Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn: Responses to Stressful Situations

“Fight,” “flight,” “freeze,” and “fawn” are terms that represent the most common trauma responses to incidents of high anxiety or stress.

Some people fight or become aggressive, while others flee the scene. On the same note, some might feel like they can’t extricate themselves from the situation (freeze), while others will attempt to flatter or please the aggressor to escape (fawn). Each of these responses can be useful in appropriate scenarios, but they can go haywire, too.

People with anxiety disorders often deal with heightened, misguided, and even debilitating versions of these acute stress responses. For example, someone with complex PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) might use any of these techniques in response to nonthreatening scenarios because a related trigger hearkens to a traumatizing time.

For some people, a threatening situation is an opportunity to confront their fears with anger and aggression. As your blood pressure rises and your heart rate increases, you might become more argumentative, cruel, or even violent to defend yourself. In a truly threatening situation, this can prove useful. There are many other circumstances, however, wherein the fight response does more harm than good to everyone involved.

When you go into flight mode, you seek to leave threatening circumstances as fast as possible. This becomes problematic when your experience of past traumas begins to color your present reality inaccurately. For instance, you might have experienced unhealthy conflict when you were younger, which caused you to withdraw and flee the situation. As you get older, this same behavior might prevent you from navigating conflicts in healthy, understanding ways with loved ones.

While the fight or flight responses are perhaps the most common, freezing up is very normal, too. You might experience dissociation or detachment as you find yourself unable to either act in self-defense or run away from the situation. Sometimes, freezing allows you to buy enough time to fight or flee; other times, it can leave you at a greater risk of harm.

Some people respond to threatening individuals by turning to people-pleasing. They might attempt to flatter or calm down the person threatening them, perhaps attempting to lighten the mood with self-deprecating humor. People who grew up with narcissistic parents often fall back on the fawn response because it proved so useful in navigating their own problematic upbringings.

These stress responses can help keep you alive when they function well, but they can also reduce your quality of life when they occur at the wrong time or to an unnecessary extent. These are just a few reasons they occur:

• Biological processes: Your brain and autonomic nervous system have evolved to keep you alive in threatening situations. When confronting a real or perceived threat, your amygdala fires off a fear response to your hypothalamus. As you snap into defense mode, your adrenal glands pump adrenaline and cortisol through your body, leading you to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
• Preferred coping mechanisms: People can develop a preferred set of coping strategies. Genetic factors and conditioning might set the groundwork for what leads you to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, but you also will develop a personal preference for what works for you over the years on a subjective level. Self-evaluation will help determine whether your responses to stressors help or hurt you.
• Preliminary conditioning: Past trauma informs present behavior. For instance, if you experienced a great deal of childhood abuse, you’ll still gravitate to the stress response you used to escape or alleviate that pain most effectively. This can sometimes lead you to develop unhealthy or codependent relationships in adulthood.

Imagine you’re in a crowded bar and an aggressive person comes up to you. It’s clear they want to start a fight. If you argue or engage right away, your fight response has activated. By contrast, if you head for the exit right away, you’re more prone to the flight impulse in dangerous situations. If you freeze during the conflict, you might feel unable to move or even say anything in response to the aggressor. Fawning would constitute trying to talk your way out of the situation.

The fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses can be helpful or harmful when it comes to your overall sense of well-being. Keep these tips in mind so you can manage them with wisdom and clarity:

• Practice mindfulness. When the sympathetic nervous system kicks into gear, it can be easy to let your emotions get the best of you. Mindfulness allows you to take a breather and determine whether these responses are reflective of reality or causing you an undue amount of stress.
• Recognize when they serve you. These survival instincts can help you meet your own needs or cause you to neglect them. Take stock of how these responses affect you. Look back on times when they’ve kicked in and ask yourself whether they reflected the situation’s true threat level. This sort of self-evaluation will help you parse out when they’re useful and when they’re counterproductive.
• Speak with a professional. Consider speaking with a licensed therapist or mental health professional if you feel any of these responses is wreaking havoc on your life. It’s possible you might have an anxiety disorder, in which case it’s possible you’re fighting, fleeing, freezing, or fawning far more often than you have to in reality.

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