What a week.
Do you think I’ll ever start one of my pieces differently during these four years? I’m not sure, but either way, I’m okay with beginning in that truth each Friday.
I actually believe we have to start with that truth — that what’s going on right now is awful, and that it is hard to be human. When we start here, we can always begin anchored in kindness, and recognition of our fight.
Disclaimer: my entire life has been full of both joy and pain. The following piece details my life in different states of survival. Please know this wasn’t the whole story of my life. My life has been and forever will be one of spectacular duality where the joy and meaning coexist with the pain and hardship. And that is why, always, I live and fervently believe I live a beautiful life.
I didn’t know how to be kind to myself for a very long time.
As a child, I could always be kind to others, even my bullies. But somehow, when it came to me, I did not know how to live kindly with myself.
Anytime I was told I wasn’t good enough, needed to do more, had to try harder, my brain — primed and constantly looking for threats — internalized what my teachers and parents said as gospel.
OK… I must work harder… They must know the way, this must be how I survive…
No matter how hard I worked, it didn’t help. I still felt like I didn’t belong, was unlovable, and doomed to be alone, and forever broken.
Now, thanks to the work I’ve done learning about the nervous system and myself these past years, I see that living in survival mode for decades was the source of so much pain and so many of the behaviors that were diagnosed as mental illness throughout my life.
Today I want to share those experiences — a part of my map of survival — as a way of helping explain how the brilliant, often misunderstood nervous system is the thread that ran through it all.
A Childhood in “Fight or Flight”
A Second Disclaimer: What you’re about to read is one of the most privileged experiences of childhood trauma; I have two incredibly loving and well-intended parents who did every single thing in their power to help me as best they could; what was considered beyond the “gold standard” for care for a neurodivergent girl with a learning disability at the time. Please also know I love them dearly, and (even though I don’t need to say it), there was nothing to forgive. And if there was, I forgive it all — because I wouldn’t be here writing this without everything they afforded me through tutoring, access to care, and love, so much love.
When I was small, my first instinct was to fight against whatever pain came my way, especially the stress and the pressure to be “normal” (when I so clearly was not).
At home, I’d often take on my parents. Our fights were so chaotic back then that my elder sister couldn’t even tolerate watching them. Just this week she described a memory she has of me struggling to learn to read.
“You were just writhing on the bed. Writhing — like you were being physically tortured. I couldn’t even watch. It hurt to watch, so I’d leave. All I know is when I came back, you’d have stopped screaming and with tears streaming down your face, you’d be trying to read again.”
Those tantrums were my nervous system in a state of “fight” — or sympathetic activation. When learning to read was SO hard, the struggle itself felt life-threatening. These tantrums were my body’s way to keep me myself. And even though my parents were loving and well-intended in their relentless tutoring, my body still perceived it as an existential-level threat.
But fighting wasn’t my only escape. There was also “flight” mode. Taking off. Hiding. Running. Doing anything to get away from the threats in front of me, especially when the chaos of my neurodivergent mind took over.
When my thoughts raced and feelings swallowed me whole, I’d often run to the pantry (or if at school, the teacher’s lounge) and grab all the sugary treats I could find before hiding in a closet and inhaling whatever I’d found: cookies, marshmallows, chocolate chips. There, I would eat and eat and eat, trying to suffocate my feelings and until the pain in my distended stomach overtook the pain in my soul.
And yet, no matter how hard I fought or how far I ran, I still could not find a sense of safety.
But the entire time I was struggling, my nervous system kept problem-solving — unbeknownst to me.
Pushed into “Freeze” and “Fawn”
Soon after, my body then discovered the “fawn” and “freeze” states. And they were my fallback, always.
Fawning is often called “people pleasing” but there’s more underneath. It can look like making yourself smaller, gentler, and kinder in moments of deep fear. It can also look like overhauling your personality, behavior, and entire sense of self to please others, which was the case with me.
For me, this showed up in so many different ways over the years.
In childhood, it looked like doing schoolwork that physically hurt, so my parents would love me. Then it looked like serving as a kind of therapist to teachers, adults, and peers at the very real cost of my own wellbeing. In my teenage years, it looked like anorexia and dismissing my bisexuality entirely. And by college, when I thought I would finally have a fresh start, it looked like agreeing with my doctors and their endless roster of medications so that I could avoid a 90-day hold in a locked psychiatric unit.
