Instinct

Instinctual responses. We all have them. Hard-wired into our development and functioning. There are three predominant instinctual responses to threat: fight, flight, or freeze.

While we are all capable of all three and do change the response on occasion, we all have one or two that we lean on more than the others. Which particular response is your go-to, seems to be heavily influenced by the age or stage of development at which you first became accustomed to threat and therefore wired-in a selected instinctual response. At least, that's my theory.

For instance, I, as someone who began experiencing trauma at a very young age, rely most heavily on the freeze response. This makes sense in a certain way: at a baby, you don't have the option of flight or really much to work with in terms of fight. So being quiet and still and hiding sort of makes sense at that stage of development, from an evolutionary perspective.

What I find bizarre, is that I can see my autoatic response shifting. Not completely, not all the time. But I can't pretend that I haven't experienced a certain desire for the fight, of late. I don't know why or how this change has occured. What I'm finding most compelling about this change is my ability to recognize it, articulate it, and usually, control it. But I see the thread upon which it's based. I can imagine it the way an animal will fight with another over the same mate or piece of food. It's survival of the fittest. It's competition. It's 'that's mine'. And it's also, often, how dare you? or fury over some injustice. But I have come to recognize that anger is just the knee-jerk protection mechanism for pain. Maybe all of them are just ways of coping with pain.

I have spent the majority of my life in the company of two particular men. I have been thinking about thier instictual responses. The first, Guy, was a combo of flight and freeze. He was very ambivalent in that regard. He would have long periods of isolation, self-hatred, self-fulfilling prophesies of being alone in the world and unloved, He would push people away and avoid conflict and drink. He would hide from his pain and regret by finding some new thing to distract himself with. He would alternate that with taking an unbelievable amount of shit from other people while claiming that they were closest to him. He would stay stagnant and or become extremely needy. Very occasionally, he would fight. But I think he avoided this response because his own fury frightened him. This all sort of makes sense. Guy realy only started to face threat when he was in his late childhood/early pubescent stage. At that point, he ccould run and hide, but he was also psychologically and socially tied and vulnerable. It was also at a stage when he would have just been coming into physical power, and understandably, his own sudden need for rage would be terrifying if never explored or harnessed before then.

Milo, on the other hand, is a runner plain and simple. His problems started at an earlier age and in a situation wherein the reality was so incredibly painful, his only means of coping psychologically was escapism. Fortunately, he avoided turning to alcohol, drugs or self-abuse for his escape. He had an imagination and an amazing back garden and a village of unsuspecting town folk, vacant highlands, and miles and miles of unsupervised trouble to make.

These instinctual responses are normal and helpful in many cases. But ultiately, as adults we often rely on them to the detriment of our facing our fears and having more fulfilling lives, now that we are in fact capable of doing so. It's fear that keeps us in the loop of these same behaviours and the trap of not breaking the pattern.

Which begs the questions: What is your automatic response to threat? How did it serve you once upon a time? Is it holding you back now? What hurt are you trying to avoid?