Understanding Fear, Part 1: Chemical and Biological Responses to Threats, Danger, & Abuse

Fear can hit in a split second, before we have words for it, and then we’re left wondering why we reacted the way we did. With this episode we begin our 4 part series about fear by getting specific about the science. With Jordyn Lawson, Chief Residential Officer at Genesis Women’s Shelter & Support, we unpack what fear really is in the brain and body, why it’s tied to survival, and how the amygdala works like a smoke alarm that can shut down the thinking brain when it senses danger.

We talk through fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, including why “freeze” can feel like total paralysis and why memory can get fuzzy during terrifying moments. We also explore the difference between real threat and perceived threat, and how trauma can make the nervous system extra sensitive to cues that resemble past danger. For survivors of domestic violence, that context matters: fear often tracks patterns, and instinct can be protective even when other people dismiss it.

From there, we move into PTSD and complex PTSD, the impact of chronic fear on adults and children, and the behaviors that can grow out of survival mode, like anger, avoidance, people-pleasing, isolation, perfectionism, and dysregulation. We close with practical nervous system regulation tools you can use right away, including simple grounding, box breathing, five-finger breathing, cold water, and paced movement, plus the mindset shift we keep coming back to: fear isn’t the problem, what happened is. 

Transcript

Why Talk About Fear

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Today, we launch a series about the emotion of fear to better understand what it is, how it manifests, the role of fear in domestic violence relationships, and how in some cases fear can actually be to our benefit. My guest for part one of this series is Jordan Lawson, Chief Residential Officer of Genesis Women's Shelter and Support, and she's here to explain what happens within our brain and body when we experience fear. I'm Maria McMullen, and this is Genesis, the podcast. Jordan, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Thanks for having me, Maria.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Thanks for being here. It's always good to be with you, and we're here to discuss a very important topic. It's the beginning of a series. We're our first speaker in the series about fear. So we want to understand all the elements of fear and how maybe we can be a little less afraid of it. What do you say?

SPEAKER_00 0:50

I think it's incredibly interesting, incredibly important. So I'm grateful to be here to talk about it today.

Fear Is Survival Mode

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Thank you. So let's jump right in. When we say fear, what are we actually talking about from a brain and body perspective?

SPEAKER_00 1:04

So when your brain is really noticing fear or looking for the feeling of fear, truthfully, what's going on in the brain is survival. Is there a threat that is going to put my life in danger, my ability to survive in danger, my ability to protect my children or my home or those things around me in danger? And then how do I respond to that threat in the way that gives me the greatest chance of survival? So I think it's important for people to always understand it's not just a feeling. It can be a really uncomfortable feeling. It's a really important feeling because it's directly connected to survival.

SPEAKER_01 1:39

And it's not always a bad thing, right? It could serve a very important purpose.

unknown 1:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

No, it's absolutely not always a bad thing. You could call it fear, you could call it instinct, you could call it trusting your gut, you could call it being able to read people, whatever you want to call it. It's a really important ability, again, to survive. The reality of our world is that there are good people and there are not good people, right? There are safe situations and there are risky situations, right? And so our brain's ability to help us distinguish between the two and protect ourselves and to be able to be okay is a really important skill to have. It's a really important functioning of our brain.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

And it is hardwired within our biology. And this is something that I guess humans have possessed throughout the ages. It's not new. Certain types of fear may be new to us, but the ability to detect fear is as old as our DNA might be, right? So let's talk about specifically in the brain, because there's a chemical process that goes on when fear is triggered. What part of the brain is responsible for detecting fear?

