What are your Survival Strategies?

In this episode, I go over what "survival strategies" are, how to start to understand ourselves more by knowing what our personal survival strategies are, and how to begin to approach our trauma with self-compassion.

As I mention in this episode, you can download my guide on survival strategies for BIPOC called Moving Beyond Survival with Self-compassion for free!

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Transcript

Hey everyone! Welcome back to the KAI YIN Spells & Skills podcast! It is officially Aries season and spring over here, and yeah I’m feeling it, it’s nice! That transition from winter to spring, it can be pretty rocky and that energy of Aries is the warrior, that fighting spark of life that propels us into existence. And what better time to chat about this episode’s topic: survival strategies. So today we’ll be talking about what survival strategies are, and how to recognize to our personal signs of when we’re in our survival mode. In other episodes we’ll talk about what to do about it, when you notice it happening. But the first step is to be able to notice it and name it, so that’s what we’re going to be getting into today. 

 1:00

So why is it important for us to understand our survival strategies? For generations many of us, especially BIPOC, we’ve survived many dimensions of violence and systemic oppression in both personal and collective ways. I’m thinking about institutions like the legal system, primary and higher education, access to land, healthcare, workplaces, etc. and most of us are constantly navigating environments that were created to exclude or exploit us. Despite that, we still continue to exist, and sometimes thrive, against all odds, and that’s incredible. At the same time, the impacts of being constantly in that survival mode, it’s also worn us down mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. I’m sure many folks are resonating with that right now, especially these days. Even on the best of days even just navigating heteropatriarchal, white supremacist systems, capitalism, colonialism… it turns out it’s quite stressful! So while I do believe our survival strategies, whatever they are, are brilliant because they have kept us alive, and I also believe that existing to survive is not enough. We deserve to grow and flourish in our lifetimes. 

 2:37

So just starting off with what are survival strategies? So when we live through life threatening or emotionally disturbing experiences that go unprocessed, we end up experiencing trauma. So traumatic experiences end up staying with us, often because in these moments we lack the choice to exercise our agency or return to a sense of safety. So what ends up happening is that part of us remains prepared for danger, or otherwise known as “survival mode”. Meanwhile, the emotions and the sensations that went with those traumatic experiences, they remain stored in our bodies, in our nervous systems. They are stuck waiting for that opportunity to feel safe again. 

Survival strategies are automatic instinctual reactions we developed in trying to protect ourselves from emotional distress and harm during traumatic experiences. So when we’re in survival mode, our body, emotions, and thoughts will organize themselves in several different styles of survival strategies. Of course keep in mind our bodies, cultures, and personalities are diverse so take these examples with a grain of salt and adapt it to your situation. Each survival strategy generally has a purpose, specific emotions that go with it, and how it shows up in our bodies. 

The first one is called “Attach/Cry” and this is a strategy where the purpose is to call for help, and staying to a caregiver or others for safety, and the emotion that may go with this a sense of neediness, a desire to stay close to a safe person, and in our bodies this may show up as tension in our throat, vocalizing, reaching arms, or our torso may be leaning towards another person. 

The second one is called “Flight” and maybe you’ve already heard of this one. The purpose of this strategy is to react to danger by fleeing the situation. The emotion that may go with this is a sense of wanting to escape and in our bodies this may show up as a tension in either the lower body or legs, there might be an impulse to run, or looking for exits, or an impulse to distract ourselves.

The third one is “Fight” and the purpose of this strategy is to react to danger when fleeing isn’t an option. So the emotions that may go with this are vigilance, rage, and fear. In our bodies, this may show up as tension in our muscles such as our hands, sometimes finding them in fists, or we’ll suddenly have narrowed vision, like tension in the eyes, there may be an elevated heartrate or getting sweaty, and typically there’s rapid breathing. 

The fourth strategy is called “Freeze” and the purpose of this strategy is to await the opportunity to escape. The emotions that may go with this are terror and some dissociation, and in our bodies this may show up as panic, rigidity. So if you image the “deer in the headlights” kind of look, our heartrate is going to be significantly high even though we might be really rigid and still. And we may also experience as well some hyperventilation. In freeze, this is the place where we’re both in that in between of immobilized and mobilized. We’re almost deciding, are we able to do something that is going to seek help elsewhere from another person or in the environment by leaving?, or are we going to use our muscles and try to defend ourselves?. Or in terms of the immobilized responses, which we’ll talk about in one second, which are strategies we have to use by staying where we are, and they have a lot more to do with what we’re doing inside of ourselves to manage that overwhelm.

The fifth strategy is called "Fawn/Appease". The purpose of this strategy is to avoid harm by avoiding conflict. So the emotion may go with this is a general sense of disconnection from our own emotions and needs, we’re really oriented to the other person, and in our bodies this may show up as a hypersensitivity to the other person’s emotional state, really noticing a lot of perhaps details about the other person, maybe their eyes, the tone of their voice… and we’re shifting our behaviours so that we can avoid conflict with the other as much as possible. 

Finally the last one is called "Shut Down". This is a strategy where the purpose is, basically we’re preparing for harm in some kind of way, so there’s a going to be a numbing out to minimize to anticipated pain or harm. The emotions that may go with this are shame and depression, and in our bodies this may show up as flaccid muscles, hypoventilation – so that’s when we’re breathing, sort of barely breathing, really shallow, we’re still breathing but it’s almost like there isn’t really a rise and fall happening within our bodies. And we may also be feeling like our heartrate is significantly low, and often with shut down, there’s a stillness that goes with it – it isn’t like the stillness with freeze where we’re rigid but there’s a lot going on, our heartrate is high, we’re maybe looking around – this is a stillness that’s very in a way quiet because of our low heartrate and we’re not even sometimes conscious of our own thoughts, everything just kind of goes quiet.

9:39

So these are just some examples of some of the common survival strategies, these are six of the common ones. There are so many ways of describing survival strategies, there are so many variations, and often we’ll have more than one or just a few, sometimes they change depending on the environment, the situation, of course, the people you’re with – some folks make us feel really safe, and others do not – so it depends on your situation how these survival strategies show up for you. In terms of the prompt for this episode, I wanted to invite folks to think: were there any survival strategies you heard that you could relate to and as you’re thinking about what resonates with you and what doesn’t, I wanted to invite to think as well in a way that’s self-compassionate. So knowing that, ok, we do these things because we don’t feel safe, and recognizing whatever they may be, it’s part of the way that we’re wired humans and it shows up in different ways, not always because we want to. There’s definitely still space of course in terms of accountability… you know we don’t want to just excuse the things we do when we’re in survival when they’re harmful to others; but at the same time it’s important to approach understanding ourselves at this level with some self-compassion, with some openness to know like ok now that I can name these things, I’m going to try to notice them more, I’m going to try to shift them with support and those are some things we’ll be talking about in future episodes as well. 

I also wanted to mention that if this topic resonated with you, I created a free guide to “Moving Beyond Survival with Self-compassion” mainly for BIPOC folks. You can download your copy by signing up on my website, it’s on the homepage, or my Instagram bio to get the link.  

In this beginner’s guide, I go through what trauma is, what survival strategies are, and how taking a self-compassionate approach to understanding your patterns can begin to create more space for transformation and possibility in your life and relationships. My hope with this guide is to help you to start to notice your automatic reactions and past experiences with care, and imagine new ways you can move through the world feeling grounded and whole.