Within the VVC is the social response to threat known as the tend and be-friend or fawn response. This response helps us navigate social threat and ensures we belong to the group in a way that ensures our safety. The primary aim of this response is to make sure we belong — it’s one of the major ways we are able to feel safe — wired into us from the earliest times when our survival depended on us belonging.
When we are unsuccessful in navigating social threat this way, particularly if that lack of success happened in childhood, we can get stuck in the “fawn” patterning. This patterning is unconscious and is often part of our way of navigating life that we are unaware of.
This is defined by Peter Walker in this way; .”Those who fawn tend to put the needs and wants of others ahead of themselves at the cost of the health of their own egos, and the protection of and compassion for themselves.”
Because this is unconscious and it is socially rewarded, we often find our way through life with these patterns unchallenged.
This patterning, particularly if our behaviour from our early days has been to “make nice”, to put other’s ahead of us, to “take the burnt chop”, will mean that we have little capacity to navigate social challenge and find it hard to tolerate discomfort, particularly around belonging. This can show up in our internal landscape, personal relationships and social groupings.
To be clear, this is not about navigating tricky situations by deescalating but still finding your way to meeting your needs, it’s the unconscious patterning that sets us up to give away our agency in social situations in order to soothe conflict and find acceptance. This can look like co-dependency and people pleasing behaviour.
In the longing to belong to something greater, the spiritual path to belonging inherently requires us to tolerate challenge and discomfort. In Chopra’s model for example, the second stage about ego and fear is all about battling with the challenges of life, recognising that you are the mercy of all that surrounds you. Engaging with power in the third stage is fraught with risk of being seduced by the sense of cultural power such as money and position. In many ways the final step of Sage and Spirit are only possible because of the wrestling in the earlier stages.
A collision of need.
When our experience has caused us to adapt so that our “go to” response is to fawn, we are set up in an unconscious way to pattern our lives and choices around staying “nice”, not rocking the boat. We will engage in our lives striving to make others comfortable and to make nice, we learn to view conflict and hardship as a threat; this means we are going to avoid or withdraw from these experiences.
When we have a hardwired fawn response we are robbed of our stamina to withstand discomfort and conflict, we are vulnerable to a process called spiritual bypassing.
Spiritual bypassing.
John Welwood, who coined the phrase, defines spiritual bypassing as using “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business,’ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.” The goal of such practices, he claimed, was enlightenment.
The longing to avoid hard stuff makes us attempt a leap over the uncomfortable and sometimes shameful wrestling with ourselves required in the first stages of spiritual growth. We don’t have the capacity to look at our own shadow or weakness because we are trying to belong and to avoid the discomfort of these unpalatable facets of ourselves and our lives. What we long for and what we keep grasping for is the blissful union and ultimate belonging.
In western culture (aka white supremacy aka patriarchy and capitalism) we have developed a propensity to take an eclectic grab bag approach to spirituality. Gone are the days of deep spiritual connection and belonging to the land. As part of the legacy of colonialism white people are dislocated from our ancestral land and spiritual practices we seek belonging in borrowing spiritual traditions from first nations people, perhaps seeking the belonging they have and grabbing onto traditional practices of others without embedded understanding of the deeper roots.
When we are hardwired for feeling threatened by the difficult and the complex because of our trauma, we are susceptible to vaulting over discomfort and trying to grab the shiny ring of enlightenment again and again. Couple this with modern western culture’s social instructions about what a good person looks like — all giving, selfless and hard-working, if our trauma remains untended, as it often does with the fawn response because it’s so socially rewarded, we are left without any muscle for difficulty and this weakens us, particularly when things are uncertain in the wider culture.
Uncertainty in the time of covid19.
I wonder if, in the current climate of distress and uncertainty around covid19, we are seeing a lot of this fawn patterning in action. Is it possible that part of the dynamic within the spiritual community that is adhering to theories about the virus being the great awakening, only those who believe the virus is a hoax and who are in the know about the machinations of Bill Gates will be saved by Trump as the saviour from liberal politics as rotten cabals of paedophiles is an unwillingness to confront the complexities and challenges inherent in social change and the very real social threat the virus poses?
I wonder if in our own trauma response we are trying to avoid the discomfort and challenge of this time and shoring up our sense of self using spiritual ideas to both belong and feel more enlightened than those who are wearing masks, staying socially distanced, adhering to stay at home orders?
I wonder if in our longing to belong, in our wounded attempts to make meaning, we are damaging the very thing that will help us get through — our healthy and generous relationships with each other.
1. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. C.G. Jung.
2. http://pete-walker.com/fourFs_TraumaTypologyComplexPTSD.htm