SPEAKER_00 2:49

So if you think of a baby developing in utero, their brain is developing, the functioning of the brain is developing and functioning back from the brain stem. And then as you're growing, your functioning is increasing, your ability, your skills, the parts of the brain that are working move forward. And that's important to understand because it means the back part of the brain is really focused on survival. Your both basic instincts of keeping your heart beating, keeping your lungs breathing, keeping your legs moving so that you can maybe run away or anything there, regulating your sleep, telling yourself you're hungry so you can eat. All of that's happening in the back part of the brain. The back part of the brain is survival. And there is a specific part of the brain back there called the amygdala. The amygdala's entire function is to sense threat or danger and warn the brain, function in a survival mode if there is threat or danger. So I always think a good way to think of the amygdala is like a smoke alarm, right? So a smoke detector in your home is not off, it's silent, right? It's silent most of the time, but it's not off. And while it's silent, it's sensing for smoke. Smoke being danger, being threat. And so if there is not immediate threat, it's silent, it doesn't really do anything. Sometimes we can even forget that it's in the room, right? That it exists. But if there is smoke, if something happens and the smoke detector picks up on the smoke, it's going to start blaring. It's going to start activating, right? And that's exactly what the amygdala is set up to do. It senses danger, it senses threat. And then when it perceives threat, it will actually activate and blare in the brain, like a five-alarm fire going off, in order to then choose reactions that would give us the best chance of survival. So one of the things that's really important to understand about the amygdala is that when it senses smoke or when it senses threat and it activates, it actually shuts down the thinking part of the brain. And then it goes into sort of this choice of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. And so it sensed danger, it activated the brain, it shut down your ability to think and waste time thinking, to be frank. And then it went into fight, fleet, freeze, or fawn based on distinguishing characteristics about you, your history of surviving, your personality, the situation, those kind of things. So I think the amygdala is really just so interesting. It's so amazing. It's crazy how much it controls everything, and we're not even aware of it. Most people don't even really know about their amygdala or what it's doing. Again, because in these moments of danger, when somebody feels threatened, it's activating in a way that it's really taking over the brain. It's really choosing how somebody's going to react and how they're going to respond in a protective way. It's not a conscious thought-through decision. It is a reaction. And so the power that it has, what it does in that functioning, I always think is really important and really amazing.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

Yeah, I appreciate that distinction because what was going through my brain while you were saying that is we're not making conscious decisions when we feel fear. We are responding. It's like an instinct, trying to just take action to either protect ourselves or in some way respond to whatever the threat might be. And this can change our ability to reason, to make decisions, to remember things. Often in times of fear, and we hear survivors say this, is that they just don't remember what happened or they don't remember what they did. We can feel fear instantaneously. It can strike, even before we consciously understand what happens. It's like when that hair stands up on the back of your neck and you just start getting goosebumps. You know something, you sense the fear is in the air.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the way in which, and again, when we are talking about, I like that we're using the words instinct. I like that we're using the words just sensing, right? Because that's the idea that the amygdala, your brain, your ability to sense danger, it comes before having to prove that something actually is dangerous. You can actually sense it and be aware of it and go into a protective mode, actually start to respond in a way that would maybe increase your safety, maybe even just increase your comfort or your protectiveness before you necessarily have facts in order or evidence that something actually is threatening. And I think that's a really empowering idea. The idea that I don't have to, especially for women in our society, women who are often told that our instincts are hysterical or we're being too reactive, too sensitive. I think it's really empowering to hear that with the hair stands up on the back of my neck, that's my brain sensing danger. And I get to do something to feel safer, even if that's all that's happening. I don't have to necessarily wait and pick up on things and get information that tells me, oh yes, I do get to be afraid. It's okay for me to be afraid in this. That instinct that we're using, the ability to notice I don't feel comfortable here, something doesn't feel right, is the amygdala empowering us to say, take steps to be able to protect yourself, to be able to be safer.

Perceived Threat And Trauma Triggers

SPEAKER_01 8:01

And it's hardwired in all of us, men and women alike, right? So to discount women's intuition, if you will, is very unfair and just wrong. Is there any chance that the brain can or cannot tell the difference between a real threat and a perceived threat? And why does it sometimes get it wrong?

