August 8, 2025 • 18 mins
Summary: Our neurobiological response to co-parenting stress often mirrors evolutionary survival mechanisms, triggering fight, flight, freeze, or fawn reactions when we receive messages from difficult ex-partners. Recognizing these pattern is the critical first step to interrupting automatic responses and choosing more intentional communication.
Key Takeaways:
• The "four Fs" (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) are natural trauma responses designed to protect us in threatening situations
• Different situations may trigger different response patterns based on your history
• You can't control your initial reaction, but you can learn to recognize it before responding
• Naming what's happening creates space between your reaction and your response
• Asking trusted friends about your typical response patterns can provide valuable insights
Resources:
Check out our High Conflict Communication Bootcamp for just $19, where we go beyond naming these responses and provide practical tools for each pattern.
If you’re tired of every conversation with your ex turning into a fight, the High Conflict Communication Bootcamp for Moms is for you. In this self-paced 3 day online course, get scripts, strategies, and a workbook you can use right away, designed for moms in high-conflict co-parenting and parallel parenting. Enroll now for just $19 here.
BestInterest Co-Parenting AppJoin BestInterest App and get 22% off yearly subscriptions with code LITTLEHOUSE22
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Kids First CoParenting System: If you are co-parenting with a narcissist, dealing with a manipulative ex, or feeling overwhelmed by high-conflict dynamics, you are not alone. These resources are designed to help you protect your child’s emotional health and take back control of your co-parenting experience.
Get More Support
- How to Co-Parent with a Difficult Ex Masterclass (Free & Instant Access)
- High Conflict 3 day Communication Bootcamp for Moms
Explore the Kids First Co-Parenting System to learn how to raise emotionally secure kids after divorce, even when your co-parent refuses to change. This is the support system every overwhelmed mom needs.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to the Kids First co-parenting podcast the
podcast for smart, intentional,millennial moms raising
resilient kids after separationand divorce.
I'm Dr Carolyn Royster, a childpsychologist coach and a mom.
After thousands of therapyhours with kids caught in the
middle of high conflicthouseholds, I'm here to help
(00:28):
moms like you do it differentlyFrom peaceful co-parenting to
total chaos.
I've got you here.
We talk boundaries, regulationand how to raise a great kid,
even if your ex is beyonddifficult.
We blend science with real lifeand, as always, keep the focus
where it matters.
I'm raising great kids.
This is Kids First Co-Parenting.
(00:50):
Welcome to another episode ofthe Kids First Co-Parenting
podcast.
I am so happy you're here.
If you've ever gone blank orgotten really defensive or just
frozen or said yes when youmeant to say no after receiving
notification on your app or atext, there might be a reason
(01:11):
for that.
Today, in this episode, you'regoing to learn about the four Fs
, which is a pretty well-knownpsychological phenomenon, and
I'll explain to you how itrelates to high conflict
co-parenting, because it is atrauma response.
My friend and you'll see how itshows up in co-parenting,
conflict dynamics and aroundcommunication in particular, and
(01:32):
I'm going to help youunderstand why.
The first step is understandingwhat this is before you can
work with it and know how torespond.
Okay, before we dive in, I justwant to give you a little
update on me.
Life is really good here.
It's been a very busy end ofsummer.
Just returned from anall-inclusive in Mexico with my
family and it was fantastic,highly recommend Kids Stay Free
(01:57):
Resorts.
I had a wonderful time.
It was very relaxing, eventhough I had kids running around
, swimming and doing the poolsand the beaches and all of those
things, and so I've kind ofreentered into work after taking
that very much needed space andI'm feeling really grateful for
it.
So that's just a little updateon how things are with me.
(02:19):
Well, let's dive in.
Okay, so you know, the goalwhen we're communicating with
your co-parent is to try to stayreally calm.
That's the whole point.
Right?
You want to stay calm, and thereason we want to stay calm is
so that you don't respond out ofa place of anger, which is more
likely for you to feel, I don'tknow, not happy with how you
(02:45):
respond, or to say something youdon't mean, or to say something
out of anger, or to be reactive.
Now, if you are co-parentingwith someone who's really
narcissistic or trying reallyhard to get control or power
over you, or is playing a gamethat hopefully you're not
playing the game of like I justwant to win.
