Kids First Co-Parenting with Dr. Royster
The podcast for moms raising secure kids after divorce & separation, even when their ex makes everything harder.
Kids First Co-Parenting with Dr. Royster
Trauma in Co-Parenting: Understanding Your Fight-Flight-Freeze-Fawn Response
Summary: Our neurobiological response to co-parenting stress often mirrors evolutionary survival mechanisms, triggering fight, flight, freeze, or fawn reactions when we receive messages from difficult ex-partners. Recognizing these pattern is the critical first step to interrupting automatic responses and choosing more intentional communication.
Key Takeaways:
• The "four Fs" (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) are natural trauma responses designed to protect us in threatening situations
• Different situations may trigger different response patterns based on your history
• You can't control your initial reaction, but you can learn to recognize it before responding
• Naming what's happening creates space between your reaction and your response
• Asking trusted friends about your typical response patterns can provide valuable insights
Resources:
Check out our High Conflict Communication Bootcamp for just $19, where we go beyond naming these responses and provide practical tools for each pattern.
Kids First CoParenting System: If you are co-parenting with a narcissist, dealing with a manipulative ex, or feeling overwhelmed by high-conflict dynamics, you are not alone. These resources are designed to help you protect your child’s emotional health and take back control of your co-parenting experience.
Get More Support
- How to Co-Parent with a Difficult Ex Masterclass (Free & Instant Access)
- High Conflict 3 day Communication Bootcamp for Moms
Explore the Kids First Co-Parenting System to learn how to raise emotionally secure kids after divorce, even when your co-parent refuses to change. This is the support system every overwhelmed mom needs.
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Welcome to the Kids First co-parenting podcast the podcast for smart, intentional, millennial moms raising resilient kids after separation and divorce. I'm Dr Carolyn Royster, a child psychologist coach and a mom. After thousands of therapy hours with kids caught in the middle of high conflict households, I'm here to help moms like you do it differently From peaceful co-parenting to total chaos. I've got you here. We talk boundaries, regulation and how to raise a great kid, even if your ex is beyond difficult. We blend science with real life and, as always, keep the focus where it matters. I'm raising great kids. This is Kids First Co-Parenting. Welcome to another episode of the Kids First Co-Parenting podcast. I am so happy you're here.
Speaker 1:If you've ever gone blank or gotten really defensive or just frozen or said yes when you meant to say no after receiving notification on your app or a text, there might be a reason for that. Today, in this episode, you're going to learn about the four Fs, which is a pretty well-known psychological phenomenon, and I'll explain to you how it relates to high conflict co-parenting, because it is a trauma response. My friend and you'll see how it shows up in co-parenting, conflict dynamics and around communication in particular, and I'm going to help you understand why. The first step is understanding what this is before you can work with it and know how to respond. Okay, before we dive in, I just want to give you a little update on me. Life is really good here. It's been a very busy end of summer. Just returned from an all-inclusive in Mexico with my family and it was fantastic, highly recommend Kids Stay Free Resorts. I had a wonderful time. It was very relaxing, even though I had kids running around, swimming and doing the pools and the beaches and all of those things, and so I've kind of reentered into work after taking that very much needed space and I'm feeling really grateful for it. So that's just a little update on how things are with me.
Speaker 1:Well, let's dive in. Okay, so you know, the goal when we're communicating with your co-parent is to try to stay really calm. That's the whole point. Right? You want to stay calm, and the reason we want to stay calm is so that you don't respond out of a place of anger, which is more likely for you to feel, I don't know, not happy with how you respond, or to say something you don't mean, or to say something out of anger, or to be reactive. Now, if you are co-parenting with someone who's really narcissistic or trying really hard to get control or power over you, or is playing a game that hopefully you're not playing the game of like I just want to win.
