Trauma responses are natural reactions to distressing events, involving physical, emotional & psychological dimensions. (Positivepsychology.com)
Trauma responses happen outside of our consciousness; it's an automatic reaction of our body which recognizes it's in danger.
There are multiple recognized trauma responses, so I'll mention five I encountered most often: fight, flight, freeze, fawn and flop.
Inspire yourself to think about them while writing hard events your characters go through. I invite you for an introspective journey as well!
FREEZE
→ shutting down because of the threat
→ you're stuck in place. You can be dissociating, going numb or feeling too much, but all while unable to escape or fight, forced into inaction
FIGHT
→ confronting the threat
→ you response in an attack; verbally or physically; with assertion or aggressiveness
FLIGHT
→ avoiding the threat
→ can literally flee the scene; feeling panicked, escaping the situation by any cost
FAWN
→ appeasing the threat
→ people-pleasing, overstepping their own boundaries, not speaking up about their needs or fears, doing whatever to please the threatening person
→ typically found in people who experienced abuse
FLOP
→ inability to respond to the threat
→ sudden muscle strength loss and/or collapse; can pass out
How to include them in writing?
1. FLIGHT
In my story My Nepenthe the MC, Conn, reacts to hard situations primarily with flight response. Here is one of the examples:
I know that accent, I know those clothes, I know those spears. I start running without a single word. I don't decide to, my body does it automatically; I can't slow down, I can't stop, I have to keep running.
→ Conn literally runs away before even processing the situation fully
2. FIGHT
In my story Narkissos the MC tends to react in fight response. Here's one of the examples:
Aeneas dreamed of both his parents dying almost every night, but when it actually emerged, he didn't feel satisfied. He was mad.
'Don't you fucking tell me you just went and died!' he screamed at the corpse, touched and disturbed. 'How dare you? It was supposed to be my fun! MY!’
→ finding a corpse is never pleasant. Here, Aeneas, already with cognitive deficits in empathy and emotions, reacts with rage which seems out of proportion
3. FAWN
In Narkissos there's another important character with the name of Demi. She reacts to painful situations by fawning, as seen in an example:
Although she was still feeling scared and now also she was freezing, she obediently started moving accordingly to Aeneas' instructions (...)
Demi tried relaxing as much as possible. She closed her eyes, and kept moving.
→ Demi follows Aeneas' instructions despite the uncomfortable feelings it brings her. Pleasing him is more important to her than anything
4. FREEZE
I couldn't find an example from my writing, but freeze response could be described like this:
“She knew it was stupid to stay, she knew she should turn around and walk away as fast as possible. Instead, she stood still, feeling as if her body had turned into stone. She couldn't move a muscle.”
→ the feeling of "body turning into stone" is typical for freeze response
5. FLOP
Flop used in writing could look like:
“My eyes widened as I saw my husband kissing Anne. They both stopped and stared at me, shocked by my sudden appearance. I wish to scream, to beat them both up, but my body doesn't allow me this pleasure. Instead, my vision gets dark and I fall to the floor.”
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