Instead of doing what's rightfor kids, then responding when
(03:07):
you are activated is a terribleidea, and most moms know that.
So most people know I reallyshould calm down or I really
need to take a minute before Irespond.
However, when you're flooded orwhen you're having a really
hard time with something becauseit's triggering or it's
insulting or it's irritating orwhatever it might be, sometimes
(03:31):
we want that feeling to go awayas quickly as possible and, as a
result of that, you may send aresponse or send a message or a
text that you later regret,because you were activated and
you were having a hard time andso, instead of letting yourself
regulate and calm down, you saidsomething that you wish you
hadn't or that was just plainreactive.
(03:53):
Had you thought more about it,you maybe wouldn't have said it.
Along the journey of usfiguring out how to help you
respond with integrity and totruly respond in a way that puts
your kids first and protectsyour own mental health, I need
you to understand and knowwhat's happening first.
That is the meat of what we aregoing to talk about today.
(04:15):
Again, as always, this is notever meant to make you feel bad.
Information is power and I wantyou to have this information
because these are well-knownpsychological concepts that we
can use.
We have the information, we usethem.
We know how and why they'reactivating you.
Then you can work a little bitquicker on managing your
(04:36):
response.
But it's hard to fix a problemthat you don't understand, as we
always talk about here.
Okay, so let's dive in.
There are a couple of verycommon responses that folks will
have when they're in astressful situation or a
traumatic, life-threatening,anxiety-producing situation.
Okay, this is neurobiological,this is the way we were made.
(04:59):
This is how we were designed ashuman being, as animals, as
evolutionary creatures, howeveryou want to explain it.
Okay, what I'm going to talkabout?
These styles of responding.
They're not actually unique toyou and, in fact, a lot of times
when I teach moms about this,they start thinking about how
they are also seeing this kindof response in their kids.
(05:21):
Okay, that's kind of the coolthing about learning about
ourselves is, when we learnabout ourselves, we also get the
chance to learn about raisinglittle people into adults.
There tends to be kind of anevolutionary response to stress,
and when I say kind of, I meanthere is.
So I want you to pictureyourself way back in olden times
(05:43):
, right?
Perhaps?
You've come across this greatland of ours in a covered wagon
and you're sitting by a campfireon the edges of the Rocky
Mountains, beautiful woods allaround you, night has fallen,
right, you just finished cookingyour elk caribou over the fire,
life is good, and you hear atwig snap in the woods.
(06:05):
Evolutionarily or biologically,your body is going to respond
to that sound a couple ofdifferent ways.
We call them the four Fs.
The first response would befreeze, okay, and so you may
freeze when you hear the soundof that twig snapping, because
(06:26):
your brain subconsciously andvery quickly is starting to
think oh my gosh, is there abear in the woods?
I better freeze so it doesn'tsee me and come eat me.
This is how primal theseinstincts are.
So freeze is the first one.
It's where you kind of getstuck, and sometimes people will
even talk about feeling theirbody freeze, get very immobile,
(06:48):
like they can't move.
They want to move but theycan't.
That is the freeze response.
Another response you could havewould be to fight.
So you may pick up a rock or Idon't know history's not really
my thing, guys but your shotgun,if those were around at the
time of covered wagons, I'm notsure, maybe because you ate an
elk, so I guess you could havehad a bow and arrow.
(07:08):
Anyways, this is the whole side.
You pick up your weapon,whatever you use to kill the elk
that you're eating, so morbidI'm not really a fan of.
Anyways, whatever you pick upyour weapon, right, and you get
ready, all of the stresshormones and adrenaline in your
body is preparing your body tofight.
You suddenly feel really strongand you get that weapon ready
(07:29):
and you're like whatever comesthrough those woods and into
this campsite, I'm going tofight it.
That's a fight response.
You may also have a similaradrenaline response that
triggers you to flee.
Okay, so that's the third F wehave done freeze, fight and flee
.
Flee is you're running.
(07:49):
You hear that twig snap andyou're like I gotta book it out
of here.
We're getting gone, we gottarun, we gotta get away from this
bear as fast as we possibly can.
That is how we're going to staysafe.
And then there's somethingcalled the fawn response.
So this would be again with thebear metaphor.
The twig snapping is a bear.
