Ep. 35: Fight, flight, freeze or fawn- how to help your children

This is the episode for every protective parent. I walk you through what fight, flight, freeze and fawn responses look like in your child, why they experience these responses and how you can help them navigate them. 

This is a short but incredibly impactful episode designed to educate and empower you. 

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Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants 0:01

Welcome everybody to the Survivor's Playbook. I'm your host, Chantal Contorines, and this is the podcast for every survivor of abuse. If abusers can have a playbook, then why can't survivors also have a playbook so that you can learn to live lives you love despite what the abuser in your life does or doesn't do? And today, we're talking about something that protective parents witness all the time but often don't truly understand, especially at first before they have the proper knowledge, support, and validation. That's why I'm talking about it here today. Your child suddenly becomes explosive. Transitions are difficult. They're withdrawn, anxious, overly compliant, or emotionally shut down after spending time with their coercively controlling parent. And you're often left wondering, "What is happening to my child?" You oftentimes might think that you are a bad parent because your child is behaving this way when they're with you. What if I told you that many of these behaviors you're seeing and experiencing are not bad behavior, defiance, m- manipulation, laziness, disrespect, or even weakness, but actual survival responses? Today, we're gonna talk about the four nervous system survival responses children often develop when they are living under coercive control. You've probably heard of these: fight, flight, freeze, and/or fawn. And we'll talk about these responses and what they can look like, what they can sound like, why they happen, and most importantly, what you as a protective parent can do to help your children feel safe enough to slowly heal and regulate again. And before we begin, I want every protective parent listening to hear this. Your child's nervous system is adapting to survive in an incredibly unsafe emotional, psychologically, and mentally unsafe environment. That does not mean that they're broken. It means that their body is trying to protect them, that their minds are trying to protect them So what's a survival response? Children who live with coercive control often exist in a chronic state of stress, unpredictability, emotional confusion, hypervigilance, and or fear, just like you did, even if there's no physical violence happening. And this is where it gets tricky because an abuser never has to raise their hand or their voice for it to be abuse. Coercive control is about power, intimidation, manipulation, instability, criticism, emotional punishment, fear, and conditional, quote unquote, "love." It's transactional. A child's nervous system is not asking, "Is this fair?" It's asking, "Am I emotionally safe? Can I predict what will happen? What do I need to do to stay connected, protected, and or avoid conflict?" And when a child cannot safe- safely fight back, escape, or emotionally process what's happening, their nervous system adapts. That adaption becomes a survival response. Remember, they're trying to survive Let's talk about the fight response, the first one. The first response is often the easiest one to mislabel. These are children who may look angry, aggressive, defiant, explosive, controlling, argumentative, reactive. They may yell at you after transitions, hit siblings and/or yourself, refuse instructions, become emotionally dysregulated over small things, right? Small, tiny things become these massive issues. And protective parents oftentimes think, "Why are they taking this out on me? What have I done wrong? I must be doing something wrong." But this is because this is happening, your child is doing this because you are, in fact, a safe parent, and with you, they can just be their messy selves. Children suppress enormous amounts of stress in controlling environments. When they finally reach emotional safety, i.e. you, the nervous system releases what it has been holding. Fight responses can sound like, "You can't tell me what to do. I hate you. Leave me alone. Dad, Mom says you're the problem. You're always ruining everything. I don't wanna be here. I wanna live with Mom or Dad." And underneath that fight response is often fear, confusion, grief, loyalty conflicts imposed by the other parent, and emotional overwhelm. These children are not trying to be dangerous or difficult. Their nervous system is trying to regain control when they are out of control and things are outside of their control. That's a really scary place to be. What protective parents can do This is really important, right? This is where your power lies. What can you do? You can't control what the coercively controlling other parent does to your children, but you can control how you respond to your children, how you meet your children, no matter how messy or dysregulated they are. You need to, as often as humanly possible, stay regulated. Do not personalize the explosion. Remind yourself it's because you are your children's safe landing space. Hold calm boundaries. Focus on safety and connection over correction and punishment. Validate their feelings without validating harmful behavior. You can validate their actual feelings, even if they're totally made up lies based on the other parent's narrative, without actually saying that you agree with them. "But I hear what you're saying, and I'm so sorry that you're so angry." For instance, "I can see your body is overwhelmed right now. I'm here. We can talk when things feel calmer." A regulated parent regulates a dysregulated nervous system. You help your children co-regulate. In order to do that, though, you need to take care of yourself. Let's look at the flight response. These are the children who cope through escape. This might appear like children who are constantly trying to stay busy, one activity, other after another. They avoid any kind of emotional conversation. They isolate in their room. They don't want to be around the family, especially when historically they used to want to gravitate towards the family room or the dinner table for conversations These are your gamers. They overuse screens. They become really reliant on screens, and now more than ever, it's really easy for it to be conflicting. Is it because of our reliance on screens, or is it because they're trying to escape? Flight is escapism, right? They become perfectionistic, struggle to sit still, distract themselves constantly. Flight can also look like anxiety. These children often feel safest when they are mentally or physically somewhere else. They might say things like, "I'm tired. I don't know. Can I just go to my room? I don't wanna talk about it. Can I go on my iPad or my phone?" What's important to understand is that avoidance is often protection. Some children feel emotional vulnerability because emotions may not feel safe in their coercively controlling home. I can guarantee that no emotion other than happiness and acquiescence