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How to Keep Politics From Ruining Your Holiday

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The country has grown increasingly polarized, but families can still find their way back together.

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In fact, the brain is hardwired to deliver a wider range of reactions, which can be summed up as fight, flight, freeze, fawn and flop. The latter two being the least discussed and talked about.

All of them are a natural outcome of fearful situations or extended periods of trauma. With Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or C-PTSD, they can leave a lasting legacy and become a recurrent behaviour.

This article explains what Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn and flop are. It also explores the link between PTSD and C-PTSD and fawning behaviour in more detail.

The scientific background

First, a quick overview of the terminology.

The first three are obvious. At times of immense stress, it's common for people to: become combative or overly defensive (fight); to abruptly remove themselves from the situation (flight); or shut down, become withdrawn and unable to make decisions (freeze). This may manifest as any of the following:
The Fight Trauma response The Flight Trauma response The Freeze Trauma response
The fourth response - fawn - refers to when someone actually moves closer to the source of their trauma and tries to placate or win over their aggressor and may manifest itself in the following ways:

These are natural reactions triggered by part of our brain. The brain's limbic system has evolved least since primitive times.

In fact, we share this instinctive behaviour with other animal life! Any creature responds quickly to potential danger by fighting back, running or becoming totally still. Or, to diffuse danger they form a closer attachment to their aggressor (fawn).

Fawning as a response to trauma

To outsiders, the fawn response can mask the distress and damage you're suffering. If you were really being mistreated, why would you be trying to please the person responsible?

It can also be the response that engenders the greatest sense of confusion and guilt in someone with PTSD or C-PTSD. This person has treated you - or is treating you - badly, Yet, your natural instinct is to attempt to soothe them, instead of distancing yourself or fighting back.

Fawning (or misplaced attachment) is a common reaction to childhood abuse. The victim responds to an abusive parent or some other authority figure by being highly agreeable, pressing down their own needs and their knowledge that the abuse is wrong.

In later life, it can manifest as being highly submissive, looking to others to shape your reactions and relationships and struggling to make sense of yourself or your daily life on your own.

Characteristics of fawning behaviour also include over-dependence on the opinions of others and lacking boundaries. It makes you highly vulnerable to narcissistic people, or anyone who tends to control and manipulate others.

Addressing flight, fight, freeze and fawn responses

Some experts within the field of trauma response add a fifth potential reaction; flop. This is when someone reacts to intensely stressful situations by becoming totally overwhelmed and physically and mentally unresponsive and may manifest itself in the following ways:

Very similar to 'freeze' trauma response, but may also include

Total bodily collapse (which might involve blacking out or loss of consciousness)

Loss of control over bodily functions

Total disorientation

Appearing disengaged

Showing a lack of emotions

Complete submission

When you have PTSD or C-PTSD, symptoms like hypervigilance and heightened arousal, or depressive episodes and hypoarousal, can mean you display any of these responses frequently. Sometimes within relatively unthreatening situations.

Other trauma responses

URGENCY: 'Traumatic events require us to act quickly, without much thought for the long term. Trauma responses limit our ability to slow down and be mindful of the big picture. When you notice yourself feeling like you need to figure out everything all at once, pause and notice your breath. Notice the urgent energy with compassion. Validate the part of your that feels threatened. Let that part of you know: "I see you, I know you feel afraid. I'm here for you now.

In addition to acknowledging this part of us with compassion, we can also use the power of the breath to release these trauma responses from our nervous system.'

One of the first steps to addressing your PTSD and C-PTSD is to accept that these reactions are instinctive and 'human'. Then, during therapy and treatment sessions, you can also learn to dismantle any negative repercussions, find triggers and learn to manage recurrent episodes of these behaviours.

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It’s so much more than just ‘fight or flight’ – PTSD UK

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a community for everyone in the UK affected by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

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Reactions in Oneself

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Getting Rid of Negative Energy: 20 Powerful Practices for Cleansing Your Energy Field

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Just like your home gets dirty, so does your energy field, which needs clearing and cleansing regularly. Learn 20 techniques for instant energy purification.

