You may have heard the term “fight or flight” to describe what people do in response to frightening situations. For example, you as face-to-face with a lion. Are you the kind of person who takes a weapon and starts to try and fight back? Or will you runaway? 

While these terms begin to describe our normal reactions to scary situations, there’s more to it than that. Even if in today’s society, the scary situations we find ourselves are more likely to be emotional trauma than a lion.

In today’s podcast, I will introduce the most well-known responses to trauma which are the fight, flight, or freeze responses. Flight includes running or fleeing the situation, fight is to become aggressive, and freeze is to literally become incapable of moving or making a choice. However, there is a fourth response, called the fawn response which involves immediately moving to try to please a person to avoid any conflict.