By Manasi | Monday: Research Reads Reading time: approx. 6 minutes
If you have ever frozen when you wanted to speak up, appeased someone when you wanted to say no, or found yourself unable to move in the face of something frightening you have experienced a trauma response in action.
These responses have become more widely discussed in recent years, which is largely a good thing. But with wider discussion has come a degree of oversimplification. Terms like “fight or flight” get used loosely, “fawn” has entered popular psychology with varying degrees of accuracy, and the underlying neuroscience is often flattened into something that sounds tidy but misses the most important parts.
This post is an attempt to explain what these responses actually are, where they come from, what the research tells us, and most importantly what it means when they show up in your life.
What you will learn in this post
- What the fight, flight, freeze and fawn responses are and where they come from
- The neuroscience behind them, in accessible terms
- Why these responses happen even when there is no physical danger
- What it means when they become patterns rather than acute responses
- How this understanding connects to trauma treatment
The origins: why we have these responses at all
The fight-or-flight response was first described by the American physiologist Walter Cannon in the early twentieth century. His observation was straightforward: when an organism perceives threat, the body undergoes rapid physiological changes designed to maximise the chances of survival either by confronting the threat or escaping from it.
The mechanisms are driven primarily by the sympathetic nervous system. In the presence of perceived danger, the hypothalamus triggers the release of adrenaline and cortisol. Heart rate increases. Blood is redirected from digestive organs to large muscle groups. Breathing becomes shallow and rapid. Non-essential functions, digestion, reproduction, higher-order thinking are suppressed. The body is, in the most literal sense, preparing for action.
This system evolved over millions of years in environments where threats were largely physical and immediate, a predator, a hostile individual, a life-threatening situation requiring fast response. It is exquisitely well-designed for that context.
The difficulty is that the human nervous system cannot clearly distinguish between a physical threat and a psychological one. The brain regions responsible for initiating the stress response particularly the amygdala, which functions as the brain’s threat-detection system respond to perceived danger of any kind. A difficult conversation, a critical email, a memory of something that once happened: all of these can trigger the same cascade of physiological changes as a genuinely life-threatening event.
Fight
The fight response involves mobilising towards the threat, confronting it, pushing back against it, attempting to overpower or remove it.
In its acute form, this is entirely adaptive. In a physically dangerous situation, fighting back can be lifesaving.
In psychological and relational contexts, the fight response can look like anger, irritability, an urge to argue or dominate, defensive aggression, or a compulsion to control situations and people. When someone becomes disproportionately reactive to minor stressors what is sometimes described as a “short fuse” this can reflect a nervous system that has become sensitised to threat and defaults quickly to fight mobilisation.
It is worth noting that the fight response is not inherently problematic. The capacity to assert boundaries, to challenge injustice, to stand firm in the face of pressure these are expressions of the same energy. The question is always whether the response is proportionate to the actual situation.
Flight
The flight response involves moving away from the threat escaping, withdrawing, creating distance.
Again, in its acute and proportionate form, this is adaptive. Getting out of a dangerous situation is often the right response.
In psychological contexts, flight can manifest as avoidance of situations, conversations, feelings, or memories that feel threatening. It can look like workaholism (staying busy to avoid sitting with difficult internal states), social withdrawal, a tendency to exit relationships or situations when they become uncomfortable, or physical restlessness and an inability to be still.
Anxiety, in many of its presentations, has a significant flight component: the urge to escape the uncomfortable internal experience of the anxiety itself, which ironically maintains and amplifies it over time.
Freeze
The freeze response is less well understood in popular culture than fight or flight, but it is equally important and often more distressing for the people who experience it.
Freeze involves immobility in the face of threat. In the animal world, this is the “playing dead” response and it has survival value in certain predatory contexts where movement triggers attack. In humans, it is the experience of being unable to move, speak, or act when confronted with overwhelming threat or danger.
The neuroscience here is nuanced. Peter Levine, whose work on somatic experiencing has been influential in trauma treatment, describes freeze as a state of thwarted action the body has mobilised for fight or flight but is unable to complete either response, and so the activation becomes locked in the system. The psychologist Stephen Porges, whose Polyvagal Theory has been widely discussed in trauma circles, describes a related state dorsal vagal shutdown as a distinct physiological response involving withdrawal, dissociation, and collapse.
In practice, freeze can look like: going blank in a confrontational situation, being unable to speak when you want to, dissociation, emotional numbness, or the experience many trauma survivors describe of not being able to respond to something happening to them in the way they would have wanted.
This last point deserves emphasis. A significant proportion of people who have experienced sexual violence describe freezing being unable to physically resist or call for help. The freeze response is an involuntary physiological reaction, not a choice, and understanding it as such is important both for survivors making sense of their own experience and for wider conversations about consent and trauma.
Fawn
The fawn response is the most recently named of the four and is primarily associated with the work of therapist Pete Walker, who developed the concept from his clinical work with adults who experienced childhood trauma.
Fawn involves appeasing the source of threat becoming compliant, accommodating, and self-effacing in order to neutralise danger. In contexts where direct confrontation or escape is not possible most notably, for a child in an unsafe family environment making oneself agreeable and non-threatening can be an effective survival strategy.
The difficulty is that fawn patterns tend to persist long after the original threatening context has passed. In adult life, fawning can look like chronic people-pleasing, difficulty saying no, prioritising others’ needs and emotions to the exclusion of one’s own, a habitual tendency to over-apologise or defer, and a deep discomfort with conflict or disapproval.
People with strong fawn patterns often describe a pervasive sense of not knowing what they actually want or feel because the orienting question for so much of their life has been what does this person need from me? rather than what do I need?
It is important to note that the fawn response is not as firmly established in the neurobiological research literature as fight, flight, and freeze. It is a clinically useful concept with strong face validity it maps recognisably onto patterns many people experience but it should be understood as a framework developed from clinical observation rather than a neurologically validated fourth survival mechanism in the same sense as the others.
When responses become patterns
Each of these responses is, in its acute form, adaptive. The difficulty arises when they become default patterns when the nervous system remains in a state of chronic activation, or when responses that were necessary in one context get applied indiscriminately to situations that do not require them.
This is the essence of what trauma does to the nervous system. The psychologist Bessel van der Kolk, in his widely read book The Body Keeps the Score, describes trauma as the experience of being stuck the nervous system locked in responses that made sense in the original threatening context but continue to fire in conditions that are now, objectively, safe.
Trauma-informed psychological approaches including somatic therapies, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), trauma-focused CBT, and approaches drawing on Polyvagal Theory work, in different ways, to help the nervous system complete what it could not complete at the time, and to develop greater flexibility in responding to the present rather than the past.
What this means for you
If you recognise yourself in any of these responses if you identify a tendency to freeze when you want to speak, to fawn when you want to set a boundary, to flee situations that feel threatening even when you are objectively safe this is not a character flaw. It is a nervous system that learned to keep you safe and has not yet received the information that the danger has passed.
That information can be communicated. The nervous system can change. And understanding these patterns really understanding them, rather than just knowing the words is often the first step in that process.
If you would like to explore this further in a professional context, you are welcome to info@mindthroughmylens.org
Further reading
- Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Penguin.
- Levine, P. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books.
- Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. W. W. Norton.
- Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing.
Manasi is a Therapist and independent researcher working towards a PhD by published works. She writes about the science of the mind, trauma, and psychological wellbeing.
Leave a Reply