Welcome back to the next in our series on healing trauma.
Today we're talking about fight,
Flight,
Freeze,
And fawn,
Emergency responses that are generated by our nervous system.
We will also go a bit into the polyvagal theory of Dr.
Stephen Porges who is in partnership with a licensed clinical social worker,
Deb Dana.
The basics of fight,
Flight,
And freeze are that these are responses that happen in our body when we feel like we're in danger.
When we assess something to be dangerous,
We move into some kind of a response that will help us to survive.
One of the important things to know about this is that these are generated by the unconscious mind,
By the nervous system.
These are not things that we think through consciously and then make a decision about.
One of the reasons that that's important to know is because we sometimes shame ourselves for going into a fight response,
For running away from something,
But these are really generated on a much deeper level than that.
Our nervous system has a negativity bias.
It remembers everything that's ever happened to us that was scary or overwhelming or hurtful.
It uses all of that evidence to predict what's safe and dangerous in this moment and going forward.
A lot of that evidence is from the past,
From when we were a child for instance,
And something that we could quite easily handle right now was overwhelming to us at the time.
Most of us will try to get away from trouble if we can.
That's the flight response.
If our system decides that we have a better chance if we go into a fight response,
Then that's what we'll do.
And if neither one of those seem like they're going to work,
Then we're going to go into a freeze or a shutdown response.
The fourth one,
Fawning or appeasing or people-pleasing,
Is more of a social strategy.
It's something that we've learned to do to try to get the person harming us on our side,
To try to protect ourselves through being super nice,
Not being confrontational.
It doesn't work exactly the same as fight,
Flight,
And freeze,
Which are really in our body.
They're physical.
Fawning and people-pleasing is a little bit more related to social acceptance and inclusion,
Avoiding social ostracism or rejection.
And it's also quite gender-based.
People conditioned as girls and women are more likely to fawn than a man is,
For instance.
In our body,
A flight response feels like,
I need to get out of here.
Sometimes we physically escape,
And that can happen in a moment.
It can also happen over time.
If we have a flight response,
We want to get away from our hometown,
From our family,
We might be inspired to move across the country.
We might also get really involved in screens,
Video games,
Movies,
Shows.
It's a way that we can escape our own life and not have to bring it in,
Not have to acknowledge or live through what's going on,
Because we're not really there.
Dissociation,
Disconnection,
Those are part of a flight response.
And dissociation can also be part of fight and freeze as well.
If we go into a fight response,
That's different than being angry and expressing our anger.
When we are activated into a survival response,
We're not really operating from our full self.
The whole of our brain is not engaged.
We're in a fight for survival.
This could look like out-of-control anger or rage.
When we're not in a fight response,
We might really care for that person.
When we are in a fight response,
That becomes secondary.
We need to survive this encounter.
We're often really hot,
Impulsive.
We don't think through the impact of what we're saying and the effect that we'll have on our relationships.
People who typically go into a fight response have a lot more trouble in their relationships because other people are scared of them and trying to protect themselves from them.
People in a flight response might be frustrating to be in a relationship with because it's hard to connect with them.
In a fight response,
There's no question that person is engaged and it doesn't feel safe for the people around them.
We have a sense that they're not operating with their full capacity.
They're out of control.
A freeze or a shutdown response can happen again in the moment or it can be long term.
We might disconnect,
Dissociate.
We leave the room even though we might physically still be there.
Our breathing might become shallow.
If we're really scared,
We might be holding our breath.
Our body becomes very small.
We want to avoid detection from the person who could hurt us.
This can certainly be physical and it can also be emotional and social.
We're trying to protect ourselves from being hurt and disconnecting or shutting down is one of the ways that we do that.
When we know that these fight,
Flight and freeze responses are generated by our nervous system,
There's a couple of things that we could do.
One is that we could try to increase the accuracy of our perception of,
Am I in danger?
Am I safe?
That's called our neuroception.
Partly that involves watching our thoughts,
Being aware of the thoughts that are going through our mind.
Somatic mindfulness can help us to get an early warning of when we're starting to get dysregulated.
We talk a lot about emotional regulation,
Emotional dysregulation and co-regulation.
When we are in a fight,
Flight,
Freeze,
That's another way of saying that we're emotionally dysregulated.
We're not acting with our full capacity.
When we're emotionally regulated,
Then we're able to come up out of a freeze response.
We're able to feel and express our anger without being in a fight response.
We might still be very angry and we might sound angry,
But we are also present and grounded and aware of what we're doing.
So we come out of these responses and back into regulation.
In the polyvagal theory,
That's referred to as ventral vagal.
Ventral vagal is a state where we feel calm and grounded and we have our brain available to us.
We are not in a survival response.
We go through these states all the time.
We go into a bit of a freeze,
We get into a bit of a fight response or a flight.
The key is to recognize what's going on and to be able to come back into being grounded into a state of ventral vagal.
We want to know what's going on.
We want to be able to come into nervous system regulation.
When we are grounded and calm and have better access to our mind,
Our wisdom,
Our heart,
We want to be kind and compassionate.
We have to come back into ventral vagal,
This state of being calm and grounded and having access to our full brain and our wisdom in order to function well in the world.
It's also the only state in which we can feel compassion,
Especially for ourselves.
When we are in a fight response,
Flight,
Or freeze,
We literally don't have access to compassion,
Kindness.
We are trying to survive.
In summary,
What we need to know about the way fight,
Flight,
Freeze,
And fawn work is that this is generated by our neuroception.
When we perceive that we are in danger,
Our nervous system will do something to help us survive.
It might not be what we really want.
These are very primitive functions.
It worked a lot better for running away from a tiger hiding behind a bush than it does from the kind of complex social interactions that we're in now.
Our nervous system is also highly alarmed into feeling like we're in more danger than we actually are because our brain does not know the difference between something that we see in a video clip,
In an image,
Something that we vividly imagine in our mind.
Those are very alarming to our nervous system.
So another way that we can improve the health of our nervous system is to limit our visual input of trauma.
We could stay informed through print media,
Through other ways,
To really limit how much time we spend catastrophizing as well.
In addition to not exposing ourselves to outside images,
We also want to work with reducing the amount of catastrophic thinking and that will help to reduce the signals of danger to our nervous system.
We can also send signals of safety.
We could look around the room,
For instance,
And notice that there's nothing here that's going to hurt me.
We could notice when we're doing that that we're not back in our childhood home or in our grade seven classroom.
We are here in this moment right now and we're doing some exploration and healing of past trauma.
We're understanding our nervous system so that we can be more proficient at regulating ourselves and that offers the opportunity for us to co-regulate with others as well.
Because our nervous systems are largely non-verbal,
We take in cues through our senses like visual,
Sounds.
If we are holding our breath,
That's a cue to the nervous system that there's danger.
If we work with a smooth continuous diaphragmatic breath,
Then we turn that signal around.
We're signaling that we're safe.
This is really workable.
We do need to have a number of experiences of safety in order to have the felt experience in our body that we can handle what's here.
Over time,
That becomes our experience and it goes into that pool of evidence that our nervous system uses to determine safety and danger.
In addition,
When we notice that we're going out of regulation,
We have a lot of tools and practices that we can use to bring ourselves back.
