- Hey, everybody.
Today we're gonna talk about our stress response,
otherwise known as fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
Now, I know you're probably wondering
what freeze and fawn are
and why we don't hear about them as often.
Well, that's what we are going to dig into today,
so stay tuned.
Let's start out by explaining what our stress response is.
Now, whenever our nervous system believes
that we are threatened either physically or emotionally,
and it actually doesn't matter
if we are truly at risk or not,
we just have to believe that we are.
Like if we think someone could attack us,
or if the situation at hand
seems to be requiring more resources than we have,
we can be pushed into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
Now, being pushed into this state causes our amygdala,
what I call the fire alarm in our brain,
and our entire limbic system to sound this alarm.
This change in our brain focuses our body on survival.
And in order to do that,
it takes the planning and more organized part of our brain,
otherwise known as our prefrontal cortex,
completely offline.
Now, this can cause us to feel on edge,
act impulsively, and even feel overwhelmed emotionally.
It's supposed to be short-lived
in order to save us from that perceived threat
and then go away.
But for many of us, it can last for much, much longer.
I wanna take a quick minute
to thank the sponsor of today's video, Skillshare.
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And now it's fight, flight, freeze, and fawn time.
First, let's jump into the fight response
because it's fairly simple.
When our brain perceives a threat to its safety
and it assesses the threat
and it decides that we are much bigger
and stronger than the threat,
then it will tell us to fight back.
And this could be us pushing someone down,
or running at the threat,
or even yelling at someone loudly
to get them to leave us alone.
And a funny example of someone using their fight response
happened when I was in middle school.
So a boy that I went to school with
came to school one day with a black eye.
And I guess he had watched an episode
of "America's Funniest Home Videos."
Anybody remember that?
I used to love that show as a kid.
It was something like that anyway.
And I guess he saw someone scare their friend so much so
that they screamed (softly screams) and they fell backwards.
He thought that was really funny,
so he decided to try this out on his older brother.
And so he went home
and he hid behind his older brother's bedroom door.
Well, when he jumped out to say boo and scare his brother,
instead of his brother screaming, falling down backwards,
he punched him in the face, giving him a black eye.
It was, you know, a little rough,
but his brother didn't go into flight, freeze, or fawn.
He went straight into fight.
In short, when we are threatened in this situation,
we fight back.
Which moves us easily into flight,
which is when we assess the perceived threat to our safety
and decide it's best that we run away
as quickly as possible.
This usually happens when we are young or weaker
or just smaller than whatever the potential threat is
and we see an easy way out.
We turn on our heels and we get the hell out of there.
A personal example of this
would be my intense fear of the dark as a kid
and kind of still as an adult.
I don't love it.
And even though our house growing up was pretty small,
when you turned out the hallway light,
there was no other switch.
You had to run all the way to the other end
to get either to the bathroom or my bedroom.
And I know this doesn't make any logical sense,
but I swore to God that some boogeyman
was hiding the darkness.
Like as soon as I hit that light and turned them off,
I would sprint full board down the hallway
and either get into the bathroom or in my bedroom
with the lights on, obviously.
And then I'd shut the door, completely out of breath.
So ridiculous.
But we later put a nightlight in the hallway
probably 'cause my mom saw me doing this, you know,
so that helped.
But that perceived threat of a boogeyman, right,
it doesn't matter if it's an actual threat,
it's the perceived threat,
caused me to run away from it as quickly as possible
by going into my flight response.
The final two stress responses aren't talked about as often,
so feel free to let me know in the comments
if something isn't clear
or you wanna add your own thoughts
and experiences with them.
And with that, let's move into freeze.
Now, freeze happens when fight and flight are assessed
and not seen as viable options.
This can happen when we are children
and an adult is hurting us,
or when we're in a car crash
and not in control of either vehicle.
When fighting would be futile or possibly cause us more harm
and fleeing isn't available,
we do the only thing we can, we freeze.
