**Why Your Fight, Flight, Freeze & Fawn Responses Keep Winning (The Real Solution Is Upstream) — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/fight-flight-freeze-fawn-responses-upstream-solution/

Heidi Priebe explains why chronic fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses persist and argues the real fix is upstream: finding environments that don't reward survival responses, not just overriding t

## Key Takeaways

- Intervening only at the moment of a survival response is often insufficient; the environment shapes which responses get reinforced.
- Survival responses can become genuine strengths that people identify with, which makes them hard to give up.
- Healing means selecting environments where new skills are rewarded, not just forcing opposite action in hostile contexts.
- The right environment offers challenge paired with support, enabling nervous-system re-patterning over time.

## What the video covers

- The video centers on the window of tolerance, the zone of optimal arousal where people respond with choice, authenticity and flexibility.
- Heidi argues that trying to override fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses in the moment is often insufficient when a person's environment rewards those responses.
- The Desmond Tutu 'pulling people out of the river' quote frames the thesis: intervene upstream, not only at the point of reaction.
- Survival responses are often adaptive strengths developed in hostile early environments, which people later come to identify with.
- Strengths built around one response create a blind spot about how to succeed in opposite environments, such as making healthy appeals for needs in friendly settings.
- Under dysregulation, people tend to double down on environments where their familiar strengths feel in control, self-selecting into matching contexts.
- Advice to simply assert or be vulnerable can backfire in social circles that expect the person to always be capable and in charge.
- A sidebar on William Moulton Marston and the DISC personality framework contextualizes how environments shape predictable behavior patterns.
- Healing involves finding the right intersection of challenge and support, so skills are practiced in contexts where they are rewarded and integrated.
- Gradually removing oneself from contexts that reward 4F responses and moving toward environments that reward regulation that doesn't have to be fought for is the proposed path.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Introduction to the Window of Tolerance
2. 02:00 Why Intervening at the Response Point Falls Short
3. 04:50 Upstream Causes and Adaptive Strengths
4. 08:40 The Blind Spot and Self-Selecting Environments
5. 16:40 The DISC Sidebar and Marston's Four Quadrants
6. 22:00 Challenge, Support, and Re-patterning the Nervous System
7. 27:30 Freeze, Burnout, and Choosing Contexts
8. 41:40 Moving Toward Environments That Reward Regulation

Answers

## Questions about this video

What is the 'upstream' solution Heidi Priebe proposes?

Rather than only correcting survival responses in the moment, she suggests identifying and changing the environments that reward those responses. Finding contexts where the opposite skills are valued helps people stop falling into the same patterns.

Why can advice to 'just be assertive' be bad for some people?

If someone's social circle expects them to always be in charge, sudden vulnerability or calm appeals may be met negatively. The advice can reinforce the survival response because that is what works in their current environment.

How do fight-response strengths become a blind spot?

A person who relies on control to meet their needs builds real skills in that area but may not learn how to make healthy appeals in friendlier environments. Those skills stay underdeveloped, so they keep seeking out contexts where control feels necessary.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00

Speaker A

Hey guys, I'm Heidi Priebe. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here.

00:06

Speaker A

Today on this channel, we're going to be talking about the window of tolerance. Which is that zone of optimal emotional arousal where we're able to deal with our lives from a place of choice and authenticity and flexibility.

00:21

Speaker A

And in particular, I want to talk about what the right point to intervene is if we find that we have a habit of dealing with our entire lives from outside of our window of tolerance. So if we are

00:34

Speaker A

chronically responding with fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses. Now, if you have no idea what any of these terms mean, I do have a video that's linked in the description of this one that goes over what the window of

00:47

Speaker A

tolerance is as well as some signs that you might be chronically outside of it.

00:52

Speaker A

But what I want to talk about today is how a lot of us assume that the point where we intervene with these responses ought to be the point at which we find ourselves encountering them.

01:03

Speaker A

So for example, if I have a lot of fawn responses online and I've recognized that I have a pattern of living almost chronically from a state of being in a fawn response. I might think that the solution is to just learn some

01:18

Speaker A

assertiveness skills and then practice them over and over and over. Right? That's a very reasonable belief to have. Or in the case of the flight response, we might think, "Okay, the way to heal from this is to just notice the

01:31

Speaker A

moments where I feel kind of caged in or like I'm freaked out by committing to something and I just need to work harder to maintain presence and to stay committed." So we can kind of think of these responses as things that are necessarily

01:46

Speaker A

making our lives worse and more difficult and that if we could just take opposite action, would make our lives easier.

