6 Trauma Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn, Fine, & Faint

Experiencing a traumatic event can have a lasting impact. Many people wonder why they might feel irritable, on-edge, or unhappy long after the traumatic experience has passed. If you’re feeling this way, you’re not alone: the World Health Organization estimates that 70.4% of us experience trauma, and 3.9% of us will develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at some point in our lives – but the effects of trauma can be prevalent even without a PTSD diagnosis.

In this post, we’re talking about the 6 Fs of trauma responses, how and why they can differ from PTSD, and the effect your attachment style can have on your response to trauma.

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What Is a Trauma Response?

When we experience something that feels like a threat to our lives, we sometimes experience the effects of trauma. The traumatic event could be anything that made you feel scared and endangered, even if your life wasn’t actually at risk. For example, 41% of burglary victims report severe symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following the burglary, even though they may not have come face to face with danger.

Your response to trauma is unique to you and what you’ve been through – while you may recognize similarities with the 6 trauma responses listed here, the reality is that people usually experience a mix of thoughts and feelings that correspond to different trauma responses.

A trauma response in this sense describes the ways that our bodies might react to trauma, and the thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations that result. These reactions happen during the traumatic event, but can also be triggered after the danger has passed. Triggers can be anything that reminds us of the event, including sensations, people, thoughts, and feelings.

Experiencing a trauma response is not the same as PTSD, which is characterized by persistent intrusive thoughts, avoidance, negative mood, and high anxiety for a long time after the traumatic event.

The 6 Trauma Responses Explained

If you’ve heard of “fight or flight”, then you’re already familiar with two of our common trauma responses – but there are many other ways your body might respond.

You might find different variations of these “6 Fs” of trauma responses, but each one is a valid and natural way to react to an unnatural event.

Today, we’re going to take a look at these 6 responses:

• Fight
• Flight
• Freeze
• Fawn
• Fine
• Faint

The Fight Response

When faced with immediate danger, your sympathetic nervous system activates. This sends your blood to your heart and lungs, away from your extremities and digestive organs, so that you can take rapid action. Your focus narrows and your muscles become tense, and you might notice sweat, a racing heart, and fast breathing.

At this point, your brain makes a snap calculation – “can I overpower this threat?”

When the answer is yes, you enter the fight response.

In the fight response, you might feel intense anger, a surge of energy, or an urge to physically lash out. You may find your jaw or fists clenching, and your instinct is to move toward the threat.

When the fight response is triggered, you might feel all these feelings again. You might be more irritable, tense, and argumentative than usual.

The Flight Response

If the answer to “can I overpower this threat?” is “no”, then your brain’s next calculation is: “can I outrun this threat?”

When your brain decides to outrun the threat, you enter the flight response. In the flight response, you are still preparing for action, so your physical responses are similar to the fight response. However, you direct this energy away from the threat, instead of towards it.

When the flight response is triggered, you might feel exceptionally restless, fidgety, and tense. You might also take excessive measures to avoid thoughts and feelings about the traumatic event, such as an intense focus on a new skill or project, to the detriment of other aspects of your life.

The Freeze Response

When you cannot overpower or outrun the threat, your brain now has to divert to its next best survival technique: the freeze response.

The freeze response is thought to emulate “playing dead”, or staying so still that perhaps the danger won’t notice you.

During a traumatic event, the freeze response can feel like your body has gone rigid and you’re stuck in place. Your heart rate may slow down as your body preserves energy, slowing your breathing too. You may feel physically numb, which helps your body to survive by stopping you from experiencing the full impact of the threat.

When the freeze response is triggered, you may feel physically incapable of moving even though you want to. You may feel dissociated, like you’re not completely present or you’re separated from yourself. Some people also experience psychological regression, temporarily reverting to younger emotional states when overwhelmed. The people around you might notice that you seem “spaced out”, distracted, or depressed.

It’s not uncommon for trauma survivors to feel shame following the freeze response, with many wondering why they didn’t “do anything” – but the fact is that you did. Your body responded to help you survive in the best way it knew how to.

The Faint Response

During the freeze response, your heart rate and blood pressure can become so low that you faint. This can protect your brain from having to experience the event at all.

The faint response can also persist after the event – there is a documented correlation between traumatic experiences and susceptibility to fainting. You may also feel lightheaded, weak, or dizzy.

The Fawn Response

The fawn response usually occurs when all other options are unavailable and the threat is long-term and relational. This is often an aggressive or abusive person close to the survivor, like a partner or family member.

During the fawn response, you try to appease the threat to make it less likely to pose a risk to your safety, even though this is often at your own expense. For example, you might spend hours tidying the house to avoid conflict, even if you need to be somewhere else during this time.

When the fawn response persists outside of the context of the threat, you might have difficulty with people pleasing, avoiding conflict, and sacrificing your own needs to benefit others. It might be difficult to say “no” and set boundaries, which can create a vicious cycle of abuse.