SPEAKER_00 8:20

That's a really good question, Maria, because I think it is important to use the word perceived threat there. Like we were talking about, again, it it's instinct, right? It's noticing things that make me uncomfortable, things that might not be quite right for me. And so sometimes it can happen before there's evidence of there being a true threat or not. Specifically and particularly for victims of trauma. If somebody has experienced trauma, if they have been exposed, if the amygdala has been exposed to smoke multiple times, it actually becomes like a smoke detector that can't tell the difference between a five-alarm fire and burnt popcorn in the microwave. It maybe is blaring and going off like it's a five-alarm fire in the house. And really, it's just some smoke from that popcorn that I sat too long and forgot about. And so what we notice and what we see in victims of trauma or victims of domestic violence, specifically at Genesis, is the more often that they have experienced threat, the more likely they are to experience a trauma trigger and be triggered by things that they perceive as threatening. And those events may or may not be actually threatening. It's how they might be similar or in connection or in some way remind the person of the real threat that happened before. So I always think it's important for people to hear that there's usually always a real threat that's happened before that it's rooted in. But people who've been exposed to a lot of trauma can become highly sensitive to reacting to things that they perceive to be threatening. And they may not be an immediate danger, an immediate threat, but the person feels very unsafe in the moment, feels very much there is the potential for danger in the moment.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Yeah, and that makes me think of patterns, right? Because in domestic violence, there are these patterns of behavior, and victims begin to learn those patterns as a way to protect themselves for one reason. But those patterns can maybe they won't play out the same way every time, but they can give us that perceived threat or the idea that something bad might be about to happen. So we're talking about the brain, we're gonna move on to the body. But just to recap on the brain, we have the amygdala, which is part of the primal brain. And this is the limbic system. Yes, absolutely. Okay, so I'm testing my knowledge of what I've learned from you over the past seven or so years. So the limbic system is activating when we sense fear.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

Yes, and then what it's doing is it's actually shutting down the cognitive thinking part of the brain. I use a kind of silly example, but I talk about if you're driving down the road, I'm from West Texas. And so in the country in West Texas, we drive on back roads, right? And let's say I'm driving my little Kia down a back road, and all of a sudden I turn a corner and I've got one of those big trucks headed straight for me, right? What happens in that moment is my limbic system, my amygdala, that entire process back here that's triggered by my amygdala, sensing the threat of the car, activates and it shuts down my ability to think. The reason this is so important is because if I were to give you options of would you rather think through all the steps and all the things in that moment? How fast is that car going? How deep is this ditch over here versus this ditch over here? How many pounds per square inch do I need to push on this brake to be able to stop my car? Right. Do you want to spend time thinking about all those things? Or do you want your amygdala to take over, to flood your body with adrenaline, flood your body with the reactionary things that you need, those survival skills that you need. Choose fight, flight, freeze, or fawn that is best suited for your personality, your instincts, your history, the situation that is, and react immediately without having to think about it. And I would choose being able to react as quickly as possible, survive as quickly as possible, right? I don't want to waste time thinking and get closer to that truck coming at me.

What Fear Does To The Body

SPEAKER_01 12:13

I think that's a great illustration of what it feels like to be in that immediate sense of fear and exactly what's happening. So thank you for providing that context. Let's move on to the body. So the body is a little bit different from the brain, especially when we're talking about fear. What physical changes happen in the body when fear is triggered?

SPEAKER_00 12:35

So if you think about the reaction of fear, like we've talked about being really instinctual, right? We've talked about fight, flight, freeze, or fun. What's happening, for example, in fight is that one of the first things that happens when your amygdala essence is fear is it floods your body with adrenaline. It wants to boost up your energy. It wants to tense up your muscles, it wants you to be ready to fight back, to be really strong, or it wants your muscles in your legs and your body ready to flee as fast as it can, if we're talking about flight, right? So it literally changes the hormones in your body the second that you sense fear in order to have every organ in your body react in survival mode as quick as possible. If you talk about freeze, so freeze is interesting because we hear that most commonly that women and children react in this freeze space. I talk about it. You were talking about this being an instinctive survival skill since the dawn of man. I think about it evolutionary too. I think of like possums, right? Possums are confusing to me because they play dead to survive, and somehow that works, but I judge it and think it's dumb, but it works. It's similar in the freeze, it's like a possum playing dumb. In certain situations, the brain is instinctively aware that something is physically more powerful than me. I'm not able to flee away from this as fast as I would want to. And so it'll freeze. It'll actually dump cortisol, dump high adrenaline. You'll have this sort of chemical reaction of multiple chemicals where you've got an upper, a downer that puts the person in this like freeze mode of staying there so that they can basically survive like a possum in being as still as possible and waiting for the danger to pass. Sometimes freeze can be felt as like a cognitive frozenness, not knowing what's going on. You talked about not remembering. In the moment, though, it can actually be this really fogginess of really being dissociated and not sure what's happening in the moment. And again, that is because of the mixture of chemicals of hormones that the amygdala is shooting through the body to get it instinctively ready to survive in one of those ways.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

