Understanding Trauma Responses
When faced with a dangerous situation, our bodies react to protect us not only in the moment but also from future threats. Imagine you were bit by a dog. During the attack you may try to fight the dog off or run. After the attack you may become afraid of all dogs because your brain is using the information from the past event to try and protect you better in the future. Hence the next dog you see (who may be incredibly sweet) is immediately labeled as a threat. The dangers you brain is protecting you from are not limited to physical attack or going to war; they include people who may hurt us emotionally.
Trauma is More Common Than Most People Realize
Most people recognize the effects of trauma in the form of PTSD, but the scope of that recognition is often limited. For example, many people rightfully associate PTSD with military members who have returned from war. However, not only combat veterans suffer from PTSD. In fact, traumatic events can also occur in everyday life – to almost anyone.
From first responders and EMTs to someone in an abusive relationship, trauma experiences vary. As a result, people respond to trauma in different ways. Chances are you’ve heard of “fight or flight” responses to threats before, but they’re often misunderstood, and they aren’t the only common reactions to threats.
By understanding more about the most common responses, you might be able to get a better picture of how you, personally, react when your brain perceives a threat. When you’re able to develop a deeper understanding of your mind’s automatic response(s) to threats, you can learn to better manage those reactions and work through it when it happens.
With that in mind, let’s start by taking a closer look at how these trauma responses develop.
How do Automatic Trauma Responses Develop?
We all have the capacity to engage in any of the trauma responses discussed below. If we perceive a threat, then we instinctually respond in a way that our brain thinks will best get us out of the dangerous situation.
Ways of responding to threats can become more automatic when they are successful. For example, if a child responds to a parental threat by angrily lashing out and then gets slapped, expressing anger (“fight”) may be less likely to be used again. Whereas, if a child responds to a parent by lashing out and the parent gives in, then the child may be more likely to use that response again when threatened in similar ways. We often have trauma responses that our brain prefers, but that doesn’t mean we don’t ever use the other trauma responses. We may have different responses depending on who we are talking to, what type of threat our brain perceives, and the context of the threat.
Trauma Responses are Automatic
It is important to note that these responses are automatic. Information comes into our brain and is first encountered by the part of the brain responsible for survival. If it perceives a threat, then it's going to kick into action to protect you! It turns off access to the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that is logical. Being logical takes time, and your brain needs you to respond now! For example, you walk into a yard with a rope on the ground. Your survival brain (which is not the most logical) sees it first and sees a snake. You jump and start to run away, during which time the information that it’s only a rope finally makes its way to the logical part of your brain, which concludes there's no danger.
The survival part of our brain is like the military veteran who immediately springs into action (even when you wish he wouldn’t) and starts throwing punches or grabs you and pulls you into an underground bunker before you even understand what’s going on. As inconvenient or irritating as this is, it’s hard to be angry at them because they’re doing it all to protect you.
And while you will always respond to threats with trauma responses, with proper trauma treatment you can stop reacting to things that are not actually threats. You can develop tools to lessen your brain’s need to react (or over-react) to some perceived threats.
Types of Trauma Responses
While everyone might look a little bit different after a traumatic event, there are four primary types of trauma responses. Each is a normal, understandable response the brain may have in face of significant stress.
Fight
The “fight” response is one of the most commonly recognized trauma responses. This occurs when you become aggressive during a traumatic experience. Essentially, your body prepares for battle. If you feel threatened in any way, your brain’s natural defense mechanism might be to act out.
This “fight” trauma response doesn’t necessarily mean things have to get physical, but it certainly can. You might even do something that typically isn’t in your character. For example, throwing a punch or yelling at the person trying to do you harm.
If the traumatic event is something out of your control, like a natural disaster, your fight response might include showing aggression to the people around you.
The fight response focuses on self-preservation and self-defense. When your brain recognizes that you’re in a traumatic situation, your sympathetic nervous system is activated with of an influx of hormones. It’s an involuntary, natural response that you really have no control over. Your body prepares you to mobilize by doing things like increasing your heart rate and sending blood to the muscles in the arms and legs. It also shuts down long term body functions, like digestion, to conserve energy for responding to the perceived threat.