01:55

Speaker A

But what I I to talk about today is how for a lot of us who have been operating from outside of our window of tolerance for the majority of our lives, the problem actually lies way upstream of the moments where we are actually

02:10

Speaker A

enacting these responses. So, what does that mean? There is this very famous quote by Desmond Tutu that goes, "There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river.

02:22

Speaker A

We need to go upstream and figure out why they're falling in." So, what we're going to be talking about in this video is learning to recognize why we end up in these patterns of chronically being in a fight response,

02:35

Speaker A

or a flight response, or a freeze, or a fawn response. How there are certain actual strengths that we might develop over the course of our lives if we're routinely in these responses, and how learning to get inside of our window of tolerance is

02:51

Speaker A

less about taking opposite action, and more about finding the environments where it's not necessary for us to exercise these responses in the first place.

03:02

Speaker A

Because otherwise, what we're going to be chronically doing is trying to override our instincts, and just do the opposite of what we would normally do inside of an environment that might be heavily rewarding of our survival response, so of that fight, flight,

03:19

Speaker A

freeze, or fawn response, and heavily punishing of or ignoring of the opposite action. So, then what happens when we try that new thing? When we try asserting ourselves, or advocating very calmly for our needs to get met, or experimenting,

03:35

Speaker A

or committing to something, is that we might find those responses based on the environment that we have self-selected into after a lifetime of operating in one way, are actually going to push us back into those survival responses, because those are likely to be the

03:52

Speaker A

responses that work inside of the environments that we are embedded in. So, the kind of high level of how this happens for those of us who have spent a lot of our lives outside of our window of tolerance is that early on in life,

04:05

Speaker A

we learn to overcompensate to adapt to a particular environment. Okay, so maybe we were in a really hostile environment where the only way to get our needs met was to very very forcefully insist upon them.

04:19

Speaker A

So, this is the kind of environment where a fight response is genuinely adaptive. Right? And then what happens is that we end up developing genuine strengths through continuously being in that fight response that over time we might start

04:34

Speaker A

to identify with. So, we might go, "I am someone who is incredibly good at asserting myself. I am someone who is incredibly good at using force and strength of will to get what I want. I am someone who is

04:48

Speaker A

incredibly good at getting myself into positions of power and providing for myself." Right? So, we're not always going to see that fight response as something that is a bad thing. We might actually come to identify with it as something that we

05:04

Speaker A

are really good at. The problem is that as we are building this strength, what we are also doing is developing a blind spot about what it means to be well adapted to the opposite environment.

05:17

Speaker A

So, if I'm focusing a lot of my time and energy and effort on making sure that I am staying in control because I grew up in an environment where the only way to get my needs met was to be in control.

05:29

Speaker A

What I am necessarily not learning at the same time is how to make healthy appeals to getting my needs met inside of environments that are more friendly and willing to meet them.

05:42

Speaker A

Right? So, there's that quote, "To the man who only has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." So, as we go through life, we might not even think to start seeking out environments where people are attuned to

05:54

Speaker A

us, where they care for our vulnerabilities, where they want to meet our needs, because we don't even know that that's an option.

06:01

Speaker A

Instead, we go into every situation going, "How do I make sure that I stay in control of meeting my own needs here?" And so, what ends up happening is we might end up self-selecting into a whole bunch of environments where those

06:15

Speaker A

skills that we've developed are a really good match for that environment. And then, in instances where we are dysregulated, so where we might feel things like a bit of vulnerability or a bit of uncertainty, what we are likely to do is

06:29

Speaker A

to double down on running straight back to those environments where we do feel in control, because that's where our strength and self-organization lies.

06:38

Speaker A

Okay? So, just telling that person who may have been in a fight response intermittently from a very young age to simply not use as much force, to assert themselves calmly, to just be vulnerable and expect that their needs are going to

06:53

Speaker A

get met, might be absolutely terrible advice inside of the life that they are currently living.

07:00

Speaker A

Right? Where maybe the majority of their social circle expects them to be the one who is always in charge and always capable, and might respond quite adversely to them suddenly coming in with a whole bunch of vulnerability.

07:13

Speaker A

And so, the intervention point for this person might not be, "Hey, notice when you're in a fight response and back down." It might be, "Learn to find contexts where your fight response is not rewarded." And in fact, where the opposite skill

07:30

Speaker A

that's in your blind spot is one that is rewarded, so that we start balancing things out.

