Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn- Your bodies responses to triggers and threats

Our bodies have unconscious patterns of responding to perceived threats that happen without conscious control, ranging from simple to complex defensive reactions.

• Fight response involves mobilizing energy against a threat with aggressive outbursts, criticism, or controlling behaviors

• Flight response means moving away from threats through anxiety, overthinking, or intellectual distancing

• Freeze response feels like "one foot on gas, one on brake" – internal activation with external immobilization

• Functional freeze allows you to operate normally while feeling detached from yourself and others

• Shutdown/collapse response creates complete disconnection, numbness, and loss of muscle tone

• Fawning response involves pleasing others while disconnecting from your authentic needs and feelings

• These responses aren't defects but natural protections that can become problematic when chronically activated

• Healing involves metabolizing these energies rather than eliminating them

• The goal is creating a nervous system that's both strong and flexible in its responses

• Understanding your default patterns helps you respond more authentically in relationships

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Chapters

• 0:00 Unconscious Threat Responses
• 8:15 Fight and Flight Responses
• 19:06 Freeze Response Explained

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Let's talk about the unconscious ways that we respond and react to perceived threat, expected threat. Now, remember that perceived part is really important because it doesn't actually have to be threatening. Your body could still perceive it that way If you had parents who are emotionally volatile, if conflict was a threat to you as a child. Things as simple as your kids acting out can create this threat response in you. So again, I just want to remind you that these are unconscious patterns that happen in your body. They happen without your brain connecting to your body to tell it what to do, at least your conscious brain. So the different patterns that we have are fight and flight. We're going to talk about these first because, for the most part, animals, when they are faced with a threat, specifically a direct, obvious threat, not more of the chronic, complex threats that many, many people faced in their early childhood If you are faced with a direct threat, your animal body, your body's first two responses are typically going to be to fight the threat, to mobilize muscle, to mobilize movement against and towards the threat, to scare it away, to threaten it away, to quite literally engage in conflict with it, to attack the threat head on, or your animal body is going to mobilize into flight energy.

Speaker 1: 1:32

So you, very split second, very quickly go. Can I fight this? And if not, can I get away with it? Can I run to safety? Can I get to a place where this threat won't be able to access me, so that energy is moving away from the threat. So again, fight is moving towards the threat with an aggressive, mobilized energy, with a fist energy, if you will. It is taking on the threat head on. It is mobilizing against, towards, moving towards the threat. Flight is you're going to mobilize away from the threat. You're going to get yourself away Very quickly. You're going to try to find shelter, security, something bigger or badder than you that can fight the threat. These are usually the first two responses that our bodies will go to.

Speaker 1: 2:22

Now, if we cannot fight and we cannot flight, typically the body will go into a freeze. There are different kinds of freeze, but we're essentially going to think of freeze in a very simplistic threat way and the way that essentially our animal bodies and the animal kingdom would have responded, which is that internally you have a mobilization, you have an activation, so you start having this energy of I need to get away, but you realize that like I can't really outrun this threat. I can't fight this threat, so I'm going to freeze. And what this looks like and what this feels like is it's like one foot is on the gas and one foot is on the brakes. You, internally, are mobilized and activated. You have a lot of energy moving in your body, but externally, you are immobilized. To move, you literally freeze. This is like a deer in headlights. Right, they see it, and all of a sudden they are frozen. They look like they're not moving, they look like they're not breathing. It is a state of stuckness. You're bracing for the impact of the thing. Right, this freeze response can happen in a car accident, where your whole body just races. A lot of times, when you're in freeze response, you become hyper aware, you feel panicked. There's overwhelm, there's terror. There's not action or any shifting of the external behaviors, but internally there's a ton of activation.

Speaker 1: 3:47

So, fight, flight and freeze are the reflexes that we typically have, that are a little bit more simple, with simple traumas, with simple threats. That there's a way to attack this, there's a way to get away from this. Again, also just thinking of the way these energies mobilize you. A fight energy mobilizes you against something. A flight energy mobilizes you away from something. So a fight energy can also look like aggressive outbursts, criticizing, yelling, controlling others, passive, aggressive comments and actions. This can be over functioning. So some people will over function and overwork. Because you move aggressively towards the threat, which is a little bit more complex. When it's not a tiger, when it's not a bear, are you moving towards and against? Is the energy moving up and out of you? Does it move to mobilize you into action, into muscle and a fist and aggression? That is what that fight energy looks like and what it feels like.