Fight, however, is not always a helpful trauma response. Perhaps you grew up in an emotionally abusive household and developed a reliance on the fight response to protect yourself from the abuse of your family members. While it helped you cope at the time, your adult brain may now perceive well-intentioned things a loved one says as a threat because it shares something in common with the abuse in your childhood. Although logically you understand that your loved one is nothing like the past abuser(s), your automatic trauma response has already been triggered and you come out fighting.
Flight
The other well-known trauma response is the “flight” response. When encountering a perceived threat, your nervous system activates and your body releases stress hormones that signal you to flee. Your brain is interpreting the situation as unsafe and tries to get you to safety. So, instead of standing up and defending yourself from a threat, your instinct is literally or metaphorically to run as far away from it as possible.
Having a natural flight response doesn’t make you weak or ill-equipped to handle a traumatic situation. It’s your brain’s way of telling you the safest thing you can do at that moment is to get as far away as possible.
While there may be times that a flight response is needed, overreliance on it may cause problems. Maybe you grew up being bullied and learned to run away at the sight of your abusers. You continued to run from other threats, strengthening flight as a useful trauma response.
As an adult, your brain may perceive conflict as a threat, and you avoid and run from all conflict. You may find you leave difficult or unpleasant situations. You may have trouble staying at a job or in a relationship.
Freeze
While the fight-or-flight responses mobilize you to take some kind of action to protect and preserve yourself from a threat, the “freeze” response takes a different approach. It temporarily paralyzes you with fear and leaves you unable to move. You’ve probably heard the expression “deer in the headlights” before. Well, that’s exactly what the freeze response is.
When you freeze during a traumatic experience, it is your brain’s way of telling you that it doesn’t believe you can fight your way through the situation OR flee from it. So, the next best thing is to stay in place, perfectly still.
During the freeze response, you might feel completely numb and unable to move. Some people might even call it an “out of body” experience. You may experience feelings of panic, lightheadedness, nausea, dizziness, numbness and tingling. You might experience swings between parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system actions. Symptoms of dissociation may be seen during freeze responses.
On the surface, it might seem silly, but think about how many movies you’ve seen where the main character is so terrified of a situation they can do nothing but stay perfectly still. Unfortunately, that’s not so far-fetched – it’s a typical trauma response!
There are some situations in which freezing is actually the best thing to protect yourself from further harm. Such as when your safest course of action is to do nothing and wait. It may prevent you from doing or saying something you would regret. It’s one of the most common ways trauma affects your brain when you don’t know what else to do.
Unfortunately these automatic responses, once developed, can follow us into adulthood and trip us up later in life. Perhaps as a child, your dad would yell at you, and you weren’t allowed to leave or say anything so your body learned to freeze. Now when you are in a disagreement as an adult and someone raises their voice or yells, you are suddenly unable to engage and find yourself freezing, waiting for it to be over.
Fawn
One of the lesser-discussed ways trauma affects the brain is through the “fawn” response. Fawning is a way to avoid or diffuse trauma by essentially people-pleasing, even if it is to your own detriment. People who lean toward this response are usually willing to move mountains to please someone or avoid further trauma.
Those who use this response often try to appease those involved so everyone can return to a sense of safety and security, or to prevent a threat altogether. Most often, this response develops in childhood and is usually a result of physical or emotional abuse, as well as in those with narcissistic caregivers and/or romantic partners. After trying to fight, flight, or freeze several times without success you look for another way to manage the threat.
Children typically use fawning in an attempt to cope when they’re dealing with an emotionally or physically abusive parent. They might try to do whatever it takes to please that parent so the abuse will stop, or to keep it from happening. You may have found out that the situation would deescalate by doing whatever you could to please your abuser.
Overreliance on fawning into adulthood could put you at a greater risk of getting involved in co-dependent or abusive relationships. You attempt to avoid abuse through helpfulness and compliance. You disregard your own happiness and needs, regardless of how badly you are treated.
