Responses — Trauma & Instinct

What are commonly referred to as "trauma responses" are, in fact, normal physiological responses of the nervous system. Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn are adaptive mechanisms designed to protect the organism.

These only become problematic when the response is interrupted, incomplete, or remains unprocessed. In these cases, the body gets locked into a specific nervous system state and begins to operate from a place of stuckness. This is where Spinal Attunement becomes an incredibly powerful modality — by creating space for the completion and metabolisation of these incomplete responses.

A cultural context.

Trauma responses live on a spectrum, and almost all of us carry these incomplete impulses somewhere within us — whether individually, ancestrally, or culturally. In a world that teaches us to suppress instinct, override emotion, and valorise performance, it is no wonder that many of us are walking around in chronic states of contraction.

These responses are not signs of personal failure. They are intelligent, adaptive, and normal.

As Dr. Gabor Maté explores in The Myth of Normal, our culture is itself dysregulating. We are conditioned to accept disconnection, overwork, emotional suppression, and sensory overload as baseline reality.

"In the modern world, disconnection has become normalised. What we call 'normal' is often anything but natural."

From this lens, we understand that trauma is not simply what happened to us — it is what happens inside us when we are left alone with the impact. The fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses are necessary biological protections, often imprinted in the autonomic nervous system without ever being fully discharged.

Our work as practitioners is to hold the field steady enough, and safe enough, that these impulses can finally complete.