Speaker 1: 4:54

That flight energy can be intense anxiety there can be overactive and analytical. That flight energy can also look like fleeing to intellectualism to get out of your body. So a lot of times flight in our current modern system you aren't technically just running away, but you're consistently overthinking in order to avoid feeling that energy that's happening in your body, though, the anxiety that's happening in your body. You go to your head to get away from the threat, even though it's not actually getting you away from the threat. There's no action happening, there's no movement away from the fear. There's nothing to do here. There's only this active energy in your body that is moving away from the thing.

Speaker 1: 5:41

And then that freeze energy again, it's when there is a shutdown, but that external shutdown there's still an activation underneath it. So one way you can think of this is there's not a numbness in that, there's no sensation. There's a numbness in that it's like when you get up and your foot goes numb and you can't really use it right, like if you have your foot that's a little bit numb, it's frozen, you can't like move it. It feels weird to walk. There's this weird sensation going on. But there is sensation there. There's like this buzzy, tingling, throbbing for some people, like there is still sensation underneath the surface but externally there isn't movement. So those are the primary ones that we go to.

Speaker 1: 6:31

Now let's dive into a little bit more of the complex responses, where there's usually more than one thing going on. So freeze and shutdown are looked at as separate things, especially in polyvagal theory. But we just talked about that freeze. Now let's talk about the functional freeze. So functional freeze is you are on autopilot, you're there, but you're not really there. So you have that freeze going on where there's all of this activation and energy. But instead of looking frozen, you're going through all of this activation and energy, but instead of looking frozen, you're going through all of the motions but you're no longer there. So it's kind of this blended response of a flight and a flight energy and a freeze energy. You can function, you're going through all the motions, you're getting shit done, you're being productive, everything looks really good, but you feel detached and disconnected from your body. You feel detached from yourself, from your emotions, from other people. You're in the room, but you're not really in the room.

Speaker 1: 7:32

That is what a functional freeze looks like, and that's really important, because people who are having stuck freeze response are going to look like there's something wrong. They're going to look dysregulated. People who are in a functional freeze, they're not necessarily going to look like they're having dysregulation. It's not going to look like you're feeling that you're struggling. It's not going to look like you deserve healing and to feel better in your body because things look great. Things don't feel right, though. Things don't feel good.

Speaker 1: 8:03

And what's really interesting, when you are healing from these freezes, when those responses start to thaw, moving through that can be more uncomfortable because all of a sudden, those uncomfortable sensations that your body protected you from start to come back online, those protective responses of fight and flight, they start mobilizing in your body again, because it's not that they disappeared, it's that they got repressed under a freeze. Your body protected you from those responses to either protect you internally or to protect you externally. Right, so they protected you externally from the threat outside of you, but they also protected you internally from an threat outside of you. But they also protected you internally from an experience, from emotion, from sensation that threatened your well-being, that threatened your life this existential threat to yourself. Something in you froze, a part of you froze, or you froze overall. So there can be different parts of your personality that are frozen or that are in functional freeze. This can be shame. A lot of people will label this shame or guilt or that, like I feel bad. There's this activation, but you can't seem to make any momentum on it, you can't seem to change it, you lose access to it. A lot of times in coaching, this can also look like someone will be talking about something and all of a sudden they're like wait, where was I? They lose track of it. Their body is freezing, their body is making that thing go unconscious. It's kind of tucking it away and putting it down so that we're not dealing with it. Right now, there's an avoidance of that emotion. Because it's too much for the system. So that's what that can look like sometimes. Another type of freeze because it's too much for the system, so that's what that can look like sometimes.

Speaker 1: 9:45

Another type of freeze or it's a little bit different than freeze is the shutdown and collapse. This is different than the freeze in that, instead of there being an activation and an immobilization right so you're stuck, but there's all of this internal fastness or fight energy, but you feel paralyzed to do anything with it. The shutdown collapse is this overall feeling of dissociated. There's a detachment from your mind, body and your present. It's like a limp animal that fainted or played dead. There is this tiredness, this slowness. You feel immobilized. So, instead of your body being frozen and you bracing, think of like if we were playing freeze tag and all of a sudden I yell freeze. That's what a freeze looks like A shutdown collapse is.

