Survival Responses
4:02
Companion Slides
Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn — four automatic responses. Why freeze is never a choice.
Key Concepts
- Fight: confrontation, aggression, resistance
- Flight: escape, avoidance, running
- Freeze: the body locks up — a calculated, millisecond survival strategy, never a choice
- Fawn: people-pleasing compliance to survive — not weakness, but survival
- People shift between all four depending on context
- Regulation comes before reasoning — survival mode bypasses the thinking brain
Part of
Module 1: How Trauma Changes People
What trauma really is, how the brain responds, what the ACE study tells us, and the science of resilience.