07:37

Speaker A

So, this is a bit of a sidebar, you can skip past it if it's not interesting to you, but there is this personality system called DISC that's really often used in corporate environments that just looks at people's different strengths

07:49

Speaker A

and aptitudes. But, DISC has a really interesting history. Because it didn't originate as a personality assessment.

07:56

Speaker A

The man who first theorized of what eventually became this kind of personality assessment was named William Moulton Marston.

08:04

Speaker A

And he wrote a book with a title that I just absolutely love called Emotions of Normal People.

08:10

Speaker A

And his kind of argument inside of this book was that there are predictable ways that we are all going to respond to certain environmental contexts.

08:21

Speaker A

And he kind of divided it into these four quadrants. Where we're looking at how humans naturally behave across two different axes.

08:29

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So, one is whether the environment that we're in is friendly or hostile. And the other one is whether we feel more or less powerful than that environment.

08:39

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So, in environments that we perceive as hostile, but we see ourselves as more powerful than the environment. So, we see the skills that we have as capable of influencing the environment. What we are going to adopt is a dominant

08:53

Speaker A

approach. So, we're going to try to establish control and take charge of the environment and drive it towards the end result that we want. And then in environments that we perceive as friendly or non-adversarial, where we believe that we have power over

09:08

Speaker A

the situation. So, where we have agency over what happens, we will induce our will on the environment. So, essentially, we will try to inspire or motivate people to go in the direction that we want to take things. And we'll

09:21

Speaker A

do this in a very friendly and cooperative way rather than that kind of strong-arming approach that we might take in an environment that is more hostile.

09:29

Speaker A

And then, when we perceive ourselves to be in environments that are friendly or non-hostile, but where we also imagine that we are less powerful than the people or the events in our environment, we take a submissive approach. And the

09:42

Speaker A

way that Marston meant this was not submissive in a negative way. It was essentially being happy and eager to support the people or the projects or whatever it is that make up that environment because we believe that that's the role that we can best take

09:55

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on. And then, last but not least, in contexts where we feel that the environment is hostile and we are less powerful than the people or the events in that environment, we take on a compliant role. So, we kind of keep our

10:08

Speaker A

heads down, figure out what needs to happen in order for us to not incur any sort of negative punishment, and we do that.

10:16

Speaker A

And Marston's argument was that essentially this is how we all behave in either of these four quadrants.

10:23

Speaker A

But the leap that kind of got made that turned this into a personality assessment eventually was the idea that if we spend a lot of our early lives inside of one of these four quadrants, what we're going to start to do is

10:35

Speaker A

develop a lot of strengths that help us operate really well inside of that context. And so, we're going to go on in life to find more environments where those strengths are needed. So, people who grew up in hostile environments that

10:49

Speaker A

they felt more powerful than may have developed really strong skills for practicing leadership inside of hostile environments. And so, as adults, maybe they go seek out roles that reward that skill.

11:01

Speaker A

And this is essentially the same argument that I'm making here about the four F responses. So, if we grow up in contexts where we have learned to habitually rely upon fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, we are highly likely to

11:16

Speaker A

develop parts of our personality or genuine skills that adapt us well to the original environments that we developed those skills inside of.

11:26

Speaker A

And so, as we go through life, we might self-select back into environments where it is genuinely wise for us to behave in a way that is kind of akin to one of these four responses. Because these responses are not mistakes. Right? They

11:41

Speaker A

are wise adaptations to particular contexts. The fight response is a wise adaptation to environments where our vulnerability is not seen or competently tended to by the people in charge. And so we need to assert ourselves or fight for dominance

12:00

Speaker A

in order to get our needs met. And so a really great strategy, if we find ourselves in these types of environments over and over again, becomes making sure that we know how to get ourselves into that position of

12:13

Speaker A

strength and power. Because that's the only place from which our needs are going to get met. And if that's a strength that we have, we might end up in a lot of contexts over the course of our lives where being strong,

12:25

Speaker A

decisive, assertive, someone who gets things done, are genuinely valued and rewarded by the environment.

12:33

Speaker A

The flight response is highly adaptive inside of environments where certain states of being are either prohibited, met with huge punishment, or just totally neglected and starved out.

12:46

Speaker A

It is really wise in these contexts to focus a lot of energy on escaping them so that we don't get trapped in environments that require self-abandonment for us to stay safe within them. When we're looking at attachment, there can be this idea that

13:02

Speaker A

avoidance romanticized freedom. Right? But when we go one layer deeper than that, it's not freedom in and of itself that avoidance are romanticizing.

