Tag Archives: Fight or flight

Happiness, Love, Parenting, Personal Reflections, Writing

Tomorrow’s Presentation at the Montana CASA Conference in Butte

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Tomorrow’s talk is titled, Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Children’s Mental Health and Happiness. Because this talk is about what everyone should know, I suspect everyone will be there. So, I’ll see you soon.

Given the possibility that everyone won’t be there, I’m sharing the list of the 10 things, along with some spiffy commentary.

First, I’ll give a strength warning. If you don’t know what that means, you’re not alone, because I made it up. It might be the coolest idea ever, so watch for more details about it in future blogs.

Then, I’ll say something profound like, “The problems with mental health and happiness are big, and they seem to just be getting bigger.” At which point, I’ll launch into the ten things.

  1. Mental health and happiness are wicked problems. This refers to the fact that mental health and happiness are not easy to predict, control, or influence. They’re what sociologists call “wicked problems,” meaning they’re multidimensional, non-linear, elicit emotional responses, and often when we try to address them, our well-intended efforts backfire.
  2. Three ways your brain works. [This one thing has three parts. Woohoo.]
    1. We naturally look for what’s wrong with us. Children and teens are especially vulnerable to this. In our contemporary world they’re getting bombarded with social media messages about diagnostic criteria for mental disorders so much that they’re overidentifying with mental disorder labels.
    1. We find what we’re looking for. This is called confirmation bias, which I’ve blogged about before.
    1. What we pay attention to grows. This might be one of the biggest principles in all of psychology. IMHO, we’re all too busy growing mental disorders and disturbing symptoms (who doesn’t have anxiety?).
  3. We’re NOT GOOD at shrinking NEGATIVE behaviors. This is so obvious that my therapist friends usually say, “Duh” when I mention it.
  4. We’re better at growing POSITIVE behaviors. Really, therapy is about helping people develop skills and strengths for dealing with their symptoms. More skills, strengths, and resources result in fewer disturbing symptoms.
  5. Should we focus on happiness? The answer to this is NO! Too much preoccupation with our own happiness generally backfires.
  6. What is happiness? If you’ve been following this blog, you should know the answer to this question. Just in case you’re blanking, here’s a pretty good definition: From Aristotle and others – “That place where the flowering of your greatest (and unique) virtues, gifts, skills, and talents intersect (over time) with the needs of the world [aka your family/community].”
  7. You can flip the happiness. This thing flows from a live activity. To get it well, you’ll need to be there!
  8. Just say “No” to toxic positivity. To describe how this works and why we say no to toxic positivity, I’ll take everyone through the three-step emotional change trick.
  9. Automatic thoughts usually aren’t all that positive. How does this work for you? When something happens to you in your life and your brain starts commenting on it, does your brain usually give you automatic compliments and emotional support? I thought not.
  10.  How anxiety works. At this point I’ll be fully revved up and possibly out of time, so I’ll give my own anxiety-activated rant about the pathologizing, simplistic, and inaccurate qualities of that silly “fight or flight” concept.

Depending on timing, I may add a #11 (Real Mental Health!) and close with my usual song.

For those interested, here’s the slide deck:

Ten Things CASA Sept 2025Download

If you’re now experiencing intense FOMO, I don’t blame you. FOMO happens. You’ll just need to lean into it and make a plan to attend one of my future talks on what everyone should know.

Thanks for reading and have a fabulous evening. I’ll be rolling out of Absarokee on my way to Butte at about 5:30am!

Personal Reflections, Writing

My Post-Election Letter to Educators

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Earlier this week, I had an amazing Montana educator tell me, among other things, about how the election results ignited fears for the future of public education. In response, I wrote the following piece. I know it’s a little intellectual, but that’s what you get from a college professor. I’m sharing this with you mostly because I think you’re all amazing Montana educators and want to support you in whatever way I can.

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In this moment, I’m aware that while some are celebrating this morning’s election outcome, others are experiencing despair, sadness, anger, betrayal, and fear. After an election like this one, it’s easy to have our thoughts and emotions race toward various crisis scenarios. If that’s what’s happening to you, no doubt, you are not alone.

