by Matt Licata
In the language of attachment theorists, the developmental psychologists who explore how we bond as infants with critical figures around us (or as adults in romantic and other relationships), flight or denial-based responses correspond loosely with avoidance, when we close down and deactivate the attachment system in hope that doing so will soothe the fire and bring us back into a state of homeostasis. If we can effectively purge the difficult thought, feeling, or sensation from our experience, we think we can then avoid its untoward effects, which usually involve a deeper confrontation with our own vulnerability and sensitivity.
On the other end of the spectrum is the “fight” response, which does not so much deny, numb, or repress what we’re experiencing but generates a more active engagement to seek discharge from the underlying anxiety through behavior we hope will get us out of overwhelm and back to safe ground. Colloquially referred to as “acting out,” this strategy includes compulsive activity in which we urgently scramble to get our needs met in less than healthy ways: blaming or attacking others, pushing them away and then immediately pulling them back, panicking and texting incessantly when the other does not immediately return our call, and more generally moving out into the environment or toward another for hopes of regulation. We are caught up and tangled in the thoughts and feelings, and we need release, spinning outward in hopes of soothing the intensity.
With respect to the specific attachment response most native to us, we might equate the fight reaction to anxious attachment, in which we hyperactivate the attachment system, moving anxiously toward the other in the hope they will provide the regulation we need to come back online and into a manageable state. We spin toward the other to meet our needs and confirm that everything is okay, so they see us in the way we need to be seen and somehow remove us from what appears to be impending abandonment and overwhelm. We are unable to regulate ourselves and thus begin the journey outward, marching toward another person to somehow help us to discharge or soothe the underlying anxiety and uncertainty.
It’s important to note that there are healthy and unhealthy ways of reaching out to another in times of need to help us coregulate difficult and threatening emotional states. In fact, the capacity to turn to another in times of distress is one of the critical aspects of secure attachment, as I noted earlier, and an expression of the sacredness and preciousness of our human experience. It’s important to note that there is a healthy or adaptive turning toward another for help and an unhealthy, addictive, or avoidant way that often ends in further suffering and struggle, for us and for them, and tends to serve those older pathways of misattuned self-abandonment, shame, and blame. To discern between these, in ways that will be unique for each of us, is one of the critical tasks we must encounter and work through on any path of deep healing and transformation.
Finally, in the “freeze” response, we become flooded by our immediate experience to such a degree that the only way we can effectively handle what has become unbearable is to shut down. It has gotten to the point that we cannot successfully repress the overwhelming thoughts and feelings or move effectively out into the world for help. This is a response some of us learned as children in environments of consistent trauma and empathic failure, where we were not able to flee or fight, and the only option was to unplug from conscious engagement by way of dissociation. Loosely speaking, we could equate this strategy with disorganized attachment, usually associated with trauma, neglect, and abuse. The freeze response is often likened to the adaptive strategy we see in animals in which they “play dead” in the face of impending attack by a predator in hopes that the aggressor will bypass them. We can recognize a freeze response when we find ourselves a bit checked out, not fully there, out of touch with our experience and surroundings, and disconnected from our bodies. We can’t really feel anything (other than a vague sense of flatness or helplessness); we’re numb, blurry, and scattered, unsure of what we’re thinking. It’s as if our thoughts and emotions are happening not in us, but somehow just outside us. We can’t quite relate to our experience because we’re not fully there as the experience-er. It’s as if we’re looking down upon it from some other place. We can’t really fight or flee. Somehow neither of these are options, even if we determine that one or the other would be an effective response to the situation. We just can’t do it.
These three evolutionary strategies are wired into the brain as part of all human beings. Their constellation in a moment of emotional activation is not evidence that we have failed, are “unspiritual,” or have done something wrong but that we have a tender, beating heart and open, sensitive, functioning nervous system. From this perspective, even these pathways are expressions of the sacred, of something pure and even holy. It is an act of great self-compassion to slow down and begin to observe these hardwired responses to stress and emotional activation, not so that we can attack, shame, or judge ourselves as they inevitably arise but so that we can bring increasing awareness and kindness to ourselves and slowly begin to chart a new course.
By familiarizing ourselves with these instinctual ways of responding to difficult and challenging experience, we build a foundation for a new way to befriend ourselves and choose differently in a moment when we are triggered. Instead of falling down a rabbit hole and following the habitual reactive grooves of shame, blame, and self-attack, we slow down, become curious, and meet ourselves afresh. Seeing clearly how and in what specific situations we engage the pathways of fight, flight, and freeze allows us to “hold” our experience in a new way. Remember that the holding we are speaking about spans intrapsychic (personal), relational, and spiritual domains. Personally, we can learn to hold parts of ourselves and our experience in a new way and at other times receive this holding from another. The more spiritual, or transpersonal aspect of holding, however, involves an experiential realization (which tends to deepen over time) that a dimension of our experience is untouched by difficult experience, was never harmed by what happened to us in the past, and was always “securely attached” in our relationship with God or the Divine or the Soul or Spirit. This realization can be incredibly healing and transformative because it brings alive the direct awareness that we need not change our past to heal, to awaken, or to transform at the deepest levels.