13:11

Speaker A

It's that we all romanticize the states where we feel like we are free to be ourselves.

13:17

Speaker A

And for a lot of avoidance, they learned inside of intimate connection, I'm not safe to be myself. But when I'm alone, I am.

13:25

Speaker A

Right? So they're going to be chronically running back towards that state of aloneness where they feel like they can relax and be who they are when they feel pressure to contort themselves inside of a connection.

13:37

Speaker A

And if we are in environments, especially early environments, where it is actually true that being who we are would get met with some severe consequence, it is incredibly wise to figure out how do I grow or develop myself in a way that will allow me to

13:55

Speaker A

context shift so that I can change the environment I'm in to one that allows me to express more of myself.

14:03

Speaker A

So if we have those lifelong flight responses online, we might find that we get really, really good at developing a growth mindset, at figuring out how to change the situation that we're in so that we can get ourselves to somewhere

14:17

Speaker A

better. We might start to identify as someone who is always hustling, always looking for opportunities, and these might become genuine strengths that we have. That make us very successful in things like business or in generally becoming very agentic and autonomous and

14:33

Speaker A

independent. And then we might find ourselves in a lot of contexts as our life goes on where ambition and productivity and independence and growth orientation are hugely rewarded and all of the opposite skills incur negative consequences. The freeze response is

14:51

Speaker A

highly adapted inside of environments where the cost of making a mistake is huge. Okay, so that paralysis that we might experience in moments of uncertainty can actually become a really great strategy for avoiding harm by learning to think

15:08

Speaker A

super carefully and analytically through every single possible outcome before we decide to make a move.

15:15

Speaker A

And this again is a strength that can be incredibly beneficial in certain career paths or in certain other contexts that we might find ourselves in in life.

15:25

Speaker A

And so, we might grow to think of ourselves not as someone who is chronically operating from a freeze response, but as someone who is thoughtful analytical careful intentional about what actions we take.

15:37

Speaker A

And then we might end up self-selecting into a lot of environments where those skills are incredibly important.

15:43

Speaker A

Right? Because maybe we're in environments where the cost of mistake genuinely remains quite high.

15:49

Speaker A

So, fields of work or relationships with people where if we make a mistake, there actually are very severe consequences.

15:58

Speaker A

The fawn response is one that is very adaptive inside of any environment where powerful or threatening people do not cause harm to the people that they feel endeared to.

16:09

Speaker A

In those contexts, finding and emphasizing the parts of ourselves that genuinely do align with those people is a great strategy to develop.

16:20

Speaker A

Right? It keeps us safe. And so, we don't start to think of ourselves in a lot of these cases as people who are fawners. We think of ourselves as people who are really good at deeply understanding other people and

16:34

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appealing to people effectively. And these become genuine strengths that we might carry through life.

16:41

Speaker A

Which might mean that we end up self-selecting into a lot of contexts that both need and reward people who are quite socially adaptable, who are good at understanding and aligning with the motives of other people, or who are quite good at detaching from

16:55

Speaker A

their personal agendas and needs, and kind of assimilating to whatever the environment needs. And suddenly starting to tune into what we want and advocating for that inside of those contexts might be something that gets met with a lot of

17:08

Speaker A

resistance or punishment. Right? So, now we're going to quickly look at what happens if we try to change each of these behaviors without changing the environments that we are inside of.

17:20

Speaker A

So, if we have a chronic lifelong pattern of being in that fight response and believing that we're only safe if we are in control, what we often have under developed is the skill of tuning into our own vulnerability and navigating through it

17:35

Speaker A

effectively. So, we might try to be vulnerable with someone, but end up doing it in a way that is both incredibly unskillful and in an environment that doesn't even reward the skilled version of it.

17:49

Speaker A

Right? So, this might be akin to being someone who is usually really emotionally pent up and who keeps everything very self-contained.

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Speaker A

And then the first time we go to try and practice vulnerability, we end up just totally emotionally dumping on someone who has intentionally chosen to be close to us because they like our stoicism and the fact that we are usually quite

18:11

Speaker A

self-contained. And so, we might get a totally negative reaction out of that person. And then what our body learns is, "Okay, well, this is pointless or even harmful.

