4 Helpful Tools for When Fear Triggers You
Fear can make the body feel as though an immediate danger is unfolding, especially when earlier relational trauma has taught the nervous system to scan for threat. This essay explains why the past can feel suddenly present and offers four practical ways to seek steadiness, perspective, bodily support, and helpful action.
“Honey, Mom has COVID.”
“I’m so sorry, but we need to let you go.”
“I need to schedule time to talk with you. Immediately.”
“Can you come into my office for a minute? I need to talk to you about your daughter’s lab work.”
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Fear. Be it perceived or actual, an immediate or imaginary threat absolutely feels terrible.
Fear hijacks our brains and bodies, flooding our limbs and chest with cortisol and making us feel like there’s fiery heat coursing through our limbs and into our throats.
We panic. Flounder, acting impulsively or taking rash action to do something. Anything.
We freeze. We shake. We may start sobbing.
Fear impacts us all. But sometimes it impacts us disproportionately.
Take, for instance, those sentences at the top of this essay.
Do you feel scared and fearful of just hearing them?
Or do you feel fairly neutral, noticing that they’re not ideal intellectually but also not really feeling anything in your body when you read them?
It’s not uncommon for those who come from relational trauma histories to have disproportionately higher and more severe fear reactions to those sentences (or to actual parallel lived out experiences).
In today’s essay, I talk about why, and also share four helpful tools to cope when fear triggers your own trauma.
Why Fear Can Feel So Immediate
Relational trauma , the experience of repeated, protracted events or situations that overwhelm an individual’s ability to respond, most usually taking place in a relationship where there’s a large imbalance of power (such as parent and child) , is an experience with impacts that can linger long after the original trauma has ended.
Relational trauma describes repeated overwhelming experiences within a relationship marked by a significant power imbalance, often during childhood. The essay describes how its effects can persist after the original danger has ended.
In plain terms: When an old relationship taught your body to expect danger, a present-day uncertainty can land with far more force than the moment itself seems to warrant.
One such example of a lingering impact is the disproportionate response relational trauma survivors might have when threats and fear , be they perceived or actual , take place.
Why?
Because of several reasons.
Often those who come from relational trauma backgrounds may have lived through actual events that threatened (or seemed like they threatened) their survival.
Their nervous system was taxed and taught at an early age to be hypervigilant, leaving them predisposed to overly activated nervous systems and a sensitive “scanning” system for danger, a body and mind quick to race to fear and, in fact, flood with it.
Hypervigilance is a heightened state of threat-scanning in which the nervous system remains ready to detect danger. It can develop after experiences that made safety feel unpredictable.
In plain terms: Your system may rush toward the worst possibility because it learned that missing a warning once felt too costly.
Moreover, for those who come from relational trauma backgrounds, the past may quickly become present.
What do I mean by this?
The boss who asks to speak with you collapses time and suddenly you feel as powerless and helpless as you did at 10 years old when your father dropped you off on a highway and sped off. Leaving you alone. Leaving you vulnerable.
The flaw you find in your paperwork plunges you into catastrophe. You know you’ll end up in jail and be utterly ruined for accidentally not crossing every T and dotting every I. You feel like your life is over.
These are just a few moments when perceived fear feels like actual fear to our minds and bodies. Time collapses and our past traumatic experiences show up, warping our perception of the present.
If this has happened to you, if this ever does happen to you, here are four helpful tools you can use when fear triggers your own trauma.
And please note: you don’t have to come from a relational trauma background to benefit from these tools. Anyone can benefit because fear is universal.
Four Helpful Tools
Be it your therapist, your spouse, your best girlfriend, your pastor, your yoga teacher, your child’s daycare director, talk to someone , anyone , who loves you and knows you and whose own nervous system is grounded and regulated enough to be able to help you.
To give you perspective. To provide, perhaps, a more accurate and realistic, and pragmatic view of what’s going on.
Soothing our nervous systems by relying on others isn’t weak. It’s smart.
And it’s particularly smart when we’re so flooded with fear that we’re catastrophizing, and unable to access our brain’s prefrontal cortex in the ways we really need to.
Pick up the phone, send a text, run over (in a mask while standing six feet apart) to your friend’s home.
Do what you need to do to access others’ in your life who can support you and help you regulate.
