Our Safety When Someone Else Is In A Fight Response

How do we stay grounded when someone else is angry and out of control? In this guided somatic session, you’ll explore how your body responds to another person’s fight response, and how to stay safe and steady. Through breathwork, visualization, and trauma-informed tools, we bring awareness to our survival patterns and shift toward calm.

Learn to recognize when it’s time to set a boundary, step away, or stay present with care. This practice helps you listen to your body, soothe internal alarms, and reclaim your center in the face of another’s dysregulation. This is part 2 of our series on Anger.

Transcript

Let's start by noticing how we're arriving.

Whenever we're working with something that's potentially stirring us up,

Anger in a fight response is one of those things.

It's difficult if it's happening within us.

It's difficult if somebody around us is in a fight response.

We're going to work today with how to manage that.

If it's starting to get too intense,

Cyclic sighing is a deep double inhale through the nose and then a long exhale like breathing out through a thin straw.

Let's do that for several breaths.

Deep double inhale.

Long slow exhale through your mouth like you're breathing out through a straw.

Double inhale through the nose.

And as you're breathing out,

Let your whole body soften.

Let your shoulders relax.

Let yourself settle.

Notice what else you're feeling.

When we're working with anger,

It's very different than a fight response.

When we are feeling some kind of threat or danger,

We go into a survival strategy.

Fight and flight.

Sympathetic nervous system arousal.

Our body mobilizes to either flee or to fight.

Freeze is a parasympathetic.

We're numb.

We're disconnected.

Fawn is the other one that we often hear are people pleasing.

It's another strategy to protect ourselves.

One of the things that we do is we look really closely to see what is the actual threat that's here in this moment.

We're going to be working with somatic inquiry which involves looking within and noticing how am I responding to these thoughts right now.

Nobody's yelling at us.

They're not scared of anybody.

We might have people in our life that they are in a fight response and we're scared or we're nervous.

Right now in this moment,

We let our body know that.

As we're looking around,

Notice if there's anything dangerous or are you fairly certain that your body will be safe during this practice.

Oftentimes threat comes from behind so we might look behind us to see what's the situation behind us.

We could notice oh my body feels pretty relaxed or my body's very tight or I'm feeling really anxious and kind of jittery.

If you tend to go into a bit of a flight response,

Try to get away from danger,

That's your go-to.

Then often that shows up as a jitteriness or I can't really stay still.

I need to move around.

I need to get away.

A lot of the work that I do is on helping us understand what's going on in my nervous system.

Am I in a regulated calm state or am I in more of a fight,

Flight,

Freeze or fawn response?

If I'm in a fight,

Flight,

Freeze or fawn,

It's a survival response so therefore there must be a threat or I wouldn't be in that.

Part of the accuracy of our nervous system is to notice what am I bringing in from the rest of my life and what is it that's just here right now.

As we're looking around that's one of the reasons we do that is we look around and say actually right now there isn't any danger here.

I might still be feeling really activated or lots of compulsive thinking and that's because we have a history with our nervous system.

When you're doing these inquiries,

Especially when we're looking at something as intense as somebody else is in a fight response and I'm scared or how am I going to deal with this,

Then we want to keep coming back to working with our breath.

Long exhales through the mouth.

You might hold your own hands.

Remind yourself that you have a body,

That you're here.

You might notice your feet.

You might stand up and move around a little bit.

Do a bit of shaking.

There's all kinds of ways that we can bring ourselves back into awareness that we're here.

Thoughts in our mind can be very vivid.

We can believe what's going on based on the thoughts in our mind.

One of the reasons that I do some positive visualizations is that we do believe what's going on in our mind but often if you think about someone being in a fight response,

Our images are quite alarming.

Even though there's nobody here yelling at us right now,

We have a memory in our body of that.

Our nervous system remembers that and has a negativity bias so if it can over-exaggerate the danger a little bit,

We pay more attention.

But that's a really stressful way to live.