Yeah, it sounds like a paralysis, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Yes, absolutely. I've heard from victims before who have experienced an attack and have said that they were willing their legs to move. They were trying, telling their arms and hands to push back, but their body literally wouldn't move. It can be a literal physical frozenness that we oftentimes hear from victims. It could be that cognitive frozenness of just being confused or dissociated and unsure. But it is really this I'm gonna be like a possum. I'm gonna be as still as possible, I'm gonna be as small as possible, I'm gonna be here until the danger passes.

Why Scary Moments Stick

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Yeah, because I get the sense that all of these things happening at once, the brain is activating in different ways, and then the body is overwhelmed by the sense of fear and all of the different chemicals that may be running through it at a very unusual rate. And fortunately, these are very brief episodes in time, right? They don't happen all that often at that overwhelming level, but they are so memorable to us. If you ask people about some of their earlier memories, maybe they're from childhood or a different time, very often we hear about these experiences. Once I was so scared when this happened, because we tend to hang on to some of those things.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

I like a lot that you use the word overwhelming. I think that's a really important word to describe what's happening in that moment. And in this, what you're talking about is the way in which the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain, works in conjunction with the amygdala, right? A lot of times I explain to people that your memories, as much as we really want to think of our memories as being sentimental, they're actually not as sentimental. They're usually very much focused on survival. We remember the things that helped us survive. We remember positive things because it was an example of safety and things that are safe. We remember these really scary moments because it gets filed away as a, okay, remember that threat next time. In case it happens again, this is what it was, this is what it felt like, this was what was going on around me, and here's what I did to survive. And if it does happen again, then my brain has this go-to action because last time I did this to survive. So this time I'm gonna automatically do it again, and it's gonna be my sort of survival skill that becomes my instinctive way of reacting.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

And survival skills are critical for all humans. So it doesn't matter who you are, you're gonna experience some type of fear in your lifetime, and you're gonna learn from that fear, and you're gonna develop the skills so that the next time you encounter something scary or feel threatened, you have better ways potentially to cope with it. And I just want to go back to something you said very early on in this conversation about in utero, when the brain begins to develop in the fetus, and you have that little brain stem in the back, which is the very early beginnings of the brain. And the function of that brain stem or the amygdala is to focus on survival. And I suspect that's why so many babies survive, right? And are actually born because it's one of the very first parts of our human body that develops.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

Yeah, absolutely. At the root of everything we're doing in life, surviving is imperative to be able to get to the next thing. And a lot of our body functioning, a lot of our reactions, a lot of our day-to-day stuff is really rooted and is really focused on survival.

Reframing Fear Without Shame

SPEAKER_01 18:08

Yeah, and I want to to really emphasize that because I know fear sounds like something we want to avoid. I certainly want to avoid it. I don't want any more fearful memories or episodes, but they are somewhat inevitable at times. And my hope is that listeners will get comfortable with the idea of fear. So in order to explore it, in order to really understand it, in order to use it to our benefit. I don't want you to feel afraid. I know that sometimes you might feel afraid, but this is an opportunity for us to dig deep in what it is, what it's doing to us, and how we can take better control and learn from it and do more than survive to really live.

