In four texts (The Weight of Fear, The Response to a Threat or How I Learned to Fight, Stop or Else, and From Appeasement to Compassion) I review the innate mechanisms of survival, the behavioral responses to the immediate danger, and how they manifested themselves in my life and in the lives of the individuals closest to me in my orbit. It is a personal story, informed by theoretical underpinnings on this subject in which biology informs psychology and culture, and vice versa. The evolutionary perspective is pertinent in this regard because natural selection preserves certain characteristics for their survival value. These attributes are then genetically transmitted to future generations. It is in this way that humans have inherited "ancient" survival strategies to respond to threats.
A key characteristic of these inborn survival mechanisms is immediate activation of the physiological and behavioral reactions in response to danger signals. The assessment of “dangerousness” occurs in the limbic part of the brain, specifically in the almond-shaped structure known as the amygdala. The amygdala is activated when it receives stimuli that indicate danger. This system works according to “the smoke detector principle” (1), which means it is biased toward perception of threats, even when there are none, because it's "better to be safe than sorry." To sum it up, the brain system that nature has conceived for us as protection against danger is distinguished by the quick automatic response with a low threshold to threatening, new, or uncertain stimuli or situations, In addition, this system is future oriented because the past informs what is to come (2). It quickly learns from the experience, especially from the cues that are species-specific. Only a minimum trigger is needed to initiate "ancestral fears" (2), for example, of snakes, spiders, darkness, strangers, and separations. We are predisposed to be much easier frightened by the sorts of danger that humans faced in prehistoric environments, then by more likely sources of danger in our present time, such as automobiles, guns, pollution, radiation, and electricity. Apparently, the pace of cultural evolution is too rapid to allow biological evolution to follow. According to evolutionary psychologists, we still have Stone Age minds in modern skulls (3).
When the brain perceives a threat, it automatically initiates reaction with one of 4 Fs– Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn behaviors. The ‘‘fight or flight’’ response, also called the ‘‘acute stress response,’’ was first introduced into our collective vocabulary by physiologist Walter Cannon in 1929. He suggested that animals react to threat with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system. At the present time the best-known theoretical elaboration of the survival mechanisms is advanced by Stephen Porges (4). He based his polyvagal theory on the evolutionary science and comparative neuroanatomy. Porges identified three branches of the autonomic nervous system: the sympathetic dorsal vagal (associated with fight-or-flight responses); the parasympathetic dorsal vagal (associated with freeze survival response); and the ventral vagal or social engagement system (associated with safety and when dysregulated with fawn response).
The active survival response (fight or flight) is initiated when the amygdala (the alarm center of the brain) sends distress signal to the body’s commanding center (hypothalamus), which activates the center of the sympathetic nervous system in the brainstem creating a state of the hyperarousal. It is as if the accelerator pedal of the car is pressed to the floor leading to a significant energy surge so that the body is almost immediately ready to fight or flight. A high level of adrenalin circulates through the bloodstream and diverts blood from the digestive and reproductive systems to the muscles, heart and lungs, creating a state of emergency. The pulse and blood pressure increase, breathing becomes fast, small airways in the lungs open up, and more oxygen is sent to the brain increasing alertness. The second component of this survival response is related to the HPA axis, which stands for the coordinated system of the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and the adrenal glands resulting in the release of cortisol, another well-known “stress hormone.”
A real-life event involving my daughter Simone illustrates the power of the fight-flight response. At the time she was living in a California mountain town. Her home was only a couple hundred feet from a remote state park. One early morning, she made a decision to go for a run by herself on one of the wilderness trails. In the middle of her workout, she stopped for a moment to stretch. With her head between her knees, she spotted a mountain lion peeking at her from the brush only a couple feet away. Without a moment's thought, she took off. Her automatic flight response propelled her to run for her life. She later recalled that common advice dictates never to run from a mountain lion. Instead, you should put your hands in the air, make noise, and act bigger than you are. This advice instructs humans not to trigger a mountain lion's predator instinct. But Simone's thinking brain was not online at that moment. Her primal survival instincts drove her to run to safety rather than face the beast head on. She is lucky the mountain lion did not follow her, and she lived to tell the tale. This is a prime example of how our fight or flight instinct doesn’t not allow our higher brain to weigh in on the decision-making process.
