Fight Flight

Flight offers an immediately available opportunity for expression of the emotion in the fight-flight group and therefore meets the demand for instantaneous satisfaction... the group will fly. Alternatively, attack offers a similarly immediate outlet — then the group will fight.

Bion argues that the fight-flight basic assumption group is governed by the demand for instantaneous satisfaction, making it susceptible to any leader who licenses immediate attack or panic, with fight and flight being interchangeable expressions of the same primitive emotional state.

Bion, W.R., Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, 1959thesis

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The social engagement system may provide the first line of defense prior to the mobilizing, sympathetically mediated defenses of fight or flight. It also appears to be used simultaneously with other defensive subsystems at times.

Ogden situates fight-flight as a secondary, sympathetically mediated defensive tier that is activated only after the social engagement system fails, establishing the hierarchical model that organizes sensorimotor psychotherapy's treatment of trauma.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis

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The individual is forced to abandon active, mobilizing defenses (fight or flight) in favor of defenses that are immobilizing: freeze or 'feigned death.' Levine noted that 'the bodies of traumatized people portray snapshots of their unsuccessful attempts to defend themselves.'

Ogden argues that trauma is constituted by the failure and abandonment of fight-flight in favor of immobilizing defenses, and that therapy must restore these incomplete mobilizing responses to reinstate adaptive functioning.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis

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We mobilize our fight-or-flight response. Finally, in this 'hierarchy of default' — when neither of the more recently acquired systems (social engagement or fight/flight) resolves the situation, or when death appears imminent — the last-ditch system is engaged.

Levine frames fight-flight as the intermediate tier in an evolutionary hierarchy of default defenses, superseded only when immobility and shutdown become the last resort against lethal threat.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010thesis

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The fight response is characteristically provoked when the prey feels trapped, under attack, or when aggression is perceived as capable of securing safety. Impulses for fight behavior are often experienced somatically by clients as tension in the hands, arms, shoulders.

Ogden details the somatic phenomenology of the fight response — provoked by entrapment and manifest as specific bodily tensions — establishing that fight-flight is clinically accessible through body-focused awareness rather than verbal report alone.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis

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If threat is perceived, however, this may engender a threat mobilization response: active defensive strategies, in particular, fight and flight... accompanied by specific behavior patterns such as crouching, attack, running, and autonomic responses of increased heart rate and rapid respiration rate.

Fogel describes fight and flight as the outward-directed threat mobilization responses that succeed the anticipatory vigilance state, specifying their autonomic and behavioral signatures within a staged model of threat appraisal.

Fogel, Alan, Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness, 2009thesis

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Jay's therapist encouraged him to execute both the fight and flight actions... As he performed these actions of fight and flight, Jay felt a new sense of strength and competence. He felt empowered by the physical experience of having discovered and executed the physical actions.

Ogden demonstrates through clinical case material that the deliberate, mindful execution of incomplete fight-and-flight impulses in therapy restores the client's felt sense of agency and competence frozen at the moment of the original trauma.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015thesis

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Instinctively we duck, we dodge, we retract and stiffen, we prepare to fight or flee; and when escape seems impossible, we freeze or fold into helpless collapse... when we are activated to this level and are prevented from completing that course of action, the system moves into freeze or collapse.

Levine argues that the interruption of fight-or-flight — the prevention of action completion — is the core mechanism by which survival energy becomes trapped in the body, forming the physiological substrate of trauma.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010thesis

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Freezing gives way to fleeing or fighting, either of which may, in turn, give way to the other... the defensive motivational state, in my view, is a consequence, not a cause, of the responses that result when a survival circuit is activated.

LeDoux challenges motivational-state theories of fight-flight by arguing that the defensive motivational state is itself a consequence of prior circuit activation, reframing fight-flight as output of survival circuits rather than as emotion-driven behavior.

LeDoux, Joseph, Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety, 2015thesis

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Emotions of fear and terror fuel a flight defense, and anger and rage fortify a fight defense... All these emotions are adaptive in the moment of immediate peril and stress because they support the function of the particular animal defense.

Ogden maps specific emotions onto each animal defense, identifying fear-terror as the affective engine of flight and anger-rage as the affective engine of fight, arguing that these emotions are adaptive rather than pathological when understood in their defensive function.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting

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If this approach were ineffective, however, the social engagement system would automatically give way to the mobilizing fight/flight responses of the sympathetic nervous system... increases overall arousal and mobilizes survival mechanisms (flight and fight behaviors) in response to threat.

Ogden explains the automatic neurophysiological transition from social engagement to fight-flight as a sympathetically driven escalation in response to perceived threat, grounding the clinical concept in polyvagal neurophysiology.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting

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Identifying the nature of the threat leads to one of three reactions: fight, flight, or freeze. If actual danger is located, there are three available strategies: fighting the danger, running away from it, or remaining completely still so as to be invisible.

Heller presents fight-flight-freeze as sequential outputs of the organism's orienting process, emphasizing that the startle-arrest-orient sequence precedes and determines which defensive strategy is deployed.

