Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and flop – these are the five trauma responses. They can have lasting effects, often leading people to deal with emotional reactions and symptoms of trauma-related disorders. The good news is that you can heal from your trauma responses with targeted trauma therapy. Innovative treatment techniques can make the process more efficient and effective than it has been in the past.

Understanding Trauma

Most people will experience a traumatic event in their lifetime. Traumatic experiences are overwhelming life events that fall far outside of regular experiences. They can cause dramatic changes in your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors — both in the short term and for months and years to come.

Trauma is a natural response to an event; switching into survival mode is your body’s attempt to protect you from the harms and dangers of the outside world. While everyone experiences trauma differently, common reactions include:

  • Shock
  • Feeling emotionally numb or drained
  • Exhaustion
  • Anxiety
  • Dissociation
  • Agitation

In most cases, these effects resolve within a few weeks. But for some people, the effects of trauma can last for months, years, or even a lifetime if left untreated.

When the effects of trauma persist for an extended period and begin to disrupt your everyday life, it could be a sign of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This incredibly difficult mental health challenge can cause many negative effects, but it can be treated through trauma therapy and other mental illness interventions.

What Is Trauma?

Trauma is a deeply distressing or disturbing experience that can profoundly impact an individual’s emotional, psychological, and physical well-being. It can stem from a wide range of experiences, such as physical or emotional abuse, neglect, natural disasters, accidents, or witnessing violence. These overwhelming events can disrupt your sense of safety, security, and control, leading to various emotional, cognitive, and behavioral reactions.

For instance, someone who has experienced childhood trauma may struggle with trust issues or have difficulty forming healthy relationships. Similarly, a person who has survived a natural disaster might experience ongoing anxiety and fear whenever they hear about similar events. Trauma is not just about the event itself but also about how it affects your ability to cope and function in daily life.

Struggling with trauma doesn’t mean you’re broken – in fact, it means that your brain and body are trying to protect you. With support, you can address the root causes of trauma and heal over time.

Sources of Trauma

Several different life events or experiences can lead to trauma. Common sources of trauma include:

  • Sexual assault
  • Violence
  • Death of a loved one
  • Domestic violence
  • Natural disasters
  • War
  • Military combat
  • Car accidents
  • Physical or mental abuse

These traumatic events can leave individuals with painful memories that persist long after the event has passed, affecting their mental and emotional well-being.

While these events above aren’t necessarily uncommon in the scope of a lifetime, sometimes they can feel so far outside your everyday lived experience that you may not know how to react, feel, or behave. Instead, your body launches into autopilot to protect you, leading to the five trauma responses many people experience.

Navigating Traumatic Events and the Aftermath

A traumatic event is a shocking, scary, or dangerous experience that can leave a lasting impact on both your emotional and physical health. The aftermath of such an event can be just as challenging as the event itself. 

In the immediate aftermath, you might experience a range of reactions, including shock, denial, anxiety, fear, and hypervigilance. These are natural responses as your mind and body try to process what happened.

As time goes on, you may find yourself dealing with more persistent trauma symptoms. Flashbacks, nightmares, and avoidance of triggers are common. Physical symptoms like headaches or stomach problems can also arise, making it difficult to go about your daily life. The emotional trauma from a traumatic event can lead to a sense of helplessness and a struggle to regain control over your life.

What Are the 5 Trauma Responses?

The five trauma responses –fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and flop – describe the ways that people react to a traumatic experience in the moment. They encompass a range of reactions to trauma, and trauma responses are a natural survival instinct.

While each behavior may be different, they all share a common goal. A trauma response is your mind’s way of removing you from danger and protecting you from further harm. Yet, sometimes the brain overcorrects, and your mind and body learn that certain situations are cause for a trauma response.

For example, if a dog attacked you, you may have an extreme fear of dogs for years to come. A person in a major vehicle accident may be too frightened to get behind the wheel for months or years after the event. Despite knowing that these situations are rare or unlikely to occur again, your trauma response makes it incredibly difficult to go about your life without experiencing significant distress.

Understanding your trauma response is just one of the many ways for you to start the path to healing. By learning about your physiological reaction, you can choose a different path rather than letting your body pull you on autopilot.

1. Fight

One of the most common trauma responses is the instinct to fight back against the person or situation that has led to a traumatic event. This response can also include physical reactions such as increased heart rate and muscle tension. When people have a fight response, their initial reaction is anger or rage. They can show aggression, defiance, or even violence against the source of the traumatic experience.

For example, if you were in a car accident, one fight response might be to attack the person who hit your vehicle. But the fight response isn’t always literal or even immediate.

Another example of a fight response is yelling at another driver on the road, even long after the event. You may find yourself quick to anger or easily frustrated when preparing for a drive or blame one of your passengers for distracting you during everyday driving scenarios.

2. Flight

In contrast to the fight response, the flight response involves making every attempt to leave the situation as fast as possible. People who utilize the flight response can run, leave unexpectedly, and experience an overwhelming surge of anxiety and fear.