Fawning behavior is often mischaracterized as a choice — or even a manipulation. But the truth of the matter is that in survival mode, the prefrontal cortex is fully offline. These were survival instincts, not conscious choices. And it’s one of the most stubbornly wired neural pathways I have.
But our nervous systems are clever geniuses, so when even that didn’t work, next came “freeze.”
Freeze is where I lived after everything else failed, where dissociation stole my body from me and the world became a ghost town. Freeze — the survival state where playing dead is the only option left — was how I survived a decade of intermittent psychosis, repeated hospitalizations and sexual assaults, and the isolation and terror that followed. (I won’t go into too much detail here, as I’ve written about some of this in my memoir here on Substack already).
By the end of it all, I had lived massive chunks of my life on every level of survival mode. And still, my body was hurtling toward collapse, constantly under stress, never able to shift into the “rest and repair” mode of the parasympathetic nervous system, that we all so desperately need.
So there, in the malaise of exhaustion and complete and utter burnout, I kept pushing. I kept chugging coffee. I kept doing exposure therapy. I kept working, working, working — just as I had done when I was a little girl — with tears streaming down my cheeks.
I kept thinking: just work harder… that must be the secret…
Finally, “Fugue”
My body – not knowing how else to communicate that I needed to make some massive changes in my life — then launched a new survival state: the neural pathway of dissociative fugue.
In Latin, fugue means to flee. And in our current limited understanding of the experience, dissociative fugue is the nervous system’s way of literally severing the body’s connection with time, place, and identity. It’s a psychological response that only the most extreme trauma survivors experience. It’s extremely rare, and shows up more often when war, natural disasters or other extreme stressors are present.
When I come to after a fugue state, I don’t know how I got there or what happened. Time is lost. I’ve woken up in a forest, in an ocean, in places as far as two states away, or as close as just a few steps down my road, having no idea what led me there.
Very little science has been done on this at all (given how few of us there are), but one thing is clear: for some of us, these fugue states are the final option when all other survival options have failed.
Now, I don’t share this for pity, or even attention. I share this because I have finally come to understand the patterns that were driving my existence for the last 38 years. I finally now see that I was actually living in survival mode for all that time — which means I lived without full access to my pre-frontal cortex. I had no true agency for all those years.
That is not okay. And I do not, under any circumstances, want that to happen to anyone else, if I can help it.
And most importantly: there is a way out.
Exercise: Honoring Your Survival Modes
Before we move into deeper conversations about healing, I believe it’s necessary to first honor this brilliant part of ourselves, and the very survival it ensured.
The nervous system isn’t a stress center to be “hacked” or “regulated” away — it’s a full life alert system that does its best to keep us alive when life gets extremely difficult, or even impossible.
To start, it helps to simply notice how our nervous system tries to keep us safe. To note how these survival modes aren’t flaws — they’re the body’s best attempts to protect us.
This week, if you’re up to it after reading ALL OF THAT (oof), take a few minutes to jot down the ways you recognize and honor the survival modes in yourself:
When you feel under threat, do you get sharp, loud, or ready for a fight?
Do you find yourself wanting to run, escape, or distract?
Have you noticed moments when you work hard to please, smooth things over, or make yourself smaller?
Do you ever feel frozen — stuck, blank, or unable to move forward?
💜 There’s no right or wrong answer here. Just notice. 💜
And if you want to share (zero pressure) you can share your responses here, where we will always honor your wishes as to confidentiality and anonymity.
By naming these states, you begin to trace the patterns of your own survival — and begin to build your own map.
Even just noticing this, itself, is a form of bravery and care.
And with that, I’m off to frolic in the leaves with my two girls before heading to Harvard for the massive event I spent the last six months building out. EEK!!! Allll the nerves and big feelings!! More on that event in two weeks probably, because I will be sleeping relentlessly afterwards as I recover in bed watching alllll the teen television.
With love, I wish you a day.
Kindly,
Kate
If you’re just joining us, we are currently in Week 3 of our exploration of the Nervous System. If you’d like to catch up on the previous posts, they’re here:
Next week, we’ll share a handful of easy ways to start connecting with (and befriending!) your brilliant, beautiful nervous system.
Thank you for being here. 💜