SPEAKER_00 18:48

Yeah, in therapy, Maria, we call that reframing. So when you look at something and you're gonna reframe it in, but how does that benefit me? What do I do with that? How do I help? And we do this a lot with victims of domestic violence because understandably, we know that domestic violence is, like you said, a patterned repetitive experience of danger, of being afraid. And so it's completely understandable. And I have so much empathy and compassion for my clients who come in and say, I want to never feel afraid again. I don't want to feel this way again. I'm tired of feeling this way. And my sort of answer is I completely understand that, but it's not that I don't want you to ever feel that again. I want you to reframe it as this is how smart you are, this is how powerful you are, that you have the ability to notice this feeling. You've already been doing that to survive this very difficult situation you've been in all along. And you're gonna continue to grow in your instincts and in your skills and in your safety plan and in your awareness and use this to be able to protect yourself in future situations, whether that be unfortunately maybe ongoing abuse from the abuser, or it just be situations in the world that could be risky, right? One of the things I would say, if there's any professionals listening to this, is we teach every single one of our clients about this, about how the brain reacts, about what the amygdala is and the prefrontal cortex. And we teach them about the impact of trauma on the amygdala. And we're doing that because it's empowering to understand what your brain's doing in that moment. Oftentimes when people have a situation that was really scary and they survived it, they might look back and go, why did I do that? Why didn't I do this? Why didn't I say that? We might actually judge ourselves for how we survived it, right? I brought up the possum. I judged the possum for how he survived. But it's smart. He survived. And we really like to help our clients move through that judgment, maybe even shame of how they survived by being able to say, look at how smart your brain is, that it knew in that moment that you might not be able to run fast enough, or you might not be able to physically overpower this person or fight them. And so your brain was so smart and it continues to be so smart because it can survive in those ways. So I absolutely agree with you. I think it never feels comfortable. It doesn't feel good to be afraid, but understanding it as your power to be able to protect yourself, to take care of your home, to take care of your kids, I would hope that it could be a boost of empowerment, a boost of confidence, a boost of independence.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I also just want to say one thing to listeners here. Your experience of fear is unique to you. We have all these systems, we all have the same systems. They they work in similar ways and whatnot, but your experience is unique to you. And we take nothing away from that. You may feel nauseous when you're afraid. You may, as Jordan said, be frozen. You may freeze. There are lots of other physical symptoms you can have. You can have a headache, you can be shaking uncontrollably. So there are gonna be these manifestations that are like really in the body that are a result of everything else that's happening in the brain and with all the hormones that go on. And that's okay. And I want people to feel like If I feel nauseous when I experience fear, that's my body's reaction to this moment.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

And also the impact of all of those chemicals, right? And it happens in seconds, like you said, milliseconds, overwhelming the body. The amygdala senses that something's dangerous, floods you with different hormones. And so, of course, the reaction to those hormones and that increase of adrenaline or that increase in corduroy, maybe nauseousness or a headache or the shaking. So I think that's a really important thing to say that the symptoms of that don't necessarily demonstrate that it was wrong or that something bad happened. It just is that unfortunate impact of the flooding of hormones in that moment.

PTSD And A Nervous System Overload

SPEAKER_01 22:39

Yeah, so that brings us to a great point to try to bring some of these things together, tie them all together for people. Let's talk about fear trauma and the nervous system. What happens when the fear system gets activated too often or for too long? Like when people experience PTSD or complex PTSD.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

I think I might want to break this down a little bit into kids and adults. If we talk about children, remember we started off the conversation saying that your brain develops from the back to the front. Your functioning increases as your brain develops to the front. And the brain's actually not finished completely developing until on average around 23, 25 years old. And so it's important for people to understand that when a child experiences danger, when they experience threat, when they're exposed to child abuse or they're exposed to domestic violence, even if they were not the direct person experiencing the abuse in the home, if they're witnessing these really scary things going on, what's happening in that moment is the brain is being distracted from developing and it's being sent right back into that survival mode, that foundational rooted survival mode. And unfortunately, what that can mean is that it can actually start to delay development. It can cause milestones to be delayed. It can cause just not being quite on track with where other kids in their class may be developmentally, neurologically. For an adult, the more often you experience that danger or the threat, like we talked about, the more you can experience a trauma trigger. And so the more you may experience ongoing experiences of threat and danger, seeing other things in the world that you perceive as being threatening, and you're having that same very intense, very disruptive, very uncomfortable experience more frequently. And again, it's disruptive, right? It's hard to keep my job, it's hard to parent my kids, it's hard to remember all the things I need to do when my brain is so focused on where's the threat, where's the danger, and how do I protect myself. What we also know is that the amygdala is like a muscle. The more often it gets worked out or used, the stronger it becomes. Actually, what we see in the neurological research, the research that neuroscientists have done on the amygdala and on its reaction to fear, is that the people who have been exposed to danger multiple times can actually have an amygdala that's increased in size. We have brain scans of children who horrifically had experienced child abuse, and their amygdala was up to three sizes bigger than that of a child who never experienced trauma. And what we know is the impact of that, the impact that it's important to understand there is in some way when the amygdala is overused, it becomes activated all day, every day. And so a lot of people who've experienced complex trauma, repeated exposures to trauma, repeated exposure to danger and threat, they're living out of their amygdala. Their amygdala is activated all day, every day, which means it's shut down their prefrontal cortex, their thinking brain all day, every day. Maybe they're able to function and go to work, but they're having a really hard time remembering things later in the day that they did. And so when they go to work the next day, it's wait, what do I do? What happened yesterday? Maybe it's as severe as dissociating and not being able to really be present in the moment and really know what's happening in the moment, right? I have a client right now, actually, who is driving herself to work, but frequently on the way home from work will have to call us and ask us to walk her through directions to get home because she's confused as to where she is. When the amygdala's been overworked like this, overexposed to trauma and threat, and it's activated all the time in survival mode, the impact on the thinking brain can be really serious.

