Fight Or Flight Response In Relationships: Chasing & Running Away from Love
What does the fight or flight response in relationships look like?
The fight or flight response in relationships manifests in various ways and can differ from person to person. When triggered, some individuals may exhibit a fight response by becoming defensive, argumentative, or confrontational. They may engage in power struggles, constant criticism, or verbal aggression as a way to protect themselves. On the other hand, the flight response can cause individuals to withdraw, avoid confrontation, or emotionally shut down. They may distance themselves, become emotionally unavailable, or even end the relationship abruptly to escape perceived threats or discomfort. Understanding these responses can help navigate relationship challenges with empathy and develop healthier coping strategies.
Both the anxiously attached and the avoidantly attached person fear abandonment.
So much of this topic dips into codependency issues that are tricky to navigate to say the least! We’ll try to tackle some basics here to start. The fight or flight response in relationships is rooted in our instinctual survival mechanisms. When faced with perceived threats, whether real or imagined, our bodies and minds prepare to either confront or escape the situation. In the context of relationships, this response can be triggered by various factors such as conflicts, emotional vulnerability, or a fear of intimacy.
Have you ever experienced a relationship where you were forced headlong into your abandonment wound from childhood? The person reacts to you the way a caregiver did when you were young, sending you into a fight or flight response. This is mirroring on steroids, supremely painful, and a huge growth opportunity if you are ready for it.
Often, we tend to want to avoid the pain we feel from being re-traumatized (triggered into an emotional flashback), so we either run totally away from the person who triggered us (we flee) or we charge after them (we fight). Either way, we are actually running from the trauma and pain that we are afraid to re-experience. Why do we chase after or run from people who trigger us in this way? Well, there are good reasons for this, actually
First, our nervous systems are used to chasing after love or running from it. It is likely that we have been doing one or both of these reactions since birth. It is all based on attachment styles. Sometimes, the fight reaction (the chasing) can also become a fawning reaction whereby we start to please and appease the ones we are chasing. We want them to love us and approve of us, so we “try” to get them to pay attention, and think we are smart, beautiful, athletic, or talented in some way. The person who runs away from love is someone who deeply fears being engulfed and trapped by love. Also, if they love too much, they could be at risk of being abandoned again, which is obviously very terrifying. At the heart of it all, both attachment styles fear abandonment.
Chasing love is related to a person who has an anxious/ambivalent (Preoccupied) attachment style. When a child is neglected or abandoned, or his caregivers are inconsistent with their attention—sometimes responsive and loving and sometimes rejecting—the child’s nervous system becomes hypervigilant. The child doesn’t know which end is up, and they cannot trust that their survival needs will be met. As you might be able to guess, this creates a deep feeling of neediness, anxiety, and insecurity in the child and, until healed, lasts their entire lives.
There is a push-pull dynamic that happens with this attachment style. This person has a sensitive nervous system, might come across as either clingy or possibly even rejecting, and does not trust themselves. The way this person “fights” for love is by going above and beyond to please people, seems very dependent and desperate for love and approval, becomes codependent, can become aggressive at times (pushy or bossy), crosses boundaries, and seeks attention and validation from their love relationships. They need their relationship to help them know that they are worthy. They might come across as emotionally insecure, and this is simply because they are constantly being re-activated into feeling unsafe in their nervous systems. They continually attract the kinds of people who will re-trigger this fear/fight reaction. These types often are attracted to avoidantly-attached or addicted partners who cannot meet their needs due to escaping from their own wounds. So, the anxiously-attached person re-experiences being abandoned over and over again.
The person who runs away from love has more of an avoidant-attachment style. They dismiss the importance of love, become very self-reliant, and are not able to be emotionally vulnerable. They might also be fearful of love, they strongly fear rejection, and they have low self-worth. This happens when their caregivers are emotionally unavailable or even rejecting of them. This child learns that their needs will not be met so they make a decision on some level not to need anyone. But they actually do need others and they do want and crave love. They fear abandonment deeply because they were neglected and not cared for as children when they needed love, attention, and care. As an adult, when love comes knocking, the avoidant flees from emotional attachment to love. They keep everything on a surface level, are very independent, and can also feel anxious or afraid of getting too close to someone they could potentially love because it triggers their fear that they might need the person and that the person might leave them. So, they don’t even “go there” emotionally. However, they are actually very dependent on their love relationships and can become codependent, too, just like the anxiously-attached person can become. This person has likely loved deeply but was either betrayed by love or was not able to show the love they felt and was then rejected and abandoned by their loved one who, in turn, felt abandoned by them.