Flop/Faint
During the “flop” trauma response a person may become unresponsive (physically or mentally), and could even faint. After becoming paralyzed by fear and so overwhelmed by stress a person may physically collapse. This is seen when animals faint or play dead when encountered by a predator.
Attempting fight or flight may be more dangerous because it may escalate the danger. In the wild, a predator may lose interest in prey that collapses and move on. Becoming immobile may be adaptive when you don’t see it likely you can escape or win a fight.
The “faint” response can help ensure survival. Blood supply increases to the brain once the body is horizontal. Fainting is also connected to feelings of disgust, which is a reaction to something that is perceived as offensive. Witnessing or experiencing horrific events can also trigger vaso vagal syncope, which is dysregulation of the vagus nerve. This causes nausea, loss of bowel control, vomiting, and fainting.
How to Use Your New Understanding of Trauma Responses
Hopefully, after reading about the trauma responses above, you are able to identify the responses that you use most often. As you begin to understand how these responses work, you can learn to manage them better.
One way to manage your trauma response is to understand your window of tolerance. This is the optimal zone in which you are able to effectively manage your emotions. If you go outside this window, then you go into survival mode. (Remember who is in charge of survival mode? The military guy who sometimes overreacts and you can’t convince with logic to stop seeing certain things as threats…).
When outside your window of tolerance you may become hyper-aroused (over- aroused) or hypo-aroused (under-aroused). When hyper-aroused you may feel anxious, overwhelmed, or panicked. When hypo-aroused you may feel numb, disconnected, or shut down.
If you begin to recognize that you are nearing your window of tolerance’s limits, then you may be able to make attempts to calm your nervous system before you go outside of it. For example, if you are talking to your significant other and realize that the topic is triggering you, then you can let them know you are feeling triggered and need a break to calm your nervous system. Then you can return to the conversation at a later time when you are not outside your window of tolerance.
Trauma Often Links the Past & Present
It is helpful to understand that often whatever is triggering you in the current situation is as much about the past as it is the present. For example, you have a conversation with your loving supportive significant other who comments on how nice your outfit looks. You immediately begin to worry that they are saying you look nice because they want you to dress up more often, or that they don’t find you attractive in your other clothes. This partner has never given you any reason to think this way, but perhaps your mother criticized your appearance or told you that you must always look your best if you want to earn a partner’s love. As a result, you have a deep fear that you are not loveable, and that you have to make yourself pleasing to others or they will reject you.
If this is a big wound and trigger for you, then when your significant other says you look nice you may slip out of your window of tolerance. Your deepest fear is coming true and so you may get angry (fight), leave (flight), become unresponsive (freeze), or try harder to please them (fawn). Remember your significant other merely said you look nice. They may have meant that wholeheartedly. This reaction is based on the trigger that began with your mom.
As you learn what your triggers are, what your trauma responses are, and understand your window of tolerance you will become better able to find ways to support yourself when triggered. You can talk to people around you, if appropriate, and set boundaries for how to support one another when triggered.
So, Now What?
Hopefully this brief overview of common trauma responses has helped provide a better understanding of how your mind and body react to perceived threats. While this knowledge alone can’t prevent you from getting “triggered”, it can help you learn how to work through traumatic experiences more effectively, recognizing your tendencies and “catching” yourself more quickly so that you can avoid escalating situations and instead hit the "pause” button to give yourself the space and time you need to process.
Trauma Therapy Can Help
If you want to resolve the underlying cause of the trauma response, so that you are no longer triggered by the past, then you may need to seek the help of a trauma therapist. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an evidence-based trauma and PTSD treatment. Working with an EMDR therapist can help you work through past memories so that they no longer feel distressing or continue to trigger you.
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At my Pleasonton, CA-based therapy practice I use online therapy to offer therapy to anyone in California. I specialize in using EMDR therapy to treat trauma. More specifically, I provide trauma therapy, CPTSD Treatment, and PTSD treatment. Additionally, I also specialize in emotional trauma therapy, EMDR for depression, and anxiety treatment. I look forward to hearing from you and providing support for your mental health.