Why Your Body Gets Stuck in Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn After Trauma

Many people come into therapy saying something like:

“I know I’m safe now… so why does my body still react like I’m not?”

For some, this shows up as a persistent sense of feeling unsafe. For others, it looks more like being stuck in specific patterns — snapping defensively, constantly staying busy, shutting down emotionally, or automatically putting everyone else’s needs first.

While feeling unsafe is one common outcome of trauma and chronic stress, many people also notice their bodies getting stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn long after the original danger has passed.

This isn’t because you’re failing to move on.
It’s because your nervous system learned how to survive — and it hasn’t yet learned that it no longer has to.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn: Not Choices, But Survival Responses

These responses are not personality traits or coping “styles.” They’re automatic nervous system states, shaped by your experiences and governed by the autonomic nervous system.

• Fight may show up as irritability, anger, defensiveness, or a constant readiness to protect yourself.

• Flight often looks like anxiety, restlessness, overworking, perfectionism, or difficulty slowing down.

• Freeze can involve numbness, dissociation, brain fog, exhaustion, or feeling stuck and unable to act.

• Fawn develops when safety depended on appeasing others — people-pleasing, minimizing yourself, or losing touch with your own needs.

At the time these responses formed, they were adaptive. They helped you get through something overwhelming, unpredictable, or unsafe.

The issue isn’t that your body learned these strategies — it’s that your nervous system may still be using them even though the context has changed.

Why the Body Doesn’t Automatically Let Go

Your nervous system doesn’t operate on logic or timelines. It doesn’t update itself simply because you understand what happened or because life looks calmer now.

Instead, it learns through:

• Repetition

• Sensation

• Experience

If you grew up in an environment that was emotionally inconsistent, chronically stressful, or required you to stay alert to other people’s moods, your body may have learned that staying activated or shut down was safer than relaxing.

For many people, calm doesn’t feel neutral — it feels unfamiliar. Sometimes it even feels unsafe.

That’s why reassurance like “You’re fine now” or “It’s over” often doesn’t land in the body, even when it makes sense intellectually.

When Survival Responses Show Up After the Danger Is Over

It’s common for these patterns to become more noticeable after things improve.

When you were in the middle of the stress or trauma, your system was focused on getting through. Once there’s more stability or space, the nervous system may finally start signaling what it didn’t have room to process before.

This can look like:

• Anxiety increasing after leaving a stressful relationship or job

• Emotional shutdown once life slows down

• Strong reactions to small or neutral situations

• Difficulty resting, trusting, or feeling present

If this resonates, you may also relate to the experience of feeling unsafe even when you know you’re not in danger — a pattern explored more deeply in this related post: Why Do I Still Feel Unsafe Even When I Know I’m Not in Danger?

Both experiences often stem from the same place: a nervous system shaped by past conditions that no longer exist.

This Isn’t “In Your Head”

Many people become frustrated with themselves at this stage.

You might think:

• “I should be over this by now.”

• “Nothing bad is happening.”

• “Why am I still reacting like this?”

But trauma and chronic stress are stored in the body, not just in memory or thought. Your nervous system is constantly scanning for cues of danger or safety — a process called neuroception.

If your system learned to prioritize protection, it may continue to interpret the world through that lens, even when your current life is relatively stable.

This isn’t weakness. It’s conditioning.

How the Nervous System Learns Something New

Healing doesn’t mean forcing yourself to calm down or trying to eliminate these responses. It’s about gently expanding your system’s capacity for safety, one experience at a time.

This often includes:

• Learning to notice which survival state you’re in without judgment

• Supporting regulation rather than pushing through activation or shutdown

• Working with the parasympathetic nervous system through breath, movement, and connection

• Reclaiming a sense of agency by focusing on what is within your control

• Allowing safety to be something your body experiences, not just something you understand

Over time, these small, repeated experiences can help your nervous system update its expectations.

You’re Not Broken — You’re Adapted

If your body feels stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong.

It means your nervous system learned how to protect you in an environment where it needed to.

With patience, support, and the right kind of care, those patterns can soften. Your body can learn that it no longer has to stay on high alert to survive.

And that learning happens slowly, relationally, and with compassion — not force.