Ep.66 Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn: What's Your Survival Response?

If you've got so much on your plate that part of you secretly wants to burn it all down and quit everything, this episode is for you. You're not falling apart. Your anxiety just found a new way to talk to you. And once you learn the language, you get your power back.

EPISODE SUMMARY This week Sari shares a real time story of anxiety showing up in a way she'd never felt before. After years of chronic panic attacks, she thought she knew her pattern, the fight response. Then she overcommitted herself into the ground, PTA, a leadership role, clients, the podcast, managing mom life and hit a wall where the only answer her body could find was quit it all.

In this episode she breaks down the four survival responses, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, and how anxiety presents differently depending on which one is running. She talks about why high functioning women keep filling the void, where control sneaks in, and why honoring your no is the most regulating thing you can do for your nervous system. Anxiety is the messenger. This is how you start listening before it becomes a Mack truck.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why your anxiety can show up completely differently than it used to, even years into healing
• The four survival responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) and how to spot which one is yours
• Why high functioning women overcommit, and the real question underneath the busyness
• How control shows up when you believe you have to carry everything alone
• Why awareness alone doesn't change you, but choice does
• How honoring your no actually settles your nervous system
• What happens in the subconscious mind when we sit down and have a conversation with the pattern instead of fighting it

REFLECTION When your anxiety gets loud, which response do you reach for first, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn? And what would change if you treated it as a messenger instead of an enemy?

Free 5 Minute Nervous System Reset If your nervous system feels strung out and you need something that actually helps right now, grab the Free 5 Minute Nervous System Reset. Something you can use tonight.

And if you're ready to stop white knuckling your way through and have someone help you talk to the pattern underneath it all, book a Freedom Roadmap Session. This is the work that gives you freedom from the very thing keeping you stuck.

 You're not broken. You're not behind. And you're not alone. If you made it here, that means something.

TIMESTAMPS 

00:02 Welcome in, and why anxiety shows up in so many different ways 

02:24 The real question underneath overcommitting: what void are you trying to fill 

04:47 Carrying it all alone, and where control actually comes from 

07:10 The week it all caught up: Warrior Women, the missed episode, freeze and flight 

09:35 The four survival responses explained: fight, flight, freeze, fawn 

11:14 When the answer becomes "I quit everything, burn it all down" 

12:47 Sitting in your emotions, and anxiety as the messenger 

15:03 Your power and your choice: how long do you actually need to feel it 

17:31 Giving yourself space, and why the coaching call landed so differently 

19:52 Honoring your no, the Oracle card, and finding your own pattern 

22:00 Hypnosis: having a real conversation with the program that's been protecting you