That's some of the dynamics of what's going on.

So as we go through this,

What we're going to do is keep coming back to safety,

Recognizing that we're safe.

But in these somatic inquiries,

There's something here that's going on.

When it's actually going on,

We don't have the time to really work with it,

We're going to work with a memory of it.

Bring to mind someone specific.

Who do you know in your life that is in a fight response around you?

Fight response by definition is kind of out of control.

It's a survival response.

We're fighting for our life.

We're fighting for survival.

Anger is related but different.

I might be really angry at somebody but I'm aware where I am.

I know what I want to say.

I'm not dumping on somebody.

I'm here.

I'm aware that this is a person that I care about if I do.

I want to express something.

I want to express my anger but I'm not blasting them.

And we know the difference between those two.

We know it in ourselves and we also know it when someone else does it.

When you're bringing up a memory,

Notice what is your response in your body and what memory is coming up.

In a practice session like this,

It might be good to not do a 10 out of 10.

It could be somebody from your past.

It could be somebody that's in your life right now.

Abusive bosses,

For instance,

Who would just go off either on me or someone else.

They're scary.

Bring to mind somebody and then notice how that's coming in.

It creates some kind of a physical response.

You might notice that you're holding your breath.

You might notice that your breath is getting kind of rapid or you're feeling anxious.

You might notice that your shoulders are up around your ears a bit or you're clenching your teeth or you're clenching your fists like holding yourself back.

And notice what are the physical signs that you're thinking about you're bringing up this memory of someone around you being in a fight response.

Work with what's happening in the body first.

We're going to go into thoughts in a minute.

What would be helpful for you right now?

If you're feeling a lot of activation in your body,

You might want to get up and shake it out.

You could take some deeper breaths.

Breathe in through your nose.

Do the double inhale if you want.

And then a long slow exhale like you're breathing out through a thin straw.

You could hold your hands.

You can look around the room.

We're just reminding ourselves that we're going to go into this a little bit.

We're going to come back out a bit.

We're going to go in.

We're going to come back out.

We're not actually in the room with somebody who's in a fight response.

We're remembering that.

That's how we work with trauma.

That's how we heal trauma is in this moment.

I know I'm safe and I'm bringing this up to work with them.

See if you could allow your breath to be continuous so that you're not holding your breath.

If you are holding your breath,

As soon as you notice it,

Just see if you could take a few breaths.

And then what are the images or words?

What are the thoughts?

You might have an image of somebody's face.

Sometimes when somebody's in a fight response,

Their face is very angry.

They might be red.

The voice is very loud.

They might be swearing.

Remember that you're looking at an image,

A memory.

What comes to mind for you?

Thoughts are images and words.

Images are colors and shapes.

And if it's a face,

If it's images,

Whatever it is you're looking at,

Sometimes images are moving like a video clip.

Sometimes they're still like a photograph or like a piece of art.

When you're looking at or bringing up this memory of someone who's in a fight response,

Notice that you're looking at and or hearing words.

This is thought-based.

We have this response in our body,

But we also have the thoughts.

Put the image,

Whatever it is you're looking at,

On the other side of the room.

Find a blank space on the wall or something and put it over there.

And then notice what it is.

Is it moving?

Is it still?

Is it somebody's face?

And what's your response as you're looking at it over there on the other side of the room?

As you're inhaling and exhaling,

Remember that you're here,

That we're looking at an image of something.

You could put that image into a frame and then you could notice on the outside of that frame there's empty space.

I've got a wood wall over there.

I can see that wood behind the frame,

Behind the image.

I can also notice that image is 12 feet across the room.

Notice what colors.

Maybe that's a picture of somebody's face.

So notice the details and then put the frame around it and then let's take our eyes around the empty space.

One direction two or three times and then the other direction two or three times.

Let your eyes move around that empty space.

And then look back at the image and notice what's your response to that now.

Number one,

What does the image look like after we do that framing and tracing?

They look a little less intense.