Similar to the flight/fight response, a freeze response is believed to have adaptive value. Freezing is considered to have a number of evolutionary benefits such as avoiding predator detection, optimizing perceptual and attentional processes, and preparing for rapid escape or defensive combat (5). In this context, freezing is seen as an orienting response occurring immediately after threat detection, involving a strong attentional component. In the text Stop of Else I gave example of this response when my wife encountered the rattlesnake. Similar brain structures involved in the fight/flight response are also activated in the freeze response, but through some other way. Having separate pathways for these two types of defensive behaviors can allow the body to respond quickly to changes in the environment and establish a rapid shift from one type of response to another.
The second type of freezing is obvious in situations of extreme danger and threat of death when physical contact with the attacker (predator) has been established. This freezing response presents in the form of tonic immobility. In this instance activation of the dorsal branch of vagus leads to bradycardia, vasodilatation, and hypotension. The drop in arousal, awareness, cognitive processing, and numbness of all emotions is the result of the shutdown of the brain area called thalamus (inner chamber), which is the principal gateway to awareness (6). All sensory information, except for the sense of smell, is transmitted through the thalamus to the cerebral cortex. In this way the thalamus plays a major role in regulating arousal, the level of awareness, activity, and consciousness. Its adaptive shutdown leads to the anesthetized dissociative state of the organism. The state of dissociation from the present life-threatening situation takes place accompanied with the cessation of sensations, feeling, movement, and speech. This response may be useful when additional attacks are caused by the movement or when immobility may increase the chances of survival from the predator or attacker who believes that the prey is dead and liberates it. I briefly described this dissociative state through my brother's childhood experiences, when he faced traumatic life circumstances.
Finally, the fourth F is fawning. It is not the only term used. In fact, there are a lot of words about this survival strategy. Let me mention some of the labels found in the literature such as the codependent, people-pleaser, false-agent, enabler/fixer, pathological caretaker, compulsive caregiver, rescuer, imposter syndrome, nice person syndrome, Cinderella complex, tending and befriending, and Stockholm Syndrome (7). If we want to remain close to the instinctive survival strategy, the main characteristic of this response is a pacification and submissive behavior in the situation of entrapment or confinement (8). It is a sophisticated interpersonal threat response system involving the “smart” ventral vagus that accomplishes two functions. The first is to keep the older survival strategies (fight/flight/freeze) under control, and the second is to down-regulate the state of arousal in the perpetrator. Hostage studies indicate that a calm, regulated state that conveys safety cues may increase survival rates among those who have found themselves in this traumatic situation (9). I was not even close to those circumstances of life, but in the text From Appeasement to Compassion, I described on the personal example a few situations when I instinctively used this strategy to prevent being injured.
(1) Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, by Randolph M. Nesse, Dutton, 2019
(2) All We Have to Fear, by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, Oxford University Press, 2012
(3) The Adapted Mind, by H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1992
(4) The Polyvagal Perspective, by Stephen Porges, Biol Psychol., 2007, 74(2): 116–143, 2007
(5) Updating freeze: Aligning animal and human research, by Muriel A. Hagenaars, Melly Oitzl, and Karin Roelofs, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 47: 165–176, 2014
(6) Dissociation Following Traumatic Stress, by Maggie Schauer and Thomas Elbert, Journal of Psychology, Vol. 218:109–127, 2010
(7) Love or fear? The please/appease survival response: interrupting the cycle of trauma, by Cloe Aigner, Thesis, Simon Fraser University, 2022.
(8) Traumatic entrapment, appeasement and complex post-traumatic stress disorder, by C. Cantor and J. Price, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 41(5), 377–384, 2007
(9) Trauma narratives: It’s what you say, not how you say it, by J. Jaeger et al., Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 6: 473–481, 2014
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