Speaker 1:Instead of doing what's right for kids, then responding when you are activated is a terrible idea, and most moms know that. So most people know I really should calm down or I really need to take a minute before I respond. However, when you're flooded or when you're having a really hard time with something because it's triggering or it's insulting or it's irritating or whatever it might be, sometimes we want that feeling to go away as quickly as possible and, as a result of that, you may send a response or send a message or a text that you later regret, because you were activated and you were having a hard time and so, instead of letting yourself regulate and calm down, you said something that you wish you hadn't or that was just plain reactive. Had you thought more about it, you maybe wouldn't have said it. Along the journey of us figuring out how to help you respond with integrity and to truly respond in a way that puts your kids first and protects your own mental health, I need you to understand and know what's happening first. That is the meat of what we are going to talk about today. Again, as always, this is not ever meant to make you feel bad. Information is power and I want you to have this information because these are well-known psychological concepts that we can use. We have the information, we use them. We know how and why they're activating you. Then you can work a little bit quicker on managing your response. But it's hard to fix a problem that you don't understand, as we always talk about here.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's dive in. There are a couple of very common responses that folks will have when they're in a stressful situation or a traumatic, life-threatening, anxiety-producing situation. Okay, this is neurobiological, this is the way we were made. This is how we were designed as human being, as animals, as evolutionary creatures, however you want to explain it. Okay, what I'm going to talk about? These styles of responding. They're not actually unique to you and, in fact, a lot of times when I teach moms about this, they start thinking about how they are also seeing this kind of response in their kids. Okay, that's kind of the cool thing about learning about ourselves is, when we learn about ourselves, we also get the chance to learn about raising little people into adults. There tends to be kind of an evolutionary response to stress, and when I say kind of, I mean there is.
Speaker 1:So I want you to picture yourself way back in olden times, right? Perhaps? You've come across this great land of ours in a covered wagon and you're sitting by a campfire on the edges of the Rocky Mountains, beautiful woods all around you, night has fallen, right, you just finished cooking your elk caribou over the fire, life is good, and you hear a twig snap in the woods. Evolutionarily or biologically, your body is going to respond to that sound a couple of different ways. We call them the four Fs. The first response would be freeze, okay, and so you may freeze when you hear the sound of that twig snapping, because your brain subconsciously and very quickly is starting to think oh my gosh, is there a bear in the woods? I better freeze so it doesn't see me and come eat me. This is how primal these instincts are. So freeze is the first one. It's where you kind of get stuck, and sometimes people will even talk about feeling their body freeze, get very immobile, like they can't move. They want to move but they can't. That is the freeze response.
Speaker 1:Another response you could have would be to fight. So you may pick up a rock or I don't know history's not really my thing, guys but your shotgun, if those were around at the time of covered wagons, I'm not sure, maybe because you ate an elk, so I guess you could have had a bow and arrow. Anyways, this is the whole side. You pick up your weapon, whatever you use to kill the elk that you're eating, so morbid I'm not really a fan of. Anyways, whatever you pick up your weapon, right, and you get ready, all of the stress hormones and adrenaline in your body is preparing your body to fight. You suddenly feel really strong and you get that weapon ready and you're like whatever comes through those woods and into this campsite, I'm going to fight it. That's a fight response. You may also have a similar adrenaline response that triggers you to flee.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's the third F we have done freeze, fight and flee. Flee is you're running. You hear that twig snap and you're like I gotta book it out of here. We're getting gone, we gotta run, we gotta get away from this bear as fast as we possibly can. That is how we're going to stay safe. And then there's something called the fawn response. So this would be again with the bear metaphor. The twig snapping is a bear. It comes into the site and you get your eyes really wide and you get down low and you make your cute little like I'm a cute little baby, don't hurt me, kind of a cuteness response or a fawning response that then helps you seem less appealing to a predator that's called the fawn. So the four major responses are fight, flight, freeze and fawn right. These responses that are very normal for human behavior have come out of an evolutionary tactic to keep oneself safe in a life-threatening situation.
Speaker 1:Today, what we're talking about is how do these responses show up and how does this apply to co-parenting? You need to really understand them first before I go into how it applies to what we're talking about today. Many of you have left traumatic, conflictual, difficult dynamics. In some cases you have been physically hurt. In sometimes some cases there have been traumatic events, let's just say, that have occurred with your co-parent. In other cases it's more of a slow build as in over time we've gotten to a place where you are stressed out and having a stress response, if not a full-on traumatic response, to interacting with this person. And so how do these things show up when you're co-parenting with a difficult ex, whether or not you've had an actual traumatic experience with this person, which, unfortunately, a lot of the moms that I work with have right and so I'm not minimizing that. But I'm also saying sometimes, when you've had a long history of getting triggered by someone, we will start to see these patterns show up.
Speaker 1:How does this concept of the see these patterns show up? How does this concept of the four Fs show up in co-parenting In particular, really conflictual co -parenting. Let's take fight. Fight's probably the easiest one to understand. So you get that message, you get that alert on your app and your response would be something like I'm gonna fire back, I'm gonna escal fire back, I'm going to escalate this, I'm going to really get into trying to prove my point. It gets really, really heated really fast. You're like those are fighting words and I'm fighting back. Buddy boy, a lot of times this comes from a place of you're not going to push me around anymore, like that's not happening. No, thank you Again. It's not a judgment, it just is an important pattern to understand.
