The Four Trauma Responses
You've heard of fight or flight, and you probably know those sensations well: your heart speeds up, your blood pressure goes up, you feel agitation, and you feel like either getting in someone's face or getting out of there immediately. These are the responses of a body escaping an intolerable situation by revving up for action.
Animals have these reactions too: imagine the herd of deer that startles and runs (flight) or two bucks locking horns (fight). These responses are encoded in human nervous systems too and move faster than rational decision making – your heart rate speeds up for that noise in the dark faster than your brain analyzes what it was. But sometimes we forget that not all situations can be escaped, not everything can be fended off or left in the dust: a small child trapped with a large adult cannot outrun or outfight that adult any more than a prisoner of war can leave the scene or establish dominance. So our bodies come prepared with automatic responses ready for these more helpless kinds of crisis, too.
Feeling activated
Two more trauma responses beyond fight and flight are commonly recognized as freeze and fawn. You don't consciously choose these responses any more than you choose to rev your heart rate for an unexpected noise in the dark. They are automatic and selected by the brain faster than you can consciously think. When your brain believes running away or fighting back are likely to increase rather than decrease your risk, it opts for a freeze or fawn response before you’re even aware of it.
Freezing can look like feeling numb and out of your body, with slower speech and thought, low motivation, and a general feeling of being stuck. This is a very common response when the brain intuits that not fighting back is the best way to escape. If you've ever seen a cat carrying around a still but alive mouse, you've seen the freeze response. By opting for stillness, the mouse is reducing its wounds, reducing the alertness of its captor, and saving its energy up for a future moment to run. In the human realm, the body often opts for this during assault: if I am still, I may be less injured and be able to save energy for escape later. Survivors often wonder why they didn't fight back, why they didn't run, or why they didn't yell: the freeze response is why. It was an automatic brain choice based on intuition and a gut feeling of how to save you, because the brain is always prioritizing survival.
Always scanning for danger
Fawning is another sophisticated trauma response, based in human brains that are deeply attuned to social surroundings. When the brain intuits that fighting and fleeing won't be successful and that freezing may not be the right path either, then it turns to fawning. A fawning brain turns with friendliness and kindness to harmful people, soothing them so they don't explode or do something worse. It's an incredibly effective tactic sometimes that forestalls a lot of problems, but it also creates a lot of inner confusion for someone whose brain has gone this direction: why am I so nice to people who hurt me? Why did I do favors for someone who had bad intentions for me? You can read more about fawning here.
It's really marvelous how adaptable the human brain is for the various kinds of trouble a lifetime holds: it can fight, it can flee, it can freeze, and it can fawn. It's a fabulous toolbox for survival!
And, those behaviors that served us well in crisis can become encoded as habitual responses to things that are not crises. The very brain wiring that kept you alive, can later come back around and trip you up when survival is not at stake. The fight response may explode in anger at the wrong people, flight might have you exiting relationships that are not dangerous, freezing might keep you in a harmful relationship, and fawning cause you to pursue relationships that are unhealthy. What keeps you alive in crisis, isn't necessarily helpful all the time.
Freezing to escape notice
That's where trauma therapy comes in. If a chronic trauma had your brain opting for one trauma response above all others, you may have lost ready access to the other ones – or it may have lost access to being relaxed and free of a trauma reaction in situations that don't require it. Trauma gets us stuck. Therapy can help us get unstuck. You can soothe that chronic fighting urge, expend the need to flee, learn to act instead of freeze, and learn to hold a boundary instead of fawning. And then if another crisis comes, your brain is free to select an appropriate response instead of going to an automatic survival path from your past that may or may not be the best fit.
Schedule a free consultation to talk about how trauma therapy could help you hold these four trauma responses in a different way in your brain and body.
Elizabeth Peters, LMSW is a licensed therapist seeing clients in person in Wichita and online across Kansas. She provides EMDR and somatic therapy for adults who are overwhelmed by anxiety, trauma, painful relationships or spiritual harm.