Somatic healing practitioners have distinguished the most common survival strategies as flight, fight, freeze, appease, and dissociate. In The Politics of Trauma, Staci K. Haines closely studies the iterations of each reaction, explaining that “these protective responses are well beyond our conscious capacity to control them. We have inherited them through both evolution and the particular biology of who made and birthed us. In turn, they work with the interpersonal, cultural, and social context in which we live.”