Laurence Heller, Ph D, Healing Developmental Trauma How Early Trauma Affectssupporting

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These responses fall into two general types: mobilizing actions, such as crying for help, fighting, and fleeing, and immobilizing actions that keep us from moving when the mobilizing ones are ineffective, such as freezing and shutting down.

Ogden classifies fight-flight as the mobilizing pole of a fundamental binary between activation and immobilization in the animal defense repertoire, situating it within an evolutionary taxonomy of innate survival capacities.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting

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When a traumatic event is so severe that the individual has no recourse but to freeze or submit, the defensive system becomes disorganized afterward: 'Each component of the ordinary response to danger, having lost its utility, tends to persist in an altered and exaggerated state.'

Ogden, citing Herman, argues that the failure of fight-flight to secure safety produces lasting defensive disorganization, with each component of the threat response persisting in distorted form long after the danger has passed.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting

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fight-flight group, 63, 64, 65, 67, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 97, 152, 160 dependent group and, 81, 82, 91 leadership of, 161, 177, 180 security in, 94–5

Bion's index entries for the fight-flight group reveal its extensive theorization across his text, confirming its status as one of the three foundational basic assumption states and its systematic relationship to dependency, pairing, leadership, and security dynamics.

Bion, W.R., Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, 1959supporting

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Marcy realized that her anger was originally meant to fuel a 'fight back' defensive response that she could not act upon during the abuse.

Through clinical narrative, Ogden demonstrates how chronic anger can be understood as residual fight-response energy that was thwarted at the moment of trauma and continues to organize the client's somatic and relational experience.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting

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The primitive fight-or-flight response originally evolved in fish, to help them fight off or flee from threats. In modern day humans, our fight-or-flight response gives rise to many powerful emotions: frustration, irritation, anger, and rage (fight); and concern, anxiety, fear, and panic (flight).

Harris maps the phylogenetic origins of fight-or-flight onto a spectrum of contemporary human emotions, arguing that frustration through rage constitutes the fight pole and concern through panic the flight pole of an evolutionarily conserved response system.

Harris, Russ, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009supporting

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soldiers under fire can rarely flee or even physically fight... His instinctual response to overwhelming threat precluded action. This story speaks to modern cultures that tend to judge immobilization and dissociation in the face of overwhelming threat as a weakness.

Levine uses the case of a traumatized soldier to argue that the inability to execute fight-or-flight is involuntary neurobiological paralysis rather than moral failure, challenging cultural stigmatization of freeze responses.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting

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The relationship between attachment avoidance and the core cognitive schema of rapid fight-or-flight was first documented in research wherein participants were asked to read short descriptions of behaviors in threatening situations.

Lench documents empirical research linking attachment avoidance with a rapid fight-or-flight cognitive schema, revealing how attachment style predisposes individuals to mobilize self-protective defensive responses before social coordination is attempted.

Lench, Heather C., The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting

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The autonomic nervous system regulates three fundamental physiological states. The level of safety determines which one of these is activated at any particular time. Whenever we feel threatened, we instinctively...

Van der Kolk, drawing on Porges's polyvagal theory, frames fight-flight as one of three fundamental autonomic states whose activation is governed by the organism's moment-to-moment assessment of safety.

van der Kolk, Bessel, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2014supporting

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The freeze response is characterized by high sympathetic nervous system arousal and hyper attentiveness, combined with a feeling of being unable to move... a shutdown defense, or 'feigned death,' is powered by the dorsal vagal branch.

Ogden differentiates freeze from shutdown as two distinct immobilizing responses that succeed fight-flight failure, clarifying that freeze retains sympathetic hyperarousal while shutdown is a dorsal vagal collapse — a distinction that sharpens the clinical meaning of incomplete fight-flight.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting

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We should not underestimate how compelling instinctual fear reactions are and how readily they can become maladaptive... Transmittance of fear through postural resonance creates an escalating situation, a positive feedback loop (with negative consequences).

Levine demonstrates that fight-flight instincts can propagate socially through postural resonance and contagious fear, producing maladaptive panic cascades — evidence that the response transcends individual physiology to become a collective phenomenon.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting

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If we add fawning to this list, we can say we don't want to be people pleasers, but our bodies don't ask our opinions when they feel threatened. Trauma responses lead to emotional dysregulation.

Clayton situates fawning as a fourth trauma response alongside the conventional fight-flight-freeze triad, arguing that all such responses are involuntary somatic reactions to perceived threat rather than conscious choices.

Clayton, Ingrid, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves--and How to Find Our Way Back, 2025aside

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Middle phase of group development is marked by flight from tasks or engagement of battles within or outside of the group. The emotional state is one of hostility and fear.

Flores, applying Bion's framework to addictions group therapy, identifies the middle phase of group development as dominated by fight-flight dynamics — flight from the therapeutic task and hostile battle — confirming the basic assumption's clinical presence outside pure psychoanalytic settings.

Flores, Philip J, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997aside

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