fight, flight, freeze, and fawn

Hot, very hot days, the garden is brittle and dusty. In the morning, we harvest. Amazing as it is, there are trees full of pears, apples, plums, a row of blueberry bushes, beetroot, fennel, carrots like never before and a long maze of blackberry vines climbing along the hedge. We water sparingly in drips and drops, buckets of waste water from the kitchen and the shower. The house is cool with all the blinds down during the day, ceiling fans here and there. At night, a light breeze flies through the rooms, now that all windows are open and I listen to the martens fighting and mating, their shouts are very loud and shrill, almost like the crying or anguished screams of a person. 

Just before dark, we cycle along the river - nothing mighty about the narrow trickle of the Rhine these days. 

picture taken by Meike Böschemeyer/local paper

I count the swans, seven, with one black one among them. The light is so beautiful, the last rays of the sun colouring the clouds pink and purple. We stay until the last daylight fades. On the bench just before we turn away from the river, a young Arab couple has set up a small campside table for several nights in a row now. The other day, we stopped and wanted to wish them a pleasant meal and discovered that they are both deaf. We only managed a brief exchange of smiles and waves.

This here below has been on my mind for many days now. I recognise myself, my mother, myself again, and well, so many women. 

  

. . . the hypervigilance so many women feel toward others’ emotional states is not dysfunction. It is very often an accurate response to real power dynamics. When women develop finely tuned antennae for the moods in a room, they are not being oversensitive. They are being precise.

A woman’s nervous system that hesitates before disagreeing, that softens every request, that scans faces before speaking – that nervous system is not confused. It has correctly mapped the territory. Her nervous system is running an accurate cost-benefit analysis of authenticity in environments where authenticity has a well known cost and consequence for her.

When you scan a room before you speak, you may not simply be anxious. You could be calculating. Your body just might be running a complex algorithm honed over years: Who has power here? What happened last time I disagreed? Can I afford the consequences of being fully myself in this room?

That is threat assessment not a personality flaw. 

(There are) four survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.

The term “fawn” was given to us by psychotherapist Pete Walker, who observed in his work with complex trauma that some survivors learn to secure safety not by fighting or fleeing, but by appeasing: merging with others’ expectations, anticipating their needs, becoming indispensable or invisible as the moment requires.

. . . fawning is what a nervous system does when its social-engagement circuitry becomes a survival tool – when connection itself is drafted into defence. It is the strategy of choice when fighting means certain defeat and fleeing means abandonment or destitution. Far from being passive, it is arguably the most sophisticated of the survival responses: a real-time diplomatic operation conducted by your physiology on your behalf. 

Now ask yourself: for most of recorded history, which sex has most often faced exactly that configuration – unable to win the fight, unable to afford the flight? Fawning is not a female flaw. It is a rational adaptation to a specific, gendered predicament, repeated across generations until it became embodied.

Your people-pleasing isn’t a weakness. It’s your body’s brilliant attempt to navigate systems that were never designed for your thriving.

Honour that intelligence.

 

Ailey Jolie 

 

It rained. Early this morning, for about one hour. Not enough but, the sound of it! And it cleared the air a bit, the physical one, the brown smelly smoke plume from the fires 50 km away from here and the sticky angry one between us two stubborn humans. This summer has been so awful most of the time. I am exhausted. 

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.

“Pooh!” he whispered.

“Yes, Piglet?”

“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”

A.A. Milne (The House at Pooh Corner) 

we breathe in when plants breathe out

 

I have a vague memory of cooler days and there has actually been the odd late evening just after sunset when I reached for a thing called cardigan -  the lightweight version mind you. Thankfully, with longer nights, there is a pleasant enough cooling down period and the early hours offer a short promising glimpse of maybe even autumn. But before autumn, the gods of gardening have invented pears and plums and apples and grapes, all calling for attention.

This summer has been brutal, not just due to heat and drought but also due to hard personal private loss and grief and all that it entails. I am nursing this idea that once I have recovered my ability to walk proper long distances, I will walk away from it all and towards something lighter, easier, a more hopeful way of living again.

Part of me is bursting with ideas and plans and energy and then I find myself carefully walking down a steep hillside after watching the solar equinox yesterday and I have to stop every so often to let people pass and to figure out a way to reassure my beating heart that I will never again slip on a narrow, dry, stony, uneven, downhill stretch again, at least not now. (And I did not. But back home I crawled onto the comfortable sofa and felt sorry for myself for the rest of evening.)

 

more riverbed than river

This is where I cycled yesterday with the sun burning down on my back. I have never seen it like that. And still I am hopeful. When I cycle back from the river and through the small streets of our suburb which was once a medieval village, I can count the number of roofs and/or balconies without solar panels on one hand. Every day, I get notifications about meetings, self-help groups, technical support groups, sharing skills and ideas and tools, and also concerted actions, rallies and court cases and reminding local elected people of their responsibilities. Yes, the idea that climate action is about individual responsibility is as ridiculous as suggesting everyone can equip themselves to fight in war. But around here, I feel we are many and growing. And if it's a battle, so be it.

 

. . . people who throw up their hands and give up. I will assume some of them sincerely believe that it's too late, there's nothing we can do, we have no solutions, and nobody cares. For others it might be an excuse for doing nothing – if you can pretend the drowning people will inevitably drown, you justify remaining a bystander. 

. . . if you think the entire realm of life on earth is threatened wouldn't you throw yourself into understanding the threat the way you do when you get an alarming medical diagnosis? But lots of people don't. They make uninformed we-are-doomed-it's-too-late pronouncements and remain bystanders. 

Rebecca Solnit 

 

 . . we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass to the sun

. . . sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach the earth but none of those miles go through the straight of Hormuz

Bill McKibben 

 

It's as if the ancient gods of nature are playing a prank: “We’ll set the world alight, make pigeons fall dead from the sky, make ash rain down, cook people in their homes, melt the tarmac in the car parks ... and turn the oceans into a lukewarm soup. Let’s see who notices what – and when.”

Every child knows what’s happening here. It is humanity’s most tedious, most predictable and most thoroughly studied catastrophe. But its scale still seems too vast for political action, so everywhere the response is just pretending nothing is happening. 

Instead, scientists are being discredited. On certain social media platforms, their findings have long been regarded as elitist musings from an ivory tower. The handling of the Covid pandemic served as a blueprint for the far-right attack on science.

 

Nils Minkmar