The Other Three "F-words"
The Other Three "F-words"
Fight, Flight and Freeze
Aloha! Welcome or welcome back to They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir. Which “they” still do and then I say yes I have been and send “them” this way.
Last week I took a break and suggested newcomers might catch up on some possibly relevant previous posts. Iʻm back with a bit more writing about things that keep coming to my attention. Like the Vagus Nerve - which seems to be on everyoneʻs tongue and YouTube video list these days.
A sweet reader shared with me in a private message this past week that she saw in Hawaiʻi Civil Beat an interview with a counselor on Maui who “says there is nothing ʻdisorderedʻ about people profoundly disabled by trauma, in reference to Lahaina PTSD. It’s more like PTSR. Response. Post-Traumatic Stress Response.
Wow. This reader said she deeply appreciated that reframing. As do I. And what a great introduction to todayʻs topic, which has to do with our responses to perceived or real threats.
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Conventional interpersonal wisdom says tigers donʻt change their stripes, people donʻt like change. Conventional physical science says a body at rest will stay at rest.
There is a contrary view. Buddhist thought says that everything changes and the cause of emotional and mental suffering is our resistance to the truth that everything changes. The new sciences of chaos and complexity theory say that entropy does not always increase, that sometimes systems self-organize into new possibilities. These new sciences agree with indigenous observations of the nature of the natural world, which is alive, constantly changing, constantly communicating. Both posit that any thing at all that is not us can only be understood in relationship to us as the observer.
My personal experience, as documented again and again in this memoir, is that life keeps lifing indeed, and therefore the better I get at being present to how things are in this moment, the better equipped I am to flow with the inevitable disruptions and transitions both life-changing and insignificant. The heavy cream is spoiled? Get creative and modify the recipe for tonightʻs dinner. The Twin Towers and Lahaina town as we knew it disappeared overnight in my lifetime? We grieve, find compassion and do our best in the immediate term and short term, and then try to be thoughtful about what will serve place and people for generations ahead.
Taking this back to the microcosm of my recent thread of posts on the topic of horses and horse wisdom, I want to explore our hardwired, innate response tendencies, the way our stories affect our responses, and the way our past experiences can also physically hardwire our responses. Maybe over the course of a couple of posts, because there is a lot of meat to chew on here.
Let me start with another key moment in Action in Management, the two-year management and leadership course I was in over twenty years ago where I learned about being a dignified beginner, the course during which I had my first experience wtih Equine Guided Education.
Bob Dunham, the creator and teacher of the course, included a strong somatic component, drawing on his studies of aikido. One afternoon we participated in an exercise designed to give us more self-awareness of our innate tendencies in situations in which we felt threatened. The somatic learning was then to be translated into how we might typically respond when under our ideas were under attack in a meeting, or our strategy under attack in the marketplace.
Bob explained that each of us would stand in front of him one at a time. We would be looking directly into each otherʻs eyes. In his right hand he had a wooden sword, which he would raise above his head. At a certain point he would lower the sword in a quick movement, as if to strike us.
Every single person did one of two things. Some jumped back out of striking distance, and others leapt forward in counterattack. Not a single person managed to respond calmly with an alternate or preplanned response.
I found the experience intense; I noticed my heart pounding for a good while afterwards. It was also a profound learning moment. Even though I had watched several people do the exercise before my turn, I had no better luck controlling my response in a thoughtful way. The body simply responded before the mind processed what was happening.
I was naturally a “fight” type (I can hear those of you who know me in real life saying “duh”). No wonder in a contentious meeting my mind was continually rebutting instead of listening. No wonder when I saw someone mistreating a friend or an animal or a child, I would become a dangerous, man- or woman-eating tigress. No wonder I was the type of person who sought challenges, who spoke proudly about being a “Type A personality,” who argued for the value of “good stress.” I found the energy shot released in the face of challenge or threat, up to a certain level, addictive.
Thatʻs the sympathetic nervous system for you. The automatic “flight or fight” response is hardwired in our bodies.
Turns out there is a third “f-word” that comes into play when the situation is extreme and neither fight nor flight is an option. That word is “freeze.” Sometimes, freezing looks like dull-eyed compliance. Sometimes it looks like disassociation. Sometimes it looks like depression. Sometimes, it looks like every employee in a start up or Wall Street or law firm looks, like every horse on a dude string looks, like every servant or captive in the household looks, and so it looks like “normal” behavior.
At its most extreme, freezing looks like those nature documentaries where a lion has taken down and bitten but not yet killed its prey, and their unfortunate but still breathing dinner has shut down and stopped trying to escape. Like my mare Zara when she laid down to die rather than accept being saddled.
Take a deep breath or two, please. Just in case all this talk about threats and tigers and lions and swords has created a sympathetic nervous system response in you.
I promise next week we will go the other direction and talk about the parasympathetic nervous system and the vagus nerve and polyvagal theory and what all that has to do with Hottie and you and me.
When you canʻt fight or flee, you freeze for survival or to not feel the pain. And then you can get stuck in freeze. You can get stuck with the gas pedal running your nervous system even when there is no immediate, actual danger.
The brain responds to a potential threat the same as to an actual threat. “What happens before what happens happens” - like Hottie shutting down just being led out of the pasture. Safety is in the herd. My awareness of her reassured her that she was safe in the world when I was around and led also to her trusting the other two horses as a herd to keep each other mutually safe.