(08:09):
It comes into the site and youget your eyes really wide and
you get down low and you makeyour cute little like I'm a cute
little baby, don't hurt me,kind of a cuteness response or a
fawning response that thenhelps you seem less appealing to
a predator that's called thefawn.
(08:29):
So the four major responses arefight, flight, freeze and fawn
right.
These responses that are verynormal for human behavior have
come out of an evolutionarytactic to keep oneself safe in a
(08:50):
life-threatening situation.
Today, what we're talking aboutis how do these responses show
up and how does this apply toco-parenting?
You need to really understandthem first before I go into how
it applies to what we're talkingabout today.
Many of you have left traumatic, conflictual, difficult
(09:12):
dynamics.
In some cases you have beenphysically hurt.
In sometimes some cases therehave been traumatic events,
let's just say, that haveoccurred with your co-parent.
In other cases it's more of aslow build as in over time we've
gotten to a place where you arestressed out and having a
(09:34):
stress response, if not afull-on traumatic response, to
interacting with this person.
And so how do these things showup when you're co-parenting
with a difficult ex, whether ornot you've had an actual
traumatic experience with thisperson, which, unfortunately, a
lot of the moms that I work withhave right and so I'm not
(09:55):
minimizing that.
But I'm also saying sometimes,when you've had a long history
of getting triggered by someone,we will start to see these
patterns show up.
How does this concept of the seethese patterns show up?
How does this concept of thefour Fs show up in co-parenting
In particular, reallyconflictual co -parenting.
Let's take fight.
Fight's probably the easiestone to understand.
(10:17):
So you get that message, youget that alert on your app and
your response would be somethinglike I'm gonna fire back, I'm
gonna escal fire back, I'm goingto escalate this, I'm going to
really get into trying to provemy point.
It gets really, really heatedreally fast.
You're like those are fightingwords and I'm fighting back.
Buddy boy, a lot of times thiscomes from a place of you're not
(10:38):
going to push me around anymore, like that's not happening.
No, thank you Again.
It's not a judgment, it just isan important pattern to
understand.
Then we have our folks that aredoing the flight response.
What does this look like?
So this might look like youavoid, you're withdrawing,
you're not even responding, andsometimes I do coach moms to not
(10:59):
respond.
You do not need to respond allthe time.
This is presuming it issomething you should respond to
and so you just really don't.
You just like kind of ostrichit bury your head in the sand
Like I'm going to pretend, likethis isn't an issue.
Then we have the freeze.
Freeze and flight can look verysimilar in regards to
communication.
So if we're not talking aboutactually physically leaving the
(11:21):
room with your ex, which wouldbe flight and freeze, which
would just be like where youkind of just tense up and don't
say anything at all, it's alittle bit different with
communication because flight andfreeze can look really similar.
Freeze and flight the wayyou're going to differentiate
them is really more of what itfeels like internally for you.
When you freeze, you go blank.
Your mind kind of just goesblank.
(11:43):
You can't really think it feelslike.
You can't think I should sayit's really hard to make a
decision.
You may kind of stall, even ifyou know the right decision or
the right response, and so again, it's an internal experience
that feels different.
The flee response is I would doanything to just not ever have
to respond to that, where thefreeze response is I should do
(12:04):
something, I need to dosomething, and then not being
able to kind of formulate thewords if that makes sense the
fawn response.
And the reason I bring this oneup is because it's really
interesting in high conflictco-parenting Because what ends
up happening is one personreally becomes kind of a doormat
for lack of better words overlycompliant, overly accommodating
(12:28):
, maybe really trying toover-explain or trying to really
smooth things over, reallyreally wanting to make sure that
this person isn't mad at you.
You may have different topicsmay bring out different
responses in you, and Iencourage you, in your own
therapeutic settings or in yourjournal kind of, where you're
working things out, to reallyexplore why that is, because
(12:49):
there probably is a reason,journal kind of where you're
working things out to reallyexplore why that is because
there probably is a reason.
However, I just want you tokind of understand the basics of
this, really think about whatyour style is across different
areas that might come up.
What is really important foryou to know and what I want you
to take away from this is thatyou really can't always control
your first reaction.
It's gonna happen.