are allowed in the other home. Your children have to suppress everything that makes them human in order to align with their abuser and secure any modicum of safety they possibly can. They have learned that feelings get dismissed. Vulnerability becomes weaponized. Emotional honesty causes conflict. Needs are inconvenient, their needs. Their coercively controlling parent's needs are not inconvenient, but their needs are absolutely inconvenient. It's a real reversal of the child-parent role. What you can do as a protective parent to help your children navigate and co-regulate, do not force emotional disclosure. Create connection through low-pressure moments with high love. In your home, it's always gonna be high love, low pressure. It doesn't mean that you don't have boundaries, but you really have to pick your battles and really create as little pressure as humanly possible in your home. You're gonna normalize feelings. You're gonna build safety slowly and consistently. Sometimes healing conversations happen while driving, oftentimes when you're doing something else and you're not looking face to face. So while you're driving, baking, building Lego, coloring, walking the dog, or sitting beside each other doing something, not through intense eye contact interrogations. That does not feel safe. Safety grows in ordinary moments, so take any opportunity that you can to converse, to connect. Freeze is the response that often gets misunderstood as laziness, apathy, or lack of motivation. Now, many of you have thought, "My kid's lazy. They really lack motivation." But freeze is a shutdown. You are shutting down operations. These children may go quiet, seem emotionally numb, struggle to make decisions, the indecisive child, disassociate, procrastinate, look flat, right? Like unemotional, just no emotions, no happiness, no anger, just nothing. Have trouble concentrating, seem disconnected from themselves. Freeze happens when the nervous system feels overwhelmed and powerless. It's essentially, I can't fight, I can't f- flight, so I shut down. You may notice your child staring blankly after transitions or seeming to be emotionally absent or distant or unable to even answer simple questions. They might say things like, "I don't care. Whatever. I don't know. I'm fine," even when they are very much not fine. What you can do as their protective parent, reduce the pressure. Do you see a theme here? High love, low pressure. Can't say that enough. Offer gentle choices and not too many, just a few. You don't wanna overwhelm them. Focus on co-regulation before conversation, connection before correction, which is also why it's so important that you do the hard work when you don't have your children to help yourself be the most calm and present parent that you possibly can be for your children. It doesn't mean you're gonna be p- perfect. In fact, you're going to be under so much pressure. Perfection is not what we're going for, but you need to try your best to be as regulated as humanly possible. And when you make mistakes, you acknowledge them, you apologize, and you correct your behavior Simple grounding can help. So things like warm blankets, snacks, music, walking, gentle routines. I can't tell you how important transition r- rituals are for children. They also need routines because in a coercively controlling home, unpredictability is the name of the game. So your house needs to be predictable. Routines equals predictability. And most importantly, don't misinterpret their shutdown as indifference Sometimes freeze is what survival looks like in children. Remember, no matter how your children present, they are s- trying to survive an incredibly inhospitable environment the best way they know how and the only way they know how. And let's now talk about fawn, our last response. This is the response that gets praised m- the most by the outside world. These are the children who become people pleasers, hyper-compliant, emotionally over-responsible, caretaking, profession- perfectionistic, excessively agreeable. They may become little emotional managers, trying to keep everybody happy, trying to not upset anybody, trying to keep the peace in the home, trying to prevent conflict before it starts. These children often learn, "My safety depends on keeping others comfortable." They're contortionists. They're constantly contorting themselves to appease other people. This may s- sound like, "It's okay. I don't want to upset Mom or Dad. I'll just go along with it. Please don't be mad. I'm so sorry," constantly on repeat, more than is necessary. These children are often carrying enormous anxiety beneath the surface, and because they appear easy, their distress gets overlooked. Parents praise them for being the easy child. What you can do as a protective parent to help your child who is the people pleaser inside of the fawn response, teach them that they are allowed to take up space. They are allowed to have needs and articulate these needs clearly. It doesn't make them high maintenance. It makes them human. Encourage healthy disagreement, debate. Model boundaries, how to create them, enforce them, and how to respect them. Praise authenticity so when your child's actually being honest and not just when they're being compliant. Reassure them that they are not responsible for adult emotions, nor are they responsible for managing their siblings, their peers, their teachers, coaches, other extended family's emotions. Children should not feel responsible for maintaining peace in adult relationships or even in children relationships. They're children So what you need to remember. I know many of you are listening to this and thinking, "My child is showing all four." That's incredibly common, right? Children don't typically just stay fixed in one, although some do. It's fluid, and they might present as all four in any given moment. Children can move between these responses depending on the environment, the parent they're with, their developmental stage, their stress load, their perceived level of safety. And healing, remember, for children and adults is not linear. There will be setbacks. It will be two steps forward, one step back. There will be moments where you wonder if anything you're doing is helping or working. But please hear and remember this, a consistently safe, emotionally attuned parent matters more than you know. And even when it doesn't feel like it, your calm presence, your predictability, your emotional safety, your repair when you make mistakes, which you will, your belief in your child, these things become corrective emotional experience, not overnight, but over time. Remember, you're playing the long game in everything that you do. Thank you so much for listening to the Survivor's Playbook. If today's episode helped you feel less alone, more confident, empowered, and capable, please share it with others who might also need this validation. And if you're ready for deeper support, you can join my monthly membership or grab free tools on my website. All links are in my show notes. Please remember, your clarity is your power. Your calm is your resistance. You are not crazy. You are not alone, and you are not powerless. Until next time, keep going. I see you