Illuminating Our Preferred Strategy
As part of your inquiry, it can be helpful to discover which of the strategies you most naturally turn to in the face of challenging experience. When you are triggered, what is your first line of defense, the most familiar pathway of reaction, the one that hardly takes any effort at all but seems to just be waiting there to greet you? For example, let’s say a new partner promises to text you at a certain time and doesn’t, your boss critiques your contribution to a project, or someone implies that you are horribly unspiritual or ignorant. The important point is to investigate what, specifically for you, brings about that hooked quality, in which the situation gets hot, claustrophobic, and sticky; in which you feel trapped, as if you’re starting to slide down a hole or rocket out of your body; and in which you feel the rage, the shame, the irritation, the embarrassment, the panic. How do you respond? What is that automatic, knee-jerk, in-the-moment reaction most native to you—the one with the goal of removing you from the underlying vulnerability and impending sense of overwhelm as quickly as possible?
The invitation is to begin to familiarize yourself with these dynamics in the moment, not in order to shame, judge, or beat yourself up for not staying calm and holding it all together but so that you can begin to care for yourself in a new way oriented in insight, empathy, and compassion. Over time, the goal is not to have to follow the pathways of misattunement, aggression, and abandonment but to slowly begin to become more flexible, wise, and skillful in the ways you respond during times of activation. Remember, this work can only be done in the immediate moment. Just this moment. And this one. Don’t overwhelm yourself by contemplating how you will do with dozens of future moments—“I’ll never be able to do that”—and other predict
ions. None of us can care for or tend a future moment. Remove that pressure and burden from yourself. Be kind and stay close to yourself, right here, right now. Can you turn to yourself in this moment?
Contrary to what we often believe in a moment of being triggered, the mere appearance of these hooks is not evidence that something has gone wrong, that we have fallen short, that we are bad people or neurotic or have lost our way. Remember that these strategies arose as our best ways to care for ourselves at an earlier time when we did not have the capacities to stay with, metabolize, and integrate anxiety and other challenging emotional states. But if you have made it this far in the book, you are ready and able to take that next step into a new world.
To fight, flee, or freeze is not an error, mistake, or sign of failure but evidence of a certain kind of intelligence, creativity, and even grace. No, those actions might not represent the most up-to-date, wise, and skillful response, but they need not be rejected or judged wholesale because to do so has a way of keeping them alive and reinforcing their prominence in our experience. Remember, the primary invitation is not to rejection, purging, or deleting parts of ourselves but to expanding consciousness of what is happening, for it is from that increased awareness that we can choose a new way.
Although these strategies served a lifesaving function at one point in your life, you might come to discover that the mere repetition of these behaviors are no longer necessary in all situations and in many ways are interfering with a life of freedom, spontaneity, and flow. Now you have other capacities that you can rely on in moments when you truly need yourself more than ever. Although you might never completely step outside your neurobiological wiring, you can lean on your familiar strategies in those moments that you need them and implement other ways of being when the original strategies are not necessary.
Into the Sacred Middle
Within the sacred middle, that alive territory in-between the conditioned reactivity of flight-flight-freeze, we are invited, slowly at first, into an experiment in self-care. For just one or two seconds at a time, we can begin to replace the old pathways with something fresh, to overwrite the conditioned circuitry of self-abandonment with the new wiring of empathy, mindfulness, and lovingkindness. Here, we can enter a profound intimacy with our experience while at the same time not fusing with it, falling in, and becoming flooded by it. Close, but not so close we lose perspective. Intimate, but not so intimate we become lost in our experience and identify with it as who we are in an absolute sense. Navigating and dancing in this unfamiliar middle territory is something we can all experiment with and come to know experientially at a pace that is right for us, based on our own direct experience, and rooted in deeper levels of curiosity and compassion.
As we continue to explore between the extremes of fusion (unhealthy merging) and repression (denying unwanted experience) and stay open and curious in the unresolvable nature of the center, we naturally generate rest and creativity, and a new freedom dawns—alive, unprecedented, and filled with new vision. Just so we’re clear, when I speak about “fusion,” I am referring to the experience of losing touch with ourselves and our own integrity and “blending” with another in an unhealthy way. To start to see the specific ways we respond in a moment of activation is essential on the path of healing, though it is not easy. It can be humbling to discover just how many of our go-to, habitual, addictive behaviors and ways of being are organized around getting us out of feelings we do not want to feel, in the attempt to protect us from raw, tender vulnerability at the core.
One reason some of us tend toward fusion is that it was once an adaptive strategy, an effective (and potentially lifesaving) way to keep us out of some vulnerable, unworkable anxiety and other emotional material we did not have the capacity to metabolize. These ways of responding to overwhelming experience do not often yield completely to increased knowledge and awareness but require cultivating the capacity and tolerance to slowly, bit by bit, contain, hold, and integrate the feeling states that historically (and currently) we’ll do just about anything to avoid.
