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A Defense of The Fawn Response
What the Somatic and Trauma Fields are Missing
In the somatic, trauma and nervous system regulation field, practitioners are taught that fight, flight and freeze are the three fundamental, hardwired human stress responses. Fight and flight are sympathetic and movement-oriented, self-protective motor programs designed to do things and get us places. Parasympathetic freeze causes stillness, hiding, waiting, disappearing, contracting, dissociating and collapsing.
A UCLA study by Taylor, et al, published in 2000 by the American Psychological Association, argues for an additional stress response, called “tend-and-befriend.” The authors “propose this theory as a biobehavioral alternative to the fight-or-flight response…which has dominated stress research of the past 5 decades and has been disproportionately based on studies of males.” In reference to tend-and-befriend, the APA dictionary of psychology states, “Neuroendocrinal evidence from research on both human and nonhuman animals suggests an underlying physiological mechanism mediated by oxytocin and moderated by female sex hormones and opioid peptide mechanisms.”
In this study, tend-and-befriend behaviors include “caring for offspring under stressful circumstances, joining social groups to reduce vulnerability, and contributing to the development of social groupings, especially those…
