TRAUMA RESPONSES HOW TO
TRAUMA RESPONSES FULL

The first step in managing any response awareness-we must feel to heal. Healthy fawn responses can include compassion for others, compromise, active listening, and a sense of fairness. Unhealthy fawn responses can include codependent relationships, staying in violent relationships, loss of self, destructive people-pleasing, or few or no boundaries.

TRAUMA RESPONSES FULL

Healthy freeze responses can include mindfulness, awareness, and full presence in the moment.

Unhealthy freeze responses can include dissociation, isolation, frequent zoning out, brain fog, difficulty making decisions, difficulty taking actions or getting things done, fear of achieving, or fear of trying new things.

Healthy fight responses can include establishing firm boundaries, being assertive, finding courage, becoming a strong leader, and protecting yourself and loved ones.

Unhealthy fight responses can include controlling behaviors, narcissistic tendencies, bullying, conduct disorder, demanding perfection from others, and feelings of entitlement.

Healthy flightresponses can include being able to disengage from harmful conversations, leave unhealthy relationships, remove yourself from physical danger, and properly assess danger.

Unhealthy flight responses can include obsessive or compulsive tendencies, needing to stay busy all the time, panic, constant feelings of fear, perfectionism, workaholic tendencies, and the inability to sit still.

An unhealthy flight response, on the other hand, may be to become a workaholic to avoid confrontation, while a healthy flight response may be to exit an unhealthy relationship. For instance, an unhealthy fight response may result in increased aggressive behavior, while a healthy fight response may be the desire to set and maintain healthy relationship boundaries.

These trauma responses can show up in either a healthy or unhealthy way.

The fawn response can be defined as keeping someone happy to neutralize the threat.

The freeze response can be defined as pausing instead of running.

The fight response can be defined as pure self-preservation.

The flight response can be defined as getting away from the situation as quickly as possible.

You may have one or more of them at different times and under different circumstances: You do not have to default to unhealthy trauma responses that keep you stuck.Īs mentioned above, the four types of trauma responses are: fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Over time, you can work on healing your trauma you do not have to let it take up any more room in your life. This will enable you to reconceptualize (reimagine/rewire) them into a pattern that works for you and not against you.

Knowing about these trauma responses can help you see how you are responding to trauma triggers, which will, in turn, help you recognize the warning signals of how they are showing up in your life and what they mean for you. This means that when anything similar happens to us, the predictive pattern will “switch on” in our mind, brain and body, and we can automatically revert to it, which strengthens it further. The more this trauma pattern is activated/triggered, the stronger it gets. When this happens, the brain sends a message to all the cells of the body about this thought tree, so the memory is stored in the body as well. The more intense the experience, the more energy and strength the thought tree has. These main trauma responses are actual neural structures that get built into our brain as “thought trees.” The experience triggers the response with all its memories, including the knowledge, data and emotions that are attached to the memories like branches and leaves on a tree. Although recent research indicates there may be two more trauma responses common to human beings, I am just going to concentrate on the main four for this podcast.

TRAUMA RESPONSES HOW TO

In this podcast (episode #403) and blog, I will talk about these different trauma responses, and how to manage them in the moment using self-regulation and mind-management techniques. We are all familiar with the fight or flight response, but there are actually four main trauma responses, which are categorized as “the four F’s of trauma”: fight, flight, freeze and fawn. When we experience any kind of trauma, we can respond to the threat in various ways to cope.

Trauma responses