Just look at that and then come back into your body.

Breathe.

Relax your shoulders if you're tense.

Take a few deep breaths.

And sometimes we hear voices or sounds,

Especially when someone's in a fight response,

Their voice can feel very threatening.

When they get into that,

Sometimes people just flip,

But often things escalate.

So we might have the experience of we're out in a public place,

We're hearing some voice starting to get into that louder,

More aggressive.

We sense that in our mammal body.

There's something off about that.

One of the things that we might also do is notice what are the sounds.

Is part of what you're hearing loud sounds or an angry voice?

And one of the ways that we can work with that is to tap on your forehead.

Whatever the words are in the sounds,

As you're tapping on your forehead,

Take your attention away from the sounds and into the sensation of that on your forehead.

That helps to loosen the grip,

Loosen the trance.

And then you might look back at the image.

We're going to come back and work with memories again in a moment.

But before we do,

What's happening in terms of your survival response?

We're deliberately slowing things down,

Looking at the image,

Working with sound.

What normally happens for you and what happened to you just now in the last five or 10 minutes?

Do you feel like you went into a fight response back,

A freeze,

A flight?

Did you have the urge to start fawning,

People pleasing,

Kind of lessen the amount of charge in the situation?

Sit with that for a moment.

What is your response in the last little exercise,

But also generally speaking?

For me,

I tend to go into freeze.

If somebody is yelling or escalating,

I might go into trying to placate them or fawning if it's something that I thought might work.

Let's all calm down,

Take a break for a few minutes.

But oftentimes,

If someone's really in a fight response that just makes them matter,

I'll just go into freeze,

Avert my eyes.

If I can leave the room,

I often will.

What's your experience with that?

When somebody gets into a fight response,

What do you do?

So ideally,

What we're trying to do is be emotionally stable and calm so that we can,

Number one,

Assess more accurately what's going on.

What is the actual threat?

If somebody is yelling and they're at a sports game,

And it's a game where in your area,

When you go to sports games,

Nobody ever has a ride or something.

But if you're pretty certain that your body's going to be safe and hears those loud voices,

As soon as you realize,

Oh,

That's what it is,

They're cheering for the team or they're mad at the ref or something like that,

Then our accuracy increases.

We go,

Okay,

I'm not threatened here.

So that same loud voice,

Same tone of voice in a different situation might be dangerous,

But it's not here.

That's one of the reasons why we're trying to stay as stable as we can so that we can assess what's actually going on here.

What do I need to do?

What's the level of threat?

Working with something as volatile as anger is that we have a lot of memories in our body about people who are angry or are experienced with anger.

One of the reasons it's hard to be around someone who's expressing anger is because so often people are out of control.

They're actually in a fight response.

You can actually be quite calm and angry and expressing it respectfully in a way that's not dangerous to another person.

That's often not our experience.

So our nervous system is always looking at all of our experience.

What is the best way to keep us out of trouble?

Women are more likely,

This is gender conditioning as well,

More likely to fawn,

To try to talk things down.

Men are more likely to go into a fight response,

Although there's a lot of men who go into freeze or flight or fawning and a lot of women who go into fight response too.

There is some kind of a gender issue there though.

In another time we're going to work with when we're in a fight response or when we're trying to express anger,

Right now we're really working with when somebody else is in that situation,

They're volatile.

Bring back the same memory or a different one.

What is your usual?

You think about all the times that you've been around somebody who's spewing off or ranting and it might not be anything to do with you.

It might be somebody is upset about politics or upset about some driver that cut them off and they're just really giving her and then we're sitting there,

I don't know if I'm comfortable with this or we might get angry as well and we rant with them.

As you're looking through what is your usual pattern,

We're looking more for not when we get engaged in a kind of a mutual ranting session but more when somebody is in a fight response,

When they are escalated and we have that sense that they're either out of control or they might be losing control.

Check in with our body.

