Welcome back to this series on the stress responses. Our hope is to untangle the web of confusion that has been spun surrounding these responses, and to demystify this innate human ability that we all possess and experience regularly. Our last two articles explored the freeze response—you learned how to recognize the differing stages of the freeze response in both Big T (catastrophic events), and Little T/social (equally important series of events, that happen over a period of time) experiences, and how to move through it.  In this article we are going to explore the fight or flight responses, and what better way to explore this than by examining the classic slasher film, Halloween.

TRIGGER WARNING: This blog may be triggering for some to read. While the situations discussed are hypothetical, and taken from a classic horror film, it may be dysregulating for some readers.

We learned in the first article that yelling obscenities at the TV screen during slasher films is to no avail. The victim’s nervous system has completely taken over and thrown them into the freeze/collapse/flop response. They physically cannot make the conscious decision that we all swear up and down that we would make if we were thrown into that same situation. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you likely would not grab any of the number of objects laying within arms reach to protect yourself with. Your body will probably release any functions it’s holding onto to reserve energy for survival. You can use your imagination as to what these functions might be….I see your wheels turning…..what might it be….ahhhh, yes those are the ones. There’s a reason for the saying “You scared the _______ or ______ out of me!” Oh yes, and this can happen during several of the stress responses.

So, while you are screaming and yelling at poor Laurie Strode when she first spots her adversary it is actually YOUR body that has gone into fight mode. Wait a minute Autumn, I am sitting at home on my couch watching a movie, why would I go into fight mode? Great question! It is because the nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real and a perceived threat. As you’re watching Michael stalk after his victims, your body is releasing stress hormones like cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, which are making changes in your body on a physiological level.

Pay attention next time, how did your posture change? I bet you are sitting more upright and leaning towards the TV. What do your muscles feel like? I’d be willing to guess they are tense. What are your arms doing? Hmmm….they aren’t flailing towards the TV are they? How about your mouth, do you find you need a drink soon after calling poor innocent Laurie every name in the book, and boasting about how you definitely would not run up the stairs, because obviously there’s no way out, or how you would pick up that fireplace poker just there to her right. 

Okay, okay, wait a second. So, Laurie is running, and I am sitting on my couch in fight mode? It sounds like she is in flight, while I am in fight, but she is the one in danger, what is going on here? I understand, there are a lot of complicated nuances that go into all of this. So, let’s go to Haddonfield and take on the master of horror for ourselves.

It’s October 31st and naturally you’re asked to babysit your neighbor’s kid Tommy, because you have nothing better to do on Halloween night. You make popcorn, and reluctantly (NOT!) watch a horror flick with little Tommy (Hello foreshadowing), and now it’s bedtime (finally peace at last!). You sent Tommy up to his room to get ready for bed, you’ll be up in a minute to tuck him in.

It is likely that at this point the phone rings taking your attention away from the unlocked back door or open dining room window. You hang up the phone and notice a sudden cold breeze coming in through the dining room window. As you approach the dining room, you see the white curtain blowing in the breeze (Interesting, you could have sworn this window was just closed 30 seconds ago, but instead of listening to your gut and getting out of there, because society teaches us not to trust those gut instincts) you walk over with that confused look on your face, close and lock the window, (ummm too late BTW), and rub your arms in an attempt to warm up. Something feels “off” but you can’t put your finger on it (Ahhh, now look who is making all of those same choices we judged Laurie for), so you proceed to load the dishes into the sink before heading upstairs to tuck Tommy in for the night. 

Standing at the sink you hear movement coming from the next room. Your body immediately tenses up, your head turns towards the noise, and you’re holding your breath (you might recognize this as the startle response)—your nervous system is doing its job by scanning the environment for cues of safety or threat. Of course, we are going to talk ourselves out of whatever silly fear we have because for now you can still access the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, rational thought, decision making, and other higher order thinking functions), but that will not be the case for long.

