Your Trauma Therapist by Lauren Auer, LCPC is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. For more content follow me on Instagram.
Someone grabs for your purse in a parking lot. In the second before you have time to think anything at all, your body has already decided what to do next. Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fawn.
Most people have heard these four words by now, tossed around in therapy offices, self-help books, and social media captions. Fewer people understand what’s actually happening underneath them, why one person’s body chooses to run while another’s goes still, or why the same person might respond completely differently depending on the day.
That’s what this series is going to unpack, one response at a time, using that same parking lot scenario as a thread running through all four pieces. Before we go response by response, it helps to know what each one actually looks like, since most people have heard the terms without ever getting a real explanation of what’s happening underneath them.
Fight shows up as confrontation. Raised voices, tense muscles, an urge to push back or take control of the situation.
Flight shows up as escape. Restlessness, a pull to leave the room, the conversation, or sometimes the relationship, before things can get worse.
Freeze shows up as shutdown. Going still, going quiet, feeling foggy or far away, sometimes losing track of time entirely.
Fawn shows up as appeasement. Agreeing, apologizing, smoothing things over, prioritizing someone else’s comfort over your own even when nothing is technically wrong.
None of these are conscious decisions and none of them are personality traits. They’re what your body reaches for when it senses threat, chosen in a fraction of a second based on what kept you safest before. This piece is about the one that tends to get the least sympathy and the most shame: fight.
Your nervous system is not making a moral judgment when it decides to fight. It is running a fast, specific calculation: do I have enough power in this moment to push back and come out ahead?
Let’s go back to that parking lot. Your body doesn’t pause to weigh the options the way your conscious mind would in hindsight. It scans for a handful of specific signals, and when enough of them line up, fight becomes the response it reaches for.
Say the person is visibly smaller than you, or moving in a way that reads as clumsy or uncertain. Your body clocks that as an opponent you could plausibly overpower, and that alone can tip the calculation toward fighting back instead of letting go.
Say instead there’s no distance to put between you, no clear path to run. The person already has a grip on your arm or your bag and physical contact is happening whether you want it to or not. Freeze and flight aren’t really on the table anymore. Defending yourself physically becomes the only strategy left.
Say you grew up somewhere that fighting back got results, or you have your own history of successfully defending yourself before. Your nervous system treats that history like a filed report. This approach has worked. It reaches for it again, often before the specific facts of this new moment have even finished registering.
And say some other response failed you badly in the past. Maybe you froze once in real danger and it went wrong. Maybe fawning didn’t stop someone from hurting you anyway. Your body learns from that too, and it will often rule out whatever didn’t work last time in favor of whatever has the better track record, even in a completely different situation with a completely different threat.
The psychiatrist H. Stefan Bracha laid this out in a widely cited 2004 paper, describing fight as one option on a spectrum of survival responses that also includes flight, freeze, and even fainting, with the body choosing based on how much control a person actually has over the threat in front of them.
That’s why the same person can freeze in one moment and fight in another. It was never about being a “fighter” or a “freezer” as a personality type. It’s about what your body picked up on in that specific set of circumstances, weighed against everything it already knows from your history.
“I yelled at my wife over a dish in the sink. A dish. I heard myself and I couldn’t believe it was me talking.” A client said something close to that to me once, arms crossed, jaw tight, not looking for permission to be angry so much as someone to tell him what was wrong with him. Nothing was wrong with him. His nervous system had learned, a long time before that dish ever hit the counter, that fighting was the response that kept him safe. It hadn’t unlearned that yet.
Maria (name and details changed) grew up in a house where the loudest person in the room got left alone. She learned early that going quiet made her a target and going big made people back off. By the time she came to therapy in her thirties, she didn’t want to be someone who raised her voice at her kids over spilled cereal, but some part of her still treated conflict like the opening round of a fight she needed to win before it could be used against her.
Daniel (name and details changed) came in after being put on a performance improvement plan at work. He’d snapped at a manager in a meeting, over a comment he later admitted wasn’t even really about him. What his body remembered was a father who used criticism as a setup for something worse, and a childhood strategy of pushing back hard and fast so nothing could land before he was ready for it. His fight response had once kept him from being an easy target. In an office with a normal, if clumsy, manager, it was costing him his job.
Neither of them was an angry person underneath it all. Both of them had a bodyguard still running an old playbook, one that made sense given what it was built to survive.
What gets lost in most conversations about anger is that fight, like freeze and fawn, is a survival response, not a personality trait. The body that fights is not broken or violent by nature. It is a body that learned, at some point, that pushing back was safer than backing down, and it hasn’t yet gotten the update that the room has changed.
Peter Levine’s work on how the body processes overwhelming experience points to something practical here. Fight energy that gets activated and never fully discharged doesn’t just disappear. It tends to resurface in situations that carry even a faint resemblance to the original threat, which is part of why a dish in the sink or a comment in a meeting can trigger a reaction that looks wildly out of proportion to the moment. It usually isn’t disproportionate to the moment it’s actually responding to. That moment just happened decades ago.
This is different from freeze or fawn in one important way. A freeze response rarely hurts anyone else in the room. Fight can, even when the person underneath it is desperately trying not to become what hurt them in the first place. That double layer, the shame of the reaction plus the fear of becoming the very thing they were protecting themselves from, is often what brings people into my office in the first place.
I think about this the way I think about a tree that grew around a fence. The fence went up when the tree was young and needed the protection. Years later, long after the fence stopped mattering, the trunk still carries that shape. It isn’t a flaw. It’s evidence of what the tree survived, and it can still be worked with.
Deb Dana’s writing on applying polyvagal theory in clinical work focuses on exactly this kind of updating, helping a nervous system learn through repeated, felt experience rather than through logic alone, that the current environment doesn’t require the same defense the old one did. Telling someone to “just calm down” doesn’t touch this. The body has to feel enough real safety, often with support, before it’s willing to try a different response.
If you recognize yourself in Maria or Daniel, the goal isn’t to become a person who never gets activated. It’s to build enough of a gap between the trigger and the reaction that you get a say in what happens next. That gap is trainable. It just isn’t instant, and it isn’t built through willpower alone.
If you’ve spent years afraid that your temper makes you dangerous, I want to offer you something different to sit with. The fight response that scares you was built to protect something. Somewhere along the way, it kept you or someone you loved intact.
That doesn’t mean it gets to run the show forever. It means the work isn’t punishing yourself for having a bodyguard who’s still doing its job a little too well. The work is teaching it, patiently, that it’s allowed to stand down.
Next in this series: flight, and why running isn’t always the response it looks like from the outside. Subscribe below so it lands in your inbox.
Your Trauma Therapist by Lauren Auer, LCPC is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. For more content follow me on Instagram.
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