It's probably already happening, I'm sure it's happened for
(13:13):
years and your feelings areimportant and they're good
information for you, and sotrying to control how you react
or that first initial reactionis gonna be really difficult,
right?
If you are someone that justyou know that you kind of go
into a fawn response, it's notvery helpful for you to spend a
(13:35):
lot of time trying to undo that.
But what is helpful is for youto learn to acknowledge it and
recognize that like oh, I almostalways respond this way.
And then learning how to workwith that response style before
you send that message back,before you get overly like no,
no, it's fine.
(13:55):
If we're talking about the fawnresponse, you can see like, oh,
I'm doing it again.
And then here are the toolsthat I have to work with that.
Before I respond, your firststep is to name what it is
that's happening.
Again, we talk all the timeabout how this is a parallel to
raising kids, when we'reteaching them about their
(14:16):
emotions, when we're teachingthem about their responses.
Our first trick it's not even atrick.
The first thing you always dois you name what you're seeing.
You look upset.
I'm noticing that.
I really want to fight backright now.
That would be an example of myown naming of a response.
And then I want you to thinkabout the tools, and if you
don't have these tools, thereare so many ways that you can
(14:38):
get them.
There's also this reallywonderful resource within the
Kids First community, we havethe communication bootcamp.
The whole first day of thatit's spread out over three days
and the whole first day we talkreally in depth about fight,
flight, freeze and fawn, andthen I give you the tools on how
to respond in those situations.
(14:59):
So there's a lot of ways thatyou can work with it once you
understand what's happening foryou.
So it's not about being perfectevery time.
It's about noticing patternsand working within those
patterns and then developingyour set of tools for how you
can respond.
I would also encourage you andit's always helpful to do this
(15:21):
just in general with parentingbut if you're not sure what your
style is, to kind of reach outand ask some close friends what
do you notice happens for mewhen I get a message from
so-and-so?
What do you think is myresponse?
I just heard this podcast andI'm curious what you think as
someone who loves me and knowsme.
It's not about being perfect.
It's not about getting it rightevery time.
(15:41):
The first step is starting tounderstand it, so that you can
then work on being less reactiveto it.
If you're thinking, all right,I can kind of get behind this.
I want to understand my style.
I now know that I respond inthis way, but what do I do
instead?
That is exactly what we coverinside of the High Conflict
(16:02):
Communication Bootcamp, which,by the way, is only $19 and is
well worth your time.
We go way beyond just namingthese four experiences and I
teach you how to recognize thepatterns in real time and give
you the tools to work with it.
The boot camp is three short,very powerful lessons designed
for moms just like you, justlike everything we do in the
(16:24):
Kids First community how youcommunicate.
As always, you can find thatlink in the show notes, and I
can't wait to see you inside.
Come find me on social media.
We're across all platforms.
As always, leave a review.
If you got something excitingout of this podcast or learned
something new, I'd love for youto share it and spread the word.
(16:44):
I am so happy to have you aspart of our community here.
If you have any questions, sendthem to me online.
I'm happy to answer them.
I'll see you soon.
Thanks for being here.
Welcome to the Kids First co-parenting podcast the
podcast for smart, intentional,millennial moms raising
resilient kids after separationand divorce.
I'm Dr Carolyn Royster, a childpsychologist coach and a mom.
After thousands of therapyhours with kids caught in the
middle of high conflicthouseholds, I'm here to help
(00:28):
moms like you do it differentlyFrom peaceful co-parenting to
total chaos.
I've got you here.
We talk boundaries, regulationand how to raise a great kid,
even if your ex is beyonddifficult.
We blend science with real lifeand, as always, keep the focus
where it matters.
I'm raising great kids.
This is Kids First Co-Parenting.
(00:50):
Welcome to another episode ofthe Kids First Co-Parenting
podcast.
I am so happy you're here.
If you've ever gone blank orgotten really defensive or just
frozen or said yes when youmeant to say no after receiving
notification on your app or atext, there might be a reason
(01:11):
for that.
Today, in this episode, you'regoing to learn about the four Fs
, which is a pretty well-knownpsychological phenomenon, and
I'll explain to you how itrelates to high conflict
co-parenting, because it is atrauma response.
My friend and you'll see how itshows up in co-parenting,
conflict dynamics and aroundcommunication in particular, and
(01:32):
I'm going to help youunderstand why.