If somebody is dangerously in a fight response,

We're probably not going to allow ourselves to express anger back unless we're pretty sure that we're going to be safe doing that.

Some people we call them hot-headed or they blow a fuse.

A lot of different ways that we talk about that.

Children generally don't have enough power to go off into a fight response on the adults around them.

What is your history?

A lot of this is unconscious so it's not like we're making a choice.

Our nervous system is assessing the level of threat and then it's making a decision about how best to keep us safe.

Bring to mind some examples and then just narrow in on one.

Maybe it was a long time ago,

Maybe it's recent.

And listen to the words.

If you want you could tap on your forehead again.

Keep yourself here aware that we're doing an exercise.

You might see the face again.

So another way that we can help our mind,

Our brain know this isn't happening right now,

We're looking at a memory,

Is to take a step back in our perspective and see ourselves in the image.

Instead of some big face staring at us all red and maybe they're spitting as they're yelling,

Take it back so that you can see here I am standing there or sitting there.

Here's this other person.

We're kind of seeing it as though we're in the image itself.

Anything we see out of our own eyes feels more real and more threatening than if we can take that step back.

Same as when we put it on the wall over there.

It's clear that we're looking at an image and that's what we're trying to do.

We're trying to help our nervous system recognize that we're not in danger right now.

Whatever you have as your usual response,

Notice if you're being shaming or if you're condemning yourself for that.

This is really important.

How is your response?

How do you sit with that?

Well,

I'm a coward because I always go into freeze.

Notice if you're being critical of yourself.

That's not true.

What's happening is our nervous system is perceiving a threat.

We're doing the best thing we could do unconsciously motivated through our nervous system to protect ourselves.

So we're not a coward.

If we go into freeze,

What's happened is our nervous system has assessed that's my best chance for survival and that's all our nervous system cares about is that we survive.

So if you normally go into freeze or deep freeze,

Come back into your body.

Even just thinking about it sometimes can activate that feeling in our body.

We disconnect.

We might stop breathing.

We're holding our breath.

In this inquiry,

We're kind of skirting into it a little bit,

Nibbling a little and then coming back.

We're not going completely into a memory of feeling kind of pinned back and someone's yelling at us.

We're just taking it a bit at a time so that we can notice what is my response and how do I feel about that.

Am I judging myself?

Imagine now that we're doing something a little bit different.

So if somebody's in a fight response,

If we could freeze the frame there for a moment and sit with it,

Notice our body,

Take some breaths and kind of get back into regulation.

What might you do?

What are some of the options?

One of the things that might be possible,

And none of these are we need to do this every time.

Just something that might be possible would be for me to say,

I need a timeout.

I feel like your voice is getting very loud.

I'm starting to get scared.

And I would like you to lower the level of your intensity.

Or one of the things we know about the nervous system is that it takes about 20-25 minutes for the cortisol and adrenaline to release.

So that's something you might talk about ahead of time if it's somebody who often goes into a fight response.

But you could just say,

You know,

I'm not comfortable right now.

You seem very angry to me and I'd like to stop this interaction for now.

Or if it's somebody who would just get madder,

Then we might say,

You know,

I'm just going to go get a glass of water or I'm going to go to the bathroom.

Most people won't say,

You don't need to go to the bathroom.

What we're always trying to do is come back into enough of a calm state that we know what to do.

Freeze,

We might not recognize that we could do something differently.

If we're in a fight response ourselves,

We might be really tempted to really give them a blast and that might not be safe for us to do that.

One of the things that we're trying to do is give ourselves enough of a break that we can think about what to do,

That we can let our wiser part of us come online again.

When we're in a fight,

Flight,

Freeze,

Fawn,

It's very primitive brain,

Mammal,

Body.

The other part of the equation here is that if someone is angry about something,

We don't feel as threatened as we do when they are in a fight response.

Fight response feels different.

It's out of control.

There's a different quality for it when we feel scared.

There's a different quality to what's going on.

It depends on what's happening,

How escalated the other person is.

