Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn
Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn are four common reactions we see when someone has endured a traumatic experience. In trauma healing, understanding and reconciling the reactions of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn is essential to heal post-traumatic stress.
[Transcription]
0:00:01.3: Hi everyone, Connor Moss here, with Warm Heart Counseling. And I wanted to go live today to talk a little bit about trauma.
0:00:12.3: I work with a lot of folks who are recovering from some form of trauma in their life, whether that's physical trauma or emotional trauma or sexual trauma, oftentimes trauma for many folks is centered around difficult childhoods, malattuned parents, or specific traumatic events like car accidents or infidelity. And any of these experiences in life can cause trauma. The truth is that it doesn't so much matter how intense or how difficult the experience itself is, it more has to do with your reaction to it.
0:00:55.9: So something that might be really traumatic to one person might not be traumatic to someone else. And oftentimes, we find that we all experience some amount of trauma in our lives, and what that trauma really is, is any experience that's too much for your nervous system to process and handle in the moment. So anything, whether that's a single incident of really extreme trauma or whether that's a chronic malattuned parent or a chronic experience of emotional trauma. Any experience that's too much, too outside of your window of tolerance to handle in the moment, to process and stay regulated through, that's what we call a traumatic event.
0:01:47.2: And what I specifically wanna talk about is the four most common reactions that your body or your emotions or your system will have to a traumatic experience, and we'll see how these four reactions can play out later in life over time. So the four most common reactions to trauma are what we call fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, and these are terms that describe specific physiological, emotional and mental programs or strategies that your body goes into when it goes through a traumatic experience. And it's important to remember that fight, flight, freeze and fawn, all happen below the conscious mind.
0:02:44.2: So when you have a traumatic thing happen to you, you aren't thinking through, "I think I'll get really angry right now or I think I'll try to run from this." What happens is your... To simplify it, your lizard brain or your lower brain takes over, your brainstem takes over and automatically puts you into one of these strategies for survival. So when something intolerable happens, and again, that can be something that we classically think of as trauma, like living through war or sexual trauma, it can also happen slowly over time with malattuned parents or emotionally distant family units. Any of those experiences that start to feel like too much or you can't handle them, especially as a kid, your body will revert to one of these strategies to try to keep you safe. Now, these strategies come from, if you look at it evolutionarily, they were programmed in through evolution to keep us safe.
0:04:03.1: So you see these in the animal kingdom, you see a gazelle who gets caught by a lion will go into freeze and shut down and go limp, before they get caught, they will run, they will go into flight, if they think they can handle the predator, they will try to fight the predator off with a rush of adrenaline. And we see fawning in animals as well, where an animal will try to take care of or accommodate their aggressor to try to keep themselves safe. So it's important to remember that all of these strategies come from a lower part of your brain that is connected to your physical body. And therefore they require often physical interventions to slow them down. And these can be mindfulness exercises or breathing exercises, or moving your body, but it's not the type of thing that you can just think your way out of, and it's not the type of thing that you should blame yourself for, because this happens automatically in response to an overwhelming stimuli.
0:05:15.7: So I wanna go in a little bit further into detail with each of these four strategies, because what can happen with trauma is if you experience trauma and you revert to one of these four strategies, you can revert to them often later in life, even after the traumatic event has passed, so your body doesn't always get the signal that it's safe again fully and will get stuck in one of these four reactions. So when we look at PTSD or post-traumatic stress, and when we look at trauma healing, we're really looking for one of these four reactions and seeing how that shows up in your life today after the trauma has ended, and then find a way to work with, and soothe that reaction in the moment.
0:06:03.6: So fight is the first reaction, and it's often the most... The initial impulse for many people in a traumatic experience. Fight is when your body goes into fighting mode, there's a threat that has come up, in the traumatic experience, there's a threat that you're facing and your body will give you a huge rush of adrenaline, of cortisol, your pupils will dilate, so you can see more clearly. There will be all sorts of physiological changes in your body that prime your body physiologically for a fight, you might feel tension in your muscles, you might feel like you wanna rush forward and attack something.
0:06:55.9: If your system reverts to fight often or is stuck in a fight response, you might notice that you have a lot of unexplainable anger as you go throughout your life. You can also notice that you react to threatening situations even if they're not life-threatening, and you might react with a lot of anger and your first impulse might be to fight. Maybe you get in fights often, maybe you're quick to jump to defend someone if something difficult is happening, or you just feel this rush of adrenaline, of anger almost makes you wanna scream, and rush up and punch something. If you experience this often in your life, then this could be the result of a traumatic event that has your system stuck in a fight response.
