You’ve heard of the Fight or Flight Stress Response but what about Tend and Befriend?

Ever wonder why you automatically say "yes" to everything, even when you don't want to? You're not broken - you're responding from a place of survival. In this episode, we explore the "tend and befriend" stress response, why it's so common in women, other minorities, and ADHDers, and how it kept our ancestors (and us when we were younger) alive.

You'll learn:

• Tend and Befriend v the better known Fight or Flight stress responses
• Why people-pleasing is actually adaptive survival behaviour
• How ADHD masking connects to this trauma response
• The difference between Tend and Befriend and Fawn
• Practical steps to start setting boundaries without (well, with less. Progress not perfection) guilt

Resources mentioned:

• Feel Better Every Day Podcast: feelbettereverydaypodcast.com – especially the Purr! Hiss! Freeze! ep which goes into greater detail around Polyvagal Theory and adaptive survival responses
• Sole to Soul Circle membership
• Self Care Coaching: selfcarecoaching.net

Chapters

(0:00) What is the Tend and Befriend Response?

(0:38) Meet your host: Eve Menezes Cunningham

(1:11) Feel. Love. Heal. – A framework for self-care, Self care and collective care

(1:34) People pleasing and survival instincts

(2:16) Survival of the kindest

(2:36) The science behind Tend and Befriend

(4:24) Fawn and Freeze: Trauma in the body

(6:22) How early trauma shapes us

(7:00) Why we people please (and what we’re really seeking)

(8:27) The power of saying No

(9:28) Spotting red flags early

(9:37) Practising safe boundaries

(11:19) Remember: You have the right to autonomy

(12:27) Moving from survival to love

(13:21) Healing through support and connection

(14:54) Learning to honour your preferences

(16:29) The Runaway Bride egg question

(17:16) It’s never too late to get to know yourself

(18:04) Final thoughts and resources

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Tend and befriend response. So if you were to imagine being very, very under stress, under threat, and if you think about the most powerful people in society, if you think about like the white men, it's safe for them to fight, it's safe for them to run away. Women, minorities typically have to placate, have to be appealing, have to be pleasant, all these things with tend befriend when it's a trauma response, when it is also very common with ADHD.

Hi, you're listening to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. I'm your host and producer, Eve Menezes Cunningham, and I'm a trauma therapist and survivor and ADHDer, a supervisor, supervisor, supervisor, Self care coach, author and columnist. And you can access full show notes and links and free resources through the feelbettereverydaypodcast.com or selfcarecoaching.net.

In this episode, we'll work through my Feel. Love. Heal. Framework.

Feel, which is about the active self- care, Love, which is about that uppercase Self S for the highest, wisest, truest, wildest, most joyful, brilliant, miraculous part of yourself. And the Heal element is the collective care.

We're talking about the “tend and befriend” stress response today. I was interviewed for a UK national paper recently and the interview went 45 minutes, and which was longer than I think either of us were expecting. And I still have so much more to say, I thought I'd do a podcast episode about it. (I’ll share the link when it’s published.)

Tend and befriend is something that can lead to people pleasing. And when we say people pleasing, no one's like, “Woohoo, I'm a people pleaser.”

There's some judgment there. There's some, like high functioning codependency again, a bit tend befriend even. It's how humans survived.

Everyone knows most people know about Darwin's idea about survival of the fittest. But it's also that caring, that empathy that has kept humanity going all these, however long humanity has kept going. Typically, so Shelley Taylor coined the term “tend and befriend.”

And where Herbert, no, Walter B Cannon identified the Stress Response, the Fight Flight Response. Later, Herbert B. Benson identified the Relaxation Response and the opposite in terms of the parasympathetic activation of the nervous system in that same Harvard lab. Shelley Taylor in 2000 identified this Tend and Befriend response.

So if you were to imagine being very, very under stress, under threat, and if you think about the most powerful people in society, if you think about like the white men, it's safe for them to fight, it's safe for them to run away.

Women, minorities, typically have to placate, have to be appealing, have to be pleasant. All these things with tend befriend, when it's a trauma response, when it is also very common with ADHD, we're masking a lot of allies, we often don't know ourselves, we have it.