Speaker 1: 10:36

You forget you exist, your body collapses down and you lose tone. You lose that muscle tone. You lose connection to your sturdiness and your centeredness. There is a state of hopelessness. There's a true numbness with shutdown collapse, where it's not that you're feeling pain, it's not that you're feeling that numbness where there's like there's too much sensation. It's like you're void of emotion. There is no emotion or pain, it's just this nothingness. It's this static. There's no static right. Sometimes with freeze there's like a static. With this it's just quiet nothingness, but not in a quiet, peaceful way, in a do I even exist kind of way. And this is something we're not going to work a ton with, because this is typically happening in really complex scenarios where, if you are truly having like that shutdown and collapse, that's really a place for you to get therapy, to get someone who is outside of you to have that co-regulation, especially because that can be a really hard thing to mobilize, because your body is truly, truly saying this is too much for me and it can take some time and really professional work to be able to work with those parts in yourself and with others.

Speaker 1: 11:53

So the other, more complex response that we can have is fawning. So we went through the fight and the flight, so moving against, moving away from freezing and shutting down, fawning is this primary response of an internal shutdown and disassociation. So again, you're in conversation with someone and it's like you lose contact with yourself, but instead of the frozenness, instead of you doing nothing, there is a fawning where you move towards the threat, but with like an appeasing, pleasing nature. So fighting is moving towards a threat, but it's doing it with a fist. Fawning is moving towards the threat, but you're doing it with this hug, you're doing it with flowers. It's like you see this tiger and you've realized you can't fight it, you can't run away from it. So you go and you train the tiger, you train yourself to look unthreatening and appeasing and you give the tiger treats and you give the tiger treats and you, just coming, you come up with ways to appease, please and neutralize this perceived threat.

Speaker 1: 13:02

So this is mostly going to be happening to people who have had complex traumas. Again, traumas does not necessarily have to be a big T thing. This could be. Your complex scenario in your household meant that you had to manage your emotions because you had very emotionally volatile parents. So your parents had volatile anger and so you learned to fawn where, if you were upset, you stopped feeling that upsetness. So there's that disassociation, there's that freeze that happens and then you start acting on how they feel and what they want. So let's say they're angry. You start acting in a way that your body thinks will help appease or lessen their anger or their anger being taken out on you. You make yourself be less of a threat, less of a trigger to this thing outside of you and it's very responsive. It's very relational. This fawning happens in relationships where you were not in a position of power, you couldn't fight and flight, you couldn't get away. These were your caregivers. This was chronic. It was confusing, where sometimes it was good, sometimes it wasn't, but you learned how to not have those needs. And what's really really hard with the freezing and with the fawning is that for so many people you almost lose access to it until after it happens.

Speaker 1: 14:35

I've done a lot of healing work with fawning and with people pleasing in my life and just the other day I experienced it in a big way for the first time in a pretty long time where I left a situation and all of a sudden it was like I had this shaking moment where, like, I literally shook my head and all of a sudden I was like what the hell was that? And because I've done a lot of healing work, because I've done a lot of nervous system regulation, I had this big fight energy and then I had the flight energy and all of a sudden I was like, oh, what the heck was that? And there was this context to it where I couldn't even put my finger on what was happening and that, thankfully, because of my training, not only personally but also professionally, I went oh, it was a freeze. I froze and then I fawned. And the reason I knew I froze is because I lost context, I lost memory, where I can't even remember what did I say, what did I not say, what did this person say? Was that an appropriate response? I felt like I lost context with who and what I was doing. And then I can tell that I either. I said things that I wouldn't normally say if I was fully embodied, if I was fully online, and I also know that the fawning happened because I didn't say things that afterwards I was like, damn, I wish I could have said this, I wish I would have said that, even if I didn't say it to their face. I wish I would have had that response come up in me, but it didn't happen until later.

Speaker 1: 16:08

That is a lot of times what fawning and what people-pleasing can look like. A lot of people have started to learn about this concept of fawning and of people-pleasing being something that's unconscious, because people-pleasing truly what people are talking about with the pattern of people-pleasing has nothing to do with you being nice and more to do with your body perceiving safety and perceiving external threat. So let's say you go to a big social event and you people-please. Your body doesn't know how to be fully embodied in your authentic response to things. You're losing context with who and what you are and what you say and what you don't say. You're yes and you're no. You're authentic voice. People talk all the time about authentic voice.