SPEAKER_01 26:25

And this is a manifestation that we see a lot at Genesis, working with women who are either in an abusive relationship or just trying to get away from an abusive partner. They are on high alert. And so are their children often because they've been exposed to repeated experiences of fear.

Fight Flight Freeze Fawn In Life

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Because the fear has been so frequent and probably so unpredictable. She's doing everything she can to predict the fear, but it still just pops off out of nowhere for her. Her reality is she needs to be in survival mode all day, every day, because he's literally putting her survival in jeopardy all day, every day.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

So let's talk about some of the behaviors that stem from these types of experiences. How does fear influence our behavior, our relationships, our sense of safety?

How Kids Show Chronic Fear

SPEAKER_00 27:20

So if you think of behaviors in that fight, flight, freeze, or fawn instinct period that we were talking about earlier. I talked about freezing being like a possum, right? That we talked about that physical frozenness. I oftentimes talk about fight being like a lion. A lion may pounce on something, it may attack you before you attack me, but a lion also will roar and it'll use its roar to scare away and tell other people, hey, don't come for me. I'm a lion, I'll protect myself. If you think of flight as being like a deer will take off when it hears a sound, it's not gonna hang around and notice and think about what that sound was and investigate what that sound is, it's gonna take off. So a lot of those instinctive behaviors, and again, the more often that somebody has experienced threat, the more often they're reacting in this instinctive way. They're 100% revolved around survival and it can make relationships really difficult. So somebody that has been fighting to survive may be somebody that's quick to get into arguments or quick to push people away, quick to perceive threat from other people and respond in an angry way. And the anger isn't who they are as a person, but it's their protective skill. Somebody who has survived by leaving situations really quickly, again, may struggle to enjoy a party or an event or go to the movies with friends or even be in a relationship with people because when anything feels uncomfortable, they're quick to need to leave and quick to want to be gone from that situation. We talked about being difficult because sometimes it's hard to even really be present or do what you want to do in the moment. Fawning is an interesting one because the instinctive response to fawn is this way of pleasing the other person or being attractive to the threat, not in a way that this person is weak or manipulative. They're trying to make sure that nobody is upset with them so that therefore I won't be in danger. That person could really struggle with setting healthy boundaries and being able to affirm and keep their boundaries because they feel like if I set this boundary, that person's gonna be mad at me. And if that person's mad at me, then I'm in danger. That might not be safe for me. So they may be somebody that struggles with boundaries and therefore is taken advantage of, or kind of always giving things away, maybe even a people pleaser and always feeling like they're not getting their needs met in relationships. In all of those situations, I hear a lot of victims of trauma isolate and withdraw and want to be by themselves because it's exhausting to try to manage these reactions and manage these interactions and relationships. And so maybe it's just easier if I'm by myself. Maybe it's just simpler if I don't trust anybody and I just stay by myself. And so isolation can be a real impact of this. And then again, that has a huge impact on relationships and on a person's well-being, feeling lonely, being by themselves, lacking resources and connections can be a really hard consequence of that.