We just think we override how we're feeling in order to accommodate the needs of others. I hope that this episode will help you have more compassion for any people pleasing tendencies and recognising that the Tend and Befriend response, where it's a trauma response, where it's out of a sense of fear, even though you might consciously have nothing to be afraid of, your nervous system may have been wired to immediately go into offering more than actually genuinely feels good for yourself. We're going to work through some ways.

You might also be interested in the Fawn Response, which again, it's a kind of blamey word, but I know when I first came across Peter Levine's work like 15 years ago, I think, in Waking the Tiger, and he talked about the impala, and how it would play dead when it sensed the lion.

And after the danger had gone, it would get up, shake it off and get on with its day. I used to shake uncontrollably as a teenager, I would sometimes have to stand against walls because I would shake so much. I didn't know then it was a trauma release. When I did my yoga therapy training, and some of the people were doing TRE training as well. I know a lot of people know that kind of is basically learning how to shake it off me personally, not for me, because I shook so much already. But it is connecting with the body, it's letting it go.

The fawn response is that dorsal vagal collapse we've talked about in the Purr! Hiss! Freeze! episode. You might want to go back to and other episodes as well. I'll link in the show notes.

And it's really about recognising that whether you recognise you sometimes going to Tend and Befriend or Fawn, or people pleasing or high functioning co-dependency. It's all just adaptive survival. You are here now, you have survived.

You get to watch this or listen to this and choose for yourself moving forward, what do you want to do? That bit of awareness will help you. And when I say like Fight Flight, people generally aren't delighted with themselves after they've fought or after they've fled.

But when things are stressful, we tend to fall back into those ways in which we were wired, the ways in which we kept ourselves safe, when we potentially didn't even have language, some of this conditioning is pre verbal, it's so young.

Especially with complex PTSD, interpersonal trauma, you think about babies who would have been abandoned or neglected and had to learn to be extra appealing in order to survive, like if their parents were unable to care for them properly.

They didn't know that they were utterly divine and deserving of all the love and care in the world. They grew up believing they were too much. And so we're wired to thrive when we feel safe, welcome and loved. We need that safety and connection. People pleasing can be a way of trying to get that. It's also a way of denying it. Because if we're working from a trauma response, if we're living from a trauma response, we're not showing our whole selves if we're so viscerally terrified of being abandoned.

Abandonment would have meant death when we were little, and also for our ancient ancestors as adults. It's not about shame or judgement, it's just having reasons and extra compassion for yourself so that you can recognise that the reconditioning can be challenging, it can be an advanced practice, and it's very much worth it.

If you see yourself in this, give yourself a mental hug right now. Your nervous system was conditioned this way. And again, it helped you survive, you can learn to heal it, you can learn to rewire it with practice. It's retraining yourself to seek and find safety with the people you can express your whole self with.

There was a gorgeous post that I've been telling quite a few people about recently. I can't remember who to credit, if you know, please let me know so that I can credit them. It was something about going on a first date and saying no to something before she met up with any potential man.

Nope, like no explanation, no excuses, just, “Nope, can't do Wednesday, how about Thursday?”

And a lot of the men in the comments got angry, “Why is she testing us?” And it's like, this is how deep the conditioning goes that women and other minority groups are supposed to be available and appeasing and not make a fuss and low maintenance and all these things.

For the woman who said this is her technique, it was basically showing red flags. If a stranger isn't going to hear your no before you've met them, if they're going to demand an excuse or a reason for something as innocuous as wanting to change a day or go for tea rather than coffee or something insignificant, how dangerous might that person be when the stakes are higher?

As we move into the Feel part of the Feel. Love. Heal. framework, I want to encourage you to think of someone in your life that it feels safe enough to say no to, without excuses, without explanation, without defending your no.

It may be that there's no one in your life that feels safe to do that with. This is information, it's all good. It may be a therapist, it may be a coach, it may be a good friend, but even imagining saying no and not giving a reason, just notice how that feels in your body.

How does it feel to realise that you could actually, with practice, become quite adept at setting boundaries, at showing up as your whole self and being happier, giving your loved ones a chance to love all of you rather than just the parts of yourself that you think are appealing enough, are acceptable enough.

Notice for yourself who feels safe to experiment with in terms of that and also think about the tools you might already be using to soothe your nervous system when you are in any kind of stress response.

You might want to go back to the Relaxation Response episodes, you might want to, and again I'll link to that in the show notes, I don't want to be overwhelming you with self-care tools.

