A brilliant post on the flight response that so often leads to ongoing busyness and addiction… calming ourselves is very difficult for Complex PTSD survivors such as myself who use this response or have caregivers who do.. We can become more aware with more information and practice pausing or not rushing to take action as deflection or protection so automatically over time..as well as making attempts to attune to what anxiety or buried feeling or trigger evoked a flight response..
The flight response
On Friday, I wrote about the fight response in relation to both developmental and interpersonal trauma. Today, I’m looking into the flight response and how that evolves as a go-to response in situations of perceived danger.
It is common for flight types to flee and hide from things which they cannot control. The flight response can make survivors feel that they are obsessively drawn to perfection as a form of safety and thus will force themselves to achieve, act and think in such rushed ways.
It can look like ADHD in children but can also come across as the “driven student” (Walker, 2014). The flight type response causes trauma survivors to feel constantly switched on; obsessively and compulsively driven to their goals. When a flight type is not (able to) they respond by overthinking, planning or dissociating through obsessive thought.
Walker (2014) calls this left brain dissociation…
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Emerging From The Dark Night 