Fight, Flight and Freeze: The Deer is my Teacher

I remember my first day as a postgraduate, about 15 years ago at university, all was going well until the "meet and greet buffet" with students and faculty staff, which to neurotypical people is fairly normal, enjoyable even, but for me, as a neurodivergent, was surprisingly difficult. I felt an increasing sense of unease, of being overwhelmed. Sweaty. On the verge of panic. I hadn’t realised just how socially awkward I was. I got through the buffet by retreating into a safe place in my mind, and then with about four hours to spare before the next event, as all the other students left the buffet and further mingled, I disappeared into the background, through a hole in the hedge and found the River, and walked along it as far as I could, until the city was behind me and my vista was the opening fields of the countryside. Like a deer escaping a predator my heart beat started to return to normal and I could feel that I could once more breathe again. Years later I would refer to this flight reaction as my own peculiar ‘deer-sense’.

In my mind, our animal nature is most prevalent in our symptoms of anxiety and depression and hypervigilance, which can be more pronounced in those with neurodiversity, and which evolved over countless millennia, even millions of years. It is these emotional responses and alterations in our mental health that constitutes our survival sense – that keeps us alert and safe in a dangerous world – just like a prey animal such as the deer. We have probably all seen this when we happen across a deer who startles and bounds away into the forest, or when we see a rabbit in our headlights and they just freeze, or a horse that starts kicking to rid them of their rider and saddle. Well, we do the same. We may freeze or we may run, and in some circumstances we may fight. But we do all these things in an animalistic way, and if we do react it will be in a frenzied, automatic, uncontained and uncontrolled way, with one purpose; to save our life – but with no finesse, with no exactness or accuracy and with no sense of impeccability or precision. 

In many situations in life this fight/flight/freeze reaction is neither helpful nor empowering; it leaves us vulnerable, ridiculed and in a weakened position. For example, if we get called into the manager’s office for a ‘chat’ – perhaps we haven’t done something right or we are to be criticised – we will not be able to respond calmly or rationally if we are in the fight / flight / freeze response; because this is a survival mechanism which uses parts of the brain which are very animal-like in form and function – it as if we put a wild deer in the manager’s office. That wild deer isn’t going to be happy it’s going to try and smash the window to escape. So, if we are feeling like that, feeling fearful of attack, it’s just not going to go well for us, as the manager’s office is not a life or death situation, and if we start reacting like a scared animal it’s just going to go from bad to worse. We will act like a prey animal, we will be a rabbit in the head lights, and we will not handle ourselves very competently. It all stems from how our brains are structured.

If we consider the brain as an onion with different layers, the upper layers, the neocortex deals with our higher-thinking, such as sensory perception, language and conscious thought, and frontal lobes deals with the attributes that make us both individual and ‘human’ – emotional expression, personality and our ability to communicate. As we go deeper into the brain – a little like looking at the growth rings inside a tree – we find brain structures which are old, primordial in fact, linking to our evolutionary past; the limbic system, which emerged in early primates and dealing with motivation, and emotions such as anxiety; and deeper still the brain stem, also called the reptilian brain, which controls our basic functions such as breathing, swallowing, heart rate and blood pressure. It is the centre of the brain that humans use when we are depressed, stressed, suffer from heightened states of anxiety, or are in the fight / flight / freeze response. In this state we may start to exhibit quite antisocial qualities, autistic spectrum qualities even – not wanting to be touched, not wanting to leave our safe place, not wanting to talk or to interact and so on, most probably caused by reduction of serotonin, the feel good chemical. Likewise, when the adrenalin kicks in and makes us physically react, we may react aggressively and fight or lash out or we may run, again this injection of adrenalin into our system is a survival response.

Putting ourselves into our proper context as animals, reframes our co-relationship with the animal kingdom, even leaning us towards a Native American point of view – not seeing animals as ‘other’ and lower, and ‘us’ as higher and better, but rather as them as four-leggeds and us as two-leggeds; more like cousins in a big interlocking family than wholly different and separate. 

I suppose you could say that the deer has been a great teacher to me over the years. I have learnt about my own highly attuned ‘autistic’ senses from the deer, and how my anxiety reduces, and even disappears entirely, when I am in the woods and countryside. I have learnt how to walk quietly and deer-like through the woods, even to fully allow this deer-sense to take over when it is appropriate to do so. On some occasions I have been known to go through a hole in the hedge and into a field just to get away from approaching humans, and using this sense I naturally find myself near to the deer herd and other wildlife. But I also have learnt when this deer-sense is no longer appropriate and when I need to control it, when I need to steer myself away from fight or flight, because sometimes running away is not an option. I have embraced my autistic traits as my 'deer sense', it has its use as a super-sense and it has its disadvantages too. But I have come to terms that 'this is me.'