Speaker 1: 16:51

But when you are people-pleasing, when you are fawning, there is a disassociation from self and an over-orienting and an over-coupling with what the other person wants or needs or your perceived idea of what they want and need. And all of these in some contexts are really safe, they're really helpful in short term. But when they become these stuck processes, when this becomes the only way you know how to mobilize if the only way you know how to mobilize is fawning and people pleasing, the people you love aren't going to know what you want and need. You're going to be saying yes when you mean no and you're going to say no when you really want the answer to be. Yes, there's going to be an incoherence. There's going to be this weird thing where you can't quite where have you ever been with someone, where you can't quite understand what's off with them. It's because your animal body is picking up on the reality that they're not actually being nice and authentic in their response. There's a, there's something happening in their body language or the face or the way they're talking, where there's a disgen. It's disingenuous, it's not fully embodied, it's not fully deep. There's a lot more to this and we'll be talking more about this in the future lessons.

Speaker 1: 18:10

But as you go through the next couple of days and through the next couple of weeks, why this can be so powerful is when you are in conflict, when a trigger happens, what is your body's response? Does your body spring into fight mode? Where you go to fix it? You problem solve, you're going to make it better. You're moving against it with like a fight energy. Does it move up and out of you and against the problem? Or do you disappear to the problem? Do you pretend it doesn't exist? Do you numb and disassociate and scroll your phone and pretend it isn't happening? Do you run away from it? Where you avoid it altogether?

Speaker 1: 18:49

There's a difference between doing nothing and avoidance. Doing nothing is kind of that frozen. You don't know what to do, but you're constantly thinking about it. You're constantly overthinking, overanalyzing. You're getting more information, you're listening to podcasts, you're reading the books, but you're never actually taking action. And implication Implementation that's the word I was going for. That can be what that freeze looks like versus that shutdown is. You're literally doing nothing. There's no emotion there. There's a disconnect. You feel bleh. You're not even worried about it, you kind of are impartial to it.

Speaker 1: 19:27

Or there's that fawning where, like you're aggressively moving towards the thing with this like overly helpful kind of martyrdom, I need you to feel better so that I feel better. So fawning is probably one of the more common I see in women, and I say common too, because I think a lot of women don't know how to deal with it. They don't know how to move through it. So just a reminder these are not bad things about you. They're not things that we ever really get rid of, but they are things that we can metabolize, that we can move through, because remembering back to what we talked about in a previous video tabalize that we can move through, because remembering back to what we talked about in a previous video. These energies are coming up, these activations are coming up as a mobilization to move you. What does it want you to do? And we're bringing it back to.

Speaker 1: 20:15

Okay, is this an old mobilization that has just become the pattern and the habit of oh, when my husband feels this certain way, I have this way of responding that just comes against it as a fight. As soon as I think he's having a hard day, I come against him with fight energy or I start fawning with him. When your kids activate you, when they're overwhelming you, or when they test your boundaries, or when they test when they're like doing something that really triggers you, when they're overwhelming you, or when they test your boundaries, or when they test when they're like doing something that really triggers you, do you have a fight energy against them? Do you have a flight energy? Do you avoid them? Do you move away from them? Do you shut down? How does this show up in your life?

Speaker 1: 20:58

And in the next video we're going to talk about how we meet that energy, how we mobilize these different energies, because when we can mobilize these energies, we can honor the charge without allowing that charge to either implode or explode on ourselves or the people that we love, because just like we've talked about, just like we've talked about, just because these are inconvenient doesn't make them go away. There is no amount of healing that you can do that makes these go away, because this is your aliveness, this is your responsiveness to life. You need a nervous system that has all of these mobilized online. I love that word mobilized, because I think of this. If you think of your physical body, I want my physical body to be really strong and be able to move weights. I love weightlifting. I love weight training. I want to learn how to mobilize my muscles. But have you ever seen people who are so muscular that they lose their flexibility? They become rigid and harsh? Right now I'm talking about personality too, but you think of, like, becoming really strong and sturdy and having a really good fight.

Speaker 1: 22:10

Energy, but also you don't always want to fight. Sometimes you want to move towards people with love and care and nurturing, but that's going to be really hard if your body only knows how to mobilize and to fight. What if your body only knows how to mobilize and to fight? What if your body knew how to mobilize towards someone with a softness? What if your body knew how to mobilize away from something and you knew when to quit, you knew when to walk away, you knew when to let things lie, to leave things alone. Your mobility is you finding strength and your fight, but also your flexibility, your softness, your wide dynamic range of motion. We're trying to create a nervous system that is adaptive, that can respond to a world that is constantly going to give it things, to have a reaction, to have a response. And what's important is that you can feel that response, that you can act it, that that charge can get activated and that you can know how to move it through you or allow it to move you.