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CULTURAL COMPLEXES: the hidden force in modern politics

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Podcast Episode · This Jungian Life Podcast · 10/17/2024 · 1h 58m

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Opinion | David Brooks: Maybe Bernie Sanders Is Right

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Democrats lost sight of the nation’s greatest inequality: Education.

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Thoughtful and emotional reaction to election results-FB post

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‘No time to pull punches’: is a civil war on the horizon for the Democratic party?

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Accusations and recriminations abound as Democrats try to figure out what went wrong after an electoral trouncing

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There is no need to pick only a few of the many explanations of Donald Trump's political comeback. Most of the endless reasons we have heard over the past five days ring true: inflation, incumbency, a flimsy Democratic campaign, white Americans' seemingly eternal issues with race, and what one New York Times essayist recently called "a regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright". But there is another story that has so far been rathermore overlooked, to do with how politics now works, and who voters think of when they enter the polling booth.

Its most vivid element is about the left, and one inescapable fact: that a lot of people simply do not like us. In the UK, that is part of the reason why Brexit happened, why Nigel Farage is back, and why our new Labour government feels so flimsy and fragile. In the US, it goes some way to explaining why more than 75 million voters just rejected the supposedly progressive option, and chose a convicted criminal and unabashed insurrectionist to oversee their lives.

The latter story goes beyond Kamala Harris and her failed pitch for power. When established parties on the progressive and conservative wings of politics go into an election, in the minds of many people, they represent a much larger set of forces, whether their candidates like it or not. After all, what people understand as the left and right operate far beyond the institutions of the state: political battles are fought in the media, on the street, in workplaces, campuses, and more. This has always been the case, but as social media turn the noise such activity makes into a deafening din, seeing most big parties and candidates as the tips of much larger icebergs becomes inevitable.

Trump leads the movement that was responsible for the January 6 insurrection, has made less-than-subtle noises about his affinity with the far right, and makes absolutely no bones about any of it. For the Democrats, the lines that connect a centrist figure such as Harris to the wider US left tend to look much fuzzier, but that does not make millions of people's perceptions of them any less real. Around the world, in fact, the left looks to many voters like a coherent bloc that goes from people who lie in the road and shut down universities to would-be presidents and prime ministers - the only difference between them, as some see it, is that radical activists are honest about their ideas, whereas the people who stand for office try to cover them up.

What the US election result shows is that, when told to make a choice, millions of people will draw on those ideas, and ally themselves with the other political side. Many of them, of course, have arrived at that conclusion thanks to outright bigotry. But given the remarkable spread of votes for Trump - into Latino and black parts of the electorate, and states considered loyal Democratic heartlands, from California to New Jersey - that hardly explains the entirety of his win. What it highlights is something that many American, British and European people have known for the past 15 years, at least: that the left is now alienating huge chunks of its old base of support.

That story has deep roots, partly bound up with the decline of political loyalties based around class: compared with 2008, 2024's Democratic coalition was skewed towards the higher end of the income range, whereas Trump's tilted in the other direction. The same kind of fracturing now seems to be affecting many ethnically based political loyalties: as Trump well knows, there are now large numbers of voters from minorities - and immigrant backgrounds - who largely accept rightwing ideas about immigration. That is partly because modern economies create such a desperate competition for rewards.

Why America voted for Donald Trump (again) - video

But there seems to be more to it than that: polling shows the suggestion that "government should increase border security and enforcement" is supported by higher percentages of black and Hispanic voters than among white progressives - but the same applies to "most people can make it if they work hard" and "America is the greatest country in the world". Growing chunks of the electorate, in other words, are not who the left think they are.

