Trauma doesn’t just live in the past — it shapes how your body and nervous system react to stress in the present. When you feel threatened or overwhelmed, your system automatically activates survival strategies. These are often referred to as the four trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
Understanding these responses can help you make sense of why you react the way you do — and why it isn’t simply a matter of willpower.
The Four Trauma Responses
1. Fight
- Response: anger, confrontation, attempts to control the situation.
- Feels like: irritability, defensiveness, needing to “win.”
- Purpose: protect by overpowering or intimidating a threat.
2. Flight
- Response: escape, avoidance, overworking, keeping busy.
- Feels like: restlessness, difficulty relaxing, always “on the go.”
- Purpose: outrun the danger or stay one step ahead.
3. Freeze
- Response: shutdown, stuckness, dissociation.
- Feels like: numbness, brain fog, paralysis when decisions need to be made.
- Purpose: stay still and “invisible” until the danger passes.
4. Fawn
- Response: people-pleasing, appeasing others, self-abandonment.
- Feels like: difficulty saying no, prioritizing others’ needs, avoiding conflict at all costs.
- Purpose: reduce risk by making yourself agreeable and safe to others.
Why These Responses Exist
These survival strategies are deeply wired into the nervous system. They evolved to protect us in life-or-death situations — and they still activate even when the threat is emotional, relational, or psychological rather than physical.
Importantly, these responses are not conscious choices. They happen automatically and often before your rational brain has time to process.
How They Show Up in Modern Life
Even when there’s no physical danger, the nervous system can still perceive stress as a threat. Examples include:
- Fight: snapping at coworkers, escalating arguments with a partner.
- Flight: burying yourself in work, avoiding difficult conversations, constant busyness.
- Freeze: staring at your inbox but unable to reply, zoning out during conflict, shutting down when overwhelmed.
- Fawn: saying yes when you want to say no, smoothing over others’ anger at your own expense, ignoring your needs to keep the peace.
These patterns can create challenges in relationships, work, and self-esteem — but they’re understandable once you recognize them as survival responses.
Can You Change Your Default Response?
Yes — with awareness and therapeutic support, it’s possible to shift. While your nervous system may have a “go-to” response, you can learn to recognize the signs earlier and practice new regulation tools.
Therapy can help you:
- Identify your most common trauma response.
- Understand the situations that trigger it.
- Build strategies to regulate your nervous system in healthier ways.
Recognizing the four trauma responses is the first step to loosening their grip. You don’t have to stay locked in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn — with compassion and support, change is possible.
Curious to learn more? Read my article on the freeze response to explore one of the most misunderstood trauma responses in detail.
If you’re ready to work through freeze with support, I offer online therapy for expats and adults navigating trauma, grief, and life transitions. Contact me here.
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