As we continue to make those Laurie Strode decisions and approach the noise slowly (pay attention here, your body is approaching slowly but your brain is trying to rationalize, they are in conflict, and in about 20 seconds we are REALLY going to wish we listened to our body), your heartbeat is increasing and you can hear it pounding in your ears. This is a natural fear response, one of the very first changes the body makes in a threatening situation is in the inner ear. The muscles in your inner ear shift and blood flow to the ear begins to slow so that it can pick up on low frequency noises that in Paleolithic times meant danger.

As you walk through the dining room entryway you sigh in relief and smile at yourself when the room is empty. Dropping your hands to your side, and shaking your head at your dramatic over reaction, you turn back towards the kitchen to finish the dishes. As you turn, the dining room door slowly swings closed, and Mr. Myers himself is quietly standing in the corner, the knife from the sink in his hand, cocking his head slowly to the side, as he sizes you up. 

What do you do? I bet that you are not approaching him in any shape or form, I bet you start to back away, even if that means the only place you can go is up those stairs! Your nervous system takes in this 6’8” man who is holding a knife and staring at you (clearly Mikey is not here to help you finish up the chores before Tommy’s mom gets home), and it goes into the “alarm stage.”

This is when the central nervous system is awakened and causes the body’s defenses to all come online at once. Your adrenal glands release a blast of cortisol, norepinephrine, and epinephrine, which trigger a cascade of responses such as increased heart rate, increased temperature, increased respiration, and increased energy to GET YOU OUT OF DODGE!

At this same time, the prefrontal cortex, that we talked about earlier, peace’s out and goes offline, leaving you very little to NO access to rational thought and decision making—you are in survival mode and your brain stem, limbic system, and central nervous system are in charge. Anything you do next you do not have much control over, no matter how much you thought you would when you were just watching on TV. 

So, you turn and run (flight mode), because the first option for survival is to get far away from the threat. You can feel your heart pounding against your rib cage, your breathing is shallow and fast, and you may notice the warm wet stream of urine run down your leg (yea, they often leave this glamorous part out of the movie, but it’s a very real and natural reaction). Directly in front of you is that God-forsaken staircase and diagonally a bit off to your right is the front door (which we both know is locked now anyway.)

Unless you have trained for this, and laid the appropriate neuropathways in your brain, you just might find yourself running up those steps (yep, imagine that, even you are now running upstairs and leading danger directly towards poor little Tommy), but for the sake of argument, let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and say you run to the door (congratulations, the viewers watching you in this scene are cheering you on and not berating you….yet). You reach the door, stretch out your hand, turn the handle, and…. click, nothing happens. It’s locked, and you’re stuck because the 6’8” monster is within arm’s reach.  

Pause the movie. Okay, right here the nervous system is going to make a choice and it very well may choose to freeze and flop, so just keep that in mind. In this exploration, your nervous system decides to….FIGHT! As Michael reaches you and grabs your hair to pull you into his massive body, you start to fight. But this is not going to look like how you would imagine it, because remember, you have no access to the thinking part of the brain. As a matter of fact, you have probably “blacked out” or dissociated from your own heroic fight scene. Your memory becomes fragmented, and you only see flashes of images before your eyes. You might only remember random flashes of memory (all of which will likely become future trauma triggers for you).

Your fight scene will likely feel like someone just hit the slow-motion button on you (if you’ve seen Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2, he exquisitely portrays this peritraumatic dissociation during the bathroom scene with Annie), and your pain tolerance has drastically increased, in fact, you probably feel very little as you fight off the Boogeyman. Your brain is releasing excessive amounts of endorphins (the brain’s natural pain reliever) to keep you from being distracted by the pain so that you can continue to fight.

Let’s say that someone came in and saved the day and you are transported to the hospital where you can receive treatment for your wounds. Your nervous system will eventually reach homeostasis allowing your body to calm down. This could take several hours because you have to metabolize all of those hormones and neurotransmitters that were released during your fight.

While this blog post places you smack in the middle of a horror film for the sake of education, the fight response can play out like this in any catastrophic event with some nuanced differences here and there, given the context. For the next blog, we will look at how the fight response shows up in a social context and what you can do to move out of this sympathetic nervous system response and back into the safety of the ventral vagal system. 

Written by Autumn Walsh, MSW.