No Apologies
How I am employing the DBT GIVE and FAST skills to show my younger self compassion.
Yesterday, while reading The Four-Fold Way: Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Teacher, Healer and Visionary by Angeles Arrien, Ph.D., I encountered the following Maori proverb that particularly resonated in light of recent lessons in my prolonged exposure trauma therapy, “Never spend time with people who don’t respect you.” What do you do when you don’t respect yourself? The old adage is still true, “no matter where you go, there you are.”
Last week’s trauma therapy recordings were particularly difficult to hear because we focused on the portion of my memory that has been causing the most distress. After examining emotions like guilt and shame, I am now exploring the intersection of fear and disgust. I’m not sure I would have recognized the relationship between these two emotions before my processing session today.
The Intersection of Fear and Disgust
Fear is my constant companion. It is my baseline emotion. If we could take a peek inside my mind like in the Pixar film Inside Out, fear or anxiety would be manning the control panel inside my brain.
Marsha M. Linehan’s DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Emotion Regulation Handout 6 (2d ed. 2015) explains that fear can look like emotions such as anxiety, apprehension, nervousness, overwhelm, worry, panic, and terror. We experience fear when our life, health, or wellbeing is threatened. It can return when we are exposed to a similar situation, when we experience flashbacks, or even when we are placed in situations where others have been hurt. Many of us experience fear when we encounter new or unfamiliar situations. For purposes of this week’s discussion, I am going to focus on the threat to wellbeing or safety.
When our brains experience fear, they can interpret the present condition as a potential threat to safety. Our brain may interpret our surroundings as having the potential to cause harm, remove something of value, result in rejection, cause embarrassment, or experience failure. We can also interpret the fearful event as a sign that we will not get the help we need, or that we may lose someone or something we want or need. When we experience fear, our mind may interpret the prompting event as a sign that we are helpless or incompetent.
When we experience fear, we may experience a rapid heartbeat, breathlessness, a lump in our throat, tense muscles, clenching teeth, an urge to scream, nausea, butterflies in our stomach or the urge to flee. It also can paralyze us. This can look like disassociation or a disconnection from our present surroundings. It also can look like talking ourselves out of acting to avoid the danger.
When the danger has passed, we can become hypervigilant and scan our horizon for similar danger events. We can lose control of our senses, thoughts, or actions. We may isolate, ruminate, or catastrophize and imagine the danger could result in the worst possible outcome.
Disgust is an emotion that is more foreign to my conscious thoughts. Related emotions can include antipathy, aversion, contempt, dislike, disdain, loathing, repulsion, repugnance, resentment, or spite. Disgust arises when we see, smell, feel, or taste something that is foul to our senses, like when an animal whose smell and touch averts our senses. We can experience disgust when we touch something related to a person we dislike or when we observe or experience behavior from someone that contradicts our values. When associating Linehan’s examples to my personal story, disgust can arise when we observe a person engaging in fawning behavior (avoiding or minimizing a perceived threat) or when we experience abuse, racism, or cruelty.
We can interpret disgust as a belief that we are swallowing something toxic or exposure to something that contaminates our skin or mind. Disgust can appear when we dislike what we see in the mirror or when we dislike the behaviors, words, thoughts, or actions of ourselves or others.
This uncomfortable emotion can show up in our body as nausea, gagging, a lump in our throat, aversion to drinking or eating, intense urge to destroy or get rid of something, an urge to shower, an urge to flee, feeling dirty, or fainting. Like with fear, the after effects of disgust can include narrowed focus or attention to the trigger, ruminating about the event that prompted the emotion, or becoming hypersensitive to similar triggers.
As I think about these two emotions, there are certainly similarities. A contempt or disdain for something can prompt fear or anxiety about encountering it in the future. Looping and ruminating thoughts sure sound a lot like anxiety.
Showing Compassion to My Fawn Response
Examining these two emotions give interesting context as I explore the hidden memories of my elementary and middle school part. This week’s exposure processing session has prompted me to confront my fawn response with compassion and understanding. To be honest, I don’t particularly like or respect my innate instinct to please and make myself more attractive to potential aggressors. My forty something self finds such behavior to be repugnant.
Why bow down to someone who means me harm? We can find examples of this evolutionary instinct throughout nature. Animals fawn when they are submitting to an aggressor in attempt to avoid negative consequences. Rescue dogs may lie on their back in a submissive posture, bow their heads, tuck their tails, avoid eye contact, or behave overly friendly and non-threatening in an attempt to deescalate a perceived threat and defuse potential tension.
Fawn response can show up in relationships where the abuser is a caregiver like a teacher, family member, or romantic partner. It can show up as compliance and a heightened focus on the needs and emotions of others at the expense of one’s self. It can look like developing a habit of people pleasing, co-dependency, and an inability to assert or hold boundaries.
People who fawn may find themselves attempting to be as helpful and friendly as possible. They often feel as if others take them for granted. Although they have a habit of overextending themselves, and may even feel the cost of those efforts, they still find it hard to say no. In fact, they struggle to find their voice. They may be afraid to share their opinions with others and stay silent to avoid conflict.
In sharing my plans for this week’s blog earlier today with a friend, I opined that I value candor because it reduces the power of the thing we fear. It reduces shame. There is strength in numbers. If I whisper my fears, hopes, and desires to like minded individuals, there is a hope of validation. They too may share their experiences and I may feel less alone.
This week, I am practicing the DBT skills of GIVE and FAST to help me learn to validate myself. The DBT skill known as “GIVE” is designed to provide guidelines for maintaining relationships. GIVE stands for:
Gentle: Be nice and respectful. No verbal attacks or harassment of any kind. No judging or expressing, “If you were a strong person, you would . . .”
