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

Remember: Your nervous system was wired this way to keep you safe. Now you get to choose how to move forward. 💙

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

#TraumaHealing #ADHD #PeoplePleasing #TendAndBefriend #TraumaResponse #Boundaries #NervousSystemHealing

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