Fawniness and florality
I recently came up with the concepts ‘fawniness’ and ‘florality’ - two opposite terms to describe problematic orientations to one’s own needs and others’.
The name ‘fawniness’ comes from the ‘fawn’ trauma response. When you’re feeling fawn-y, you feel inclined to appease and please others more than is reasonable. You’re over-anxious about others’ opinions; you fret about stepping on their toes. This might look like:
going along with group plans even when they don’t really suit you: ‘Yeah, I guess the steakhouse is fine…I mean sure, I’m a vegan, but…you know what, it’s fine. I’ll have a salad’
agreeing to too many projects or plans even when you don’t have time or energy: ‘Hmm, well I am kinda busy this week, but…you know what, I can fit in a coffee on Wednesday between my yoga class at 8 and work at 10’
avoid blaming others and go out of your way to excuse them: ‘I mean, sure my coworker set my desk on fire and let her cat eat my favourite bag, but… I’m sure she had her reasons’
I used to think of this trait as ‘Bad Agreeableness’, but I changed the name because (a) it seems uncharitable to the parts of me that have fawny impulses - they probably want to behave this way for a good reason, they’re not ‘bad’, and (b) it doesn’t correspond to any of the facets of agreeableness in the ‘OCEAN’ personality trait sense.
The opposite of ‘fawniness’ is ‘florality’. This name is partly a pun on ‘flora and fauna’, but it also hints at ‘a focus on one’s own flourishing’. If fawniness is the maladaptive tendency to please others, florality is an excessive, self-centred preoccupation with one’s own needs, an over-eagerness to draw and defend boundaries around oneself, a spikiness that protects a vulnerable, sensitive inside.
An example: when I travel, I’m sometimes anxious that I won’t be able to have a decent breakfast. I’ve noticed that starting the day with a good, protein-rich vegan breakfast is good for my mood, but obviously, protein-rich *and* vegan breakfasts are somewhat hard to come by if you’re not in your own home with your own fridge and your own vast stacks of tofu. It’s good to have noticed this, but sometimes I catastrophise and get over-anxious about it. It’s good to know what I want and be willing to advocate for it, but I also want to be resilient to *not* getting what I want occasionally, to things not being ‘optimal’.
I think I’m too fawny in some contexts, too floral in others. This makes sense if you buy a ‘multiple mind’ psychological framework - I have some fawny parts, and some floral parts, and they react to each other. Something IFS clarified for me was how a person can be both too X and too the-opposite-of-X, at different times or in different contexts. The fawny parts take charge, which causes the floral parts to react in opposition; and vice versa. For me, attempting to be too altruistic, too self-sacrificing, is self-defeating - it just means that in other areas of life I become fussy, spiky and irritable, as my floral parts try desperately to reassert my needs, my preferences.
All this means that overall I end up behaving reasonably, but I waste unnecessary effort. It’s like I’m a ship, and one part keeps yanking the rudder right, and another keeps yanking it left, again and again, yelling at each other all the time. I end up going roughly-straight on (I guess? I don’t really know how boats work), but in a way that uses a lot more energy, and involves a lot more conflict, than if I’d just gone straight ahead to begin with.
Photo at the top by Erika Fletcher on Unsplash