Trauma Responses

Most of us have heard of flight, fight, freeze or fawn... these are our trauma responses. Do you know which response you tend to react with? In this episode we discuss the trauma responses, what they look like, why they show up for us, and how we can practice self-compassion while we work through our triggers so that we can respond in healthier ways. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Many behaviors labeled as toxic, lazy, difficult, or manipulative are actually intelligent, subconscious survival mechanisms developed to stay safe. I'm your host, Shalee, and I'm your co-host Sam. And you're listening to Pathway to Empowerment, where we believe in thriving, not surviving. These reactions often aren't character flaws or weaknesses. They are hardwired responses designed to protect you, even if they are no longer useful in your current life situation. Today we are going to be discussing trauma responses, what they are, how many different ones we have, what they may be in response to, and how to train yourself to react in a more healthy way. In order to get into what different responses there are, let's first define what a trauma response actually is. Shalee, can you define that for us? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

So a trauma response is an automatic, involuntary, and that's important, involuntary physiological as well as a psychological reaction to a perceived danger and or a deeply stressful, overwhelming event. These responses are survival mechanisms meant to protect a person, often causing lasting emotional, mental, and physical effects.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

So what are the different trauma responses? I know there's several that start with F's, or at least that I've heard. What are they all?

SPEAKER_01 1:37

So we it's easy to remember because they do all start with F, right? So there's fight, flight, freeze, fun, and they've added recently flop or faint. So let's start off with fight. So fight is an aggressive, controlling, or confrontational behavior, such as lashing out verbally and or physically, which becomes easy when you become easily frustrated, you can intimidate others that way and work to maintain control of yourself and the situation or people. Then we have flight. Flight is avoiding or running away from threats, which can look like hypervigilance, perfectionism, alcoholism, or constantly changing jobs or relationships to avoid emotional pain. Freeze is feeling stuck, paralyzed almost, to or detached, disassociated from the body and the surroundings. This can include brain fog and or even the ability or inability to act or react. Fawning sometimes people have a really hard time with fawning because it doesn't like that's something we don't really talk about much. But fawning is trying to please, appease, or avoid threats or danger through people pleasing, often leading to difficult setting setting boundaries, difficulty setting boundaries, suppressing one's own feelings, and sometimes it leads to codependency. Finding is also an ability to like, you know, make sure the other person is focused on other aspects of situations instead of what you're fearful that they're going to like hold on to or look at. Okay. Flop or faint is a complete shutdown, including a physical collapse, passing out, or experiencing overwhelming helplessness.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

Interesting. What are some signs or symptoms that may show up so you know that your trauma responses have been activated?

SPEAKER_01 4:08

So physically, you're going to have some physiological symptoms or signs that something's going on, such as shaking, fatigue, headaches, difficulty sleeping, and even changes in your appetite. Those are some of the physical symptoms and signs that something's going on for you. Emotional signs can be intense fear, panic to the point of having panic attacks, anxiety, sadness, irritability, and anger. Emotionally, there's avoiding situations that remind the person of the traumatic event or situation, hypervigilance, which is a feeling of always needing to know where you're at, being on guard, being aware of your situations and circumstances. And then cognitively, you have intrusive thoughts about the event, confusion, and dissociation. So those are some major ones.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

When a trauma response is triggered, how can you quickly reestablish a sense of safety to in order to respond more effectively to the situation?

SPEAKER_01 5:30

So that's that's a kind of a large question that we're gonna kind of try to simplify. And by means, by simplifying it, I'm not saying it's easy to do or that it's going to be a quick fix. Okay, so the first step is really getting to know your body, knowing the way you act and react. Some of us know we're runners, right? So that would be the flight. We know that when something scary comes up, we're going to take the flight path.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

So, little question in that then is do most of us re tend to respond in the same way most of the time to triggers, or do we or is that like situational?

SPEAKER_01 6:16

It can be situational, but more often than not, we have one or two ways that we act or react to everything. So if you're if you're a a person that is a flight person or a runner, we call them sometimes, you're going to take off running. I have my oldest son that his that is his response to any stimulus that is scary for him. In fact, if it's a physical thing, he he actually got hurt one time and he was a mile and a half down the road before I could actually even catch up to him to find out what was going on. So physically running away from the situation is sometimes what people tend to do because when that when that trauma response comes into play, their cognitive brain shuts down and their body just takes over.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

Does that make sense? So more often than not, we do have one to two that we tend to really use when it's any situation for us. Okay. So again, it's easy to say, okay, know your body, know which trauma response center activity or response you have. And then we get to look at what to do with them. So when we look at that, there's certain things that each one of them you can incorporate. And I like to talk about it as in regards to like the stop light. When we're in the red zone or anger, if we know what this the red stop light tells us to do, which almost everyone knows, right? We're supposed to stop. So immediately stopping what you're doing and actually go use all the energy that's there in a healthy, productive way is going to lead you out of that response a lot quicker and back into your cognitive ability. Okay. If we look, if we drop to the green light, green light tells us to go. To go. So when we think of the blue zone, which is the depressed state or the you know shutdown mode that we've talked about with like the the flop or faint, right? The complete shutdown. If we get up and move, we're actually gonna move through it to quicker too. So knowing what what your type of responses typically are will help you know what to do next. But again, when you're in a shutdown cognitive mode and you're in a trauma response, everything is automatic. There's no new learning that is taking place. So we have to practice beforehand. So when those things do occur, we know what to do. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

How can we distinguish between a present-day reaction and a trauma response that is actually just survival from the past?