5 minute nervous system reset ad for midroll

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Fuck anxiety. It's a battle cry to all the women out there who are so tired of continuing to let anxiety keep them imprisoned in their own lives. If you wake up already exhausted, even after a full night of sleep, you move through your day taking care of everything. The kids, the work, the responsibilities, you show up with a smile, like you have it all together. But underneath it, something doesn't feel right. No one can really tell. Because you've gotten really good at one. So stick around because I'm going to share with you old and stories that get too bad. Thanks for showing up. Thanks for listening. If this is your first time, we're so excited that you found this podcast. I share so many tools, so many of my own stories about real-time anxiety and how to support them. And if you've been here a while, we're happy to have you back. And this week I want to share with you a lived experience. Anxiety is always showing up in so many different ways. And I really hope to give you all of those ways in which it does show up. Because as I say, there can be the main way that anxiety showed up. And as I have expressed before here on this podcast, a lot of that for me was in panic attacks, um, chronic panic attacks, you know, multiple a day really debilitating my life. And that was one form. But what I'm now learning, even seven, eight years later, is that anxiety still does show up and it shows up in different ways. And this week it definitely showed up in a way that I really hadn't experienced before. So one thing I am really good at, my husband tells me I'm really good at, is overcommitting myself. And I do this because I get stuck in this rut where maybe I'm bored or I don't feel I am being of purpose. And I search for things to fill my time. And then I've searched for so many and I've committed to so many that down the road, whether it's weeks, months, even a year, I'm now freaking the fuck out because I have so much on my plate and I don't know what to do because I've overloaded it. And I think those of you that are moms or listening, that are maybe even, you know, high up um in their business or own their own business, we can easily do this in our personal lives, whether it be in motherhood, whether it be in our business, even our friendships, our social life. So where are we feeling like we need to fill the void with something? And you know, the root of this would be why do you feel like you need to feel? What is what is it that you feel like is missing that you're trying to fill it with? That's always a question I come back to. And mine personally is always a place of I feel purposeless or I feel isolated. That's a big one for me sometimes. And so I have to go find social engagements, and then I have way too many. So that's definitely a thing that came up for me this week. Um, about a year ago, I had committed to be on my daughter's middle school PTA. And at the time I was thinking, wow, that sounds like maybe I could meet some people. I could also be of service to the community, and that always makes me feel really good. And so I've been doing that for a year. And for the most part, like it was fine. I signed up to be the treasurer, which don't ever fucking do unless you're an accountant. Um, I will never sign up for this again, but um it was a learning experience. Plus, I got to really experience how great the PTA actually is and what it really does for the kids, the teachers, the school, the parents, and so many things. So it was definitely an experience and an enlightening one to be part of it. But as we are closing down this school year, May is always crazy. And if you're a mom, you get it. Like, why do they have to overload every fucking thing in May? As if, you know, all the sports are ending or some of the sports are starting up and then all of the school things. I have gotten so many emails in the past three weeks that I've missed really important ones. Um, to the point of my daughter, my youngest, almost missed her aerial show that she had that she couldn't even be in because I missed one of the fucking rehearsals. Um same daughter also had a spirit squad tryout that I was supposed to put her name in a Google Doc, missed that. And if it wasn't for one of her teachers that knew she would be coming back, like, you know, and luckily the universe had my back throughout all of this. And this is why I'm so, so grateful that I am connected to a higher power in my life now because it was in the times that I wasn't that I felt like I had to carry all of this on my shoulders. I had to do it all by myself. That's where the control comes in. It's like you're the only person that can hold this, that can change this, that can support this. And in reality, that's not true. But I think we're so taught that you have to hold everything, especially as mothers, but women too. I feel like this archetype of like the boss babe and everything of like, I can do everything and I can do it with fucking ease. Well, that's bullshit. We're all strung out, we're all anxiety ridden, we're all overprocessed, over-stimulated, all of these things. And we're just on this go, go, go, go, go. We're just energizer bunnies. And even today I was on a walk with a friend and she was talking about how she's very type A. I'm going off on a tangent here, but I was just thinking, like, why why are we proud of that? Why are we proud of being type A? Where like you have to have all these things here, here, here, where it's like when when are we letting our nervous system slow down? When can we stop the overfunctioning and slow down? So this is where it really bit me in the ass this week is one of the things that I've been supporting is my workout group. If you see my social media, I post about it on there a lot. It's called Warrior Women. And I signed up to be the head of membership for our um leadership team. And it's a volunteer role. I do get my membership for free because of it, but I really love this organization. It's really helped me create um a social mecca for myself to be able to get out of the house and to really um go hang out with really badass women and work out and we go have coffee and tacos afterwards and super