Fight Or Flight

A racing heart is part of body and mind readying for the survival actions of fight-or-flight mediated by the sympathetic-adrenal nervous system... when you perceive threat, your nervous system and body prepare you to kill or to take evasive countermeasures to escape

Levine identifies fight-or-flight as a sympathetically driven preparation for action that, when it cannot discharge through effective motoric completion, becomes the somatic seed of post-traumatic disorder.

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

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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.'

Ogden argues that the failure to complete fight-or-flight responses under overwhelming threat compels a shift to immobilising defences, constituting the core somatic event in traumatisation.

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

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when 'pro-social' behaviors do not resolve the threatening situation, a less evolved system is engaged. We mobilize our fight-or-flight response. Finally, in this 'hierarchy of default'... the last-ditch system is engaged.

Levine situates fight-or-flight within a polyvagal hierarchy of default, positioned between social engagement and the most primitive immobility-dissociation system.

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

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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.

Ogden maps fight-or-flight as the sympathetically mediated second tier of defensive response, activated automatically when social engagement fails to neutralise threat.

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

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Aggressive actions are engaged as the prey/victim tries to fight off the predator/perpetrator by scratching, biting, hitting, kicking, or otherwise struggling... The fight response is characteristically provoked when the prey feels trapped, under attack, or when aggression is perceived as capable of securing safety.

Ogden provides a detailed ethological and somatic account of the fight response as it escalates from flight failure, with precise attention to its bodily expression in clients.

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

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Freezing has the lowest threshold and so is activated first. But then the prey's changing position in the imminence sequence triggers the activation of a new response... Freezing gives way to fleeing or fighting, either of which may, in turn, give way to the other.

LeDoux offers a neuroscientific corrective to the fight-or-flight dyad, demonstrating that freezing precedes flight and fight in a threat-imminence sequence governed by circuit activation thresholds.

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

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Fight and flight are outward-directed forms of engagement with the source of the threat and they are accompanied by specific behavior patterns such as crouching, attack, running, and autonomic responses of increased heart rate (tachycardia) and rapid respiration rate.

Fogel situates fight-or-flight as a threat-mobilisation response following failed vigilance, characterising it by specific outward behavioural and autonomic signatures.

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

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Jay mindfully used his arms to push out against a cushion held by his therapist, following the impulse of the tension in his arms to fight back... Jay followed the impulse in his legs to run by standing up and running in place.

Ogden illustrates clinical sensorimotor technique for completing thwarted fight-and-flight actions, demonstrating how executing these physical impulses restores a sense of agency.

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

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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.

Ogden positions social engagement as a pre-fight-or-flight defensive tier, clarifying that sympathetic mobilisation is not the organism's first protective resource.

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

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when we are activated to this level and... are prevented from completing that course of action—as in fighting or fleeing—then the system moves into freeze or collapse, and the energized tension actually remains stuck in the

Levine explains how blocked fight-or-flight energy does not dissipate but persists as trapped somatic tension, driving the freeze-collapse continuum and sustaining traumatic symptoms.

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

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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 introduces the triadic orienting-to-threat schema in which fight-or-flight follows sensory identification of danger and precedes the freeze option.

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

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Unlike wild animals, when threatened we humans have never found it easy to resolve the dilemma of whether to fight or flee. This dilemma stems, at least in part, from the fact that our species has played the role of both predator and prey.

Levine argues that humanity's dual predator-prey evolutionary history uniquely complicates the fight-or-flight resolution, rendering humans especially susceptible to unresolved traumatic activation.

Levine, Peter A., Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma - The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, 1997supporting

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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 pa

Harris maps fight-or-flight onto a spectrum of modern human emotions, grounding emotional differentiation in this ancient survival mechanism's bifurcated activation.

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

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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. Tense muscles accompany this 'alert immobility.'

Ogden distinguishes freeze from shutdown by its high sympathetic charge, positioning it as a transitional state between fight-or-flight mobilisation and dorsal vagal collapse.

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

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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 links attachment avoidance to a cognitive schema of rapid fight-or-flight, showing that individual defensive style moderates the speed and manner of threat-activated mobilisation.

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

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He mobilized a hyperaroused state not to fight or flee, but to have the energy to meet their expectations and therefore stay safe and accepted in his family.

Ogden reveals that fight-or-flight physiology can be co-opted into relational survival strategies, uncoupled from its original defensive purpose and chronically maintained in the service of attachment.

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

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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 transposes fight-or-flight from individual neurobiology to collective group psychology, describing it as a basic-assumption mentality that demands instantaneous expression through either attack or panic.

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

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caudally within the lateral PAG and dorsolateral PAG produces escape behaviors (i. e., flight). Autonomic shifts such as increases in heart rate and blood pressure parallel these behaviors.

Porges grounds fight-or-flight in the neuroanatomy of the periaqueductal grey, demonstrating that sympathetically mediated escape and attack behaviours have distinct PAG substrates.

Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011supporting

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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.

Clayton extends the classical fight-or-flight framework by arguing that fawning constitutes a fourth trauma response operating beneath conscious volition alongside the established mobilising and immobilising defences.

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

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As each person mirrors the fear posture of those nearby, he or she simultaneously senses fear and transmits that fear-posture to others in the group. Transmittance of fear through postural resonance creates an escalating situation, a positive feedback loop.

Levine describes how the somatic contagion of fear posture can propagate fight-or-flight activation across a social group, transforming individual threat responses into collective panic.

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

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Whenever we feel threatened, we instinctively

Van der Kolk invokes polyvagal theory to explain the spectrum from calm resourcefulness to collapse as determined by autonomic state, contextualising fight-or-flight within a three-tier regulatory framework.

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

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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 establish that the fight-flight group is a fully elaborated category of basic-assumption mentality with its own leadership dynamics, relationship to dependency, and security economy.

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

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