The FIVE stress responses
And why one of these is not noticed ...
Photo by Elise Wilcox on Unsplash (two women’s arms, one with a tattoo, reach for each other)
On one of my blogs, I have a “definition” of the five responses to stress - yes, FIVE.
I’m not going to repeated all of that post (you can see it - free of cost or ID check requirements - at https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-five-stress-responses.html), but those responses are:
fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and network & nurture.
Overseas, the term tend & befriend is also used, and I now consider that an amalgam of fawn and about half of network & nurture.
The following from my post, which includes my earlier views on tend & befriend vs, network & nurture might be useful:
I have generally considered that tend and befriend was a variation of network and nurture, but definitions tend to vary a bit. For the purposes of this post, which is for my convenience, and does NOT seek to be definitive:
From https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2020/05/fbu-flummoxed-by-unfamiliar.html:
Network - where the discomforted person seeks to build a group or network (such as old boys clubs, private schools, irrelevant admission criteria in any organisation, groups against LGBTIQ+ people [or some thereof], etc) against the idea they find discomforting; and
Nurture - where the discomforted person seeks solace from others who also cling to the idea that is threatened (such as friends, families [especially if the family has a powerful group mind [“egregore”], priests of that religion, etc).
From https://mcleanonline.medium.com/fight-or-flight-196fc1beb89f, which is citing “Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10941275/:
Tending involves nurturant activities designed to protect the self and offspring that promote safety and reduce distress;
befriending is the creation and maintenance of social networks that may aid in this process.
These tend to suggest they are more or less equivalent.
However, whether network and nurture or tend and befriend, when I have talked to people in workplaces who exhibit stereotypical male behaviour (including a couple of ciswomen), they’ve wrongly thought this was the fawn response - and error which assumes there are only two people in the situations: the source of the threat, and the person being threatened. In actual fact, there are also bystanders and allies - and environment/context.
Hopefully a few decades of less stereotypical male and less binary gendered research will see that fifth stress response come into wide use.
The point that has become more significant to me now is that it is the worldview of toxic alpha personalities, which is a more accurate reference than “stereotypical male behaviour” as women (mainly cis, but potentially trans, I suppose) and nonbinary (again: I suppose - although I haven’t met any engaging in this flaw) people are also capable of engaging in the ultra-competitive, self-obsessed behaviour of this personality flaw/type, which is so antithetical to the collaborative and cooperative notion of working with bystanders and allies that they do not even notice it is occurring …
Which takes us back to medical and other biases of professions that have historically been dominated by cismen and all the many, many, many problems that flow from their blindness and deafness and arrogance …
It is also worth having a look at my latest blog post:
“Post No. 3,371 - The spiritual changes signified by the Sex Discrimination Act (1984) of Australia” https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2026/01/post-no-3371-spiritual-changes.html
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