fun. So I really love being a part of this organization, but the founder was really asking me to step up in a way that felt like a lot of pressure. And one of the things, this podcast being my baby, I had kind of neglected it. If you noticed, there was a missed week between um episodes recently, and I just couldn't deal. I literally couldn't even get the episode out because I was in a place of almost freeze and fleeing to a point. And so I want to talk about a little bit the different stages of survival. You have your fight, you have your flight, you have your freeze, and we also have a fourth that we talk about more, which is fawning, which is being um oversupportive, like making sure that people are good all the time. That's also a state of anxiety as well, or survival, shall we say. And so I will say that my typical go-to when it comes to my survival mechanisms, and I've been thinking about creating a quiz that kind of helps people um find out what theirs is, but just through listening to this, you might know yours as well. So when we think about fight, right? Like I think about confrontation, I think about um like needing to be right all the time. That was so me. That was very much the black and white me of like it's my way or the fucking highway. And that was control for me of like, I'm gonna fight for this to be the way I need it to be. Otherwise, I won't feel safe. So there's that. There's the flight, which is just like avoidance. This is where we just flee the scene, we are done, we don't want to deal with it. We will just pretend as if it didn't happen, sweeping under the rug. There's freeze, which is like, and this can sometimes be the depressed state where like we just do nothing, where we are like, I don't know what to do. And so I'm just gonna stay here. I'm gonna stay in my bedroom. I'm not gonna deal. And again, there was the fawning piece, which is a lot of my husband. He is very much the caretaker. Let me nurture you, let me make sure everyone's okay, and let me pretend that I'm fine when I'm actually not. So, out of those four, I would love to you for you to hear, maybe even the comment section of this episode, what you feel like you resonate most with. Um, you can also always just send me a DM and we can chat in that way too. So this week, as I said, my normal survival response mechanism is fight, is I'm right, do it my way, or get out kind of mentality. And it was showing up very different this week. It was showing up a little bit of freeze, but primarily flight. Like I was at the point to where I just wanted to burn everything down. Now I was also on my moon cycle, I was bleeding, and everything was very heavy and emotional. It was also a full moon and Scorpio. If you follow that, um, Scorpio is all about digging up the underside and like this death and rebirth all the time. And I was in this place where I hadn't gotten my episode out on time. My workout organization, Warrior Women, wanted me to step up and do more. Um I was working with some clients that I hadn't heard back from, and I was just kind of in this place of like, I don't have time to do anything for myself. I'd kind of gotten to a place where I'd abandoned my meditation, and I didn't know how to move forward. And so that was the freeze part. But instead of actually freezing, I just wanted to be like, I quit everything. I quit everything. I quit the podcast, I quit the warrior women, I quit PTA. I mean, I sent messages out saying, like, I don't know if I can do this to my PTA people. And it's just it's interesting to witness myself go through that instead of the old program of survival and kind of the anxiety that I was feeling. And so I really want to open up this idea of like, how is your anxiety presenting? Are you someone that normally fights? Are you someone that is completely avoidant and is like, nope, I'm gonna just pretend like this doesn't exist and I'm gonna walk away? Are you someone that freezes, doesn't know what to do? Are you someone that fawns, that takes care of everyone else except for themselves and avoids themselves in the process? And I think that there's even gray areas also in between that. And I'm totally open to hearing if you're experiencing one of those gray areas, so that we can talk about it. And this was this was really hard for me to go through this this week because it's not like me to give up on things, but I had overcommitted myself so much that the easiest answer was I quit and I'm just gonna burn it all down and say, fuck it, I'm done. And now, granted, like I said, with the full moon and Scorpio and my bleed coming this week, I really needed to like sit in my emotions, and I think that's the biggest thing, right? So I talk a lot about how anxiety is the messenger, right? All of this was coming up because it was sending me a message that something had happened, something was no longer in alignment in my body, in my mind, in the world I was experiencing, and it was telling me. And, you know, it's one of those things that, like, it's that little voice in the back of your head that's been telling you for a minute, but you're just kind of like, it's kind of like that annoying fly that just keeps flying around your face, and you're like, fuck it, just get away. And you ignore it. And this is how the anxiety, the depression builds in our minds because we are constant, we're hearing it, it's that little whisper. And I talk about this on another episode about the whisper, the brick, and the Mac truck. And so, when is it that we are gonna listen to the thing? And so it had built up again to this point to where I was like, I'm gonna burn it all down, and none of this no longer works for me. Now I'm on the other side of that now, and I'm realizing as I witnessed to myself the heaviness that I was experiencing all throughout the week. Now I get to decide. And this is always comes back to our power, our choice. Okay. Yes, we can live in the experience. We can have the feeling that things don't feel good. I'm never gonna tell you to just like change your energy and be love and light. That is a strategy and it's one we can get into down the road, but in the moment, do you need to feel the thing that you're feeling? And how long do you need to feel it? Right? Is it a couple days? Is