Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn
Childhood trauma is often a major discussion in therapeutic work as you explore the origination of certain behaviors, your self-concept, and other experiences that brought you into therapy. Although most of us are negatively impacted by our experiences from when we were young, some of are exposed to prolonged trauma that impacts how we can develop and interact with the world. If you’ve been exposed to trauma that is interpersonal, repeated, and inescapable, you may be qualified for a diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD).
In the book, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, by Pete Walker, details the components of CPTSD, common experiences, and recovery information. When categorizing experiences, he describes four subtypes of survival strategies which are typically adopted by children who live in distressful homes. Those strategies are the Four F’s: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn.
If you’ve experienced complex trauma, it’s common to gravitate toward one or two of the survival strategies in your overall behavior and while forming your worldview. These strategies were likely developed in order to navigate and survive the lack of love, abuse, neglect, and other childhood pain that you did not have control over.
Being diagnosed with CPTSD isn’t the only time the four f’s come into play. Remember just because you may resonate with some of the emotional strategies we dive into below, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve experienced complex trauma. Most of us are healing in various ways, and the behaviors below may be ways you learned to protect yourself from childhood pain.
Below, we dive into each type; from typical behaviors associated with each, to common thought processes, and how they develop.
Fight
Those who can identify with the fight type are often seen as angry, defensive, and controlling. These are typically seen as negative traits but they were adaptive and protective when one was small and had to learn to defend themselves from childhood abandonment, abuse, and neglect.
Fight types may typically:
Use a high amount of sarcasm.
Are highly critical, often putting down others.
A tendency to be controlling over others.
Difficulty taking criticism.
Although maintaining a sense of control and having your guard up has been protective in the past, in the present this continues the cycle of distance from others and a lack of intimacy. While in the past anger and a fight for power may have secured safety and acceptance in the past, it now ends up pushing others away. What could happen if you were not in a constant position to defend?
Flight
“Extreme flight types are like machines with the switch stuck in the ‘on’ position.” As explained by Pete Walker in his book. If you are a flight type, you may be categorized as a “workaholic” or “busyholic.” There are several reasons for you to stay in this place. To begin, if you are consistently busy and working, you cannot think about your underlying pain or spend time confronting difficult emotions. This could manifest in several ways:
Constantly taking on new projects, picking up extra shifts, taking extra classes.
Drinking, reckless behaviors, compulsive shopping, and other addictive behavior.
Being mentally busy such as fixating on intellectualizing what is going on with oneself instead of being in their feelings.
Those who’s a flight type may even develop symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, adapting obsessive and compulsive behavior which could be triggered by unexpressed and unbearable feelings. Therefore, an extreme version of being mentally busy.
Another explanation is that someone who’s a flight type may have a learned belief that perfection equals safety and security. That if you work hard enough, you will eventually be enough and worthy of the love, attention, and acceptance that you needed when you were a child.
When you are in flight, you are essentially fleeing from your deeper feelings. Therefore, the opposite of fleeing is feeling. Especially with a history of trauma, sitting and grounding in your emotions is a terrifying experience. When you had feelings when you were younger, it often led to rejection, abandonment, disappointment and even danger. Feeling was not safe, so avoiding doing it was the best option at the time. What are safe ways for you to feel now?
Freeze
If you are a freeze type, you may often go into what is known as the camouflage response or dissociation. One who adapts into a freeze type commonly is seen as socially anxious but with more intense avoidance behavior. Others are perceived as dangerous and being around them often leads to overwhelming feelings.
You may develop into a freeze type when in childhood, it was too unsafe to fight, where there was nowhere to flee to, and if fawning was not an option. If you were a young child living in an unbearable living situation, you would have learned to detach from your surroundings and how stressful it feels– is typically described as dissociation.
As you grew older, you learned to disconnect from experiencing all of your emotional pain, because you never learned that it was safe to be present, to feel what you feel, and that others can be trusted.
Typical behaviors may include:
Intense periods of isolation.
Dissociation/derealization.
Distracting with a lot of TV, videogames, reading, and being online.
Chronic daydreaming.
Freeze types may also have a tendency to look for imperfections of others to justify their isolation from them. Staying clear of others keeps you safe from possible emotional pain however, with this strategy you would not get to experience the transformative power of a healthy intimate relationship.
Fawn:
From a young age, the fawn type was taught to believe that the price of love, attention, and affection was overextending themselves and ignoring that they have any needs at all.
If you are a fawn type, you may typically put others needs, desires, and demands before yourself. If you could take care of your caregivers or even predict what they need, then your parents would not be angry, unpredictable, or sad. You would remain safe another day and order will be restored in the household, all kept together by you.
Later on in life, a fawn type has maintained the belief that they must take care of everything and everyone around them in order to be safe and have relationships. Being helpful became an automatic response. A fawn type may typically find themselves:
Always being the shoulder to cry one and the ear that listens at all times.
Constantly completing tasks and acts of service for others.
Learning to be funny, the entertainer to keep everyone happy.
Final thoughts to keep in mind when healing:
You have developed these responses for a reason when you were a child. When you were a child, you may not have had control over the distress, neglect, and pain you were going through. These responses develop as a way to survive your situation when you were powerless. The parts of you that fight, flight, freeze, or fawn intend on keeping you safe. However, you are older, you are stronger and these mechanisms are not as necessary as they once were despite all of the survival they supported you in.
BLOG AUTHORS ALL HOLD POSITIONS AT THE GENDER & SEXUALITY THERAPY CENTER (G&STC). THIS BLOG WAS WRITTEN BY THERAPIST IN TRAININGADINA GUTIERREZ FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT OUR THERAPISTS AND SERVICES PLEASE CONTACT US.