Neuroscience of Appeasement
References
"Appeasement: replacing Stockholm syndrome as a definition of a survival strategy" Rebecca Bailey, Jaycee Dugard, Stefanie F. Smith & Stephen W. Porges
"Traumatic entrapment, appeasement and complex post-traumatic stress disorder: evolutionary perspectives of hostage reactions, domestic abuse and the Stockholm syndrome" Chris Cantor, John Price
"Bonding after trauma: on the role of social support and the oxytocin system in traumatic stress," Miranda Olff
"How Trauma Impacts Learning and How to Find Support" Nadia Albritton, MA
"The Fawn Response in Complex PTSD" | Dr. Arielle Schwartz
"Stockholm Syndrome Explained by the Stanford Prison Experiment"
If you have any topic suggestions for future episodes, don't hesitate to reach out! Send us an email at info@brainblownpodcast.com.
We'd love to hear from you.
General Outline of Episode
Neuroscience of Appeasement
1. Intro & Overview
In Season 4, we have been covering what is like to be in relation with one another. For our odd months we are covering the positive relations. In our even months, we are covering the more ‘malicious side’ of that relation, when we don’t feel safe. Last month, we covered the neuroscience of love - and where it clouds our judgment due to an influx of brain chemicals.
Laine: I was once in a conversation with people regarding ethical relationships, and a person with a lot of privilege who was in a severe age gap relationship with a person without a lot of privilege, asked me, “We love each other, isn’t that enough?”
To answer that question, here is this month's episode. This month we will explore common misconceptions of love, a small case study, and the neuroscience to go with it.
2. Common Misconceptions about Appeasement, Fawning and Stockholm Syndrome or ‘trauma bonding’
Goal: Is love enough? Are there times when love causes harm? Even with the best intentions, can we cause harm?
Essentially, when we introduce high amounts of stress, specifically when there is a lack of body autonomy or when there is privilege or power over someone, we can very much do harm. People pleasing, appeasement, doing things against our consent because we ‘love someone’ can be included in this.
This has been called by many names as we have been trying to understand the complexity in the spaces where love and trauma combine. Historically, this has been called Stockholm syndrome, which was a proposed condition to explain why some individuals connect with the ones who harm them. It's never been a diagnosis, but over the last 50 years, psychologists have been trying to understand the most severe of these cases, when someone connects with their ‘captor’. It has been built on over the years. Fawning was a term coined by psychotherapist Pete Walker to explain different types of attachment relationships. Specifically, he was looking at children who try to please, appease, and appeal to the parents who are harming them and the long-term ramifications of what it means to grow up in that space. Trauma bonding is a term that psychologists Donald Dutton and Susan Painter coined to expand on this idea to identify where there is a connection in abusive relationships, specifically an emotional bond between the abuser and the victim. None of these have ever explored the scientific side of why this occurs. Very new research in neuroscience is starting to explore these specific phenomena and trying to clarify if they really exist and why.
So what does this mean?
Is this even real?
How would you know you or someone else is doing it?
3. Case Study
Goal: Where do we see this?
The first reports of this were in 1973 in Sweden. Jan-Erik Olsson entered a bank in Stockholm with a loaded gun and proceeded to injure a police officer and take four people hostage. What is apparently interesting about this case is the care that the robber took of his hostages. There were reports of him dropping a wool jacket over the shoulders of one of his hostages, soothing her and giving her a keepsake. He consoled another, trying to reach her family, and helped when another was having a reaction to the space. This happened over the course of many days. Why this became reported as odd is that the victims connected more with their captors than they did the police who were supposed to be the rescuers, stating that they were scared of what the police would do. Within months of this, Stockholm syndrome was coined by criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, according to AP news.
This gained traction as Patty Hearst was kidnapped a year later. She was the granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper man and was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was visibly abused, starved, and tortured. She denounced her family and declared allegiance to the SLA, but later stated she did not mean to. Her sentence was commuted by President Carter and pardoned by President Clinton.