Speaker 1:Then we have our folks that are doing the flight response. What does this look like? So this might look like you avoid, you're withdrawing, you're not even responding, and sometimes I do coach moms to not respond. You do not need to respond all the time. This is presuming it is something you should respond to and so you just really don't. You just like kind of ostrich it bury your head in the sand Like I'm going to pretend, like this isn't an issue.
Speaker 1:Then we have the freeze. Freeze and flight can look very similar in regards to communication. So if we're not talking about actually physically leaving the room with your ex, which would be flight and freeze, which would just be like where you kind of just tense up and don't say anything at all, it's a little bit different with communication because flight and freeze can look really similar. Freeze and flight the way you're going to differentiate them is really more of what it feels like internally for you. When you freeze, you go blank. Your mind kind of just goes blank. You can't really think it feels like. You can't think I should say it's really hard to make a decision. You may kind of stall, even if you know the right decision or the right response, and so again, it's an internal experience that feels different.
Speaker 1:The flee response is I would do anything to just not ever have to respond to that, where the freeze response is I should do something, I need to do something, and then not being able to kind of formulate the words if that makes sense the fawn response. And the reason I bring this one up is because it's really interesting in high conflict co-parenting Because what ends up happening is one person really becomes kind of a doormat for lack of better words overly compliant, overly accommodating, maybe really trying to over-explain or trying to really smooth things over, really really wanting to make sure that this person isn't mad at you. You may have different topics may bring out different responses in you, and I encourage you, in your own therapeutic settings or in your journal kind of, where you're working things out, to really explore why that is, because there probably is a reason, journal kind of where you're working things out to really explore why that is because there probably is a reason. However, I just want you to kind of understand the basics of this, really think about what your style is across different areas that might come up. What is really important for you to know and what I want you to take away from this is that you really can't always control your first reaction. It's gonna happen. It's probably already happening, I'm sure it's happened for years and your feelings are important and they're good information for you, and so trying to control how you react or that first initial reaction is gonna be really difficult, right? If you are someone that just you know that you kind of go into a fawn response, it's not very helpful for you to spend a lot of time trying to undo that. But what is helpful is for you to learn to acknowledge it and recognize that like oh, I almost always respond this way. And then learning how to work with that response style before you send that message back, before you get overly like no, no, it's fine. If we're talking about the fawn response, you can see like, oh, I'm doing it again. And then here are the tools that I have to work with that.
Speaker 1:Before I respond, your first step is to name what it is that's happening. Again, we talk all the time about how this is a parallel to raising kids, when we're teaching them about their emotions, when we're teaching them about their responses. Our first trick it's not even a trick. The first thing you always do is you name what you're seeing. You look upset. I'm noticing that. I really want to fight back right now. That would be an example of my own naming of a response.
Speaker 1:And then I want you to think about the tools, and if you don't have these tools, there are so many ways that you can get them. There's also this really wonderful resource within the Kids First community, we have the communication bootcamp. The whole first day of that it's spread out over three days and the whole first day we talk really in depth about fight, flight, freeze and fawn, and then I give you the tools on how to respond in those situations. So there's a lot of ways that you can work with it once you understand what's happening for you. So it's not about being perfect every time. It's about noticing patterns and working within those patterns and then developing your set of tools for how you can respond. I would also encourage you and it's always helpful to do this just in general with parenting but if you're not sure what your style is, to kind of reach out and ask some close friends what do you notice happens for me when I get a message from so-and-so? What do you think is my response? I just heard this podcast and I'm curious what you think as someone who loves me and knows me.
Speaker 1:It's not about being perfect. It's not about getting it right every time. The first step is starting to understand it, so that you can then work on being less reactive to it. If you're thinking, all right, I can kind of get behind this. I want to understand my style. I now know that I respond in this way, but what do I do instead? That is exactly what we cover inside of the High Conflict Communication Bootcamp, which, by the way, is only $19 and is well worth your time. We go way beyond just naming these four experiences and I teach you how to recognize the patterns in real time and give you the tools to work with it. The boot camp is three short, very powerful lessons designed for moms just like you, just like everything we do in the Kids First community how you communicate.
Speaker 1:As always, you can find that link in the show notes, and I can't wait to see you inside. Come find me on social media. We're across all platforms. As always, leave a review. If you got something exciting out of this podcast or learned something new, I'd love for you to share it and spread the word. I am so happy to have you as part of our community here. If you have any questions, send them to me online. I'm happy to answer them. I'll see you soon. Thanks for being here.