Fight, Flight, Fawn, and FREEZE: A Story of Tuning into the Body’s Response to Danger

Written By DaisyJane Darling

The other evening, while scrolling through Instagram, I suddenly experienced a moment of self discovery: my nervous system’s go-to response is to ‘Freeze’. This is something I already knew about myself, but I had a moment of clarity that helped me understand the extent it reaches into my day to day life. 

For anyone who hasn’t heard of this yet, there are four main ways our nervous systems react to stress or a perceived threat of danger. There are Fight and Flight, which are the most well known, but there are also Fawn and Freeze. Personally, my body’s go-to response when I am in a stressful situation is to turn off. I shut down, disassociate. Walls come up and my emotions get locked down, seeming to disappear to somewhere deep within my body where I can no longer access them. Essentially, my nervous system Freezes. 

This response mechanism exists for a reason. Freezing has most definitely saved my life in the past. My adaptive child, as Terrence Real calls it, needed this response to get through things that were far too big for little me to handle. However, my body doesn’t understand that I'm safe now, and it’s safe to put this particular tool back on the shelf. 

This is an ongoing theme for me on my journey of healing and self discovery. One of the first steps on this project (which is not a linear trajectory, I might add) is learning to recognize when my nervous system clicks into Freeze mode. This can be tricky and elusive in practice; the habit of disassociating from your body makes it difficult to tune in to your body - go figure! But that just means it’s a baby step process that must be approached with lots of patience. However, poco a poco, little by little, those steps get bigger and turn into strides! 

In the hopes that someone else might recognize themself in my story, I’d like to share my most recent revelation and moment of body awareness:

I was laying on my bed shortly after lunch, enjoying a little siesta (something I’ve become too fond of while in Spain, as I am learning about the benefits of walking after a meal), when I stumbled upon a reddit story posted on Instagram. It was written by a woman whose house was broken into while she was alone with her 2 year old son. While absorbing this story, I had an image of the events going through my mind like a movie. I put myself in her shoes trying to feel what it would be like. She had to block the door, run and grab her son, hide, call the police, and develop a plan to escape. 

While going through the story I caught myself thinking, Wow, she must be so stressed! She’s doing all these things to protect herself and her son, and rightfully so - but, maybe she should just stop, do nothing and hopefully the danger will all go away. Hide. Be limp. Shut down. That’s what she should do. That must be what her body wants to do, right?

The next thought in my mind, a fraction of a second later, was, Of course she has the motivation, not to mention a ton of adrenaline going through her, to get her through it! It’s her son’s life, her life on the line after all. She should be doing everything in her power to get away! 

Yet even as I reasoned against my initial reaction, I still felt that freeze in my body, the way it closed off within this imagined scenario. The same way, I realized at that moment, that my body often does when I watch movies. 

I first began to realize in high school that consuming media can come with a significant cost to my body and mental health. I have a very difficult time watching movies and TV shows, and when I do I much prefer to watch with other people. That way I can share enjoyment in the story, but I also don’t have to venture into those stressful situations by myself. It’s too overwhelming. I get antsy, look at my phone, plug my ears, take deep breaths, stand up and move around, check out for a bit and think about something else. I stopped watching Gossip Girl a couple seasons in because the drama stressed me out to the point that my shoulders literally felt heavy and my tummy was a mess of nerves. Same with Grey’s Anatomy. I still haven’t finished Stranger Things. The difficult thing is that much of the entertainment in Entertainment comes from stressful situations. It’s make-believe, and I know this, yet the stupidity of fictional characters, all of their drama, and goosebump-inducing thriller scenes are sometimes unbearable for me - even for shows that I absolutely love. 

While the story I read on Reddit wasn’t a movie, it was still a story I was experiencing in my mind. I remember reading once that your brain doesn’t actually know how to differentiate things that happen in stories from your real life, which is why it can hurt so bad when your favorite character dies in the book you’re reading or the show you’re watching. Your brain actually experiences it as the death of a loved one, albeit a miniature version. The death of a fictional character generally doesn’t affect your day to day life, after all. 

Even though I’ve been aware of my very physical response to TV for years now, this week was the first time I was able to specifically and consciously recognize my Freeze response kicking in. Now that I have, I can associate my logical knowledge of the term Freeze with the very visceral physical feeling I experience when it happens. It’s usually quite subtle, but I can even see it looking back in the past. It feels like a contraction, and it’s generally centralized around my chest. If I were to visualize it, I might compare it to a lily closing up its petals and shrinking in on itself, as if the bloom was being played in reverse double speed. Or as if a mini me, the one who lives in the center of my being, literally steps into a small room, closes the door, then curls up in a ball in the corner, shutting herself off from the scary outside.

Now that I’ve pinpointed what it feels like I can practice recognizing it in the moment. At first that’s all I need to do - recognize it. I don’t need to pressure myself to stop it from happening, because I know that won’t work. Not at first, at least. But, little by little, one baby step at a time, I’ll find a deeper hold in my body. When I feel a freeze coming on, I can pause and gently let that little me know that it’s safe to feel. I can handle it, and she will be okay because I will handle it for her. In fact, I want to handle it - I want to feel it all! All the good, all the bad, all the weird in between. I want every bit of mushy, gushy, fuzzy, wuzzy, prickly, icky, sticky, human-ness that I can get. I thank the Freeze response for what it’s helped me survive. I suppose it is in fact a part of that sticky human-ness. But it's done its job; now it's time for an early retirement. Maybe I’ll buy it a ticket to the North Pole for a nice ski vacation. We’ll see how long it takes to convince it to leave, that I’ll be okay on my own - but eventually I’ll be waving it goodbye, off to a world where it belongs, and I'll be free to feel all the feels. 

In the meantime, though, I’ll just do my best. And that’s good enough for me.