Living in Survival Mode: Fight, Flight, Freeze & Fawn
Fight, flight, freeze and fawn. Most people have heard of these survival modes, and all of us have had to employ them at some point. These responses are designed to protect us from threat and get us out of situations that are recognized as unsafe.
Although survival responses are helpful in acute situations (like navigating through a dangerous situation), they can also hinder us from living to the full, if they are overused.
The first step in working through any maladaptively-used survival processes is to start recognizing the responses you are partial to and how they work in your life. Below is a description of some of the survival responses people commonly use:
Fight
In fight, you seek to create safety through vigilance and control.
Associated emotions include anger and rage, which are often associated with feeling powerful. In fight mode, there is lots of energy activated to diminish potential threats. This can be done through feeling bigger and making your opponent feel smaller.
Bullies often use this tactic - where others are attacked (verbally, mentally, or physically) and are made to feel small. This helps the triggered person feel more powerful and in control but is obviously harmful to all parties involved.
Sometimes, our trauma survival responses are so much our default that we don't even realize we are triggered. If you know fight is one of your preferred responses, then when you notice yourself expressing the traits of this survival response, you can start to work on connecting to other resources that create safety.
In fight mode, the tactic is to diminish the perceived threat through exerting power. It is action-orientated and reactive.
Flight
Where are my escape artists at?
People who prefer the flight option are adept at fleeing both physically, and if not, mentally. Anything to avoid the pain of their present predicament. This is rooted in the reality that at some point, they faced pain that was so overwhelming it threatened their sense of safety in this world. The best resource they had at the time to navigate that pain was to flee from it. This then became the pattern that their brain encoded and used to navigate future circumstances.
The psychological symptoms of being in flight include being easily distracted, having a scattered mind, racing thoughts and going from one thing to the next without finishing thoughts or tasks. It can also include feeling indecisive, ambivalent and struggling to commit to people or plans.
Chronic flight can involve a long-standing pain of underachieving. You have all the potential, but there is a lack of follow-through, and your brilliant ideas and best relationships don't get the time and attention needed to stand a chance at thriving. And you miss out on the self-esteem boost that comes from completing a task from start to finish and succeeding at a challenge.
A key strategy for those who love to live in flight mode include making use of addictions and compulsions to assist them in their endeavors.
Addictions and compulsions have many faces and forms, some more destructive than others.
Here are some examples of what you can be addicted to:
Work & 'busy-ness' (including habitual preoccupation and mentally checking out)
Food
Substances (alcohol, drugs)
Excessive socializing, exercising, fantasizing.
Entertainment
Neatness and order
Sex
Computer games
Watching sports
Compulsive (numbing) behavior like compulsive cleaning
Starting new projects, tasks, and relationships
Anything that causes an adrenaline rush - from bungee jumping to being chronically late and having to rush around and meet deadlines against the odds.
While people who mentally escape play the game of how much they can zone-out in conversations without being caught out, others prefer the option of physically fleeing stressful situations. The urge to run away, visit somewhere new, or create distance between you and a stressful space could indicate that your brain has noticed something that's making you uncomfortable and it's putting forward an option of what could help get rid of the stress.
Avoidance: The Wind in Flight's Sails
As mentioned, most of these things aren't wrong in themselves. It's the overuse and misuse of these tactics that create problems. One of the issues
with overusing the flight survival response is that it creates chronic avoidance. Avoiding something doesn't make it go away. It could actually make
the problems pile up - so at some point, you'll need to develop the tools to face stressful situations in a way that brings in safety and solutions.
Snapping out of flight mode involves identifying your needs (such as safety), as well as the right resources to meet those needs.
For some, that might look like a road map for how to work through pain without becoming overwhelmed and spiraling. For others, that can look like increasing your window of tolerance for being present, or working up some muscle memory in how to overcome a challenge that gives you anxiety.
Freeze
Ever been asked a question and had your mind go completely blank? That deer-in-the-headlights response is on the scale of freezing under pressure.
The underlying emotional tone of freeze is experiencing fear, but it leaves you in more of a state of being passive and numb, even as you are overwhelmed. You feel stuck. Everything from being numb and having no feeling to having a full-blown panic attack can be part of this trauma response and its aftermath. But the underlying root is a kind of overwhelm which has led to a state of hypo-arousal.
Like the other survival responses, the intensity of what comes up is on a continuum from a slight response to an overwhelming one. In terms of the freeze response, this can look like anything from a mild sense of indecisiveness to a stark sense of terror that leaves you feeling stuck. Here, both a 'lack' of symptoms (such as numbness and ambivalence) or quite intrusive symptoms such as phobias, nightmares and panic attacks all fall under the category of a freeze response.
One of the ways to get out of a freeze response is to take action. It involves connecting with the internal agency that you do have and stepping out in a direction to create change in your circumstances.
Fawn
Those well-versed in fawning are adept at reading the emotional states of other people. From there the best strategy to create safety is selected: whether that is nurturing and caring for a demanding family member or calming someone down so that they don't take their anger out on others. Fawning is self-sacrificing (and potentially self-betraying) and works to pacify other people who are perceived to be more powerful.
One of the emotions often involved with the fawn response is a sense of shame. The default thinking is to find something wrong within yourself, rather than the other person who is being difficult. This is also done to create a sense of inner control ('if it's my fault that they're behaving badly, that means that I have the agency to be different and cause them to treat others better'). There is a sense of powerlessness and that "I'm not okay". You navigate creating safety by soothing and smoothing other's emotions in order to create wellbeing.
Coming out of fawn can involve:
Setting boundaries
Advocating for yourself
Recognizing your own needs and wants
Doing activities that express who YOU are, and if need be, going on a journey to rediscover who you are
Working through co-dependency, including connecting to different ways to feel and be OKAY even if those close to you are not.
Building up resources in the form of other options, so you have more agency to go to different places and make different choices, even if the people you fawn over don't support you. This also helps create a better power balance in relationships.
Stuck in Survival Mode
Survival responses to trauma are intended to help us get through tough times. If you find yourself regularly getting stuck in one or more of these responses, it just means that your system is recognizing something similar in your current surroundings to something that previously felt very unsafe. These are all an attempt to protect you and help you get by.
If you're stuck in survival mode in a way that's adversely affecting your relationships, job, and self-esteem, there are different ways to re-wire your responses and become un-stuck.
For those wanting to engage more deeply with their own survival responses:
- What is your go-to survival mode?
- What are the kinds of situations this response works to protect you from?
- Do you find yourself defaulting to this trauma response in a way that hinders you?
- In what kinds of circumstances does this response come up?
- What are the effects of overusing this survival response?
- In your relationships?
- Your work?
- Your enjoyment of life?
- On your self-esteem? - Think back to a situation where you used a trauma survival response out of its place (i.e. it hindered you from thriving as much as it provided protection). What are some other options of navigating this situation that would maintain both safety and connection?
Once you've thought of some alternative responses, it's important to put your ideas into action. From there, decide whether you want to try that again, or make adjustments and try something else. A sign that this has worked is that you feel more at peace, grounded, safe and alive. More present and able to engage and enjoy life.