Interested: Listen and appear interested in the other person’s point of view. Face the person, maintain eye contact, and lean towards them. Don’t interrupt or talk over the person. Be sensitive to the person’s wish to have the discussion at a later time. Be patient.
Validate: Use words and actions to show that you understand the other person’s feelings and thoughts about a particular situation. Try to see the world from the other person’s point of view. Validating can look like, “I realize this is hard for you, and . . . .” It can be tricky to validate, especially when we do not agree with the point that requires validation. We can validate someone when we:
Pay Attention: Look interested in the other person instead of looking bored or multitasking.
Reflect Back: Repeat what you heard the other person say to ensure you understand.
“Read Minds”: Be sensitive to what is and isn’t being said. Observe non-verbal queues like the person’s facial expressions or body language. Share your interpretation based on your observations or knowledge of the person to confirm that you are correct and let it go if you aren’t.
Understand: Look for how what the other person is feeling, thinking, or doing makes sense based on the person’s past experiences, present situation, and or current state of mind. (Note, you do not need to agree with it.)
Acknowledge the Valid: Look for how the person’s feelings, thinking or actions are valid responses because they fit current facts, or are understandable because they are a logical response to the event or trigger.
Show Equality: Be yourself, but treat the other person as an equal who is not fragile or incompetent.
Easy manner: Smile or use a little humor to ease the person along. Be light-hearted, and use sweet words.
The FAST skill is a DBT skill that we can employ to maintain our self-respect. FAST stands for:
Fair: Be fair to yourself and to the other person. Validate your own feelings and wishes, as well as the other person’s.
(No) Apologies: Don’t overapologize. Don’t apologize for being human, for making a request, for having an opinion, or for disagreeing. Don’t look ashamed. Keep your eyes and head up. Don’t slump. No invalidating the valid.
Stick to Your Values: Know what you value. Don’t sell out your values or integrity for reasons that aren’t VERY important. Stick to your guns.
Truthful: Don’t lie. Don’t act helpless when you are not. Don’t exaggerate or make up excuses.
The emotions that have been flooding to the surface as I relisten to my trauma story recordings have been fascinating. I am learning that I lost respect for myself because of my fawn response. I engaged in behavior during my childhood that my adult part finds deplorable. Today, I am using the GIVE FAST skills to honor my younger self who learned these behaviors for survival so that I can show her compassion and forgive my adult self when her memory muscle engages in undesirable behaviors out of habit.
Safety, love, and authenticity are core values that are central to my being. Therefore, it makes sense there would be a mental tug-of-war in my head when my fawn response kicks in. I developed it as early as elementary age in response to a perceived and actual threat. My younger self learned to appear attractive, submissive, and loving in order to be kept safe.
My aggressor was scary. They were loud, omnipresent, and took up space. They were older than me. I looked up to them. I considered them family and my love for them was abundant. I love with my whole heart and soul, or not at all. It makes sense that I would expect someone I’ve known my whole life would have the same love and respect for me.
It makes sense that my younger self would struggle with seeing the harm that this trusted person caused. Given that I was raised to put family first, forgive, and be respectful of my elders, it is understandable that my younger self would be trusting, not question the person’s intent, and make myself smaller, agreeable, and quiet. With the right behavior, maybe they would see my younger self was not a threat and the confusing, unwanted, and uncomfortable behavior would end. Indeed, couldn’t the DBT skill GIVE be an example of fawning behavior intended to preserve or keep a desired relationship? (Note: I’m jotting down this very question for my DBT therapist.)
My aggressor was a child. I have no idea what or who may have made them employ these behaviors, but in being fair to myself, I did not deserve their mistreatment, rage, invalidating behavior, or aggression. I will not ask my younger self to overapologize for employing behavior she simply learned so she could survive the chaos around her. Indeed, she had a habit of overapologizing through the years.
Honesty and authenticity are core values of mine. Somewhere along the way, I grew to detest inauthenticity. My younger self engaged in fawning behavior because she saw it as the safest and fastest way to deescalate a threat. She learned to engage in behavior that was inauthentic to her core because above authenticity she valued safety. While my older self recognizes how these core values were in opposition, I can respect my younger self’s innate desire to mitigate harm.
The biggest source of shame that may have reduced my self-respect the most, was the result of actions that were not within my control. I’m not sure when I first experienced my aggressor’s harmful actions, but I know I did not ask for them. Without judgement, I can listen to my younger self’s story and accept that she did not even know she could say, “No. Stop. Please, don’t.” I can listen to her memories, accept them as fact, comfort her pain, support her while she rides the wave of her emotions, and teach her corrective behaviors when the next threat appears.
In case if you missed them, I linked to the following resources in this week’s post:
Taming My Demons (A Deeper Well, Apr. 30, 2026)
Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Emotion Regulation Handout 6 (2d ed. 2015) (available at uaf.edu)
Freeing My Inner Church Girl (A Deeper Well, Mar. 23, 2025)
Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn behaviors in animals (Feb 8, 2024, animalconcepts.eu)
Why We Can Mistake a Pet’s Fear as Friendliness (July 15, 2024, Psychologytoday.com)
Fawning As A Trauma Response (Sep. 19, 2022, apn.com)
Guidelines for Relationship Effectiveness: Keeping the Relationship (GIVE) (uaf.edu)
Guidelines for Self-Respect Effectiveness: Keeping Respect for Yourself (FAST) (gladstonepsych.com)
Wow. What an incredible valuable sharing. I learn so much from you. It makes me extra thoughtful in my position as a "coach/leader". I see new light and ways forward as a result of reading this. We are all so in it. Thank you, Gwen.