Trauma responses

Any of the behaviours in this image

sound familiar as a way of you responding to stressful situations? 🙃

The four “F’s” of trauma response are commonly referred to as the four primary adaptive responses that individuals may exhibit when faced with stress/threatening or abusive situations.

These various trauma responses may have been learned as a means of survival in childhood, abusive relationships, or severe trauma. The type of response then reoccurs later in life as a default every time the person faces anything they perceive as a threat. (It becomes a generic stress response.)

The four commonly recognised types of trauma responses:

Fight

Flight

Freeze

Fawn

(There is a fifth response called “flop” which will be discussed later).

These four main types of trauma responses can manifest in different ways for different people. For example, a healthy fight response may look like having firm boundaries, while an unhealthy fight response may be explosive anger. In an ideal situation, an individual should be able to access healthy parts of all four types of trauma responses.

Having an understanding of each of these types of trauma responses can help you understand your own behaviours. It’s necessary to have this understanding in order to take the first step toward changing your behavioural patterns and begin the recovery process. By taking this step you will be able to face a difficult situation and choose what kind of response works best at that moment, rather than defaulting to learned behaviours that may have been more negative in the past.

NB. Traumatic events are commonly thought of as events that puts you or someone close to you at risk of serious harm or death. However, “little t traumas” (bullying, losing someone close to you or a pet, injury etc) can invoke the trauma response too. Here we talk about events that are not life -threatening but exceed our capacity to cope/ cause a disruption to our emotional functioning.