What You Need to Know About Completing Stress Responses to Avoid More Stuck Trauma
This is a quick primer on what you need to know about how your nervous system works so you can work with it when experiencing distressing events and avoid trauma becoming stuck in your body.
Table of Contents:
We’re born with certain survival instincts. Additionally, behavioral adaptations can naturally start to form as soon as we’re born so we can live harmoniously with our environment and the people in it. Whether the behavioral adaptations are healthy or unhealthy depends on the circumstances.
Related: Understanding Coping
When you’re in a situation where you’re trying to survive, you automatically adapt your behaviors so you have the most chance for survival. For example, if you lived on a homestead instead of in the city, you’d likely chop wood to make fire and a shelter, plant crops, and tend to animals for your survival. You’d need different behaviors than if you lived in a city. Trying to survive in a city, you’d likely go to a job to make money so you could grocery shop and pay rent.
These are large, overarching examples of survival, but what if you’re in a traumatizing situation? As one other example, let’s say your parents were mostly kind and took care of all your physical needs, but your emotions were met with blank stares and solitude to deal with big feelings on your own, even before you could talk. You didn’t really have the emotional support you needed to develop emotionally. We could take it a step further and say that because your parents didn’t have that emotional support they needed during development as well, they met your big emotions with anger and maybe even a spanking or punishment.
In this scenario, when you needed to find safety from your caretakers, it wasn’t there. And often, even the opposite of safety was there. So, your nervous system adapted to find ways to create safety for yourself. This could look like not crying anymore, even if you felt a big emotion. It could also look like expressing the same anger toward others that your parents expressed toward you. It could even look like beginning to ignore your own emotions while trying to manage the emotions of others so you prevent dangerous outbursts and physical consequences directed at you. There could be a number of other adaptations that come about in this example.
A couple things to note about behavioral adaptations like the ones discussed above:
They impact how you live your life as an adult, your relationships, your career, and much more.
You likely have behavioral adaptations from childhood, but they can form in adulthood too.
Most behavioral adaptations aren’t created quickly. They form over years and years, and so they take time to change as well.
But they can be changed!
Adaptations are miraculous! I respect them so much because they keep you safe, and in extreme cases, alive while you need them.
There comes a point in time where you’re no longer in need of them and then they can start to keep you from progressing in the ways you want to progress.
And all of this is okay and workable. Think of it this way: you adapted in the first place. You can do it again! You truly are adaptable now even if your adaptations have become rigid and ingrained.
Window of Tolerance is a psychology concept developed by Dr. Dan Siegel, MD. The gist of it is that you have a window of tolerance where you feel safe. Within the window, you’re able to function pretty normally in everyday life. Windows vary in size depending on who you are and what trauma you’ve been through, but for most trauma survivors, windows are pretty small.
When something happens that activates fear in you within your window, your nervous system responds. It may stay in your window of tolerance if you are great at regulating, co-regulating, are truly safe and also feel safe, but it can also go above or below your window, immersing you in flight, fight, freeze, fawn, or collapse responses.
When you're under chronic stress and fear, as many trauma survivors are, you tend to live on the edge of or outside of your window.
Trauma responses, which include nervous system reactions combined with behavioral adaptions have a tendency to come in when you’re on the edge of or outside of your window of tolerance.
However, practicing consistently regulating (or trying to) when you feel stress/triggers/anxiety coming on eventually expands your window. This is the key to feeling like you have a more “normal” and calm life. If you're unable to regulate in one scenario, that doesn't mean it's a failure. It means you're healing and can try again next time.
A stress response is when your physical senses detect a threat and your brain begins a chemical reaction to communicate with your nervous system that then automatically tells you what to do to escape the danger or stress or protect the organism from pain and damage as much as possible. This is when you likely feel fear and leave your window of tolerance. The stress response completes when something occurs to indicate to your body that the danger is over and you are now safe. This is when the fear should subside and you return back to your window of tolerance.
Stress can be a good thing because it kicks your body into high gear in order to escape danger. Stress becomes bad when it’s chronic and never stops.