The first step is understandingwhat this is before you can
work with it and know how torespond.
Okay, before we dive in, I justwant to give you a little
update on me.
Life is really good here.
It's been a very busy end ofsummer.
Just returned from anall-inclusive in Mexico with my
family and it was fantastic,highly recommend Kids Stay Free
(01:57):
Resorts.
I had a wonderful time.
It was very relaxing, eventhough I had kids running around
, swimming and doing the poolsand the beaches and all of those
things, and so I've kind ofreentered into work after taking
that very much needed space andI'm feeling really grateful for
it.
So that's just a little updateon how things are with me.
(02:19):
Well, let's dive in.
Okay, so you know, the goalwhen we're communicating with
your co-parent is to try to stayreally calm.
That's the whole point.
Right?
You want to stay calm, and thereason we want to stay calm is
so that you don't respond out ofa place of anger, which is more
likely for you to feel, I don'tknow, not happy with how you
(02:45):
respond, or to say something youdon't mean, or to say something
out of anger, or to be reactive.
Now, if you are co-parentingwith someone who's really
narcissistic or trying reallyhard to get control or power
over you, or is playing a gamethat hopefully you're not
playing the game of like I justwant to win.
Instead of doing what's rightfor kids, then responding when
(03:07):
you are activated is a terribleidea, and most moms know that.
So most people know I reallyshould calm down or I really
need to take a minute before Irespond.
However, when you're flooded orwhen you're having a really
hard time with something becauseit's triggering or it's
insulting or it's irritating orwhatever it might be, sometimes
(03:31):
we want that feeling to go awayas quickly as possible and, as a
result of that, you may send aresponse or send a message or a
text that you later regret,because you were activated and
you were having a hard time andso, instead of letting yourself
regulate and calm down, you saidsomething that you wish you
hadn't or that was just plainreactive.
(03:53):
Had you thought more about it,you maybe wouldn't have said it.
Along the journey of usfiguring out how to help you
respond with integrity and totruly respond in a way that puts
your kids first and protectsyour own mental health, I need
you to understand and knowwhat's happening first.
That is the meat of what we aregoing to talk about today.
(04:15):
Again, as always, this is notever meant to make you feel bad.
Information is power and I wantyou to have this information
because these are well-knownpsychological concepts that we
can use.
We have the information, we usethem.
We know how and why they'reactivating you.
Then you can work a little bitquicker on managing your
(04:36):
response.
But it's hard to fix a problemthat you don't understand, as we
always talk about here.
Okay, so let's dive in.
There are a couple of verycommon responses that folks will
have when they're in astressful situation or a
traumatic, life-threatening,anxiety-producing situation.
Okay, this is neurobiological,this is the way we were made.
(04:59):
This is how we were designed ashuman being, as animals, as
evolutionary creatures, howeveryou want to explain it.
Okay, what I'm going to talkabout?
These styles of responding.
They're not actually unique toyou and, in fact, a lot of times
when I teach moms about this,they start thinking about how
they are also seeing this kindof response in their kids.
(05:21):
Okay, that's kind of the coolthing about learning about
ourselves is, when we learnabout ourselves, we also get the
chance to learn about raisinglittle people into adults.
There tends to be kind of anevolutionary response to stress,
and when I say kind of, I meanthere is.
So I want you to pictureyourself way back in olden times
(05:43):
, right?
Perhaps?
You've come across this greatland of ours in a covered wagon
and you're sitting by a campfireon the edges of the Rocky
Mountains, beautiful woods allaround you, night has fallen,
right, you just finished cookingyour elk caribou over the fire,
life is good, and you hear atwig snap in the woods.
(06:05):
Evolutionarily or biologically,your body is going to respond
to that sound a couple ofdifferent ways.
We call them the four Fs.
The first response would befreeze, okay, and so you may
freeze when you hear the soundof that twig snapping, because
(06:26):
your brain subconsciously andvery quickly is starting to
think oh my gosh, is there abear in the woods?
I better freeze so it doesn'tsee me and come eat me.
This is how primal theseinstincts are.
So freeze is the first one.
It's where you kind of getstuck, and sometimes people will
even talk about feeling theirbody freeze, get very immobile,
(06:48):
like they can't move.
