The 5 F's of Trauma Response We actually have 5 hardwired responses to trauma: fight, flight, freeze, flop, and friend. In a moment of danger, these responses all happen automatically to try to keep us safe.
The 'fight or flight' response is how people sometimes refer to our body's automatic reactions to fear. There are actually 5 of these common responses, including 'freeze', 'flop' and 'friend', as well as 'fight' or 'flight'.
Whether you spring into fight, flight, freeze, flop, or even fawn, your survival mechanism is to avoid the danger and return to a sense of control. The stress response can trigger instantaneously, but how soon your body comes back to normal varies from person to person.
The 4 Trauma Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn: Examining The Four Trauma Reactions. According to a research on the neurobiological consequences of psychological trauma, our bodies are designed to respond to perceived threats with a set of near-instantaneous, reflexive survival behaviors.
They describe a series of stages which individuals exposed to threat or trauma may go through, including: freeze, flight, fight, fright, flag, and faint.
It makes us act. Chronic stress in turn is an unwanted state where the brain concludes that we are under threat. The body is continuously ready to fight for our lives, which is a burden both physically and mentally. Chronic stress can lead to burnout and to many physical illnesses.
Fawning is an adaptive survival response to prolonged or complex trauma. The fawn response is characterized by placating and appeasing behavior directed toward the perpetrator of abuse, in an attempt to reduce their volatility and abusiveness towards oneself and/or others (e.g., children, siblings, family pets).
These are all great topics to discuss, but it can prove challenging to distill these larger ideas into practice. But, when we talk about apologizing, we wrap all of these complex concepts up into a single practice. It's a common trauma-state response to want to avoid conflict.
Overthinking is caused due to various reasons like fear, intolerance to uncertainty, trauma, or perfectionism. Overthinking can also be a symptom of already existing mental health conditions such as generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety, or depression.
“Fawning” refers to when an individual copes with a perceived danger by attempting to appease whoever is causing the danger in order to prevent them from causing harm. Sometimes, trauma and abuse survivors will fawn in response to their abuse in an effort to keep the abuser happy.
“In the face of physical or emotional pain, or a traumatic incident, our sympathetic nervous system has three responses: fight, flight or freeze. Emotional numbing is freezing. Our brain shuts down as a protective response to keep us safe when our nervous system is overloaded,” he says.
Flag: If there is still no resolution of the threatening situation you will progress into the fifth stage, “flag,” which is the collapse, helplessness, and despair that signals parasympathetic based nervous system shut-down and immobilization. Dissociative reactions dominate this phase.
When we're in these moments, as parents, how do we navigate them and how do we teach our children how to navigate them? Bruce Perry a world-renowned psychiatrist and head of the child trauma academy gives us a great thing called the “Three R's” he talks about first you regulate, then you relate, then you reason.
Signs of Trauma. “Trauma is different for everyone,” Choi says. But two of the more common reactions, she says, are feeling very strong emotions or feeling little. “You might have overwhelming negative emotions or not be able to stop crying.
way that allows for safe and repetitive experiences that lead to change. (Perry, 2015). The framework of therapeutic interventions with the NMT involves the 6 Rs as Key Elements of Positive Developmental and Educational Settings: relevant, rhythmic, repetitive, relational, rewarding, and respectful (Perry, 2015).
Stressors and past trauma can often trigger patterns of overthinking as well. When these thought cycles start spiraling, it is oftentimes hard to break free from and move past them.
Trauma dumping refers to persistently oversharing traumatic experiences with people who may not be ready or willing to receive this information. Trauma is a sensitive topic. While some conversations bring intimacy and healing, others may breed more trauma.
At worst, empathy fatigue is a person's inability to care. It's the negative consequence of repeated exposure to stressful or traumatic events. It can manifest both emotionally or physically.
Fawning is most commonly associated with childhood trauma, relational trauma, and complex trauma—such as ongoing partner violence. Complex trauma can become even more problematic when coupled with the collective trauma that occurs from experiences like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fawning is a trauma response that uses people-pleasing behavior to appease or supplicate an aggressor, avoid conflict, and ensure safety. This trauma response is exceedingly common, especially in complex trauma survivors, and often gets overlooked.
Toxic stress response:
This is the body's response to lasting and serious stress, without enough support from a caregiver. When a child doesn't get the help he needs, his body can't turn off the stress response normally. This lasting stress can harm a child's body and brain and can cause lifelong health problems.
Stress causes the body to release the hormone cortisol, which is produced by the adrenal glands.
•A consistent sense of feeling pressured and overwhelmed over a long period of time. •Symptoms include aches and pains, insomnia or weakness, less socialization, unfocused thinking.