Initial reactions to trauma can include exhaustion, confusion, sadness, anxiety, agitation, numbness, dissociation, confusion, physical arousal, and blunted affect. Most responses are normal in that they affect most survivors and are socially acceptable, psychologically effective, and self-limited.
There are actually 5 of these common responses, including 'freeze', 'flop' and 'friend', as well as 'fight' or 'flight'. The freeze, flop, friend, fight or flight reactions are immediate, automatic and instinctive responses to fear. Understanding them a little might help you make sense of your experiences and feelings.
The 4 Trauma Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn: Examining The Four Trauma Reactions. According to a research on the neurobiological consequences of psychological trauma, our bodies are designed to respond to perceived threats with a set of near-instantaneous, reflexive survival behaviors.
Flight is another common trauma response that we might associate with drastic behavior. Often, our flight response triggers feelings of anxiety or fear. For some, a flight response can feel like a strong desire to leave the situation. That desire can translate into walking away from a conversation or a meeting.
Experiencing terrifying memories, nightmares, or flashbacks. Avoiding more and more anything that reminds you of the trauma. Emotionally numb and disconnected from others. Using alcohol or drugs to feel better.
But, when we talk about apologizing, we wrap all of these complex concepts up into a single practice. It's a common trauma-state response to want to avoid conflict. Conflict can feel dangerous.
However, people with unresolved trauma may perceive everything as a danger, leading to unhealthy flight responses. When trauma is involved, an unhealthy flight response may lead to: Obsessive or compulsive tendencies. Needing to stay busy at all times.
Reactions to trauma
Common reactions include: feeling as if you are in a state of 'high alert' and 'on watch' for anything else that might happen. feeling emotionally numb, as if in a state of 'shock' becoming emotional and upset.
Hyper-Rationality is a trauma response and coping strategy. Overthinking, over-analyzing, and over-rationalizing are coping strategies that we learned early on to help us make sense of an unpredictable environment that at some point made us feel unsafe.
You might find relief in being busy, but the truth is that staying busy is a trauma response. Your symptoms of PTSD reflect someone who is capable of functioning in the world as long as you remain stimulated. It's possible that you're afraid of what will happen when you stop moving.
Courage, Self-Love and Complex Trauma (CPTSD)
The trauma-informed approach is guided four assumptions, known as the “Four R's”: Realization about trauma and how it can affect people and groups, recognizing the signs of trauma, having a system which can respond to trauma, and resisting re-traumatization.
The fawn response is when an individual tries to avoid or minimize distress or danger by pleasing and appeasing the threat. Someone responding in this way would do whatever they can to keep the threat, or abuser, happy despite their own needs and wants.
Complex trauma describes both children's exposure to multiple traumatic events—often of an invasive, interpersonal nature—and the wide-ranging, long-term effects of this exposure. These events are severe and pervasive, such as abuse or profound neglect.
Trauma is the impact felt from high levels of toxic stress. This can be emotional or physical. We may feel toxic stress when we face strong, frequent, or prolonged challenges. These can include abuse, neglect, violence, or substance use in the home.
People with PTSD may always feel “on guard,” or hypervigilant, and have a heightened startle response. Often, observers may note an exaggerated startle response or “jumpiness” as another potential indicator of PTSD.
When empaths are exposed to early trauma or abuse their young nervous system may develop without healing making them hypervigilant. They can become exquisitely attuned to their environment to ward off threats and ensure they are safe or enter a state of hyperarousal.
People-pleasing is sometimes referred to as the “fawning” trauma response because it's so closely associated with overly-appeasing behaviors and cycles of codependency.
Trauma. A child who is violated by any person, particularly a person of trust, may look at the world as unsafe and view themselves as undeserving of good things in life, leading to self-sabotage.
“Over-apologizing can stem from being too hard on ourselves or beating ourselves up for things,” Dr. Juliana Breines, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Rhode Island, explained. In addition to anxiety, another mental health disorder that can lead people to over-apologize is OCD.
Overreacting. Emotional overreactions are a common symptom of trauma. A victim of trauma might redirect their overwhelming emotions towards others, such as family and friends.
But repetitive, nearly constant apologies for every little thing—or, what Psychologist Paige Carambio, PsyD calls, “apologizing for existing”—can actually be an after-effect of trauma, a self-preservation technique survivors may think they still need to utilize in order to protect themselves.