The Fine Response

The fine response is unlike the others we’ve discussed, as it is not something we do during a traumatic experience, but something we might engage in in the aftermath.

In the fine response, you might experience denial about your trauma. You might play it down, question whether it happened, or pretend it didn’t. This often happens because the trauma is too big for your brain to process, or because of social pressure to appear to be okay.

Even though you might seem happy and calm on the outside, you might be experiencing anger, frustration, and anxiety. You might avoid situations that could bring up your traumatic experience, which could lead to isolation.

It’s important to know that it’s perfectly understandable, even normal, to not be fine after a traumatic experience. Even though it can feel insurmountable at times, try to approach your thoughts and feelings with self compassion, and know that these difficulties can and do get better with time.

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Trauma Responses in PTSD

PTSD first became a recognized diagnosis in 1980, but its symptoms had been known and somewhat understood for a long time.

Famously, World War I veterans were known to return with “shell shock”, which loosely described abnormal behavior such as hypervigilance, tinnitus, tremors, or insomnia. Upon finding that some of these soldiers had no physical damage, doctors started to wonder whether the cause was emotional.

However, the first descriptions of PTSD-like symptoms go all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia, as far as 1300BC, where symptoms such as flashbacks, disturbed sleep, and low mood were thought to be caused by the spirits of those a person had killed in conflict.

Any of the trauma responses can be present in PTSD, but experiencing a trauma response post-trauma does not necessarily mean PTSD is present. Within the first month after the traumatic experience, any PTSD-like symptoms can be attributed to an acute stress response. If these symptoms persist for longer than a month, no matter when they started, then PTSD may be diagnosed.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders V (DSM-V; often used by professionals to assist in diagnoses), symptoms of PTSD can be categorized into 4 different clusters, and each one must be met to form a diagnosis.

To diagnose PTSD, these symptoms must also follow exposure to a traumatic event (including learning about a traumatic event which happened to somebody close to you or repeated exposure to details of a traumatic event due to occupation), must cause significant difficulty in daily life, and must not be potentially caused by another medical condition or substance.

You may notice that many of these diagnostic criteria relate to one of the trauma responses – we saw avoidance in the flight response, and irritability in the fight response. This goes to show how these responses can overlap, often with little predictability.

After prolonged relational trauma, an individual could develop Complex PTSD (C-PTSD). C-PTSD is recognized in the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases 11 (ICD-11), and includes the previous diagnostic criteria for PTSD as well as difficulties with emotional regulation, negative self-evaluation, and difficulties sustaining and forming close relationships with others. This is often where the fawn response and people-pleasing behavior comes in.

The Role of Attachment in Trauma Responses

People with insecure attachment styles can also experience difficulty sustaining and forming close relationships with others – is this the same as C-PTSD?

Not necessarily – C-PTSD still requires all the criteria for PTSD, but the two can overlap. In fact, scientists have found that insecure attachment styles are associated with more intense symptoms of PTSD, particularly where the traumatic event occurred in early life.

A disorganized attachment style, which forms where the infant learns to fear the caregiver they also rely on, is particularly closely associated with symptoms of PTSD.

While insecure attachment styles can resemble trauma responses, such as avoidance seen in the flight response and the avoidant attachment style or people-pleasing sometimes seen in the anxious attachment style, this behavior isn’t necessarily a response to trauma – even though both are the result of survival mechanisms.

Remember how the signs of different trauma responses overlap in PTSD diagnostic criteria? Someone who experiences one trauma response is likely to experience others, whereas your attachment style can be a more stable pattern of behaviors that aren’t usually triggered outside of the context of relationships.

Recovery from trauma is a 3 stage process: stabilization of symptoms and regaining a sense of safety, processing and re-integrating traumatic memories, and reconnecting and rebuilding trust with others.

Having a secure attachment style can help with all of these stages, but it becomes particularly important in the final stage when we try to reconnect.

To help you learn about your attachment style and move toward a secure attachment type, take our course on developing a secure attachment.

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Final Words on the 6 Trauma Responses

Any extremely frightening experience can become traumatic, and how your brain reacts when survival mode kicks in is not a conscious decision. When the effects of trauma continue for a long time, people often feel frustration, confusion, and shame – understanding common trauma responses is the first step towards self-compassion, managing trauma symptoms, and eventually recovering from traumatic experiences.

Your attachment style plays into your trauma responses too, and a secure attachment can make it easier (though still not easy) to deal with the symptoms of trauma. If you don’t think you have a secure attachment style, don’t worry, as this is something that can be changed with time and intentional action.

Recovering from trauma is no easy feat, but it is possible. Remember to approach your difficulties with compassion and curiosity, and talk to a qualified clinician for personalized advice.