A lot of the times when we are working with this,

This is an ongoing relationship.

It might be a partner,

A friend,

A boss,

Someone in the family.

We can have some predictability about what's going on.

And there's this much deeper question too of if they're in a fight response,

What it really means is they are not in control.

They have let themselves or they don't have the capacity to calm down.

Listening to them,

Saying,

I'd love to know more about why you're so upset,

Mirroring back with empathy,

All of the things we might do there.

It might bring them down enough that then we can have a conversation.

They might still be angry,

But then they're more able to not feel like such a threat to us.

All of us go into fight responses sometimes,

And all of us have had other people go into a fight response on us.

As we're working with anger,

This particular session is on when somebody else is in a fight response,

Then what are my options?

Practice whichever one of those you want to practice.

I'm listening to them,

I'm inviting them to tell me why they're so angry.

I'm asking why don't we both take a couple of deep breaths,

Although sometimes that backfires because they get mad.

Whatever you'd like to practice,

And let's give that a couple of minutes.

Bring it to mind.

If it feels too intense,

Open your eyes,

Put it on the other side of the room,

Do the framing and tracing.

Take some breaths,

Hold your hand.

We want to be paying attention and then do a walkthrough.

See yourself in the image and imagine yourself saying whatever it is you'd like to say.

And it might be,

I'm starting to get a little anxious here.

Your voice is very loud.

I'm going to leave the room for a while.

It might be,

I can listen more effectively if you were to lower your voice a little.

I would like to hear what's going on.

How can we work this out?

So whatever that might be for you.

Or maybe it's to stay and freeze.

Here I am.

I'm feeling nervous.

I've had experience with this person.

I don't think they're going to be responsive to anything I do.

So I'm just going to kind of hunker down here and stay.

If I get up and move,

They might more mad.

I'm just going to stay,

But I'm not going to shame myself.

I'm going to work with my breath.

I'm going to see what's going on.

How could I stay steady?

And as you're doing that,

Notice the images.

If anything's too intense,

You could work with that.

Otherwise,

Just notice what's here.

What are the likely words that might be said?

Part of what we're trying to do is bring ourselves to a more regulated state so that we know what to do.

Another part of what we might be trying to do is get ourselves away if we feel like we're in danger.

Another part might be to try and help them regulate so that they can come out of a fight response and into perhaps feeling and expressing anger,

Which is quite different.

It's not as out of control.

People are not as likely to say things that are hurtful.

Notice your body.

If you're shoulders,

Maybe you can move them around a little.

Take some deeper breaths.

Let your body relax.

Whatever it is that you've just been working with,

Whatever strategy that you're thinking of,

Notice how you feel about that.

Is that something that you feel like,

Yeah,

I could try that?

One of the things I've found very helpful in working with someone who tends to be hot-headed or goes into an anger response is to talk about that with them when they're not in that response.

Sometimes I'll just say,

You know,

This doesn't work for me.

When this is what's going on,

I'm sympathetic to what you're feeling,

And I'm not really wanting you to just rant at me for an hour,

So let's talk about what might go on.

Could I signal you in some way?

Or maybe we could both be paying attention.

Like,

I'm going to pay attention to my response,

And if I notice that I'm starting to go into freeze,

I'll speak up.

I'm starting to feel kind of numb.

I'd like to take a time out.

I'd like for us to whatever that might be that you think might be helpful.

Everybody's nervous systems are more on edge these days.

There's a lot of pressure in the world.

There's a lot of things that are going on,

And when we are afraid,

We are closer to the edge in terms of a response,

Or a flight,

Or freeze,

Or fawning.

So we try to lower the level of threat,

Partly by increasing our own calm.

We hold our breath when we're in danger from a predator.

If we're holding our breath,

We're experiencing some kind of danger.

We look around,

And we notice,

Is there danger here right now,

Or am I responding in a conditioned way to what's happened in the past?

We try to work with our nervous system.