18:22

Speaker A

Right? I was right all along. Vulnerability is not the way to go. And so, I'm going to shut it down and stop doing it." But, because that experience may also have dysregulated us, what do we do to self-regulate? We return to the

18:37

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parts of ourselves that feel strong and dominant. So, we might immediately double down on our original strategy of finding a way to get back in control so that we can regulate ourselves again because we have that belief that the

18:51

Speaker A

only way for me to regulate myself and to get my needs met is when I have power over my environment. And so, the long-term problem that we find ourselves with is that our only reliable access to safety and regulation ends up coming

19:06

Speaker A

through that 4F response. In this case, the fight response. Right? Which kind of traps us in this cycle of when I am feeling needy or vulnerable or dysregulated in some way and I need safety. I need to use that

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muscle of control and dominance seeking to get there. So, we end up kind of using that fight response as the vehicle that gets us to a place where we know how to be regulated. But, because the fight response requires gathering up a whole

19:38

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bunch of adrenaline and energy to force ourselves into a position where we feel safe. Eventually, what ends up happening for a lot of us is we go into a flop response. Where we have just exerted so much energy even getting to the place

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where we feel okay that we start burning out. And this is very common for all of the four F responses, right? So, getting to a place where we've been kind of concentrating our energy in one way for so long that we simply cannot do it

20:07

Speaker A

anymore and we end up in a state of total burnout. Now, the opposite of this, which we're going to talk a lot more about in future videos, is finding the right intersection of challenge and support when we're learning a new skill.

20:22

Speaker A

So, an environment where we can test out, in this case, something like vulnerability and giving people the opportunity to meet our needs at a low level inside of an environment that is highly conducive to it.

20:36

Speaker A

So, in the case that we just talked about, what was happening was that there was too much challenge and not enough environmental support.

20:44

Speaker A

Whereas the right amount of challenge and support would look like trying out that uncomfortable skill of behaving vulnerably or giving ourselves a reasonable attempt at getting our needs met by other people, have it either work out or at least be a neutral experience

20:59

Speaker A

where we're not punished for trying that in any way. And then, as time goes on, keep experiencing and noticing the downstream positive effects of that new strategy working well.

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Speaker A

This is how we actually re-pattern into our nervous system the belief that it is safe to do the opposite thing. Our cognitive minds can decide all day long it is better to do X than Y, but if every time we do X we get punished and

21:28

Speaker A

every time we do Y we get rewarded, our nervous system is not going to care what our cognitive mind is saying. It is going to default to Y over and over and over again.

21:38

Speaker A

Right? Because our nervous systems are fundamentally prediction machines. So they aren't asking the question of what do I think is the healthiest or best behavior to take. The questions our nervous systems are perpetually asking is given the environments that I've

21:53

Speaker A

experienced and the outcomes of different behaviors that I've experienced, what behavior has the highest probability of keeping me safe?

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Every failed attempt to use an opposite strategy in an unsupportive environment strengthens the old prediction that vulnerability is unsafe in this case.

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Speaker A

And fighting to be in a state of dominance and control is safe. But every successful attempt of the opposite thing in a supportive environment weakens the nervous system's hypothesis that vulnerability is always dangerous.

22:30

Speaker A

Right? So if we're looking to re-pattern things not just in our thinking mind, but in our nervous systems, we have to start looking at which environments give us that right intersection of challenge and support and integration. So when

22:45

Speaker A

we're looking at the flight response, we might have an underdeveloped skill of nurturing and investing in our environments in a sustained way that actually shapes those environments to make them more comfortable for ourselves.

23:00

Speaker A

Okay, so if we grew up in contexts where certain parts of ourselves just were not allowed to be expressed. So a really simple example of this is let's say you grew up inside of a community or a household where your sexual orientation

23:14

Speaker A

was not accepted or was seen as wrong by the group of people that you were closest with.

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You may have learned, okay, there are groups of people that don't see this as wrong or where I won't incur punishment for simply being who I am and following through on my natural instincts.

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And so the nervous system might learn, okay, there are environments where it's safe to be me and environments where it's not safe to be me. And a genuinely wise use of my resources is to try to do whatever it takes to get myself into the

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environment where it is safe to be who I authentically am. But then what we might also learn is that anytime I feel like a context or an environment is not perfectly conducive to some aspect of myself, the only

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possible move I can make is to summon up all of my energy to change context.

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When in some cases a better strategy would be staying where we are and trying to get the context to adapt to our unique needs better.

