The Process in Your Brain
You react to threat in micro-seconds, processes within the brain unconsciously activates rapidly in a pattern to protect you in a moment of cerebral overwhelm. Our brains are each hardwired to protect us from harm. We generally move into fight, flee, or freeze states. It’s at these moments when we can become traumatized and absorb significant amounts of energy as biological processes start and the brain jumps into overdrive to protect you. Let me explain how it works and how you can heal from trauma by resetting your nervous system.
Identify The Threat and Situation
This happens consciously and unconsciously based on past memories and your recall on if you know what to do and how to do it to get safe and away from harm. All mammals and humans alike are hardwired to automatically identify and assess situations and then engage. So here’s what happens in as simple way as I can write it.
Flee – Get Away
If the brain determines that you can escape then often individuals flee, they get away from harm if possible. This prevents possible injury and suffering. This generally is the brain’s first option, get out of dodge. It’s optimal for your survival to not risk injury or harm to when we become hurt, overwhelmed, or threatened in a significant way we apt to get out of the immediate harm or area.
Fight – Take It Head On
If the brain determines that you cannot escape then often people will then engage with the threat, the person, the situation, the danger. It’s then that you attempt to determine if you can beat it, can you overcome what you determined before that you cannot run away from. This happens in relationships, debate and argument occur to stabilize and balance the threat. If need be, human beings tend to fight physially if the threat is too much.
Freeze – Brain Lockup
If the brain determines that you cannot get away by fleeing the situation and you might lose if you fight too much in the situation then you can lock up. The brain becomes so overwhelmed that it essentially gets stuck or frozen. The mind and body becomes inflexible and doesn’t create solutions but becomes almost totally shut down. When the nervous system has so much data coming in and processing the brain can “lock up” in the same way a computer does, frozen and immobile.
Fawning – Hustle and Act Nice
If the brain determines that you cannot escape, cannot win by fighting, and cannot afford to shut down, it may choose fawning. Fawning is a survival response where the nervous system tries to reduce danger by pleasing, appeasing, or accommodating the threat. The person becomes highly attuned to others’ moods, needs, and expectations and works hard to stay agreeable, helpful, or invisible. This can look like over apologizing, people pleasing, caretaking, minimizing your own needs, or saying yes when you want to say no. The goal is safety through connection. If I keep you calm, happy, or satisfied, I might stay safe.
Over time, fawning can lead people to lose touch with their own wants, boundaries, and identity. It often develops in environments where conflict felt dangerous, unpredictable, or emotionally costly. While fawning may have once kept you safe, in adulthood it can create exhaustion, resentment, anxiety, and a deep fear of disappointing others. Healing involves slowly teaching the nervous system that safety no longer depends on hustling for approval, and that your needs, voice, and limits matter too.
The Aftermath
The brain’s engagement is an involuntary path that is determined in nanoseconds when confronted with danger. It’s during these times that we can become traumatized. Situations that are overwhelming, painful, abusive, and overwhelm our ability to deal end up getting stuck encoded maladatively in the body and brain.
At times the trauma is so great that the mind or brain completely shuts down and we can find that we dissociate from the process meaning we literally emotionally or physically shut down to avoid pain and the situation. Fainting, repressing memory, closing eyes, closing eyes and freezing, are all ways our bodies engage when we are in the process of collapse.
What Now?
Can trauma be treated? Absolutely it can. We have EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy as well as ACT (Accelerated Resolution Therapy) as well that have clinical trial outcome data proven in treating and resolving the negative impact of past trauma. I have advanced training in each of these and can assist you in working through and healing for good.
EMDR Therapy for Trauma
Learn more about EMDR and trauma treatment on my EMDR page.