0:07:53.4: So the next reaction that you wanna look for is flight, flight refers to running away from a threat and it's generally associated with a fearful or anxious attitude towards life. Now, I wanna be clear that anxiety can come from many different sources in life, but when flight happens, there's a similar rush of adrenaline. With all of these reactions, maybe except for fawn, sometimes there is an adrenaline rush because if you're in a life-threatening situation, your body is going to try to prepare you to react as best as you can, and in that moment, you wanna be fast, you wanna be quick thinking, and you wanna have adrenaline in your system. So the same with fight, in flight, you will also get a rush of adrenaline, you might feel a lot of energy in your legs, you want to sprint away from something, and your first reaction is going to be, I need to get away from this situation right now.
0:08:58.0: So if you experience a threat and your initial reaction is to run away, now of course, this can be a natural response sometimes, but if you notice that it's above and beyond what a reasonable response to the stimuli is, then this could be a flight reaction that you're experiencing in your body, because your system is reminded of a traumatic event in the past. So in flight you'll experience a lot of fear and anxiety and jumpiness, and you might feel energy in your legs, you might wanna scream and you might wanna run away from something.
0:09:36.0: In freeze, if in the animal world, you see how animals will often go through these two strategies really quickly, first they'll see if they can fight the predator, if they can't, they'll run, and if they get caught, then they go into freeze. So this is a little more of an advanced strategy in your system and freeze unlike fight or flight actually is not as active and energizing. There can still be an adrenaline rush, but there will also be a frozen sensation where your system feels like it shuts down, you might, in extreme cases feel like you dissociate or leave your body. And you might feel like you are not able to respond to the world around you. People might be talking to you, people might be asking you questions or trying to engage with you, and you're unable to respond because you're stuck in what feels like a frozen stance. In freeze, you have very low energy, you feel really stuck, and it can be associated with depression or a feeling of being shut down emotionally in life.
0:11:03.5: Freeze can happen... Some sexual assault survivors report feeling frozen during the assault because there's a really scary stimuli, and fighting and running is not an option in those situations. So in the freeze response, your body is just shutting down to try to... In the hopes that the predator will look away and that you can then run. So if you experience a lot of very low energy, feelings of dissociation, feeling stuck and response, and you have a response to stressful stimuli of shutting down and being stuck in place, then it could be indicative of a freeze reaction that could be happening in response to a past trauma.
0:12:05.1: And now I wanna be clear that there could be many different sources for depression, and depression doesn't necessarily mean that you've experienced trauma and you are in a freeze response, but it could also be indicative of a post-traumatic stress where freeze was the strategy that was selected at that time. Now, the last strategy, fawn, is one that was talked about and discovered in research more recently than fight, flight and freeze, but it was added as another strategy in response to trauma that we see sometimes, especially in family trauma and in chronic emotional trauma, where your aggressor is your parent or someone that you live with. When fight, flight and freeze aren't really options then fawning, or taking care of, accommodating and trying to please those around you could be a strategy that could get you through a traumatic situation with less stress on yourself.
0:13:14.5: So if you think about a really malattuned parent with a lot of mental health problems, who maybe is emotionally and verbally abusive to their kids, fawning or taking care of making sure that parent is in a good mood, is actually gonna be a very adaptive strategy in that situation. And similar to fight, flight and freeze, fawning can get stuck in the on position later in life, even after the traumatic event has ended. So if you notice yourself being overly accommodating to those around you, if you feel not just a desire but a strong need to please people around you and make sure that they're okay and that you can't feel comfortable or safe until the people around you are in a good state then it could be indicative of a fawn reaction, that could be a result of post-traumatic stress.
0:14:12.5: In fawn, and I just wanna be clear that it's not the same as just having a slightly accommodating personality, but it feels like a real need or pressure to take care, and that in a social situation, there may be a lot of anxiety until everyone in the group is taken care of, and happy. And in the response to an aggressive person or a threat, your first reaction might be to soothe them or take care of them, talk them down and make sure that they are okay. So those are the four reactions that we see very often in post-traumatic stress, and I wanna be clear, like I've said that if you have some of these symptoms, it's not a 100% necessarily indicative of PTSD, but it very well could point to some traumatic experience or a memory that you have in your system that you could be reacting to.
0:15:17.7: And so if you notice one of these four reactions going on often in your life, I think it's a good idea to explore more where these feelings are coming from, and potentially explore with a therapist what you might be able to do to soothe or ground some of these ideas. Now, I don't have time in this video to talk in more detail about what to do about these reactions, but I do have another video called grounding techniques where you can explore a little bit on how you might be able to regulate if you feel some of these reactions in your daily life.
0:15:55.4: So I hope you found this helpful, if you're struggling with one of these four reactions or with post-traumatic stress in your life, I definitely recommend that you talk to a trauma therapist about what you're struggling with, it can be really helpful to talk through and unpack and gain some new skills around your traumatic past, and if that's something you are needing help with, you're always welcome to reach out to me, I'd be happy to connect and answer any questions and see if we could be a good fit to work together.
0:16:26.1: Okay, so I hope you found this helpful. That's it for today, and I will see you all next time. Take care. Bye.
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