Survival responses are part of being human. Everyone has them. They exist to help you navigate the world around you safely. Survival responses can be life saving or, when they are out of control they can be a problem.
Survival responses as adaptive
Have you ever found yourself in a rage because you missed a traffic light? Or perhaps thinking about going to the dentist makes your nerves jangle? Are you terrified of spiders or flying or thunder, and have you ever been frozen in fear? Do you consider yourself a people pleaser? Do you have difficulty saying no? All of these behaviours could possibly be survival responses. Survival responses are part and parcel of being human. Everyone has them. They exist to help you navigate the world around you safely. Survival responses are life saving when you are in a perilous situation, however they have the potential to become problematic when they are not fitting or out of proportion for your current circumstances.
The number of survival responses that experts put forward ranges from 4 to 7 and include the most common responses; fight, flight or freeze and can include the less talked about fawn, faint (also referred to as flop) flag and fine. Over the next few blog entries, we will take a closer look at each of these survival responses in detail.
Survival responses are individual. Your reaction to threat depends to a great degree on what has happened historically in your life and the connections you have right now to others and yourself. All survival responses at one time were adaptive. They helped us to survive in the environment that we lived in, and they carry on even when the world around us has changed. How you were raised, how people cared for you and responded to you when you were in distress as a child shapes the way you respond to trauma as an adult.
Difficult things happen in life. No amount of money or privilege makes any one of us immune to hardships. When you were a child, if you had an adult that was present and calm and able to soothe you when you experienced emotions too big for you to control, then you learned how to soothe your own nervous system and control your own emotions. However, if the adults in your life were absent or not able to regulate their own nervous systems, then there would be no opportunity for you to learn through coregulation how to cope with stressors in a calm way.
You may be saying “I had a great childhood. My parents loved me. I didn’t experience any trauma. Why do I have these out-of-control survival responses?” That statement may very well be true. I am a firm believer that the vast majority of parents are doing the very best they can with the tools that they have at the time. Well meaning and devoted parents may be too busy working or stressed out or angry or struggling with their own mental health challenges to be truly present enough and attuned enough to their child to coregulate with them. In the absence of that coregulation the child never has the opportunity to learn how to regulate their nervous system on their own.
So What Can I Do?
The first step in controlling your survival responses and your nervous system activation is to notice and be curious about what is going on with you. This includes physical sensations in your body, nervous system activation, thoughts, and emotions. How are you sleeping? How is your mood? Are you feeling irritable or sad? How are your energy levels? What is your relationship like with food? These are all questions to be curious about. Until you are able to notice what is going on with your body, your nervous system and your mind in a gentle, non judgemental way, there is no possibility to effect change.
Journal Prompt
Before starting to write take a few minutes to reflect. Sit in a comfortable place, take a few deep breaths to calm your body and your nervous system and ask yourself the following questions: When I am experiencing a threat what happens, physically in my body, in my nervous system and in my emotions? What do I do? Is my behaviour fitting for the situation or do I tend to overreact or underreact? Take a minute and write about how you typically react to a situation where you perceive a threat or feel unsafe.