Trauma Responses: Understanding The Flight Response
ShrinkChicks
Jennifer Chaiken, LMFT and Emmalee Bierly, LMFT
4.9 • 755 Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on ShrinkChicks, Em and Jen continue their trauma response series with a deep dive into the flight response: what it is, how it shows up, and why it can feel so productive while still being avoidant. Unlike fight or freeze, flight often looks subtle in daily life: staying busy, overworking, changing the subject, scrolling, researching, or emotionally distancing when things feel intense.
They explore how the flight response is a nervous system survival strategy, why society often rewards it, and how it can quietly prevent intimacy, resolution, and emotional depth. Listener questions cover flight during conflict, overworking as avoidance, the urge to fix instead of feel, and how avoidant attachment patterns often overlap with flight behaviors.
Em and Jen also discuss why unhealthy coping feels better in the moment, how collective trauma keeps our nervous systems activated, and how understanding your response helps you make choices aligned with your values, not just your survival instincts.
Tune in to gain insight, awareness, and action! PS: Fast forward to around 6 minutes to skip the intro and get straight to today’s content.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Does overworking, staying busy, or mentally checking out count as flight? |
| 0:05.2 | Yes. |
| 0:06.7 | It can. |
| 0:07.7 | I guess I should say, yes, it can. |
| 0:10.4 | Flight isn't only leaving the room. |
| 0:13.9 | It is also exactly what you're talking about. |
| 0:15.8 | It's staying busy so you don't have to feel. |
| 0:17.9 | So we think about it in terms of also like a numbing situation. Business can also be running. |
| 0:22.4 | It's just running in one place. |
| 0:32.2 | Welcome back to another episode of shrink chicks. |
| 0:36.8 | Take a seat on our virtual therapy couch and get ready to learn all about, well, you. |
| 0:42.1 | I'm Emily Beirley. |
| 0:43.2 | And I'm Jennifer Chakin. |
| 0:44.5 | And we're both licensed, marriage and family therapist and relationship experts. |
| 0:48.4 | We're the owners and founders of the therapy group, a nationwide psychotherapy practice with down-to-earth therapists just like us. |
| 0:55.9 | Your session is starting, so get ready to know yourself and grow yourself. |
| 1:02.6 | I used to wake up sneezing almost every morning, and I kept thinking, do I suddenly have seasonal |
| 1:07.1 | allergies inside my own home? I'd clean, I'd vacuum, I'd wash the sheets, |
| 1:11.3 | and there would be no change. That's when I realized it might not be the surfaces, it might be |
| 1:15.6 | the air. So I'm so excited to tell you about our newest sponsor air doctor. It made all the |
| 1:20.7 | difference in my house, and it's now the only air purifier we use in our home. Let me tell you |
| 1:25.5 | what I've noticed so far. Fewer random odors lingering in the kitchen, |
... |
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