Social Justice and Conditioning Fawning

Nov 15, 2021

Observing the way that time moves and shifts things is a powerful practice for building resilience to confrontation.

In toxic social justice culture, the expectation is that we condition ourselves to immediately respond to challenging feedback with our compliance. Anything short of this is viewed as evidence of fragility or toxicity.

In this expectation we are essentially conditioning people to have a fawn response, and we are stripping people of not only their right to natural and authentic reactions but also their right to choose how to respond to being challenged, if what’s in their integrity doesn’t align with what the challenger(s) expects the outcome to be.

Accepting that unpleasant feelings and reactions are likely doesn’t mean we excuse cruel or abusive behavior.

It means we understand that humans often aren’t their best selves under pressure and we take that into consideration as we go into confrontations.

We allow people their natural process.

We accept in advance that the fruitfulness of conflict often doesn’t emerge upon initiation, but after sitting with it, working with it, and allowing time and intentional engagement to do it’s job.