Building on McDougall’s ideas, Cannon (1915) 5 wrote his landmark book, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage, describing the bodily changes that occurred in the context of emotional excitement. 2, 3 Writing in 1908, McDougall 4 described the various instinctual behaviors that accompanied the emotions of fear, anger, and disgust. Positive emotions promote social-engagement behaviors, whereas negative emotions, many of which are activated by threat, invoke defense responses. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin 1 argued that human expressions of emotion resembled those of lower animals and that emotions are adaptive because they prompt action responses that are beneficial to the organism.

The process of shifting the neural pattern is the necessary first step in unlocking the patient’s trauma response, in breaking the cycle of suffering, and in helping the patient to adapt to, and overcome, past trauma. Effective interventions aim to activate or deactivate one or more components of the signature neural pattern, thereby producing a shift in the neural pattern and, with it, in mind-body state. Understanding the signature patterns of these innate responses-the particular components that combine to yield the given pattern of defense-is important for developing treatment interventions. Unlike animals, which generally are able to restore their standard mode of functioning once the danger is past, humans often are not, and they may find themselves locked into the same, recurring pattern of response tied in with the original danger or trauma.

Each of these defense reactions has a distinctive neural pattern mediated by a common neural pathway: activation and inhibition of particular functional components in the amygdala, hypothalamus, periaqueductal gray, and sympathetic and vagal nuclei. Arousal is the first step in activating the defense cascade flight or fight is an active defense response for dealing with threat freezing is a flight-or-fight response put on hold tonic immobility and collapsed immobility are responses of last resort to inescapable threat, when active defense responses have failed and quiescent immobility is a state of quiescence that promotes rest and healing. Evolution has endowed all humans with a continuum of innate, hard-wired, automatically activated defense behaviors, termed the defense cascade.

Fight flight freeze fawn cptsd