We try to cooperate with each other,

And accommodate each other as we can,

But also there's this deeper question of,

What's my responsibility in terms of my own nervous system response,

And what's somebody else's responsibility?

Is my responsibility really just to listen to them in a fight response all the time?

I get a say in that too.

What happens is the person with the most volatile nervous system response rules the interaction,

Because they're the one who's got this energy pouring out of them.

People in a fight response can be very cruel.

They can say things that they wouldn't say to somebody if they weren't in a fight response.

It's complicated to work with anger.

When somebody is having a fight response,

And they're saying things that I feel threatened by,

Or maybe they're saying things nasty about me too,

Then how am I going to take care of myself?

Well,

One of the things that happens if we go into a freeze is really frustrating for the person in the fight response,

Because there's nobody there.

We've protected ourselves.

All of these responses,

We could look at all of them as ways that we're interacting that aren't as effective as they might be.

What I would do is to try to remember to breathe.

That was the one thing I could always remember,

To be aware of each of my breaths.

I wasn't escalating the situation.

I was calmer.

I had a better sense of what might help,

And sometimes I would walk away,

Sometimes I would engage,

Whatever it was,

But I wasn't dysregulated.

It's very helpful if at least one person has their wits about them.

I might have done something or said something that triggered their anger,

But when they go into fight response,

That's their nervous system,

And it's their responsibility to work with their nervous system.

So if somebody is angry,

And they want to talk to me about what they're angry about,

I have a really strong expectation that we're going to be able to do that with respect for each other.

If I've done something,

I'll take responsibility for it.

I'll apologize if I need to,

But just being around someone who's spewing their rage and anger on me,

I don't really hang around with that anymore,

Partly because the cost of me being in freeze is too high.

When I'm feeling like I can't trust this person,

They're just out of control,

I don't have any problem being around somebody who's emotionally intense.

They're feeling deep grief or something.

That's really different than someone who's targeting and who feels dangerous.

When we're in a survival response,

We lose our capacity for compassion,

For connection.

This is serious in terms of the impact on our relationships.

How are we going to manage this in a way that respects the relationship,

But also respects our own need for safety?

Notice again before we leave,

How engaged are you in terms of your body right now?

I was kind of stirred up,

But I'm okay.

What's your plan for next?

I might go stand aside for a few minutes and just breathe.

I might put on some dance music.

You might lay down and do a bit of a relaxation.

Depends on what your system is doing right now,

What might be the most helpful.

Move around a little bit,

Take some breaths,

And really cultivate compassion for ourselves and for the other people involved.

If somebody is in a fight response all the time,

It's a miserable way to live.

It's really just a sign that they're afraid.

What they do with that isn't our responsibility.

Our responsibility is to take care of ourselves.

It's different if you're an adult in charge of a minor child.

When we're trying to help somebody,

It's helpful for us to look and see,

Is this effective?

If it's not effective,

Is there something else I could be doing that would be more helpful?

What does it cost me?

Am I willing to pay that price?

Those are things that only we can explore and answer.

There's really no right or wrong way to do that.

There's some healthier ways to make those decisions.

When we're trying to save somebody or we're trying to make the relationship work or it feels like we can't leave,

We don't have the options,

Sometimes we just need to do as much work as we can with regulating our own nervous system.

Really work with your breath.

Try out some things.

Have a conversation with the person who is often in a fight response with us and say,

You know,

This is not working for me.

How are we going to work with this?

I care about you.

I don't want to distance myself from you.

And yet when I hear that tone of voice,

This is what happens in me.

I freeze or I want to get out of here.

So how can we both come up with a way that will work better for us so we can stay in connection?

And or sometimes we make the decision that that's it.

I'm not going to stay in connection.

It's just complicated,

Right?

How do we decide those things?

The best chance we have is to be as regulated as we can and be on our own side,

Be kind and compassionate with ourselves and with other people.

But we can't do that if we're in a fight,

Flight,

Freeze ourself.