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So investing in a way that gets us more of what we need and want out of our environments. But if we're trying to isolate the flight response and make ourselves stop running away from things without any awareness of what

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Speaker A

environment we're in while we're trying to quell that response, what might end up happening is that again, we practice the skill of investing in our environments and trying to get them to adapt better to us in a way that is both

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unskillful and inside of contexts where it's not the best move. So inside of relationships or communities that are in fact not very responsive to our influence and where the investments that we're making are giving us kind of low

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return on investment because maybe the people around us are more prone to taking advantage of the ways in which we're trying to invest in them or the community, as opposed to matching our effort. So again, what the nervous

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system is learning in this context is see, it is pointless and unwise or maybe even actively harmful to try to stay and build a life or a relationship that accepts more of who we actually are.

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And it's wise to reorient our attention towards and again, finding the environments we can place ourselves in, where who we are or some part of ourselves that feels shut down in the environment we're currently in, is either accepted or even celebrated.

25:37

Speaker A

Right? So we go right back to how do I shift my context? But the problem is that over time, our only reliable access to safety and regulation comes through that flight response. So when we are feeling already dysregulated upset overwhelmed what

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our system learns is I now have a whole bunch of energy to find a way to grow or improve myself to get myself out of this context and into a better one.

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So I have to get back to exploring or hustling or changing my situation so I can return to safety.

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Which again, traps us in this nervous system cycle. Where in the moments where we need regulation and downtime and safety the most, what we instead do is summon up all of our energy to make sure that we are staying on the move.

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And then, like with all of the responses, at some point, we eventually might burn out and flop.

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And so again, we learn at the right intersection of challenge and support. So by investing in relationships or career paths or communities where our investments are genuinely appreciated and responded to by our environments, and so we do end up being capable, at

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least to some extent, of shaping our environments to be ones that feel more nurturing and supportive to us.

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Rather than assuming that there's nothing we can do, so we have to jump ship again. Now, the freeze response, which, if it has been very useful for us over the entire course of our lives, may have gotten us into a situation where

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we're relying heavily on analysis and very, very little on instinct to make our decisions.

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But then, if we try to flip into operating from instinct, again, what's likely to happen is that we do an unskilled version of it inside of a context that does not support it.

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So, let's say we're really used to inhibiting our emotions, kind of figuring out everything we're thinking and feeling, and then presenting them as clearly and clinically as possible when we talk to other people about them.

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If we instead decide to operate on instinct and start just yelling at people and insulting them without any care for impact when we're upset, what might happen is that we get very, very negative responses from other people.

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Right? Because we haven't learned to express anger in a way that is embodied, but also skillful and non-harmful.

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And so, what the body learns, if we end up getting those really negative reactions from other people, is this is pointless or harmful, don't do it again, go back to ruthlessly analyzing everything rather than acting on instinct. And then, of course, the

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problem is that, like with all of the other ones, over time, our only reliable access to safety and regulation comes through that freeze response.

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So, it traps us in that cycle of I feel something, it's intense and overwhelming, in order to get to the other side of it, I need to freeze, immobilize myself, wait until either the threat passes or I found a way to thread

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a very, very thin and specific needle through the situation to get myself to the result that I want without making any possible mistake en route.

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Speaker A

Then, and only then, will I experience safety. But, that immobilization takes up a lot of our resources somatically.

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Speaker A

Right? And so, we can end up totally burnt out from containing our energy that hard over a long period of time and end up in one of those kind of flop responses, where we just cannot manage to bring ourselves to participate in

29:23

Speaker A

everyday life for a while anymore. And then, last but not least, that fawn response. A lifelong pattern of operating from fawn can leave us with an underdeveloped skill in the areas of self-referencing. So, figuring out, okay, what do I actually want or feel

29:39

Speaker A

like would be most interesting or appealing to me in this situation, and differentiating from other people. So, being able to say, "Oh, cool. I see that you want this. I want something different, and both of those things are

29:51

Speaker A

totally fine." So, when we try to do self-referencing or differentiating, we might do it really unskillfully. So, things like setting really overly assertive boundaries, or insulting the way that someone else is doing something rather than just accepting that they can do

30:07

Speaker A

something different. And we might be doing this, again, inside of environments that do not reward even the skilled versions of these things. So, where even the healthiest forms of boundary setting or differentiating are generally met with some sort of

30:24

Speaker A

consequence or punishment. So, again, the body learns, this is pointless, or it's actively harmful. Don't do it. And then, we try to fix the dysregulation that has come up en route by doubling down on that original strategy of now I

30:38

Speaker A

have to go repair my relationship with whoever I've offended by essentially assimilating myself to their world view and really pleading to be forgiven within it. And then of course over time the only reliable access that we have to

30:51

Speaker A

those states of safety comes through practicing that fawn response, which traps us in this cycle of man, I'm feeling really disconnected from myself.

