Dear Caroline,

it’s great that you understood, with anita’s help, that he indeed was abusing you, and that you took steps to protect yourself from him in the future. What you wrote about in your last post – all the measures you took not to upset him (feeding your cat before he visited, not greeting a neighbor while he was talking to you, etc) – was basically appeasing a bully.

It’s also called the fawn response (the term was coined by a psychotherapist Pete Walker). It’s the fourth response to trauma, the first three being fight, flight or freeze. You can read about it in the article “The Beginner’s Guide to Trauma Responses” on healthline dot com.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

This response, which he [Pete Walker] termed “fawning”, offers an alternate path to safety. You escape harm, in short, by learning to please the person threatening you and keep them happy.

You might learn to fawn, for example, to please a narcissistically defended parent, or one whose behavior you couldn’t predict.

Giving up your personal boundaries and limits in childhood may have helped minimize abuse, but this response tends to linger into adulthood, where it often drives codependency or people-pleasing tendencies.

It seems to me that you were trying to appease your “friend”, so he wouldn’t criticize you, attack you or bully you. You did it by staying quiet and listening to his hour-long monologues, and doing all the other things you mentioned above.

You say:

Today, after a week since my message to him, and two weeks after his “escalation” I feel weird. Free and happy but also sad that I was abused and did not realize that, I was just trying to survive, walking on eggshells, avoiding asking stupid questions, or doing anything that would piss him off, but it was still not possible entirely to avoid it. … I feel really sad and cheerless.

It’s understandable that realizing how he treated you, and that you endured it for so long, causes sadness and grief. Pete Walker says this about recovery from the fawn response:

“this work involves a considerable amount of grieving. Typically this entails many tears about the loss and pain of being so long without healthy self-interest and self-protective skills. Grieving also tends to unlock healthy anger about a life lived with such a diminished sense of self. This anger can then be worked into recovering a healthy fight-response that is the basis of the instinct of self-protection, of balanced assertiveness, and of the courage that will be needed in the journey of creating relationships based on equality and fairness.”

You say:

Thinking about how to set boundaries in relationships with people so that it won’t happen again. I think it is easier when people are not evil. I will definitely be careful although I know a few nice people and I don’t think they would act this way, I think there is mutual respect there (except for my family but as I mentioned some of them I do not talk to anymore and some of them I meet for the minimum time during the year).

Yes, in your recovery from the fawn response you will need to set up boundaries so that other people cannot abuse you and disrespect you. The best would be not to keep in touch with people who you know will disrespect you and treat you poorly. Best is not to expose yourself to unnecessary humiliation, unless you can stand firm and call out those people on their rude behavior.