Trauma Responses

Trauma responses that most don't understand

If you have experienced any type of trauma in your life, you may have some coping mechanisms that are actually trauma responses.   There are some trauma responses that people think are weird behaviors, or just OCD.  They aren't.  People who haven't experienced trauma just don't understand them.  Your responses are normal to your trauma.

What can a trauma response look like?  Here are a few examples: 

• Freezing up when someone raises their voice

• Obsessively organizing or cleaning

• Not being able to talk on the phone, only texting

• Forgetting basic needs under stress, i.e., food, water, hygiene

• Always having to stay busy, can't relax

• Laughing or joking in serious or painful moments, or being extremely calm

• Startling easy at small sounds

• Over apologizing even for little things

• Feeling guilty when resting or having fun

• Avoiding celebrations or attention, i.e. birthdays, compliments, recognition

• Clenching jaw or grinding teeth

• Always squeezing shoulder as if bracing for impact

Main Types of Trauma Responses

Trauma responses are involuntary survival mechanisms triggered by the brain's alarm system when facing perceived threats, primarily categorized as fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. These behaviors—ranging from aggression and avoidance to paralysis and people-pleasing—are adaptive in danger but can become dysfunctional over time, often causing physical symptoms like fatigue, anxiety, and dissociation.  

• Fight: A protective, proactive response where individuals confront threats directly, often displaying anger, aggression, or a need for control.

• Flight: An escape mechanism involving fleeing or avoiding danger, which may manifest as anxiety, panic, perfectionism, or becoming overly busy.

• Freeze: A paralysis response to overwhelming fear, causing people to feel stuck, numb, or dissociated from their surroundings.

• Fawn: A "peacekeeper" response, involving submissive behavior or pleasing others to avoid conflict or further harm. 

Key Ways Trauma Responses Influence Partner Choice:  

Trauma responses, such as fear-based bonding, hypervigilance, and familiarity with dysfunction, often drive individuals to pick toxic relationships by normalizing abuse, craving high-intensity emotional drama over stability, and reenacting past trauma to seek control. These survival mechanisms, developed during earlier trauma, can cause individuals to dismiss safe partners while being drawn to manipulative or inconsistent, and emotionally unavailable, partners.  

• Trauma Bonding & Familiarity: Individuals may be subconsciously drawn to partners who mirror familiar patterns from their early, abusive, or neglectful experiences. The brain can mistake intense, toxic dynamics for passion, making healthy, calm, or respectful relationships feel boring or uncomfortable.

• Survival Mechanism Reenactment: A person may subconsciously enter a new, similar abusive relationship to try and "fix" or control the outcome that they couldn't control in the past.

• Fear of Abandonment/Low Self-Worth: Trauma often creates intense fears of being alone or unlovable, leading to desperate or premature commitment to people who are emotionally unavailable or demeaning.

• Altered Nervous System Response: Trauma can cause the brain to equate danger with attraction, often leading to an addiction to emotional highs and lows or on/off relationship cycle, or even an "eroticization of abandonment".  

• Poor Boundaries & People-Pleasing: To cope with past dangers, trauma survivors may develop a habit of people-pleasing or suppressing their own needs to avoid conflict, which inadvertently attracts toxic partners who exploit these traits.

Key Trauma Responses

• Hypervigilance & Anxiety: Constant monitoring for danger, fear of abandonment, and feeling on edge.

• Freeze (Toxic Immobility): Feeling paralyzed, trapped, or experiencing dissociation during conflict.

• Emotional Numbness/Shutdown: Disconnecting from emotions to cope with pain.

• Flashbacks & Nightmares: Intrusive, intense memories of abusive moments.

• Self-Sabotage: Pushing people away or creating conflict due to fear of being hurt again.

• Fawn Response: People-pleasing behavior to avoid conflict, which can lead to losing one's sense of self. 

Common Physical and Emotional Reactions

• Physical: Fatigue, headaches, dizziness, muscle tension, rapid heart rate, and gastrointestinal issues.

• Cognitive/Emotional: Difficulty concentrating or making decisions, memory lapses, flashbacks, feelings of numbness, guilt, irritability, or fear.

• Behavioral: Withdrawal from others, changes in sleep/diet, decreased hygiene, neediness / not wanting to be alone, and avoiding reminders of the event. 

• Emotional: Fear, panic, or feeling unsafe, Guilt, Anger or irritability, Helplessness or meaninglessness, Moodiness, Crying, Depression, Anxiety, Violent fantasies