The Fight Response: When Protection Looks Like Power
Blog Two in the Trauma Response Series
“Fight gets a bad rep, like it’s all rage and broken things. But at its core, it’s about protection. Boundaries. Control. The fight response emerges when your nervous system decides the safest thing you can do… is win.”
Fight as a Trauma Response
The fight response is one of our oldest survival instincts. When your nervous system perceives danger, it gives you a surge of adrenaline and cortisol. Your body tightens. Your vision narrows. You lean in, not away. And if escape isn’t possible, you prepare to defend.
The fight response isn’t always violent or dramatic. It can be sharp, subtle, or even praised in certain settings. It often flies under the radar, especially in high-achieving or highly reactive individuals. At its root, it’s about self-protection and sometimes, reclaiming power in places where power was once taken from us.
How Fight Shows Up in Everyday Life
Fight isn’t always fists and fury. Often, it’s woven into the fabric of our daily lives.
Here are a few real-world examples of how it can show up:
You’re interrupted in a meeting, and your jaw tightens. You don’t even notice it, but your tone gets a little sharper. Your words come faster. You need to be heard now.
A partner or friend says something critical, and you immediately defend. Before you’ve even taken in what they meant, your mind races to justify, correct, or flip the blame.
You get home after a long day and find a mess left by someone else. Instead of asking for help, you clean in a rage, muttering under your breath. Doing it all yourself feels better than asking and being let down.
You pride yourself on high standards. But secretly, perfectionism is exhausting and driven by fear of being seen as weak, wrong, or not good enough.
These responses can feel justified because they are protecting something vulnerable underneath. But if they’re the only strategies you have, they can become prisons of their own.
The Strengths of Fight
The fight response brings with it enormous strengths:
Assertiveness
Passion
Protection
Leadership
Clarity
Many people who carry a strong fight response are seen as “driven,” “direct,” “fiery,” or “principled.” They often step in where others fear to. They fight for fairness, for their families, for the underdog.
There’s honour in that. And there’s also cost.
When Fight Takes Over
The longer we stay in fight mode, the more it becomes our default setting, not just an occasional tool, but a constant companion.
This has real physiological consequences.
In fight mode, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is activated. This is the gas pedal of your stress response system. Heart rate increases, muscles tighten, breathing becomes shallow. Your brain prioritises threat over connection, redirecting blood flow from the prefrontal cortex (responsible for empathy, reasoning, and long-term planning) to the amygdala (responsible for detecting danger).
In short, the more time you spend in fight, the harder it becomes to reflect, relate, or rest.
Over time, this can lead to:
Chronic muscle tension and pain
Irritable bowel or digestive issues
Cardiovascular strain
High blood pressure and inflammation
Sleep difficulties (your body is too keyed up to drop into rest mode)
Emotional reactivity or burnout
Disconnection from others, even those you care about most
You may find yourself always looking for the next conflict, misinterpreting neutrality as criticism, or living with a constant undercurrent of irritability and tightness in your chest.
And when that becomes your baseline, you may forget what it feels like to truly relax, not just in your muscles, but in your mind.
Working with Fight in Therapy
The fight response doesn’t need fixing. It needs space. Understanding. Integration.
In the therapy room, we don’t label you as “angry” or “aggressive.” We look at the heat behind the sharpness, the need to protect, to stand your ground, to feel safe in a world that may have taught you safety was something you had to earn or enforce.
Often, we begin by slowing things down, getting curious about what your body feels just before the impulse to react, shut down, or push back. Sometimes that’s a clenched jaw. A held breath. A buzzing in your limbs. That’s the language of your nervous system.
From there, we can explore what that moment is protecting you from. Not by prying or probing, but by noticing patterns together. Some clients discover a grief underneath, others a long-standing fear of being powerless or humiliated.
Therapy creates a space where the nervous system can learn something new: that it’s possible to feel strong without being on guard. That you can have boundaries without building walls. That connection doesn’t always mean vulnerability to danger.
We don’t rush. We don’t demand change. We honour the part of you that learned to fight because it had to and we help you build a wider range of responses, so that fight isn’t the only option left.
A Closing Reflection
“What are you fighting for, really?”
“And what might happen if you didn’t have to fight at all?”
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re invitations to meet the part of you that learned, long ago, that love and safety had to be earned through strength.
When fight is no longer needed for survival, it can be repurposed… Into advocacy… Into truth-telling… Into the kind of strength that lets others in, instead of keeping them out.