4 Helpful Ways We Respond to Adversity

Trauma, to some extent, comes to all of us at some time in our lives. However, the impacts of the same adverse life event on different people can vary wildly because we perceive and experience things differently and have different resources at the time. So the outcome of being traumatised is never a given just because of an event.

Trauma is a highly personal experience - Hungarian author and physician Dr Gabor Maté describes it as:

“what happens inside of you in response to an event”

rather than the actual things that happen to you or around you during the adverse event/s.

There are various states of the human threat response that happen inside of us, and they are designed to help us protect ourselves and survive any threat we encounter by providing different options to adapt and return to balance and safety.

Let’s look at each of these 4 states more closely now.

Flock

When under threat, we'll often first check if we are safe with our peers and seek support or comfort – another word for this is to flock. We may look to our neighbour to concur “Is it an earthquake? Yes, it is an earthquake - let's get under the doorway!” After something stressful or traumatic, we may also seek a connection to help process our thoughts and feelings. By checking in with those around us, we can feel safer and able to reflect and respond. Or, if we don't feel safe socially or can’t flock then we may utilize other responses.

Fight-or-Flight

Physiologically, when under threat, we go “up the ladder” into a fight-or-flight response designed to help us address any threat and return to balance. Fight results in mobilising energy and emotions (e.g., anger) to take movement towards the threat (e.g., yell, fight or take action to resolve the threat). Flight involves avoidance of the threat (e.g., going quiet or getting away). Both have the same aim – to respond to the threat and survive.

In either case, there can be many bodily responses such as tight muscles, a racing heart, an upset stomach, and a narrowed focus on the threat. While fight is about approach and flight is about avoidance, both are designed to help reduce the threat and feel safe. Blood flow to the thought processing part of our brain - the frontal lobes - is reduced in either state meaning that our threat response and emotions can be in charge (this makes sense in acute threat as to react quickly is the fastest pathway to get you to safety). Immune functioning is also suppressed - there's no need to invest energy in fighting a cold if you’re running from danger!

Fawn

A fawn response is a lesser-known childhood coping strategy for survival where we learn to zone in on other people’s emotions and reactions by "walking on eggshells" or tiptoeing around their anger or upset. This can result from growing up with someone who was emotionally or physically abusive and who struggled to regulate their stress, anger and upset.

Fawning can include traits like perfectionism, people-pleasing, and the compelling need to look after other people’s emotions and needs before your own. A fawn response is all about: “If you’re ok then I’m ok”. This response most commonly develops from the type of relationships you encountered during childhood. For more on the fawn response read this helpful article by psychologist Dr Arielle Schwartz.

Freeze

The freeze response can happen when our fight-or-flight response doesn't resolve the threat. This occurs if our coping systems become overwhelmed and our nervous system preserves resources by going into shutdown mode, where we may feel immobilized, helpless, despairing, or dissociative (feeling disconnected from your body and not present). This response is ideal if you are being violently attacked - it sends in endorphins to help relieve pain, helps to remove yourself psychologically from the terror or overwhelm of what is happening, and helps make the unbearable bearable or allows you to prepare for death. This is a final potential reaction linked to freeze known as flop – this is a total physical collapse if all options are exhausted and death feels imminent.

All these responses are human and help us to survive. Thank goodness we have all of them available should threats arise - importantly, with know-how, skills and support we can learn to return to safety whenever these responses no longer serve us - which is the case once the danger has passed but someone continues to experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is where our fight-or-flight response is triggered easily by reminders of the events, we experience intrusive memories, flashbacks or feelings as though we are reliving certain aspects of the events, and we have an overriding instinct to avoid reminders of what happened due to fear and overwhelm of it happening again.

The meaning we give to it, the way others respond, and how we care for ourselves afterwards, all contribute to whether a traumatic event will be processed into a historic memory that no longer brings up a strong physical or emotional reaction (like PTSD) or whether it will become stuck and unprocessed. The age of the events is also profoundly impactful on how we make sense of what is happening because of the neurobiological effects on our stress system and actual brain development.

TRAUMA and trauma

Psychologist John Briere differentiates “acts of omission” (good things that didn’t happen - AKA neglect) from acts of commission (the bad things that did happen). Both can leave an imprint of trauma in different ways. Trauma has been referred to as including both big T and little t components. Big T involves adverse events such as a car accident or a sexual or violent assault that can cause a trauma response. Little t’s are the many insidious events throughout childhood and adolescence that add up over time - name-calling and bullying, being laughed at for showing your emotions, and times you didn't get the support you needed from parents. Mental health concerns that arise from repeated little t trauma over childhood are often referred to by therapists as “complex trauma” which is now gaining recognition as a formal diagnosis. Little t certainly does not mean lesser trauma impacts - in fact, most of the time the opposite is true. Complex trauma has many differences from PTSD in terms of recovery.

This is because trauma that occurs in our developmental years is shaped by the lens that we have at that time - an infant or child does not yet have wise adult eyes to perceive, understand, defend or assert themselves. They may not yet even have the language to describe what has happened. They may develop coping responses to survive their trauma (e.g., numbing with TV, food, exercise, schoolwork, and emerging alcohol and drug use) that impact their lives and relationships well beyond the trauma. The stress hormones produced by any ongoing threats can impact brain functioning and development (e.g., affecting memory and attention, their sense of time and space, how they regulate emotions, and the development of the frontal lobes in our brain where our rational thought comes from). People can live with complex trauma for a long time and it may be a big T event that is the "straw that breaks the camel's back" and often brings them into therapy.

Well-being contributions to trauma

From an integrative perspective, whether a person will develop a lasting traumatic response can also depend on the level of their physical well-being at the time of the event. For example, how rundown and nutritionally depleted a person is, impacts the stress response and the after-effects of trauma. An example of this was Dr Julia Rucklidge's natural disaster research that explored the role of micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) after the Christchurch Earthquakes. It found that post-event anxiety was reduced in those using micronutrients. The brain and nervous system have a greater demand for nutrients when in prolonged fight-or-flight episodes and nutrients will be "triaged" - sent to the most important areas - to support survival at the expense of other less pressing bodily needs. Long-term stress, poor diet, poor sleep and recovery, and challenging relationships can each also lower the nervous system's capacity to cope with additional threats and stressors and to recover afterwards.

A global pandemic and all its consequences, for a number of us, will have resulted in new experiences of trauma. Death, illness, separation, isolation, economic threats, lockdowns, mandates, and other pandemic-related events may be traumatic in different ways for different people. For some, it will be their first trauma while for others it will be a new layer on top of past traumatic events or complex trauma; pushing old triggers and wounds. Because the pandemic has been enduring it also means that many people entered a long-term stress episode which has reduced their reserves and led to old trauma and PTSD bubbling up for the first time for some.

The important thing about trauma is that there is tremendous capacity for recovery and even post-traumatic growth, under the right healing conditions and in time. Post-traumatic growth is all about positive change, including the recognition of your own personal strength, the exploration of new possibilities, cultivating improved relationships, forming a greater appreciation for life, and, for some, spiritual growth.