Trauma Responses

When adults are in traumatic situations, they have the gut instinct options of fighting back or escaping by running away. Children, especially small children, don’t have the same options because those options endanger them further. Children employ a third strategy. They freeze. This is a successful strategy for small animals because the predator chasing them doesn’t see them and moves on. In humans, however, our traumatized nervous systems never get to thaw out of the frozen state we entered as children.

Where rage activates the fight response and fear activates the flight response, the freeze response is activated by our need to suppress the anger and fear emotions. Unfortunately, suppressing our emotions has long-term detrimental physical and mental effects (Maté. The Myth of Normal. 2022).

 Did you experience childhood trauma?