They want to move but theycan't.
That is the freeze response.
Another response you could havewould be to fight.
So you may pick up a rock or Idon't know history's not really
my thing, guys but your shotgun,if those were around at the
time of covered wagons, I'm notsure, maybe because you ate an
elk, so I guess you could havehad a bow and arrow.
(07:08):
Anyways, this is the whole side.
You pick up your weapon,whatever you use to kill the elk
that you're eating, so morbidI'm not really a fan of.
Anyways, whatever you pick upyour weapon, right, and you get
ready, all of the stresshormones and adrenaline in your
body is preparing your body tofight.
You suddenly feel really strongand you get that weapon ready
(07:29):
and you're like whatever comesthrough those woods and into
this campsite, I'm going tofight it.
That's a fight response.
You may also have a similaradrenaline response that
triggers you to flee.
Okay, so that's the third F wehave done freeze, fight and flee
.
Flee is you're running.
(07:49):
You hear that twig snap andyou're like I gotta book it out
of here.
We're getting gone, we gottarun, we gotta get away from this
bear as fast as we possibly can.
That is how we're going to staysafe.
And then there's somethingcalled the fawn response.
So this would be again with thebear metaphor.
The twig snapping is a bear.
(08:09):
It comes into the site and youget your eyes really wide and
you get down low and you makeyour cute little like I'm a cute
little baby, don't hurt me,kind of a cuteness response or a
fawning response that thenhelps you seem less appealing to
a predator that's called thefawn.
(08:29):
So the four major responses arefight, flight, freeze and fawn
right.
These responses that are verynormal for human behavior have
come out of an evolutionarytactic to keep oneself safe in a
(08:50):
life-threatening situation.
Today, what we're talking aboutis how do these responses show
up and how does this apply toco-parenting?
You need to really understandthem first before I go into how
it applies to what we're talkingabout today.
Many of you have left traumatic, conflictual, difficult
(09:12):
dynamics.
In some cases you have beenphysically hurt.
In sometimes some cases therehave been traumatic events,
let's just say, that haveoccurred with your co-parent.
In other cases it's more of aslow build as in over time we've
gotten to a place where you arestressed out and having a
(09:34):
stress response, if not afull-on traumatic response, to
interacting with this person.
And so how do these things showup when you're co-parenting
with a difficult ex, whether ornot you've had an actual
traumatic experience with thisperson, which, unfortunately, a
lot of the moms that I work withhave right and so I'm not
(09:55):
minimizing that.
But I'm also saying sometimes,when you've had a long history
of getting triggered by someone,we will start to see these
patterns show up.
How does this concept of the seethese patterns show up?
How does this concept of thefour Fs show up in co-parenting
In particular, reallyconflictual co -parenting.
Let's take fight.
Fight's probably the easiestone to understand.
(10:17):
So you get that message, youget that alert on your app and
your response would be somethinglike I'm gonna fire back, I'm
gonna escal fire back, I'm goingto escalate this, I'm going to
really get into trying to provemy point.
It gets really, really heatedreally fast.
You're like those are fightingwords and I'm fighting back.
Buddy boy, a lot of times thiscomes from a place of you're not
(10:38):
going to push me around anymore, like that's not happening.
No, thank you Again.
It's not a judgment, it just isan important pattern to
understand.
Then we have our folks that aredoing the flight response.
What does this look like?
So this might look like youavoid, you're withdrawing,
you're not even responding, andsometimes I do coach moms to not
(10:59):
respond.
You do not need to respond allthe time.
This is presuming it issomething you should respond to
and so you just really don't.
You just like kind of ostrichit bury your head in the sand
Like I'm going to pretend, likethis isn't an issue.
Then we have the freeze.
Freeze and flight can look verysimilar in regards to
communication.
So if we're not talking aboutactually physically leaving the
(11:21):
room with your ex, which wouldbe flight and freeze, which
would just be like where youkind of just tense up and don't
say anything at all, it's alittle bit different with
communication because flight andfreeze can look really similar.
Freeze and flight the wayyou're going to differentiate
them is really more of what itfeels like internally for you.
When you freeze, you go blank.
Your mind kind of just goesblank.
(11:43):
You can't really think it feelslike.
You can't think I should sayit's really hard to make a
decision.