However, the flight response can also be preemptive. If you fear going to a situation that triggers a trauma response, you could cancel your plans or just not show up. For example, people who have an intense fear of public speaking may simply no-show the event or call out sick.

3. Freeze

During the freeze response, people become panicked or overwhelmed in a situation. They get caught like a deer in headlights and may not be able to respond in ways that one might expect. The freeze response can be both internal and external, leaving people stuck in place and unable to process their situation.

Freezing can be considered a strategy for blending into the background. It is often called the camouflage response.

4. Flop

The flop response is similar to the freeze response and often follows a freeze response if the situation doesn’t resolve. When people flop, their bodies stop reacting to a traumatic event. The flop response is the human equivalent of an animal “playing dead.”

People who experience the flop response may refer to it as an out-of-body experience. It’s as though the traumatic event is happening to someone else, which can provide some semblance of protection for intense and unwanted experiences.

5. Fawn

Finally, the fawn response is an attempt to appease or befriend the person causing a traumatic experience. For example, a person experiencing emotional or physical abuse can try to get on their abuser’s good side by trying to make the abuser feel more sympathetic toward them.

Similarly, someone struggling with a trauma response may try to appease someone in situations that resemble the initial traumatic event. For example, if your caregivers screamed at you as a child, you may feel triggered when scolded by an angry boss. To create safety for yourself, you may act overly accommodating even while enduring verbal abuse from your manager.

The fawn response is a way to try to reduce the likelihood that a traumatic event will happen again. While it doesn’t always work, it’s an attempt to mitigate further harm from an extreme situation.

Trauma-Related Disorders

Experiencing trauma can significantly increase the risk of developing various mental health disorders. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is one of the most well-known trauma-related disorders, characterized by severe anxiety, flashbacks, and intrusive thoughts about the traumatic event. However, trauma can also lead to depression, anxiety disorders, and substance use disorders.

These trauma-related disorders can have a profound impact on your quality of life, affecting your relationships, work, and overall well-being. For example, someone with PTSD might have difficulty falling asleep due to nightmares, or they might avoid certain places or situations that remind them of the traumatic event. Understanding the link between trauma and mental health is crucial for seeking appropriate treatment and support.

How Trauma Symptoms Color Your Everyday Life

Everyone reacts to trauma in different ways, and trauma survivors often find it challenging to control their reactions to traumatic situations. But these trauma responses can become preemptive, even when it’s unlikely that a situation will lead to a traumatic experience.

For instance, a person who displays a flight response tend to avoid situations with any perceived risk. Those who gravitate toward the fight response may become aggressive or defiant, as a rule, rather than only in response to traumatic situations. People who fawn in response to trauma can become overly sympathetic to potential abusers ahead of time, often leading to further trauma as a result.

Learning your trauma response can help you decide whether it’s how you want to act in these situations. Identifying these behaviors and developing healthy coping techniques can guide you away from defaulting to trauma responses when they don’t serve you.

To truly recover from trauma and retrain your trauma response, most people need trauma therapy from a trained mental health provider.

Healing from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

There are dozens of treatments for helping people work through trauma, recover from the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and lead healthier and more productive lives in recovery. Different treatment options include:

  • Trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy
  • Prolonged exposure therapy
  • Eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)
  • Mental health support groups
  • Psychiatric medication
  • Stellate ganglion blocks (SGB)

However, there is a new style of trauma therapy that can produce lasting results in just a few sessions, and it often helps people for whom traditional treatments have been unsuccessful.

Treating Trauma Survivors With Ketamine-Assisted Therapy

Ketamine-assisted therapy is a new and innovative approach to helping people quickly break free from the recurring pain of traumatic experiences and start living their lives without the weight of trauma holding them back.

Ketamine is a dissociative drug, which is in a subclass of hallucinogens. It has been used in the medical field for decades as an anesthetic and has recently risen in popularity for its ability to treat trauma and suicidal ideation.

When administered by a medical professional under close supervision, ketamine can help people make more progress in concurrent talk therapy sessions by disconnecting them from the intense emotions and physiological reactions associated with trauma. It holds back the trauma response that can often be a roadblock in making meaningful progress in therapy.

Ketamine-assisted therapy involves taking a small and safe dose of the drug and sitting down to talk with a specially trained and licensed therapist within 24-48 hours of professional administration. During an individual therapy session, your therapist will guide you through your experience, help you to open up about your trauma responses and experiences, and help guide you toward a happier and healthier life in recovery.

To learn more about ketamine-assisted therapy and the multitude of trauma treatment options we have available, reach out to Plus by APN by calling 866.271.6006 or filling out our confidential online contact form.

Reference

Asim, Muhammad, et al. “Ketamine for Post-traumatic Stress Disorders and Its Possible Therapeutic Mechanism.” Neurochemistry International, vol. 146, 2021, p. 105044, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuint.2021.105044. Accessed 21 Dec. 2023.