We all have unique responses to emotional distress. If you feel threatened by the election outcome, you may have impulses toward action that come with your emotions. In stress situations, we often hear about the fight or flight (or freeze) response, but because we’re all complex human beings, fight or flight or freeze is an oversimplification. Although feeling like running, hiding, freezing, or feeling surges of anger are natural and normal, most of the fight or flight research was conducted on rats—male rats in particular. For better and worse, our emotional and behavioral responses to the election outcomes are so much more complex than fight or flight.

As humans we respond to threat in more sophisticated ways. One pattern (derived from studies with female rats) is called tend and befriend. Although these are also simplistic rhyming words, I translate them to mean that if you’re feeling stressed, threatened and fearful, it’s generally good to reach out to others for support and commiseration, to support others, and to gather with safe people in pairs or families or groups.

If you work in a school, I encourage you to be there for each other, regardless of your political views. For now, it will probably feel best to stay close to those with whom you have common beliefs. Eventually, I hope that even those of you with different beliefs can recognize and respect the humanity within each other. The most destructive responses to stress and threat are usually characterized by hate and division. The more we can connect with others who feel safe, the better we can deal with our own rising feelings—feelings that may be destructive or hateful.

Another complex thing about humans is that we can have a therapeutic response to focusing on our pain, grief, anger, and other disturbing emotions. There’s clear evidence that letting ourselves feel those feelings, and talking and writing about them, is important and therapeutic. But, in an odd juxtaposition, it’s also therapeutic to intentionally focus on the positive, to imagine and write about the best possible outcomes in whatever situations we face, and in looking—every day—for that which is inspiring (rather than over-focusing on that which is depressing or annoying). To the extent that you’re feeling distressed, I encourage you, when you can, to take time going down both those roads. That means taking time to experience your difficult and painful feelings, as well as taking time to focus on what you’re doing that’s meaningful in the moment, and whatever positive parts of life you can weave into your life today, tomorrow, and in the future.

My main point is that you are not alone. Many people, right alongside you, are in deep emotional pain over the outcome of the election. As you go through these bumpy times, times that include fears for the future of children, families, education, and communities I hope we can do this together. Because in these moments of despair and pain, we are better together.

Or, as Christopher Peterson said, “Other people matter. And, we are all other people to everyone else.”

You matter and your reactions to this immense life event matters. Please take good care of yourself and your colleagues, friends, and family.

All my best to you,

John SF

Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice, Personal Reflections, Politics

The Benefits and Limitations of Rhyming and Alliteration

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Smoky Sunrise Aug 2017

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-rhyming and I’m not anti-rap.

Truth is, I think rhyming slogans are pretty darn cool. Ask my students, I use them all the time. Here are a few that have been known to slip out my mouth and into a class lecture from time to time:

  • A pill is not a skill.
  • Get curious, not furious.
  • Your goal should be within your personal control
  • To function to the best of your ability, you should embrace your multicultural humility
  • An alcoholic drink, will not help you think (better)

The benefits of rhyming (and I daresay, alliteration) is that messages emerge with might and mass, which makes them more memorable. What I meant to say here before my alliterative self took over is that rhyming produces a powerful and memorable message. That’s the good news.

The “less good” news (as us therapist types like to say) is that rhyming and alliteration, although clever and appealing, usually don’t capture ALL OF THE TRUTH, and, are often misleading.

All this initial commentary is my way of leading up to my recent critique of the liberal use of a couple of F-words (nope, I’m not talking about “Fire and fury” although that could be an alliterative example of something that’s simply not soothing the simmering psyches of people who need to settle down). Instead, the target of my critique today is the all-too-common utterance, “Fight or flight.”

What follows is an excerpt of a slight rambling rant that was included in my keynote speech at the Montana Prevent Child Abuse Conference this past April.

The context: I had just shown a video of a Harvard professor who happened to mention (without checking with me first) the clever and popular phrase, “fight or flight.” Here’s what came next:

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You may not be aware of this, but I’m an official, self-appointed member of the counseling and psychotherapy theories police. I don’t have a badge, but I’ve got a book. What this book means is that I’ve done a little background reading on lots of theoretical concepts, like “Fight or Flight.” “Fight or Flight” – We hear that a lot, even from, as my older daughter would say, that fancy Harvard guy on the video.