SPEAKER_01 9:26

So the interesting thing is that when we have a trauma response, almost always our brain will connect all the pieces. Like if you think about a train that knows it's going to, let's just say it's going to Iowa. Okay. And everything that's been loaded on the compartments of that train that need to go to Iowa, the train conductor knows where to pick up those pieces. Our brain does that same thing with each trauma event, it goes along and attaches each traumatic event to each other. So what makes that difficult is that our brain cannot distinguish between what has happened, what is happening, or what may happen. So we need to actually have skills and plans in place to help us navigate through so our brain doesn't have to distinguish between those things and we just act and react in the way that we want to have the most benefit moving out of that. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 10:38

What role does self-compassion play in breaking the cycle of shame that's often tied to the trauma responses we experience?

SPEAKER_01 10:47

So when you think about it, when you're hard on yourself, can you allow yourself to do anything differently? Not usually. We spiral down and we sink into what we talk about as core distortions because we've distorted situations and events that create that spiral of shame. And we live in shame a lot because our body is programmed to stick with the negatives and look at the negative pieces in life instead of kick yourself to a positive. So it really is important that we learn to have compassion with ourselves when we do something or have something happen to us so that we don't spiral down into that shame place, so that we can get out of it and we can do something positive for ourselves. In fact, Sam, that's a lot of the reason, in my personal and professional opinion, that when a traumatic event happens, we don't seek help for it, is because we've taken it on ourselves and we've owned it, even if it was something that we didn't necessarily plan for or have any control over.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

Yeah. You know, it's so interesting that self-compassion can be hard when we're so giving of that to our friends and family. But then if we're in that same exact situation that we were just like, oh, it's okay, you're fine, it wasn't you, and then we find ourselves in that, and and yet we blame ourselves. So we don't give ourselves the compassion that we gave everybody else.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Yeah. And you know, the interesting thing is we will we will give compassion to a stranger that we've never seen, never met, don't know anything about more than we would do for ourselves typically. So again, that's why it's so vital for us to actually put things in place that help us give ourselves grace and give ourselves leeway when something happens to us and we don't know how to navigate through it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:15

What is a commonly misunderstood behavior that is actually a valid trauma response?

SPEAKER_01 13:22

Well, you have to remember that every single response that is trauma related is valid. So more often than not, when somebody is acting in a certain fashion, they're acting that way because it's worked for them or they don't know what to do differently. So everything that happens, say for instance, this is this is a statement that you've probably heard a lot in the last probably five years. Well, that person's extra or they're too much, right? And what we're really saying is emotionally they're a mess. And emotionally, they probably are a mess because they didn't know how to do anything different when trauma struck in their world and they're just trying to survive, and they get stuck there. One of my hardest things personally is whining. When you hear people whine, but that gave them a reaction from someone important in the world that gave them attention, and so then they they used that and they tucked that away for next time something hard happened to them traumatic-wise or trauma-related, they pull that out automatically because it worked to get them that needed comfort or ability to move forward. And so when you find yourself getting irritated or you know, thinking something about someone, it's it's so vital that we actually stop and actually look at like why might that person be acting the way they're acting? Right. And so for me, even though I know whining is one of my biggest like triggers for me, and I know where that comes from, and that's helpful too.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

Right?

SPEAKER_01 15:24

I had an aunt who anything that happened to her, she whined about it. And so it was so grating and irritating to always hear that and not hear her talk in a natural, normal voice. And so when we know that we can actually give grace to them and other people, does that make sense? And so when you actually can allow yourself to share that with other people in a way that makes it make sense to them, you know, like I see you're hurting, I see that you're whining about it, but I can't help you unless you calm down, then just tell me what happened so I can give you this the comfort and the support you need instead of going, just quit whining. Does that make sense? So everything is vital, everything is is valid. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

Learning to identify your personal trauma responses, whether they manifest as fight, flight, freeze, or fun, is a transformative step toward deeper self-awareness and healing. Understanding that your knee-jerk reactions, such as people pleasing, avoidance, or intense anger, are actually protective. Trauma-informed survival strategies, allows you to replace self-blame with self-compassion. By recognizing the physical and emotional warning signs of your dominant response in real time, you gain the ability to pause and intervene rather than merely react. This awareness creates the space to consciously develop more effective present moment responses, helping you navigate triggers with empowerment and intention rather than staying stuck in the past. If you'd like a little extra help on your personal journey with this, please reach out. Shalee is an amazing therapist and life coach, and she would love to help. Tune in on Monday for our conversation about guilt versus shame. We'll see you next time.