Chasing is draining on all parties involved.
What a roller coaster! How can anyone be in a happy, healthy relationship with all this running and chasing going on? Well, it can be done. First and foremost, and as with everything, self-awareness is key here. Figuring out your attachment style and looking closely at your patterns can help you move out of this dynamic for good. Once we have really gone back to those anchors (original traumas) and processed them, we can start to see how there is another choice. We don’t have to continue re-experiencing pain through abandonment and rejection. We don’t have to cling to people who run from us or can’t help us feel secure. This is just us trying to get from others the love and attention we need from our caregivers.
This is our own personal journey and looked at closely, this is also how we can know that loving ourselves first and fully is the only way to have true love. When we love ourselves, we never settle for anything less than the love we know we can have (since we can now give it to ourselves). We don’t need to be attached to emotionally unavailable people if we choose not to be. Releasing from emotional attachment is healthy. Too much emotional attachment to anyone or anything is a recipe for disaster. Loving from a space of non-attachment is more peaceful and allows others to come forward and love us in their own time. The avoidantly-attached person needs to trust love; when an anxiously-attached person chases them for love, it can scare them. The anxiously-attached person needs to realize that when they love an avoidantly-attached person, it can simply be meant as a catalyst for their deeper healing. It surely is not the job of anyone else to do what our primary caregivers were supposed to do for us way back when.
With all things, we’ll start healing with loving ourselves and others.
Without a doubt, we did need to feel secure from birth, and if we didn’t get it from our caregivers, then we have to give it to ourselves now or get some help from others who can help us become more securely attached. Someone who is securely attached is a person who views themselves with a healthy self-concept, is confident, resolves conflict and communicates in a healthy way, has healthy boundaries with others, and who can have and maintain a connection with someone consistently. We can all become securely attached as adults. This can happen relationally with a love partner with a secure attachment style and through working with a therapist or a coach. Going back to that initial trauma and reframing it and changing the meaning of why it happened and, more importantly, how you defined yourself as a result of your caregivers’ responsiveness or lack thereof, is the way to move past the trauma and get onto a healthier and happier neural and life pathway.
Additionally, it should not be assumed that a grown person naturally or automatically outgrows this need they had as a baby to be nurtured and cared for. However, they find myriad ways to pretend that this attachment trauma has not impacted them. It is normal in our world for us to try and come across as though we are healthy and never had any trauma. After all, no one wants to seem less than or different, right? The truth is that most of us are traumatized in big and small ways as children. It comes down from past generations from people who did not have the parenting know-how or were abused or traumatized themselves and, as a result, wounded their children. Once you can really be somewhat okay with what happened to you as a child or at least know what happened and are ready to move forward, you can put an end to generational trauma, which only helps your children and their children to be happier people and our world to be a more peaceful place.
Understanding that the only part of the brain that was developed at birth was the brain stem, which is the most primitive part of the brain, can help too. Higher level brain functioning develops over the length of a child’s life and is mostly developed at about age 24. A baby’s brain does not develop normally when early life attachment ruptures are created and not repaired by the caregivers. So, if you run into people or are a person who is anxious, or avoidantly attached, please go easy on them or yourself. There is room for compassion here. You don’t need to get involved with someone who is not secure in themselves because that is not self-loving for you to do unless you know the one you love is ready to heal their attachment issues. But, you can also open your heart and realize that people don’t want to feel anxiety about love or run away.
We all want to be loved. People who have been traumatized from early on did not know this was happening to them. How could they? They were babies. And many adults do not realize they are acting out their attachment patterning until they have run around this track hurting and being hurt by others a few hundred times or so. (Or many more!) Patterns can be hard to see and break, so please be gentle with your fellow humans who are doing their best, just like you are.
As with everything else, the best way to love and to be loved is to love yourself first. Recognizing the fight or flight response in relationships is the best step towards reassessing your interpersonal relationships and boundaries!
If you need help becoming more secure in yourself and want to move past your trauma, please contact me to schedule a free one-hour coaching session to see how I can serve you in your healing journey.
