Trauma Responses Look Different In Real Life. Here’s How to Spot Them.

Going beyond fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

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Trauma has a sneaky way of shaping our lives, often without us even realizing it. We hear about the classic trauma responses — fight, flight, freeze, and fawn — but what does that really look like day-to-day? The truth is, trauma responses can show up in ways that don’t always scream “I’m traumatized!”

They can disguise themselves as everyday habits, behaviors, or even personality traits that we just assume are “part of who we are.” But if we dig a little deeper, we might find that these reactions are actually rooted in past experiences, and recognizing them is the first step toward healing.

Maybe you’re quick to get defensive (fight), or you’re always looking for an exit strategy when things get uncomfortable (flight). Or perhaps you freeze up in tough situations, feeling stuck and unable to act, even when you know what needs to be done. Then there’s fawning — people-pleasing to avoid conflict or gain approval. Sound familiar?

By recognizing when and how these trauma responses show up in real life, you can start to create space for healthier behaviors. It’s not about fixing yourself because you’re not broken. It’s about understanding why you respond the way you do and giving yourself permission to choose something different — something that serves you better. Healing is possible, and it starts with awareness. Let’s talk about how to get there.

The How and the Why: Basics of Trauma Responses

The concept of “trauma responses” was thought up by Walter Cannon, an American physiologist, after he witnessed the unconcious and automatic series of fast-acting reactions that occured in a body in a stress. The reactions, he noted, helped to assemble all the resources needed by the body to manage threatening circumstances.

When he published his first research on the subject (in 1915) he called it an acute stress response. The body of a organism under threat, he noted, released a series of hormones that prepared it to fight the threat or flee from the threat. Thus, the concept of “fight v. flight” was born.

In recent years, however, trauma research has highlighted a number of other trauma responses that are also common in survivors. Far from the basic “fight vs. flight” we now know that there are at least 4 common trauma responses that encompass most of the behaviors we see in survivors of traumatic experieces.

• Fight: Facing a perceived threat with agression or hostility.
• Flight: Running away from a perceived threat.
• Freeze: Unable to react when encountered with a threat.
• Fawn: Masking or acting to “please” a perceived threat.

These responses are triggered whenever the demands of the environment we are in become greater than our ability to cope with them. It’s dependent entirely on our individual perception of the event and our individual experiences. What triggers a trauma response in one person may not inspire a trauma response in someone else.

The key to understanding our trauma responses, however, is not in being able to memorize these four basics. It’s in being able to understand how these responses work in the real world. Far from a simple fight or fleeing from a perceived threat, in real life, our trauma response can tangle our lives and relationships in subtle, unperceiveable ways.

What Do Trauma Responses Look Like in Real Life?

So, what do fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses look like in real life? We know the most common forms of these reactions. Drug addiction. Abusive relationships. People pleasing behavior. However, what about the more subtle responses to our trauma that we’re not always aware of? Digging deeper into how we tick and why can reveal some compelling answers.

• Lapses in memory: When we experience trauma, our brain adjusts cognitive function in order to protect itself and raise pain tolerance. In those moments, you may notice a “brain fog” or a lapse in memory.
• Codependent relationships: Codependency is a common form of the fawn response. Having experienced trauma, the victim comes to believe if they become a “giver” or “appease” the person perceived as a threat, it will keep them safe.
• Work addiction: Workaholics may seem like they have it all together, but many are engaging in a “fawn” trauma response. It’s much like people pleasing. The idea is to do as much work as possible to receive safety, respect, likability, etc.
• Binge eating: This freeze response allows trauma survivors to self-soothe without facing the heavy emotions or reality of their circumstances.
• Short-tempers: When a person is quick to anger, or lashes out a lot in rage, they could be reacting within the “fight” trauma response. By lashing out, they are subconciously pushing away threats before they can cause harm.
• Trauma-dumping: Trauma-dumping and oversharing can be a form of the flight trauma response. This can be a form of compartmentalization, which is a way for victims to recall information from an emotional distance.
• Temporomandibular joint disorder: People with the fawning trauma response are more likely to experience TMJ, more commonly known as lockjaw or jaw pain. This is thought to relate to their over-agreeableness and people pleasing behavior.
• Paranoia and isolation: It’s common for people who have experienced trauma to form the belief that the world is inherently bad or dangerous. This can cause them to self-isolate and push people away.
• Tightly wound: Trauma damages the nervous system and changes the way it works. This can create a “tightly wound” personality that is always on edge and easily startled (thanks to hypervigilance).
• Becoming the persecutor: Trauma victims can reenact their trauma by putting themselves into the roles of the perpetrator. This is meant to normalize the experience, minimize pain, and return power to the victim, but they ultimately end up becoming judgemental and critical bullies.
• Go, go, go: Some trauma survivors attempt to “outrun” their trauma by keeping themselves eternally busy. They believe they are outrunning the heavy thoughts and emotions.

Is this list comprehensive? Of course not. Our responses to trauma can manifest in a million different ways. A man who was ignored by his father might develop an obsession with weekend fishing trips. A woman who was never loved by her mother might grow up to build the perfect family as a response to the trauma of her childhood neglect.

There are good trauma responses and bad trauma responses. What’s important for us, as survivors of trauma, is to get better at identifying our responses. Know where they’re coming from. That awareness is what enables us to heal, to get aligned, and to create the lives and relationships we crave.

How are you responding to your trauma? How are those responses shaping your life and turning you into the person you are today?

How Do You Resolve Your Trauma Responses in Adulthood?

With your trauma responses laid bare, where do you go next? The good news is that awareness is power. When you know how you’re responding to your trauma, you can take steps to correct those responses and create healthier behaviors. It’s like putting glasses on after a lifetime of squinting at the blackboard.

