The 4 Trauma Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn
How do they manifest in your life?
Our society still views trauma as the result of an extreme, life-threatening event like war, a natural disaster, or a violent crime.
However, the truth is that trauma can also be silent and subtle, yet extremely deep. It can affect every decision we make and transform every part of our being — even if we have no idea it is there, deep within us.
As children, we need a safe environment with predictable, available, and loving caregivers. This creates a secure base that will allow us to become confident and emotionally healthy adults.
Without this secure base, we develop unhealthy beliefs and coping mechanisms: our nervous system becomes dysregulated, we people-please, we don’t know how to identify or satisfy our needs, and we don’t know how to build fulfilling intimate relationships.
These coping mechanisms are, essentially, trauma responses. That’s why we need to stop minimizing small, “unimportant” traumas.
Unfortunately, we tend to focus on the fight and flight responses, but the truth is that there are other ways we respond to trauma — and they’re much more common than you might think.