Though a coined term, the idea of Stockholm syndrome existing has fielded a lot of debate. Is this real? And why?
According to Bailey, Dugar, Smith and Porages “Stockholm syndrome was originally proposed when trying to explain why some survivors of hostage-type situations do not, to the outside observer, appear to react to their situation with fight or flight, and further-more seem to sympathise with their perpetrator as supposedly evidenced by lack of cooperation with police, and expression of understanding or lack of expression of hostility toward their perpetrator.”
They argue that it is important to give voice to those who have experienced trauma, however, Stockholm Syndrome has problems. Specifically, it's been interpreted to reflect care between perpetrator and victim, however, this is not mutual care as it's often interpreted, because mutual care can not exist when you are harming someone. They state that although this has been suggested to help normalize survivor behavior, it does not reflect the survivor's experience, and is more from the observer or even the perpetrator. They state, “A more accurate term would be ‘appeasement’ because the word and overall description of appeasement emphasise the asymmetry in the relationship and the adaptive strategy to regulate and calm the captor, thus minimising potential injury and abuse to the victim.”
4. Neuroscience
So this is the Neuroscience of Appeasement
What happens in the brain during this process?
LAINE: -Cantor and Price are the first to introduce the idea of appeasement, stating that this is a “pacification and submission response”.
Bailey, Dugar, Smith, and Porages are using Porages' theory of polyvagal, as we have covered a few times on this podcast. They are looking at this through the lens of safety. With the understanding of how humans are wired for connection or safety, this potentially provides a lot of insight as to what happens to humans in unsafe conditions. Specifically, they argue that the neuroscience of how we are wired to survive, we have an instinctual strategy to survive regardless of the circumstances, provides a lot of insight. They argue that “Since appeasement may serve to de-escalate a situation, it was suggested that the resulting pacification could contribute to survival.” We have covered how the body changes when we feel at risk of safety. This could even just be an off-hand comment, an odd noise, etc. We can almost flip a switch and our body starts to respond differently. This is our autonomic nervous system changing to a defensive state instead of a connection state, because although we are wired evolutionarily to connect, survival comes first. The motivation to feel safe has to be before connection.
Porages is adding additional perspective, redefining the way we downregulate threat response. He’s arguing that often our natural response when we are threatened is to take a defensive state, specifically, often to fight or flee. He added to this to include our dorsal vagal response, which is evolutionarily older. Specifically, when we can’t fight or flee, we just survive somehow. This is usually a collapse, where we see this in studies of dogs yoked to other dogs who can not control if they will be shocked. They go into a “numb-like” state. However, humans are intensely social creatures. It is kind of our superpower. He states, “Faced with a situation where no escape is immediately possible, some survivors may have the resource to express a type of ‘super social engagement’ that may enable them to engage and effectively co-regulate and calm their perpetrator. We operationally define this capacity to co-regulate and calm the perpetrator as appeasement.”
So what is appeasement? Porages argues it's the ability to maintain a hybrid state. This can help both calm and regulate while engaging with fight/flight behaviors, stating “The ability to appease when in an activated state requires sufficient regulation to appear to the perpetrator as being calm. This form of regulation is not easily accessed or universally available but requires innate abilities to resources to inhibit the sympathetic arousal that would trigger the perpetrator’s defense.” Essentially, using our nervous system to regulate the aggressor through co-regulation.
The neuroscience of it?
Poarges states, “The visceral response to threat is a foundational survival circuit located in the brainstem and shared by several vertebrate species that preceded the evolution of social mammals. These circuits coordinate sympathetic arousal or dorsal vagal shutdown to support survival via defensive behaviours”. Essentially, we feel we are severely threatened, and instead of shutting down, fleeing, or fighting, we are able to use the social engagement system in the ventral vagal complex that regulates our body to co-regulate the person harming us.
How does someone do this?
Poages states that “Activating the neural substrate to appease is a challenge to the nervous system and is not an easily accessible intentional behaviour”. It means that a person is essentially returning to their autonomic state. But, if you think of the social implications of this, that might be easier than you might think.