it a couple hours? Is it minutes? What is it that you need to feel this for? And then on the other side of that, when we are rational, and then we can actually see in a being able to reflect on the situation from a different perspective, right? Being able to zoom out, not be so much in the details. When we're super zoomed in, when we're really in the feeling of the experience, it can be really hard, it can be really heavy. And if we're in survival by any means necessary, there is no rationalizing, there is no conscious thought process, there is no decision making or logic, right? It's truly almost impossible when you're in some form of spider flight, some for some form of survival. And so it's important to get out of that. Now, I give lots of tools all the time to get yourself out of that mechanism in real time. But sometimes, like I said, if you're a woman and you're menstruating, your hormones are probably a little wonky, right? And you're feeling things more deeply than you would any other time of the month. And so giving yourself space, giving yourself and letting your family know. Like it's so important, I think, for our husbands, our partners to really understand what's it, what we're experiencing in this time when our body is releasing, you know, all of the inner skin and and sloughing off and cleansing like what our body is going through, there's a reason why we're experiencing all these emotions and they come up during our moon cycle. So to give yourself space to feel those out. Now, if this is any other time of your cycle, I would urge you to maybe look at it a little bit sooner. But in this time for me, I just couldn't get out of it. And it was so heavy that I was literally like, I'm gonna fucking burn it down. I had a coaching call with a girl that I'm working with, and it was supposed to be on Monday, and that was the worst day. And I was like, today's not the day to talk to me. We ended up having it yesterday and which was Thursday, and it was so much better because I was able to be on the other side of it, reflect how I was feeling, but also take it as information as what worked for you, what didn't? And are you when this shows up again? Are you gonna let this anxiety take over? Are you gonna let this fuck it? I'm gonna burn it all down and leave, like none of this exists. Are you gonna let this happen again? Are you gonna let this become a pattern of how you continue to cope or deal with these situations? Or are you going to, number one, the next time I am brought a decision to volunteer my time, whatever it may be, what is that gonna look like for me in the future? Am I gonna be overcommitted? Um for my birthday, which was a few weeks ago, I had pulled an Oracle card out of the Rebecca Campbell Work Your Light deck, one of my favorite decks. And the card I pulled was no. It said no. It said wait, pause, reflect. And this was the card that I pulled for the entire year of 41 for myself. And I think that this is so important to really honor your no and honor your aligned yes. What is this gonna mean if I say yes right now? Is that gonna overcommit me? Is that just me like trying to keep myself busy? And is it actually causing to the anxiety already in my body? Is this just adding to the addiction? Would be the question that I would ask myself. And how do I respond? What is my nervous system response? That what is that fight or flight survival response? Are you a fighter? Do you need everything to be in your way? Do you need to control things? Do you want to confront things? Is flight yours? Do you feel like running and avoiding is the thing? Is freezing yours where you feel like you don't know what to do at all and you just do nothing? Or is fawning yours as well? And just to be open to what those are and let yourself witness yourself. Because the more that you are aware, right? Awareness is the first step, but it's not enough to change. Choice, knowing that you have choice is the very thing that can change you. You are not stuck in your program. But sometimes this is not always easy. And this is literally what I love to do with people is to we go on hypnotic journeys in my sessions. Now, granted, these are like custom curated ones, these are not generalized hypnotic journeys that are for groups. This is literally you are dealing with your situation. We're dealing with this. And now I get to take this and I get to open up your subconscious mind, not in a way that feels scary, but in a way that feels like, let's talk to it. Let's like, you know, when when have you sat down and had a conversation with someone that maybe you thought was really, really hard? And then after you had the conversation, like you felt so much better. Is there a time that that's ever happened for you? And that's like kind of what we get to do in hypnosis is we get to have a conversation with the programs and the patterns that have been working for so long. And they're working to protect probably a child or a young adult that experienced that thing. It's not even you who needs the protecting anymore. And we get to change the relationship to that. And that's my favorite thing about what I do because that right there is what gives you fucking freedom from the very thing you're experiencing, the very thing that is keeping you stuck, that's keeping you in that survival mechanism. So if that sounds interesting to you, let's book a call together. And that's all I have for you today. But that's my story. I'm really glad that I went through this so that I can understand even other survival mechanisms and how we respond in these different responses. And we'll see you guys next episode. If this episode felt like it was speaking directly to you, share it with another woman who might need to hear this too. And please leave a rating and a review. This helps boost the podcast so women just like you can find it and find real-time support and believe. Stay tuned for more episodes with stories, tools, and real hope. Because you're more than just the identity of a woman who has decided. And when you begin to feel your voice, you're not just changing your life. You're changing what gets passed down to your daughter, your granddaughters, and the women who come after you. You are not. And this is where we get to leave.