Understanding the Types of Trauma Responses: Healing Through Awareness

Often people ask what are the 3 types of trauma responses? If you are familiar with stress, you might have heard fight or flight. These are automatic reactions driven by our, appropriately named, autonomic nervous system.

Trauma researchers, treatment providers, and survivors are often also interested in a third trauma response; the immobilisation response. In the scope of trauma, this third trauma response occurs when fight or flight do not restore safety. But are there more than 3? Trauma specialists that have proposed at least 6.