How is this different than fawning? They argue that fawning is the use of people pleasing to earn approval and defuse conflict, but this specifically focuses on using self-regulation to create co-regulation, which looks different. I would argue that both could be used together, for safety, and though this distinction is necessary on a scientific lens, it is likely to be found together.
They also argue that there are long-term ramifications we don’t think about to appeasement. They argue to appease the first step of self-regulation is an assessment of what is needed, and the second step is the regulatory response. Lastly, this leads into “is it working”, but that has the person continually assessing am I safe, can I keep myself safe. They state,“Post recovery, the challenge becomes how to help support the internalisation and the realisation that there is no longer danger and life threat. There lies the dilemma, victims/survivors of long-term and isolative abuse seen in kidnapping and interpersonal violence are often led to believe there will always be danger and a life threat, even when the perpetrator is not present. Fear immobilises and compromises higher level processing, re-enforcing dependency”.
And an important part to remember in all of this is how much shame almost every trauma survivor has, especially those who might use appeasement. Because trauma so rarely fits what shows up in the 9 o'clock news or the newest blockbuster, victims often question ‘was it trauma’, ‘what part did I play in this’, and look for ways that it could be their fault. They state, “Ideas such as Stockholm syndrome can increase shame. Providing survivors with the appeasement framework normalises and commends the survival mechanisms, given the rare capacity to engage the social network when under threat. Appeasement can and should be framed as an alternate explanation for what may be a strong survival tactic, a tactic not intentional, but dependent on the capacities of a resilient autonomic state as a resource.
5. Practical Application (Strategies & Takeaways)
Goal: Offer concrete strategies to resolve the problem in your scenario, based on the science.
What practical solutions or strategies can address the problem based on the research?
Example: "How can you rebuild trust with your team after communication has
In all honesty, all appeasement takes is someone who is in relation with a human they don’t feel they have any recourse against. We are wired to keep ourselves safe; that is what we do.
As stated by Dongjun Yoo “people almost always obey orders from authority”. Sapolosky writes on this too. We have covered it in this podcast a few times, especially when humans are under distress, we are more likely to comply than not, because disagreement requires a lot from your brain. Compliance is easier.
So what does this mean? How does complying look different than consent? How do you know if you are doing it? If someone else is?
Dr. Anna Kress states if you notice the urge to please someone or do something helpful. Pause. Breathe. Be aware of your body. Try to regulate before you act. Be aware of automatic mirroring behaviors. Again, here is an important place to go slow. Consider yourself - what you think or feel. You don’t have to speak up or argue with someone if you disagree. Start just by being more aware of how you feel. Find small ways to express opinions and needs - stay within a window of tolerance but start to expand out.
A lot of this boils down to regulating first. When we feel and are safe, when we feel regulated, when we have bodily autonomy, then we can stay in a state of consent.
6. Closing & Recap
Goal: Wrap up the episode by summarizing key points and encouraging action.
But it is kind of bigger than that. This is connected to bigger issues. As I hinted at earlier, when we were covering that Porages states, “to activate the neural substrate to appease is a challenge to the nervous system,” and discusses that the brain/nervous system can require rewiring. That sounds so intense, yes, but what is much more impactful is small bits of rewiring over time. How many women feel they have body autonomy? How many trans people? How many people who don’t have power and are around those who have it?
How many times have women been taught to ‘let him down gently’? To not express opinions that might anger their husbands, their bosses, whomever. To smile more. As we covered in season 2, eating disorders are much more prevalent among women because they don’t feel their body is their own anyway.
How many times do we tell children to hug grandpa, even if they don’t want to? Tickling a child when they beg us to stop? How many children ever really have any body autonomy? How many times has it been normalized to regulate the aggressor for so many of us? How many of us have been trained to appease because it's more polite behavior? How many times have you done it? How many times have you overlooked it? How many times have you encouraged this behavior because it’s how you were raised and it’s been normalized?