Meanwhile, the widening political gap based around people's education levels - voters without college degrees supported Trump by a 14-point margin, while Harris had a 13-point advantage among college-educated people - creates yet more problems. Some of them are to do with "wokeness" and its drawbacks. Because the cutting edge of left politics is often associated with institutions of higher education, ideas that are meant to be about inclusivity can easily turn into the opposite. The result is an agenda often expressed with a judgmental arrogance, and based around behavioural codes - to do with microaggressions, or the correct use of pronouns - that are very hard for people outside highly educated circles to navigate.

At the same time, our online discourse hardens good intentions into an all-or-nothing style of activism that will not tolerate nuance or compromise. A message about the left then travels from one part of society to another: there is a transmission belt between clarion calls that do the rounds on college campuses, the Democratic mainstream, and unsettled voters in, say, suburban and rural Pennsylvania. And the right can therefore make hay, as evidenced by a Trump ad that was crass and cruel, but grimly effective: "Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you."

In its own ugly way, that line highlights what might have been Trump and his supporters' strongest asset: the idea that, because they are so distant and privileged, modern progressives would rather ignore questions about everyday economics. Nearly 40% of all Americans say they have skipped meals in order to meet their housing payments, and more than 70% admit to living with economic anxiety. A second Trump term, of course, is hardly going to make that any better: the point is that he was able to successfully pretend that it would.

That then opened the way for something even more jaw-dropping: Trump's sudden claim to be a great unifier, something implicitly contrasted with progressives' habit of separating people into demographic islands. It takes an almost evil level of chutzpah to flip from his hate and nastiness to a new message of love for most Americans, but consider what he said about his coalition of voters: "They came from all quarters: union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American. We had everybody. And it was beautiful." That is the increasingly familiar sound of populist tanks being parked on the left's lawn.

None of this is meant to imply that most progressive causes are mistaken, or to make any argument for leaning into Trumpism. What the state of politics across the west highlights is more about tone, strategy, empathy, and how to take people with you while trying to change society - as well as the platforms that poison democratic debate, and the harm they do to progressive politics. The next time you see someone on the left combusting withself-righteous fury on the hellscape now known as X, it's worth remembering that its current owner is Elon Musk, who may be about to assist Trump in massively cutting US public spending, while cackling at the weakness of the president's enemies, and their habit of walking into glaring traps.

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From Trump's victory, a simple, inescapable message: many people despise the left | John Harris

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The tumult of social media and rightwing propaganda has successfully cast progressives as one judgmental, 'woke' mass, says Guardian columnist John Harris

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Americans who care about democracy have every right to feel appalled and frightened. But then they have work to do.

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Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler. Our mistake was to think we could row this boat across the acid lake before the acid dissolved it.

We knew what the problems were, and we wanted to fix them. The principal problems that got us to this bleakest moment in American history are intertwined. They are the crisis of masculinity, the failure of the mainstream news media and the rise of Silicon Valley, and in a way they are all the same problem.

The media might be the simplest to describe. A democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the US media over the past eight years in particular created an increasingly misinformed citizenry.

When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed. When people worry about crime when it is low, an economy when it is thriving and immigrants when they do much of the hard work that sustains that economy and commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the media has failed.

When it came to Donald Trump, they went easy on him, and they again and again let him and the far right set the agenda. They constantly treated asymmetrical issues as symmetrical ones - if the Democrats resisted Republican outrages, both sides were "polarized". In the media everything had two sides, even if one side was the truth and the other was the lie, one side was the human rights or the law and the other side was their violation.

They went soft on Trump's criminality and incompetence, and his sheer volume of scandals meant that the past ones were forgotten as the next one erupted. He would not have won his 2016 minority victory had the US news media adequately conveyed that Trump was not the fun fictional character in the reality TV show The Apprentice; he was a serially bankrupt man repeatedly accused of sexual assault with a lot of criminal ties and a history of not paying his bills, being helped on by the Vladimir Putin regime, which had itself seriously corrupted the information environment of the election.