31:01

Speaker A

How do I get to safety? Well, I have to find a powerful person to align myself with and then I will be able to relax a little bit.

31:10

Speaker A

But eventually that process of continuously self-abandoning in order to get to safety is highly likely to cause burnout and collapse. So one of those flop responses where it just feels exhausting to keep participating in life. And so if this is something that

31:28

Speaker A

does become one of those kind of self-defeating cycles after enough time operating from one of those four F responses, where do we intervene?

31:37

Speaker A

So if the solution is not simply act differently in the moment because acting differently in the moment is likely to get met with a negative response inside of the environment we're in, which is going to reinforce that acting

31:49

Speaker A

differently is not the right thing to do. What do we do instead to start actually finding our way into our own window of tolerance where those four F responses are not requirements for us feeling safe and okay. The first step is not to

32:07

Speaker A

practice those opposite responses. It's to start looking for and mapping out the contexts, the environments, and the relationships where those responses are already unnecessary.

32:21

Speaker A

And resource already exists. So this might seem really simple. Right? Because we might go, well, okay, if I know that I'm a fawner, why don't I just go put myself inside of contexts where fawning is not really needed.

32:37

Speaker A

Those contexts are often ones we don't think to put ourselves in because they are also the contexts where our strengths are not appreciated. So, it might feel less comfortable for us to be in them at the beginning than it is for

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Speaker A

us to be in contexts where yes, we sometimes need to fawn, but at least people see our role in those contexts as respectable, firmly established, whatever it is. So, these are often contexts that it feels a little bit

33:03

Speaker A

counterintuitive to put ourselves in at the beginning. So again, the question that we're with in each of these cases is not how do I stop doing this thing that I so desperately want to stop doing. What we have to ask ourselves is in which

33:18

Speaker A

environment would I not need to do this at all? So, if we are frustrated because we keep finding ourselves in a fight response where we are desperate to prove ourselves, to not be misunderstood, to have the things that we need taken

33:33

Speaker A

seriously, and to matter. What we want to ask ourselves is in which contexts could I have all of those conditions met without needing to heavily defend myself, push back against other people, advocate over and over and over for my needs to be known?

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Speaker A

In which context would that not be relevant at all? So, the answer to this might be contexts where people are competently attuned to and treated well when they're not in positions of power or relationships where self-advocacy at a very neutral

34:10

Speaker A

level is seen and responded to healthily. Right? So, if we're chronically in a fight response, but we're also inside of a romantic relationship where the only way to get our needs seen and cared about is to essentially win in argument,

34:27

Speaker A

it's going to be a kind of adaptive inside of that relationship to keep going into that fight response.

34:34

Speaker A

But, we could be in relationships where just telling someone, "Hey, I'm uncomfortable with this, or I need us to talk about this thing." gets responded to well.

34:46

Speaker A

And in that context, the fight response is naturally going to come online less often, because the thing that we need on the other side of the fight response is already available to us. And as a sidebar, we're going to talk in future

35:00

Speaker A

videos about times where we might do something like go into a fight response even inside of a context where what we need on the other side of it is already available to us, and that's more about recognizing when we are safe.

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Speaker A

But the first step is recognizing when our responses are still adaptive inside of the context that we're in, and then thinking about what would it look like, what would need to happen for this response to not be adaptive.

35:28

Speaker A

Same with the flight response. In which contexts would that need to be constantly monitoring and staying aware of, where we might need to grow next, or which future situation we might eminently need to devote a bunch of our

35:42

Speaker A

resources to figure out? In which contexts would those things become irrelevant? One answer to this might be any context or environment or community where sticking around and advocating for ourselves leads to more aliveness, and creating a life for

35:59

Speaker A

ourself that feels increasingly like the right fit, rather than environments where sticking around and committing means committing to more and more self-abandonment.

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Speaker A

So, contexts where it's safe to bring more of our whole selves into the picture, and where in fact the more we interact with the environment, the more we shape it in a way that continues to help grow us over time.