Unless we grew up around enlightened parents, teachers, and authority figures, none of us was trained in becoming familiar with and navigating this middle area, and we do not have psychological, emotional, somatic, or neurobiological reference points for it. To generate a new way of organization requires a complete retraining of the nervous system and emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual bodies; it’s as if we were starting afresh as total beginners. We can honor this reality and not shame ourselves for not being able to “do it right” when we inevitably fall apart and do not heal ourselves as quickly as we were hoping. There is no urgency on this path, and it unfolds according to its own timeline.
It’s important to remember that ideas such as the “middle place” are images, meant to be evocative and provocative, to stimulate feeling, imagination, creative thinking, and intuition for us to work with and enter into relationship with, not reified “places” that exist in some objective sense. We need not “find” some middle place in a literal way in order to engage this process. We will not likely discover the “middle place” by way of empirical investigation but imaginatively, phenomenologically, and experientially within the fire of our direct, embodied experience. This “middle place,” which we must discover for ourselves, reveals an alive dimension of experience. In the middle, in the center, we are always, already held; life itself is holding us. From this perspective, holding is not something that one day will happen to us, but something we realize is always occurring. Training ourselves to recognize this middle territory helps us to discover experientially that no matter what is happening in our lives, we are held by something greater than ourselves, even our most challenging experience is workable, and intelligence underlies it. It is not an error or mistake but an instinctual expression of a natural urge toward integration and wholeness.
Sanctuary for the Unwanted
As a way of investigating this territory for yourself, you might ask: What feeling state will I do just about anything to avoid? What is the one emotion or inner experience, more than any other, I am determined to stay out of at all costs? Sadness? Grief? Rage? Shame? Uncertainty? Joy? Rest? Peace? Remember, it’s not only the so-called negative emotions we avoid but also “positive” ones that, when activated, can generate anxiety or resistance within us. To what degree are you able and willing to let yourself be angry or sad or confused or ashamed without having to do anything about it? Or to let yourself enter a state of deep rest, or to feel causeless joy?
What would it be like, for just this one moment, to turn toward that feeling with curiosity, acceptance, and even kindness? To befriend your experience in a new way and not fall into the ancient pathways of fight, flight, or freeze? Remember, the experiment is always conducted in this moment, not a future moment. You cannot tend to your future experience, and attempting to do so is overwhelming for any of us—a future moment’s pain, confusion, or struggle is not possible to work with. Future experience cannot be found in the vessel. But what about this moment’s thoughts, images, urges, and feelings?
Just take a few minutes and begin to connect with those thoughts, feelings, and sensations you have tended to avoid; the ones that if and when they begin to arise, from which you act quickly to disconnect. This can be subtle. As you start to cultivate some awareness of specifically what this looks like for you, slowly start to invite that feeling-based material in so you can touch it, hold it, and embrace its qualities and textures for only one second at a time.
Begin to train yourself, with an outpouring of self-compassion, to build the neural foundation and resources that for many of us were just not available from the earliest times of our development. Push yourself just a bit, but not so far that you begin to spiral outside your window of tolerance. Familiarize yourself with what it would be like to surf the edges of that window, which for most requires short and frequent periods of practice.
Resist the natural temptation to “stay” for hours and
days, determined to do whatever it takes to root it all out and fix, cure, or “heal” yourself. For this latter approach is usually an enactment of the way our families of origin met our emotional experience as little ones. It is rarely an expression of self-compassion but usually an act of self-abandonment and self-aggression that only reinforces the neural patterning that the feeling is a “problem” we must “deal with”; that is, repress, purge, or act out (sometimes disguised in more spiritual-sounding language as “heal” or “transcend”).
In addition to this mindfulness-based approach, in a more imaginative way, we can discover the image hidden within the emotion—locate the “figure” who dwells inside the feeling and enter into dialogue with this one.7 Perhaps a wise old woman awaits you, or a scared little boy, a tree, quicksand, a being of light, a darkened forest, or a black hole.
Allow this one safe passage in your inner awareness. You need not “see” the image visually (this is not a native way of perceiving for many of us) but sense it in your own way. Ask why she has come, what he needs, what message they have for you, and where it is pointing you. Don’t engage only with your mind, but open yourself to the emotion and feel what is evoked. Yes, pay attention to the thoughts and beliefs, but often just underneath the conceptual spin is important information at the level of feeling. For when all is said and done, perhaps a turning of the heart, not mere insight or even increased awareness (which, of course, are also critical), will heal the wounds of a lifetime. For some, personifying the feeling and mood can help to bring intimacy with our experience more naturally than attempting to open our hearts to an abstract or clinical notion such as rage, shame, or depression. But, as Jung suggests, if we find the image or the figure within the core of the emotion, we can open a portal into deeper engagement. In this sense, the underlying image is the master key, even more primary than the thoughts, feelings, moods, and impulses that dance on the surface of conscious awareness. This discovery of the primacy of the image, brought into the contemporary world by Jung (and enlarged by others), forms the basis of an imaginal psychology, an approach to the soul oriented in tending to images. We can see this most vividly, for example, in those few moments when we awaken in the morning and the images from the dreamworld are still lingering in our awareness.