You may kind of stall, even ifyou know the right decision or
the right response, and so again, it's an internal experience
that feels different.
The flee response is I would doanything to just not ever have
to respond to that, where thefreeze response is I should do
(12:04):
something, I need to dosomething, and then not being
able to kind of formulate thewords if that makes sense the
fawn response.
And the reason I bring this oneup is because it's really
interesting in high conflictco-parenting Because what ends
up happening is one personreally becomes kind of a doormat
for lack of better words overlycompliant, overly accommodating
(12:28):
, maybe really trying toover-explain or trying to really
smooth things over, reallyreally wanting to make sure that
this person isn't mad at you.
You may have different topicsmay bring out different
responses in you, and Iencourage you, in your own
therapeutic settings or in yourjournal kind of, where you're
working things out, to reallyexplore why that is, because
(12:49):
there probably is a reason,journal kind of where you're
working things out to reallyexplore why that is because
there probably is a reason.
However, I just want you tokind of understand the basics of
this, really think about whatyour style is across different
areas that might come up.
What is really important foryou to know and what I want you
to take away from this is thatyou really can't always control
your first reaction.
It's gonna happen.
It's probably already happening, I'm sure it's happened for
(13:13):
years and your feelings areimportant and they're good
information for you, and sotrying to control how you react
or that first initial reactionis gonna be really difficult,
right?
If you are someone that justyou know that you kind of go
into a fawn response, it's notvery helpful for you to spend a
(13:35):
lot of time trying to undo that.
But what is helpful is for youto learn to acknowledge it and
recognize that like oh, I almostalways respond this way.
And then learning how to workwith that response style before
you send that message back,before you get overly like no,
no, it's fine.
(13:55):
If we're talking about the fawnresponse, you can see like, oh,
I'm doing it again.
And then here are the toolsthat I have to work with that.
Before I respond, your firststep is to name what it is
that's happening.
Again, we talk all the timeabout how this is a parallel to
raising kids, when we'reteaching them about their
(14:16):
emotions, when we're teachingthem about their responses.
Our first trick it's not even atrick.
The first thing you always dois you name what you're seeing.
You look upset.
I'm noticing that.
I really want to fight backright now.
That would be an example of myown naming of a response.
And then I want you to thinkabout the tools, and if you
don't have these tools, thereare so many ways that you can
(14:38):
get them.
There's also this reallywonderful resource within the
Kids First community, we havethe communication bootcamp.
The whole first day of thatit's spread out over three days
and the whole first day we talkreally in depth about fight,
flight, freeze and fawn, andthen I give you the tools on how
to respond in those situations.
(14:59):
So there's a lot of ways thatyou can work with it once you
understand what's happening foryou.
So it's not about being perfectevery time.
It's about noticing patternsand working within those
patterns and then developingyour set of tools for how you
can respond.
I would also encourage you andit's always helpful to do this
(15:21):
just in general with parentingbut if you're not sure what your
style is, to kind of reach outand ask some close friends what
do you notice happens for mewhen I get a message from
so-and-so?
What do you think is myresponse?
I just heard this podcast andI'm curious what you think as
someone who loves me and knowsme.
It's not about being perfect.
It's not about getting it rightevery time.
(15:41):
The first step is starting tounderstand it, so that you can
then work on being less reactiveto it.
If you're thinking, all right,I can kind of get behind this.
I want to understand my style.
I now know that I respond inthis way, but what do I do
instead?
That is exactly what we coverinside of the High Conflict
(16:02):
Communication Bootcamp, which,by the way, is only $19 and is
well worth your time.
We go way beyond just namingthese four experiences and I
teach you how to recognize thepatterns in real time and give
you the tools to work with it.
The boot camp is three short,very powerful lessons designed
for moms just like you, justlike everything we do in the
(16:24):
Kids First community how youcommunicate.
As always, you can find thatlink in the show notes, and I
can't wait to see you inside.
Come find me on social media.
We're across all platforms.
As always, leave a review.
If you got something excitingout of this podcast or learned
something new, I'd love for youto share it and spread the word.
(16:44):
I am so happy to have you aspart of our community here.
If you have any questions, sendthem to me online.
I'm happy to answer them.
I'll see you soon.
Thanks for being here.
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