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Steps to Breaking Out of the Fight-Flight-Freeze Response in cPTSD

by | Mar 14, 2025

Imagine you are feeling overwhelmed by your responses to stress—fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or forget. These responses are your body's primitive, automatic ways of dealing with perceived threats and stress. They can become problematic when they're no longer appropriate to the situation and prevent you from living a fulfilling life. Let’s explore a strategy to help manage and potentially overcome these automatic reactions, using insights into how the body and mind respond to stress.

When you experience prolonged stress or trauma, your brain and body can start to react in ways that were once protective but may now be hindering your ability to enjoy life and move forward. The fight response might manifest as unexplained anger or aggression, while flight could look like avoidance of stressors or withdrawal from relationships. Freeze might make you feel stuck and unable to make decisions or take action, and fawn may lead you to excessively please others to avoid conflict. The forget response, often a sign of chronic stress exposure, can leave you feeling numb or disconnected from your own emotions and desires.

To begin breaking free from these patterns, it’s crucial to understand their roots in past experiences that taught your brain to react this way. Your brain developed these responses as shortcuts to keep you safe based on past dangers. However, when these patterns persist outside of dangerous contexts, they can interfere with your everyday life.

Here are steps you can take to start shifting away from these automatic responses:

  1. Recognize and Acknowledge: First, identify which of the stress responses you tend to default to. Understanding your go-to responses can clarify why you might feel stuck or unhappy in certain areas of your life.
  2. Create Safety: Building a sense of safety is crucial. This can be emotional safety, such as learning to trust yourself and your reactions, or physical safety, like making changes in your environment to reduce stressors.
  3. Mindfulness and Awareness: Develop mindfulness skills to become more aware of your triggers and the moments when you fall into these automatic patterns. Mindfulness can help you pause and choose a different response instead of reacting out of habit.
  4. Physical Health: Support your physical body through proper nutrition, exercise, and sleep. These practices strengthen your body's resilience against stress and can reduce the frequency and intensity of your stress responses.
  5. Cognitive Flexibility: Work on flexibility in your thinking. Recognizing that your automatic thoughts and reactions might not always be accurate or helpful can empower you to choose different and more beneficial responses.
  6. Seek Support: Sometimes, professional help such as therapy can be vital in addressing the root causes of your stress responses. A therapist can offer tools and strategies to manage and overcome these patterns, providing support as you work through the underlying trauma.

By actively working on these areas, you can start to reduce the hold that fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or forget responses have on your life. It’s a journey that requires patience and persistence, as old habits take time to unlearn, especially those rooted in deep-seated fears and past traumas. The goal is to develop a healthier way of interacting with the world around you, enabling you to react to current situations in ways that are reflective of your actual, present-moment experiences and not just automatic responses based on the past.