SPEAKER_01 30:16

Are there any unique behaviors that children exhibit when they are in this like constant fear state?

SPEAKER_00 30:24

We see the similar things that we've talked about with children. We see them withdraw and isolate. We see them people please. We'll see a lot of kids pick up perfectionism instincts. So if you're happy with me because I got a hundred on my math test, then I'm safe. But if I get a 99, then I have huge anxiety because I'm not safe, because you're not gonna be happy with me. But we also see a lot of acting out behaviors. We see a lot of maybe like that lion roaring or that lion fighting where I'm gonna attack you before you attack me. There's a lot of dysregulation, so a lot of hyperactivity. Remember, we talked about the body flooding with adrenaline. This is happening in little bodies as well. And so all of that just means a lot of pent-up energy and a lot of dysregulation that can be seen as hyperactivity. It can be seen as not being focused. A lot of these kiddos get diagnosed with ADHD, and it might not be ADHD, it might be the impact of the trauma. We see a lot of behaviors in children that sometimes are disruptive in the classroom or in family environments. So, for example, it's common to hear that a child who has been exposed to a lot of chaos in domestic violence, a lot of chaos and threat and danger, when things are really calm and quiet. Maybe it's a moment in the classroom where everybody's supposed to be working on worksheets and it's supposed to be really quiet. That calm and quiet actually feels like a threat to their amygdala because I don't know what to do in calm and quiet. I'm used to how to survive in chaos. I don't know how to survive in calm and quiet. And so my body actually is going to create chaos in this moment to regulate my system better, to get things in a place where I feel more comfortable surviving. I feel more aware and I know how to survive. And because that can be so disruptive to the classroom, to the family system, things like that, they can be in trouble all the time. They can be kicked out of the class and put into isolated spaces or other programs a lot. This obviously would have a detrimental impact to a child's self-esteem. And then it just becomes this cycle of negativity that has a great impact to them as they're growing.

Returning To Calm After Fear

SPEAKER_01 32:29

I think that's a really important example, especially for parents to understand who may be living in this situation that kids can be misdiagnosed. And sometimes we just need to take a step back and look a little further into the situation. And it brings us to a great place in this conversation to talk about regulation and recovery. So once fear is triggered, so we have this chaos, we have all these hormones and chemical reactions going off. How does the body normally return to calm?

SPEAKER_00 32:57

So it takes time. I think the most important thing to say is that it's not a quick thing to recover. It depends on the situation, it depends on how often I've experienced this. But for a lot of people, I'll hear that they have certain symptoms or certain reactions for a longer period of time. And so if we do specific interventions, specific coping skills, specific grounding exercises or regulation activities, it'll actually help it regulate faster. So one of the things that happens in the body, we talked about the brain overwhelming the body with different hormones. Well, the body will start to then regulate those hormones naturally, but that takes time. If we do things like drinking cold water, taking deep breaths, slowing our body down, or maybe even moving our body at a regulated pace. So maybe not sitting. If I'm trying to sit and rest, if my body feels really exhausted by what happened, sitting and resting might be important. But if I sit and rest and I feel like a powder keg just of stuff in, it might be important for me to take a walk and allow my body to regulate through movement and through being able to combat these hormones that flooded the adrenaline that threaded through my body here with cortisol and in other positive reactions to resting or exercise or drinking water or breathing exercises or things like that.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

Let's just give a few examples of how survivors of domestic violence, both women and children, come to Genesis and we help them learn how to regulate or recovery. What do we offer for that?