The lost boys and Maga women want an authoritarian leader, and the fact they can make one out of the physically and mentally pathetic Trump is a testimony to the power of tech-fueled fantasy

Of course what the Putin regime did with its hacking and leaking, its troll farms stirring up strife and spreading misinformation, was exploit vulnerabilities that Silicon Valley had created, and that Silicon Valley was not interested in fixing as long as the profits rolled in. Silicon Valley was created by white men and perhaps because the immensely wealthy titans of the industry that arose initially seemed harmlessly nerdy, or perhaps because the US government at the time when the mega-corporations arose was so neoliberal, they were never held in check as their enterprises came to dominate the world in significant ways.

Social media arose like a school of sharks in the information pool and began to devour the economic base of the news industry, to undermine the filtration systems that had limited the spread of hate, lies, misinformation and disinformation. But to talk about it as an information pool is to underestimate how much it has changed consciousness itself, how addictive and how distorting it is, how it manipulates values and emotions and beliefs.

Young men seem particularly vulnerable to its offerings, and many dank corners of the internet recruit them into misogyny and white supremacy via influencers and incel subcultures, into antisemitism and conspiracy theories, and more than that into becoming unmoored, destabilized, unwell, isolated.

The Maga right with its indifference to the normal issues of good governance and its preoccupation with clickbait distractions is an online monster and it has succeeded in creating a more angry, aggressive form of masculinity, one more convinced that debasing and dominating women is essential to its identity, whether in porn or in Trump's fantasizing aloud that Liz Cheney should face a firing squad and Harris face Mike Tyson. The endless memes of Trump as Rambo and rescuers and Jesus show how much the lost boys and Maga women want an authoritarian leader, and the fact they can make one out of the physically and mentally pathetic Trump is a testimony to the power of tech-fueled fantasy.

Of course Silicon Valley, media and the crisis in masculinity converge in Elon Musk, who used his ownership of Twitter and his monstrous wealth to push Trump's campaign along and who apparently intends to be the power behind the throne. Musk has become increasingly unhinged and far-right himself. Strikingly, two other men close to Trump have also become increasingly delusional - Tucker Carlson with his recent claims about being attacked by demons, and Robert F Kennedy Jr, with his nonsensical rantings about fluoridation and racist claims about Covid-19. JD Vance, formerly a not very successful venture capitalist, was chosen by Silicon Valley oligarchs as Trump's vice-president and himself seems to have become a far-right extremist with an obsession about obligatory childbearing.

They appear to be deeply damaged people and they have come to damage everything else, including the climate; human rights, especially women's rights, trans rights and immigrants' rights; and the US economy. The rest of us and the rest of the world will be the cleanup crew because men like this never clean up after themselves.

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Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do | Rebecca Solnit

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Americans will be stuck cleaning up after Maga's destructive streak because men like this never clean up after themselves

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Train Yourself to Always Show Up

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The Relational Work of Systems Change (SSIR)

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Collective impact efforts must prioritize working together in more relational ways to find systemic solutions to social problems.

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A Piece for All Hard Times by Rebecca Solnit - Inspiring Words on Resilience & Solidarity | — The Thinking Project

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A Piece for All Hard Times by Rebecca Solnit is an inspiring call to resilience, hope, and solidarity in the face of adversity. It explores healing, activism, and courage and is for anyone feeling powerless or overwhelmed to find strength, connection, and purpose again.

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Remain

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ROBBIE GAMBLE holds an MFA at Lesley University. He has poems out and forthcoming in the Naugatuck River Review, Poet Lore, Slipstream, and The Stonecoast Review. His essays have appeared in Writers Resist and on the MassPoetry website. When he is not trying to string words together, he works as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston.

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My cousin asks if I can describe this moment, the heaviness of it, like sitting outside the operating room while someone you love is in surgery and you’re on those awful plastic chairs eating flaming Doritos from the vending machine

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What fears do you have for clients/those you work with?

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What fears do you have for clients/those you work with?

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When have you noticed feeling more Connected?

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When have you noticed feeling more Connected?

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When have you felt more Connected?