What are the 4 Fear Responses? (Part 1: Fight) - Video Transcript

Hey everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist and today is going to be part one of a four part series I'm doing on the four fear responses which include fight flight, freeze and fawn. So you might also hear these referred to as the an acute stress response or a trauma response.

And I think most of us are probably familiar with the concept of fight or flight, but I'm also going to be talking about those two additional responses and basically they all originate in the amygdala, which is the part of our brain where fear is sort of activated, right? And then once that happens, we have a system that works to keep us alive if the body perceives itself to be in trouble.

And this is when the demands of our environment typically outweigh our perceived ability to cope with the situation or the threat. And what happens is our sympathetic nervous system kicks in, shuts down the bodily functions that aren't necessary in that moment, such as digestion and things like that and then activates the the bodily sensations that are going to allow us to deal with threats. So this dates back all the way to our ancestors.

You know, the person who was able to recognize a sabertooth tiger as a threat and flee the scene and remain safe. Had a better chance of survival than somebody who went to pet the sabertooth tiger. So the goal is to decrease and or or evade danger and return to a relaxed state or a state of calm and this can be done in several different ways.

So today I'm going to be talking about the fight response and some indicators that you might be having. The fight for your response is um maybe a tight jaw or grinding your teeth, you might have like a nodded or burning sensation in your stomach. Um you probably are experiencing intense anger. Um you sort of have the need to kick or punch or this urge to attack the source of the danger.

And in the modern world, most of these high arousal or or fear based situations tend to be more psychological in nature, so as opposed to physical. So, you know, back when our ancestors were alive, there was that actual physical threat from dangerous animals or a dangerous environment.

Now we have more threats such as fear about a job interview or or something like that. So it's important to know that this these responses can also take place in different forms. So this fight response may not always be physical. It could also lead to a verbal altercation. It could lead to some passive aggressive behavior or even some displacement.

So maybe somebody is actually feeling really anxious about work and so they come home and they take that anger out on their spouse. So it can take various forms and it comes from from various experiences in life and obviously I can't get into all of that in this short video. But if this is something that you experience therapy can be really helpful for kind of identifying how these patterns developed and how to sort of break them.

If you find that you're often going into this fight response or have some anger a lot of times, this will show up as anger management issues. Um, so anyway, I hope this video was helpful. Next week I'll be talking about the flight response. So be sure to watch that.

You can follow me on facebook or Instagram at cathartic space counseling or check out my website at cathartic space counseling dot com. Have a great week. I'll talk to you next time.