And sometimes people will call this
like playing possum or playing dead,
and it happens because the only option we have
to try and lessen our pain
is to completely freeze altogether.
Now, Dr. Peter Levine,
the psychologist and creator
of Somatic Experiencing therapy,
believes that PTSD is born out of our freeze response
because freeze is a helpless and hopeless experience.
And there is this woman that I follow on Instagram.
Her name is Jacey Duprie.
And one day, it was a few years ago,
it was like pre-COVID times,
she got on her stories to share
how much she hated being home alone
and really struggled with feeling safe
when her husband was out of town.
And he was on like,
I think a boys' weekend at the time or something like that.
And so she always tries to get family and friends
to stay with her in his absence.
She'd even like fly friends in.
It was really crazy, you guys.
And so I was so shocked.
Here was this 35-year-old woman
who couldn't sleep at home alone.
(imitates explosion) What?
She continued to share that it was due to the fact,
and get this, it's so crazy, you guys,
that when she was a young girl,
I think she was like 10 or 11 years old,
she was left home alone.
And when she was home alone,
someone broke into their house to rob them.
She hid in the shower of her parents' bathroom,
like in the farthest back part of the house,
being as quiet as she could,
she talked about holding her breath as long as she could,
and waited until she was sure they were gone.
She said she didn't know what else to do
because she couldn't get out of the house.
By the time she realized someone was in there,
that were already in there.
And she couldn't fight back.
She was like 10 or 11 years old and they were older, bigger,
and she didn't know if they had guns or not.
This freezing that she did in that shower for over an hour
is still something she's working on in therapy,
and just one example of how this freeze state
can lead to PTSD.
Finally, there is fawn,
which is probably the least discussed stress response
because it relates almost exclusively to trauma,
and more specifically complex trauma or C-PTSD.
As you know, children need safe, loving,
and supportive environments
in order to develop a healthy sense of self
and emotional intelligence.
When we grow up in an abusive,
emotionally neglectful, or controlling environment,
we can cut ourselves off completely from how we feel,
because how we feel is too painful
and expressing that upset can get us into more trouble
and end up causing us more harm.
Therefore, some children push their own wants and needs down
and prioritize their parents' emotional state
as a way to hopefully prevent future abuse.
Now, this focus on pleasing others
at the cost of our own wellbeing
is what is known as the fawn response.
We fawn over others in our life
as a way of trying to control their behavior.
We can believe that if we just do everything right
and say the right things,
we'll make them happy and they won't hurt us anymore.
Now, this stress response can follow us into adulthood
and we can continue to struggle
with people-pleasing behavior
and prefer to focus on someone else's emotional state
rather than our own.
Now, one of my past patients was horribly abused for years
by her narcissistic father,
and she would often tell me
how she always felt like she was walking on eggshells,
not knowing what was gonna set him off again
and always doing her best
to make sure she said and did everything just so,
so that she wouldn't continue to get hurt.
And she also told me that from a young age,
she learned not to cry or whimper when he was abusing her,
because that would only make it last longer.
Now, this disconnection from ourselves
and our emotional response
in order to please or prioritize someone else is fawning.
And it can cause us to turn our anger,
pain, and upset inward
because really it has no other place to go,
which can lead to things like depression,
self-injurious behavior,
anxiety, right, walking on eggshells,
PTSD, eating disorder behavior, and so much more.
If you are struggling with any symptoms of PTSD
as a result of your stress response,
please reach out to a therapist in your area,
preferably one, who's a trauma specialist
or the very least trauma-informed,
meaning they know something about trauma.
And if you wanna learn more about trauma, how it can feel,
how we diagnose it, and how you can heal from it,
check out my new book, "Traumatized."
It's available now,
and you can click the link in the description
to order yours today.
Thank you so much for watching
and thank you again to Skillshare for sponsoring this video.
I'll see you all next time.
Bye.