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Speaker A

These are the contexts in which the flight response becomes kind of pointless, because we've developed a community that is so tailored to helping us grow in new ways. Or we've developed a career that is so suited to our natural aptitudes

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Speaker A

and helps us continuously confront or grow through whatever we want to grow through next that it would be very silly to abandon that thing because we'd be abandoning something very dynamic and personalized for something more static and fixed. And then for the freeze

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Speaker A

response, we can ask ourselves in which context would the need to stop and figure out every possible outcome and choose the best possible path forward before making a move in any direction become irrelevant? So generally, these are contexts where there is a very low

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Speaker A

cost of mistake. Right? So environments where if we mess something up, it's okay. We can reverse our decisions, we can be playful about how we approach things. And there is not these massive negative consequences that are going to get incurred from us making

37:28

Speaker A

the wrong choice. Or environments where what's rewarded are attempts rather than outcomes. So sometimes I help myself get out of freeze responses by literally just gamifying whatever it is that I know is going to get me moving in a given

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Speaker A

direction. So going, "Okay, I don't have to write a book, but I'm going to give myself a kind of imaginary reward point for every time I sit down and write one paragraph or whatever it is. So environments that reward tiny

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Speaker A

experimental moves and that do not heavily punish mistakes are often the environments that we need to be in in order to not default to that freeze response. And then last but not least with that fawn response, instead of

38:12

Speaker A

asking ourselves, "How do I white-knuckle it better through asserting myself inside of contexts that might be hostile?" Instead, we can ask, "In which context would the need to align myself with an authority figure at the expense of my authenticity become

38:28

Speaker A

irrelevant? So, this might be context where nobody else's emotional state needs to be managed in order for you to remain safe. Right? Because for a lot of us, this is the origin of the fawn response. We're around someone who is

38:40

Speaker A

unpredictable and who might behave harmfully if their moods shift in a given direction. So, we find a way to kind of align ourselves with them and help influence the direction that their moods are oriented in so that we don't

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Speaker A

get harmed. But if we're in a context where someone can be in a bad mood and not take it out on other people because they have strong self-regulation skills online, it might be safe for us to be exactly who we are

39:06

Speaker A

around that person trusting that they can keep themselves in check even if they're unhappy with something that we say or do. That doesn't mean they never come up to us and talk to us about things that they're not happy with, but

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Speaker A

it means that they don't behave in a dangerous or volatile way when they're upset around us.

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Speaker A

Or it might mean being parts of communities or workplaces where the leadership structure is not particularly top-down.

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Speaker A

And in fact, diversity is seen as a genuine strength. So, people want to know what you are thinking and feeling that might be different from what they are because you're in an organizational structure where that is intentionally prioritized.

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Speaker A

Or for a lot of fauners, simply spending more time alone and tuning into what we think and feel when we don't have other people's voices inside of our head can be a really useful practice in reconnecting with that authenticity. So,

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Speaker A

we are going to go on in future videos to talk about a whole bunch of interventions that we can do to start increasing our window of tolerance to include more and more and more situations, but I just want to be clear

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Speaker A

that the first step for most of us, especially those of us who have spent a lot of our lives outside of our window of tolerance, is to find and spend a lot of time inside of contexts that do not

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Speaker A

reward our 4F responses. And in fact, respond more positively to the opposite. And then, over time, to eventually start structuring our entire lives around these contexts.

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Speaker A

Because believe it or not, a lot of people who are emotionally healthy are already doing this.

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Speaker A

Right? They are prioritizing spending time inside of contexts and relationships and workplaces where it is safe to be vulnerable.

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Speaker A

Where they don't need to escape in order to be themselves because their environments are responsive to what they're bringing in. Where experimentation is safe and the cost of making mistakes is not massive. And where diversity of personality and

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Speaker A

opinion is seen as a strength rather than something that is a threat to the environment.

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Speaker A

Okay, we expand our window of tolerance by putting ourselves more often inside of environments where these things are true. And getting to know the version of ourselves that does not have to rely on our 4F responses to fight our way into

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Speaker A

safety. So slowly over time, we start removing ourselves from the contexts that naturally reward those 4F responses. And putting ourselves in more and more and more of them that reward a sense of regulation that doesn't have to be fought for.

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Speaker A

All right, this is one of many videos on this topic, so there is much, much more to come, including, if you guys want, a detailed breakdown of each of these 4F responses, so fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, and how they can kind of pattern

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Speaker A

out over the course of our lives. But at this point, any questions, anything coming up for you as you've gone through this video, please leave in the comments section below. I love you guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and

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Speaker A

each other, and I will see you back here again really soon. [music]

Topics: window of tolerance fight flight freeze fawn trauma healing nervous system regulation attachment assertiveness environment Heidi Priebe DISC self-selection

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