Understand your fight and flight behaviours

Understanding your fight and flight go to behaviours is important for healing. An awareness of how you behave when your fight or flight is activated can help you improve your responses when you sit with your triggers.

If you are triggered, observe your common behaviour. We all have something we tend to do to soothe ourselves.

Some people are prone to anxiety and aggression and therefore take action to fix. Others will retreat into passive-aggressive mode, recoil and shut down.

One significant go-to behaviour to observe is the habit of getting into public spaces, social media or wanting to be around people when triggered.

Remember,

You cannot listen to yourself in noisy spaces. When you are not in the right frame of mind you can bleed on others.

Venting is not a long term healthy solution to manage triggers either, if you have the tendency to want to talk it out. Most of the time when you vent you expect other people to agree with you. This results in useless advice.

Your communication might be reactive when you feel triggered or activated. It can be attention seeking or passive-aggressive or even aggressive.

You might use people as crutches because you cannot sit with your discomfort.

You might take everything personally. You might project, or react at people or things, even when something is not directed at you.

When you do not sit down to reflect on how you are feeling, you might end up being abusive towards others because the emotions need an outlet.

In other words, your self-abuse lead you to abuse others.

On the other hand, if you go inwards without reflecting on your trigger, you might end up getting depressed. You might punish yourself with negative emotions.

In both cases some people might indulge in addictive substances and behaviours.

The idea is to sit with your discomfort, and understand what you are feeling, why you feel it and what you can do to soothe yourself with five love languages and five senses, reframing and creating solutions.

Understand your fight and flight behaviours and the warning signs you are about to behave in that way. Sit with your triggers and give yourself quality time and attention. Observe the sensations, images, feelings and thoughts. Ask yourself why you are feeling as you are and what you can do about it differently. Find healthy ways to address how you are feeling by self-parenting.

Repeat this exercise with each trigger and practice self-care daily. This helps you to familiarise yourself with your common triggers and the unmet needs behind them. It also reduces impact of triggers and their recurrence .