Once you know how you’ve responded to your trauma, you can get the right professional help, plug yourself into a fulfilling life, and lean into the emotions you’ve been running from.

1. Get professional help

Getting professional help is one of the most important steps that any survivor of trauma can take. It’s unavoidable. Sitting down with a therapist or counselor helps us to unlock both understanding and realization. It gives us a language to explain our feelings and our experiences.

When going down the path of psychological healing, it’s important to take those first steps with someone who knows what they’re doing. Find a trauma-informed therapist. Do your research. Do some digging. Find someone with a proven track record of helping people get back on their feet.

Here’s what’s important for you to remember, though. Therapy alone will not heal you. Talking to someone every week is not enough to “wipe the slate clean.” That will never happen. The person who existed before the trauma is never coming back. Therapy is simply the start of the journey to releasing the hold your trauma has over you.

2. Find ways to plug into life

The thing about our trauma responses is that they can force us to get caught up in cycles of self-denial and self-abandonment. Take the people pleasing mother for example. She might burn herself out making sure everyone else around her is happy and safe, but she doesn’t leave any of that energy left for herself. It doesn’t work.

Find ways to plug into life. Figure out where your passions and curiousities lie. What do you like to do? What adds a positive benefit to your life — solely for you and your growth?

Some examples of great ways to plug into life include:

• Volunteering at an animal shelter
• Taking a painting or pottery class
• Joining a running or hiking group

You have to find joyous and fulfilling ways to anchor yourself to life. These are the things that make your life worth living. They belong entirely to you — and no one else. These are things that benefit your life, that lift you up, and make you feel more authentic and at ease in the world around you.

These passions points are a must for anyone recovering from trauma, and they must transcend the care and energy you exert for other people. Fill your life up, from the inside out, with all the beauty, curiosity, interest, and excitement that you can find and pursue it with the wholeness of your heart.

3. Create safe spaces for yourself

One of the worst parts of trauma is that it can create this pervasive idea that you’re not safe anywhere — not even in your own skin. What is the remedy for that? It’s going to opposite direction and creating safe spaces for ourselves that we can naturally relax and grow into. What does that look like?

On the simplest level, it’s surrounding ourselves with people and spaces that make it safe for us to be human (the good and the bad). Build a support network around yourself and fill it up with people who choose to see the best in you, even when you get it wrong.

That’s a more challenging level to this too, though.

Creating safe spaces for yourself may require breaking ties with the toxic ones that have broken you. That could look like ending relationships with partners who hurt you, or going no contact with the family that minmizes you and your experiences. When we don’t have any safe spaces in our lives, we have to do the hard work of creating them, and that can mean walking away from what we’ve always known.

4. Start setting better boundaries

Boundaries are a must for any survivor trying to transcend the hold their trauma responses have over them. You have to get better at drawing the line. Not just with others, but with yourself too. Iron-clad boundaries are a requirement for any human being trying to be happy, whole, and healthy. Setting them will naturally require that you choose yourself over others (from time to time).

Figure out what it is you need to feel safe. How do you want to be treated? How do you need to treat yourself? Get aligned in your needs and your values, and start putting up the barriers where they need to be. Say no to things that burn you out, stop going above and beyond for people who don’t do the same for you.

5. Allow yourself to lean in

Every client I have has to go through one really big exercise when I work with them, and it’s called the “Passengers on the Bus” exercise. In it, we essentially visualize their emotions, as people, passing through on a bus, of which the client is the driver. It seems silly, but it serves a purpose. It helps to teach them how to lean into their emotions.

That’s one of the biggest struggles that survivors have, and it’s one of the biggest parts of recovering from trauma. Learning to be present in our bodies and feel the big scary emotions that we’re running from. Survivors hate to do it. Who wants to feel all that grief? All that fear? That’s exactly what we have to do to heal.

Lean into your emotions and get into the habit of feeling them. Instead of running from them, numbing them, denying them, allow them in and allow them to pass through your life as a stranger might walk by you on the sidewalk. Note them. Feel them in your body. Then let them pass on.

Your emotions are temporary experiences. The better you get at meeting them where they’re at (instead of running away from them) the less they will haunt you. So, be brave enough to embrace your feelings. See them as the temporary guests that they are and lean into their short term visits. They’re not there to hurt you, after all, they’re there to bring you a message. Listen to it.

Recognizing trauma responses in real life is like turning the lights on in a room you’ve been navigating in the dark. It’s not about blaming yourself or feeling like there’s something wrong with you — it’s about understanding that your brain and body are doing what they were trained to do in order to survive. But here’s the good news: just because you learned these patterns doesn’t mean you’re stuck with them forever.

The first step is becoming aware. Start noticing how your fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses show up in your everyday life. Is your instinct to argue and defend yourself when you feel attacked? Do you avoid confrontation or difficult conversations at all costs? Are you feeling frozen when faced with tough decisions, or bending over backwards to make everyone else happy? These reactions might feel automatic now, but with awareness comes the power to change.

Healing doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s definitely not a straight line. But every time you recognize an old trauma response and choose to respond differently, you’re rewiring your brain to create healthier patterns. You’re building resilience, confidence, and emotional freedom. It’s a process, but one that’s entirely within your reach.

You deserve to live a life where you’re not just reacting to the past, but fully engaged in the present and moving toward the future you want. So be gentle with yourself, stay curious, and remember that healing is a journey — one you’re fully capable of walking. You’re already on the right path. Keep going.

© E.B. Johnson 2024

I am a writer, NLP coach, and podcaster who helps survivors build more fulfilling lives. Join my mailing list for weekly advice on life, love, and healing from a traumatic past. Or, apply to work with me here.

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