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Perfectionism could be a trauma response-or it could be a cultural value, or how you were raised, or even a genuinely adaptive mode to slip into for some aspects of your job. “Lots of things can affect you, and not everything is trauma,” says Ghosh. But just having these personality traits doesn’t mean much. (She also notes that trauma is a spectrum and suggests labeling someone as having had trauma is mostly useful, from her perspective, for insurance forms.) The urge to, say, flee the room during a fight or never, ever, piss off your boss might be more deeply wired-much harder to reflect on and then shake-if it comes from a place of trauma. “These things that get labeled as ‘trauma responses’ are just predictable responses to anxiety,” says Kathleen Smith, a therapist and writer. If the exact definitions of “trauma” and “trauma response” are a little tricky to sum up, you might have already guessed that not every last personality trait possessed by human beings is consistently attributable to having been through a traumatic experience. But whatever you do in response to ward off the threat-it might get baked into your nervous system as a solid, worthwhile way to handle danger, and flare up even when you are relatively safe. The specific number of F’s also depends on whom you’re talking to, even among licensed psychologists. These are the four F’s of trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn (or tend-and-befriend, depending on who you ask-Ghosh says the research community is leaning toward tend-and-befriend, but TikTok is firmly pro-fawn). You might even try to soothe and reason with the dragon. Confronted with a dragon-danger-you might run away. She shared a picture with me, danger personified: a little dragon with two heads. Perfectionism could be a trauma response-or it could be a cultural value, or how you were raised, or even a genuinely adaptive mode to slip into for some aspects of your job.įirst, what is a trauma response? Trauma is when your body learns things in a state of danger, says Chandra Ghosh, the associate director of the Child Trauma Research Program at the University of California, San Francisco. Courtney, who goes by her first name to help avoid harassment and has 340,000 followers, says she has worked in the mental health field and though she sometimes identifies herself as a therapist in videos, she does not have a license-when I press her on her credentials, she said “licensing doesn’t mean anything for mental health,” before adding, “I didn’t crawl out from under a bridge.” The “trauma response” that she is lightly diagnosing viewers with, by the way, is being a “people pleaser.” Another poses the question: “Is this your trauma response?” as text over a video made by a woman who goes by the handle Ask Courtney.

In another, she invites viewers to “put a finger down” while she lists off various behaviors to find out whether they are a good friend or if they are just stuck in a trauma response. Or the information is relayed in a trendy TikTok format-for example, in one video, Britt Piper, a “coach,” who has taken several trainings on trauma and has nearly 200,000 followers, acts out various “ trauma responses” to the soundtracks of songs from Bo Burnham’s musical comedy special Inside. The platform’s explanations for why exactly these activities might be trauma responses are usually delivered by someone claiming to be a therapist, or perhaps a “coach.” There is colorful text, and sometimes sad piano music. Being a perfectionist? You guessed it, also a possible trauma response. Getting defensive and lashing out in fights with your significant other? Trauma response. Scrolling on social media to the point where you wonder if you have a problem with scrolling? Trauma response. Overpreparing, overanalyzing, overachieving? All possible trauma responses. Struggling to make small decisions? Possible trauma response. In current TikTok parlance, almost any behavior can be a trauma response.

Trauma responses