The problem with most rhyming concepts is that they tend to oversimplify whatever it is we’re talking about. Take for example, “No pain, no gain.” There’s some truth to that, but that statement probably doesn’t hold for everyone, everywhere.

Well, the troubling truth is that fight or flight isn’t really all that accurate. Stress doesn’t just trigger two behavioral options. There are other behaviors activated by stress, some of which also start with an F, but don’t rhyme so neatly.

There’s Faint. And there’s Freeze. Chronic stress can also increase Feeding; some of us know that first-hand. My favorite stress food comes from places that rhyme with Fakery, so I guess that’s another F word. But, then again, stress can also dull your appetite, so the feeding thing isn’t a universal response.

Then there are the “P” words, like poop and pee. High stress can affect those, sometimes rather dramatically.

But what most people—even fancy Harvard guys—don’t tell you or don’t know, is that much of the Fight or Flight research was conducted on White Males.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the research was actually conducted on White, Male, Rats.

After re-analyzing old data and new studies focusing on female rats and female humans, years ago, Shelly Taylor and her research colleagues at UCLA discovered that for females of the species, there was a tendency toward a different set of rhyming words. The females coped with stressors using a strategy referred to as “Tend and Befriend.” And to further complexify the situation, sometimes males do the tend and befriend thing too. . . although not quite so frequently as the white, male, rats.

The point . . . I know I’ve strayed from it, is that financial and workplace interventions are very good for decreasing child abuse, but IMHO. . . interventions that increase social support and connection (the tending and befriending as methods for helping highly stressed families cope) are equally important . . . and that brings us right back to you and what you can do to prevent child abuse.

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Today’s blog is just a reminder that although powerful and memorable communication is remarkably powerful and memorable, it’s usually incomplete, not always accurate, and a function of the speaker’s need or desire to be powerful and memorable. This is just as true when I say “a pill is not a skill” or when other people say other things that make use of rambling and reckless rhetoric of the alliterative or rhyming ilk.

To finish, I’ll leave you with what Shelly Taylor said back in the year 2000, as excerpted from our forthcoming textbook, Counseling and Psychotherapy in Context and Practice (John Wiley and Sons, 2018). This particular excerpt ends with brief comments from us that also, in case you are wondering, might be relevant to the recent Google manifesto brouhaha.

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Stress researcher and social psychologist Shelly Taylor made a similar contribution when researching the well-known fight or flight phenomenon (Taylor et al., 2000). She and her colleagues wrote:

A little-known fact about the fight-or-flight response is that the preponderance of research exploring its parameters has been conducted on males, especially on male rats. Until recently, the gender distribution in the human literature was inequitable as well. Prior to 1995, women constituted about 17% of participants in laboratory studies of physiological and neuroendocrine responses to stress. (2000, p. 412)

Reanalysis of existing data and new research revealed significant differences in the ways in which females and males respond to stressful situations. Taylor and colleagues (2000) concluded:

We propose a theory of female responses to stress characterized by a pattern termed “tend-and-befriend.” Specifically, we propose that women’s responses to stress are characterized by patterns that involve caring for offspring under stressful circumstances, joining social groups to reduce vulnerability, and contributing to the development of social groupings, especially those involving female networks, for the exchange of resources and responsibilities. We maintain that aspects of these responses, both maternal and affiliative, may have built on the biobehavioral attachment caregiving system that depends, in part, on oxytocin, estrogen, and endogenous opioid mechanisms, among other neuroendocrine underpinnings. (p. 422)

The preponderance of the research suggests that in fact, that White male ways of being aren’t always normative for females, or even for all males. There are physical and psychological similarities between females and males, but there are also differences. In this case, it would be inappropriate to make the case that a typical male fight-or-flight response is superior to a typical female tend-and-befriend response. There is likely an evolutionary benefit to both stress-related behavior patterns (Master et al., 2009; Taylor & Gonzaga, 2007; Taylor & Master, 2011). Sometimes differences are just differences and there’s no need to advocate for one sex-related pattern as superior over another (although if they feel threatened by this information, white male rats are highly likely to fight for their position…or run and hide in little holes in our cupboards). In this case it seems clear: Neither behavior pattern represents psychopathology…and neither will always be the superior response to threat.