I think what I've suggested, it can be transformative and it's an advanced practice. It varies day to day, sometimes it feels more possible, other times not at all, different people, different scenarios, but I want you to remind yourself that you have the right to say No.

You have the right to assert yourself. You have a right to want all the things you want, not to like demand that anyone else meets all those needs, but you have a right to your own autonomy.

In the Sole to Soul Circle tomorrow, you'll be getting, for members of that, you'll be getting a video with a special breath practice that was developed by Peter Levine to help soothe the nervous system and come out of Tend and Befriend, and also to regulate from Fight Flight, the Sympathetic Survival responses (Hiss!) basically. It's helping, and it's also, it helps come out of dorsal vagal (Freeze!), it comes out, it helps us to come more into ventral vagal (Purr!). I'll be going through that with the Sole to Soul Circle members.

As we move into the Love part of the Feel. Love. Heal. framework, I want you to remember that this response was a survival response. I want you to look in the mirror and tell your reflection, “I survived”.

You're safe, you're here. You might not be thriving yet, but you are safe and you are here. Your survival responses kept you alive, all of those adaptive responses, and by looking at them now you can have a happier, more fulfilling, easier life moving forward.

Honour that. Accept yourself. Love yourself. And thank your whole self.

As we move into the Heal part of the Feel. Love. Heal. framework, you might want to explore therapy, you might want to explore support groups, you might want to think about your loved ones and being honest with maybe one of them, and saying something like, “Look, I'm beginning to explore this, I didn't even know I was doing it, but sometimes when you ask me if I want to do do do, I actually would like some time to think about it and really get a sense of how I'm feeling before I automatically agree.”

Again, on, I don't know, TikTok or Insta or something, I saw a really sweet thing by an ADHDer who was horrified that she'd been in a relationship for years and she thought that her partner loved the kind of crispy tiny fries, whereas she loved the long and kind of, she described them as soggy fries. After several years together she asked him and he was like, “No, I wasn't eating them first”.

She'd observed him eating them first and thought, “Oh OK, I'll save them for him and I'll have the others.”

But he'd been eating those so that he could save his favourite to the end. And she was like, “All this time I really liked the others!” They were both trying to please each other, they'd both made assumptions based on what they'd observed in terms of sharing fries, and luckily they checked in with each other after a few years.

There could be all sorts of scenarios like that in your life, in your relationships, where when you actually begin to question what you've been assuming, you might be pleasantly surprised. It's all, it's building this wonderful muscle of recognising that you have a right to your preferences, you have a right to your needs and wants, so practising pausing, practising to check in with yourself about how you really feel before going along with things.

And support groups can be helpful, you might want to find, I've got the Sole to Soul membership for you, but you might want to find something in person, you might want to find something more formal.

Whatever works for you. As I mentioned, I'll be sharing in the Circle this simple breath practice to soothe the vagus nerve, and I am hoping that you are being kind to yourself as you consider your own potential for going into that response. And that you recognise that all of us have stress responses, the more we know about ourselves, the more we know about how we react under pressure, the better we can support ourselves.

And also, we can remind ourselves that there are a lot of times where it's actually, it might be triggering, but it's still safe enough for you to be your whole self, it's safe enough for you to get to know your wants and your needs and your preferences, and I am thinking a lot lately of that old Runaway Bride film with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere.

He challenges her after observing her ditch several fiancés at the altar, he challenges her to find out how she likes her own eggs, because in each interview she's given it would be scrambled or fried. I feel really funny as a vegan going on about different eggs, I kind of miss fried egg.

If you don't know, if you've grown up accommodating everyone else to the point where you don't even know it, it can feel really sad to think, “I don't even know how I like breakfast, I don't even know this really simple thing”,

But it's an exciting adventure to take yourself on. Remind yourself that you are really worth getting to know, even though it may be decades after in an ideal world you would have learnt these things about yourself, it's never too late. You deserve love from yourself as well as from others. You deserve that curiosity.

I hope that you will let me know how you're getting on, you can email [email protected] or you can comment wherever you're seeing this or listening to this.

If you haven't already subscribed and would like to, feel free to. And thank you very much for listening, thank you for watching. As I mentioned you'll find out more with the show notes with any links and also you can go to selfcarecoaching.net to find out more about the book and the Sole to Soul Circle and my other offerings.

Wishing you a delightful week and I'm looking forward to sharing more next week.