SPEAKER_00 34:27

So a lot of times what we see when somebody comes in and we see this is we do see an anxious presentation. So somebody may come in and say, this is happening, I'm afraid of this, and we can see that anxiety. Or the kind of complete opposite of what we might see is somebody might be telling me about something really scary that happened and having a very flat affect, having sort of no reaction to it at all. I can see that disconnect as being that frozen state or that dissociation. And in both of those, we're either too high or too low. And so I'm trying to help the person get back to that balanced state in the middle. One of the first things I want to do is I want to help the client build awareness on what's going on. So we're gonna ask questions like, what are you feeling in your body right now? Where are you noticing that? We're gonna ask them to sit in that discomfort of noticing that feeling. Because like you were saying earlier, nobody likes to feel uncomfortable. Nobody likes to feel bad. So it's human nature when we feel bad to do something to distract ourselves from it. One of the first things we need to do is we actually just need to feel it because we need to notice it and see it. And as I notice it, then I become more aware of it. Oh, that's a feeling I have in my stomach when I'm anxious or when I'm scared. Oh, the fact that I can't really feel those things means I've dissociated a little. So I'm gonna wiggle my toes in my shoes and I'm gonna really try to focus on feeling my toes wiggle in my shoes. So really practicing and really helping them notice those feelings and gain awareness on how what this is like for them individualized is an important first step. And then we'll give them different exercises to do. There's different breathing exercises. A box breathing exercise is a really easy one to do. So box breathing is where you may breathe for four and then out for three, and then breathe in for four and then out for three. What this is doing is again, the breathing is regulating your literal body or physical body. It's slowing things down, but it's also getting your brain to think about the countings. And so it's getting your prefrontal cortex back online. Another breathing exercise is the five-fingered breathing. So you can use your hand and breathe in and then breathe out, breathe in and then breathe out. And again, the sensation of touching my hand, the counting, the being aware of my breathing. It's getting my body to slow down and connect. It's getting oxygen into my body, really good oxygen. You know, when people are afraid and they're breathing fast, you're getting that really quick breathing. So it's not as good of oxygen. You're not releasing all the carbon dioxide you needed to. So the literal breathing is important, but it's also checking the prefrontal cortex back in. It's calming down the amygdala by getting the thinking brain back online. You can do different grounding exercises. One of my favorites to do with clients again, because it's simple. And I think simple is really important because if she doesn't have her thinking brain in that moment, I'm not trying to give her something really hard to think about and remember and do. I want it to be instinctive. I want it to be easy. So the grounding exercise I think is the easiest, is just looking around the room and naming three things that you see. So if I'm gonna look around my room right now, I'm gonna say laptop, pin, water bottle, and I'm gonna give a deep breath. And then I'm gonna try to look and just call out three other things. It's grounding because it's very much getting my thinking brain online. It's distracting me from those things that I was really worried about and concerned about back here. And I'm just calming down and being intentional to focus. You can also do the five senses where you check in and go, what do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? What do you touch? What do you taste? And have this moment to really be able to notice those things. For clients who experience trauma triggers throughout the day, we encourage them to maybe carry around things with them, like a mint or a piece of gum that they can pop in their mouth and be able to really pay attention to what does this taste like? What does this smell like? That'll get the brain back engaged, the thinking brain back engaged and help it calm down.

The One Thing To Remember

SPEAKER_01 38:24

Those are great takeaways and things we can all use today if we need to. If you have one thing you want listeners to remember about fear and about our conversation, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 38:36

I think I love what you pointed out so greatly in the beginning, and I think it's the most important one that the fear is not the problem. Probably what happened to me to make me feel afraid was the problem. What somebody did to me was the bad thing. But the fact that I felt afraid wasn't bad. It wasn't wrong, it wasn't, it might have felt uncomfortable, but it was really smart. It was really instinctive. It was really empowering of me to take care of myself. And I just think that's a really important thing because I hear a lot of women who have experienced fear feel like they did it wrong. And the truth is, however, you survived and you were smart and you got through it and you'll continue to learn and grow. And fear is not a bad thing. It is a hard thing to experience, but it's not a bad thing.

SPEAKER_01 39:22

Jordan, thank you so much for talking with me about this important topic.

SPEAKER_00 39:26

Thank you for having me, Maria.

SPEAKER_01 39:28

Genesis Women's Shelter and Support exists to give women in abusive situations a way out. We are committed to our mission of providing safety, shelter, and support for women and children who have experienced domestic violence and to raise awareness regarding its cause, prevalence, and impact. Join us in creating a societal shift on how people think about domestic violence. You can learn more at GenesisShelter.org, and when you follow us on social media, on Facebook and Instagram at Genesis Women's Shelter, and on X at Genesis Shelter. The Genesis Helpline is available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, by call or text at two one four nine four six help.