Oftentimes, when we’ve had abusive or neglectful caregivers, like mentioned in the example at the beginning of this blog post, we develop behavioral adaptations that suppress or stop our natural ways of completing stress responses. Many modern lifestyle activities and choices perpetuate chronic stress as well.
When a stress response can’t be completed, the emotion and stress chemicals (hormones) stay in you. Over time, this can cause weird physical symptoms to start presenting due to inflammation and the trauma being stuck in your body. You may find that doctors have a hard time diagnosing you or that test results are even coming back normal even though you know you have symptoms, like pain, IBS, autoimmune responses, chronic headaches, and more.
Completing a Stress Response
After you sense that a threat has passed, you can naturally reset your nervous system to complete the stress response. Natural and automatic ways your body tries to do this include yawning, shaking, crying, and more.
Some things that come to my mind for helping your body complete stress responses are if you notice yourself wanting to cry, let yourself. If you notice yourself wanting to stomp, allow yourself, even if it feels silly. If you need to take a minute to get to a private place where you can stomp, cry, shake, scream, take that minute, and go complete the response.
Shake your body. Take a walk. Dance. Move as much as you can. This helps release the energy from your body and reset your nervous system back to baseline.
The Running from a Bear Scenario
This is akin to what you hear about in hunter gatherer times—if you're being chased by a bear, your body primes you to run. It does this with a cocktail of hormones and diverting blood and energy away from non-survival functions (like digestion) and pumps it to your limbs. Once the run is over, you're able to calm down and go about your life, because you got away and so it's very clear you're safe now. The expenditure of energy by running allowed the completion of the response so the chemicals dissolve.
You can see an example of natural completion of stress responses in dogs. If you notice one of them going through something stressful, and then they automatically shake (like even after a bath), that is their body naturally completing a stress response. They don't even have to think about it. It’s all based on the body’s natural instinct, that oftentimes as humans, we ignore or suppress.
In the bear situation, without the completion of the running, the nervous system escalates and escalates preparing the hunter for death. It assumes the hunter didn't get away from the bear. It then starts to pump out chemicals that instead of inspiring a fast run, will help the body no longer feel pain.
In the modern day, there is oftentimes no "run." Without a completion, the nervous system keeps escalating, which can keep you oscillating between all the nervous system states (fight, flight, freeze, fawn, collapse) and feeling stuck.
Emotional regulation is a strategy to help your body complete stress responses and process your emotion. This involves expressing your emotions and releasing them through physical activity or otherwise.
Some people say that emotional regulation is a form of suppression, but I disagree.
Suppressing is actively pushing emotions and thoughts outside of your consciousness so you don't express them.
Emotional regulation is communicating safety to your nervous system despite the emotions and thoughts you feel. Regulating means soothing your nervous system so that it can comfortably go back into your window of tolerance where you're calm and balanced.
Completing a stress response by allowing your body to move in the way it needs to is part of regulating.
To summarize, if you’ve experienced trauma and are trying to heal from it, you likely live on the edge or easily get pushed outside your window of tolerance where your behavioral adaptations kick in and oftentimes reinforce this way of being while keeping you from completing stress responses. When you find ways to emotionally regulate in the face of stress responses, you can help your body complete it’s stress response and therefore release distressing events that would otherwise become trauma stuck in your body. And, when you emotionally regulate and are able to complete stress responses, you can choose new behaviors, that over time, help neutralize or heal past trauma. When you act in new ways, your life begins to change!
If you’d like support in recognizing what your nervous system is doing so you can start to change your behavioral adaptations and complete your stress responses, I have a free workshop for that! Register for my free, self-paced Self Healing the Root workshop today.
Questions or Comments?
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions in the comments, or you can schedule a free consultation.
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Hey there!
I’m Brandi Fleck, TICC. I’m a private practice, certified trauma-informed life coach and trauma recovery coach. All genders, sexualities, and races are welcome here. I primarily serve clients via one-on-one coaching and self-paced trauma education.
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