Escaping the present – trauma’s frozen fight-or-flight legacy

Whenever I used to call my father, he always began the conversation with the same question: “What’s new?” It’s twenty years since he passed away, yet only now do I see the pain behind that seemingly innocuous starter question. He spent his whole life trying—and failing—to escape the present moment by slipping into the new.

Escaping the present

I have fallen into the same trap. I’ve spent every moment of my life just wanting to get through to the next moment—only to repeat the loop and escape each successive sliver of time. I can feel it now, a very subtle pressure that now is dangerous and I need out.

Escaping the present isn’t a dissatisfaction measure. It’s survival. It’s how our psyche copes with frozen pain constantly bleeding from the past into the now moment.

I’m not fully here. I’m there—except that there becomes here which propels me there. It’s like an inverse version of ‘tomorrow never arrives’ where today never stays.

I see it all around me now—now that I’m attuned to it within myself. The constant rush, the low rumble of traffic on the A5, the need to make each moment of time pay its way. I see it in the people striding down the sidewalk, gaze locked on their mobile phones like angler fish: spine arched forward, brain stem collapsed, no lower back support.

Symptoms, when you know how to read them, of multi-generational trauma. Legacies of a failed fight-or-flight response somewhere in our ancestral line.

When fight-or-flight goes wrong

The fight-or-flight response was first described by physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon in 1915. It’s “a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival.” It makes us more attentive, more combative, and minimises the impact of physical injury.

To achieve this, fight-or-flight disturbs the homeostasis of the body—our state of natural, sustainable balance, which Cannon also studied. This means fight-or-flight can only be maintained for a short time—the period of immediate danger.

When neither fight nor flight are possible, the mechanism—which works chemically by manipulating production of adrenaline and cortisol—gets confused. A short-term spike turns into a multi-generational chemical imbalance. Adrenaline keeps flowing, dripping like a garden tap for generations, still urging us to flee from some situation that affected some ancestor, at some time past.

I describe this in more detail in Generational trauma is a frozen fight-or-flight response.

Cut-and-run

The upshot is this vague pressure to cut-and-run from the present. It plays out over decades as repeated moves, in failures to establish community, friendships and relationships, support networks and careers. Abandonment as strategy.

By the time I was fourteen, I spoke three languages, had lived in four countries, and been exposed to five religions. A Third Culture Kid at ease in any culture but at home in none. This did not provide a stable container for safe and sustainable living.

At the 2021 Intergenerational Trauma Conference, Peter McBride noted how trauma shocks the ‘assumptive world’ of our inner safety. When our safety’s compromised, part of our brain screams, “Run!” That scream has echoed dully for decades.

Staying present

To stay present, we must restore safety—except it’s no longer assumptive. It’s chosen.

To stop fleeing the unsafe present we must stop, ground ourselves, turn and face the source of our disquiet and anxiety.

Feel: What is this vague pressure to cut-and-run?

Observe: What is my body doing? My eyes? My mind?

Ask: What am I not feeling? Where am I numbed out?

Breathe. Wait patiently for answers. Attune yourself to their subtlety.

In a world of growing chaos, the only safety lies in being able to relax into each moment and fully experience it, high or low, knowing with certainty that I will make it through.

Next steps

For further resources on generational trauma, both free and paid, please click on this image.

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