2. Soothe your body with movement, energy discharge, and heat.
The fear response triggers our amygdala and sends a cascade of hormones through our body, triggering our adaptive fight, flight, or freeze responses.
In order to alleviate your fear, tend to your body and help it discharge the build-up of cortisol and bring back circulation to all parts of you.
Practicing taking deep, shallow breaths. Let yourself release the energy through tears, screaming, pacing. Hop on your Peloton for a 20-minute ride, or challenging yourself to 30 jumping jacks to spike your heart rate.
Movement and expulsion like this can help discharge the pent up fear energy in our body.
And then, soothe and warm your body.
Try climbing underneath your shower and letting the hot water bring circulation back to your cold hands and feet (blood flow to our extremities reduces when our fear response is triggered, less blood flow to the extremities and more blood flow to our organs to ensure our survival).
Turn up the heat in your house and putting on another sweater. Put on your slippers, put on your hat, hold your hands near the heater.
Soothe your body with heat to help yourself regulate again.
3. Play the worst-case scenario with yourself and list all the action steps that would have to happen for that to come true.
Another helpful tool when we find ourselves flooded by fear is to play out the worst-case scenarios with yourself and then list all the action steps that would have to happen for it to come true.
For example, your boss calls you into your office for what you imagine will be a disciplinary conversation. You worry that you will be fired and that you will end up on the street so you panic.
Play it out: Let’s say you really do get fired. Is it true you would end up on the street right away? Is it true you have no savings to tide you over? No way to get another job in a reasonable amount of time?
Is it true that every social support in your life would abandon you and you wouldn’t be able to crash on someone’s couch? What are alllll of the steps that would have to happen for your worst-case scenario to come to pass? And now ask yourself: is it really likely that each and every one of those things will happen?
For most of us, the answer is no. And so this tool can be a very helpful cognitive exercise to play with ourselves when we are flooded with fear and our trauma is triggered.
4. Get actionable.
For many of us, nothing soothes our anxiety and fear quite like getting actionable.
Anxiety and fear can dissipate in the face of strategic action to remedy the situation we’re most afraid of.
Worried about your paperwork gap? Consult a lawyer. Scared about your child’s lab work prognosis? Get a second opinion and ask for more tests to be run. Worried your boss is upset with you? Check out that assumption with them. Ask for a performance improvement plan and regular meetings to track your progress.
Of course, with some things in life, there are few ways we imagine we can get actionable. Such as in the face of life or death or when we’re powerless over the actions of another. But maybe, just maybe there’s some small way you can still get actionable? Even if it’s sending money to cover someone’s medical costs, or boxing up Christmas gifts for their kids and dropping them on the porch, or gifting someone some therapy sessions to help them process their own fear.
There are few examples I’ve seen where we truly can’t take supportive action in some form to support our fear.
A Reminder for Hard Days
Finally, as we wrap up this article today I want to remind you that, even though it feels like the world is collapsing, like the world is ending, you have made it through hard times before. You have survived your most terrible, no-good days before, and it’s likely you will survive again.
If you need reminders of how strong you are, and of good things that are still happening in the world and that will likely go on long after this particularly hard chapter has passed, please explore these posts I’ve previously written:
When life feels impossible. A note from me to you.
The spreadsheet isn't the problem. You already know that.
A focused self-paced course on financial trauma, the nervous-system patterns that override every budgeting app, every money mindset book, and every well-meaning financial planner. Not a productivity tool. The level underneath all of those.
A pep talk for times when you’re struggling.
A note of encouragement when adulting feels hard.
Adulting’s not easy and humaning can be hard.
101 reasons why it will all be okay.
101 self-care suggestions when it all feels like too much.
99 uplifting quotes to spark your soul and see you through hard times.
Q: Why can a small threat feel so enormous?
A: The essay explains that a current threat can activate earlier fear, making the past feel suddenly present in the body and mind.
Q: Who can I call when I am flooded with fear?
A: Choose someone who cares about you and whose own nervous system is grounded enough to offer perspective and support.
Q: Why does movement help when I feel afraid?
A: The essay describes fear as a bodily response and suggests movement, tears, pacing, and warmth as ways of tending to that activation.
Q: How can I test a worst-case scenario?
A: Write out every step that would need to happen for it to come true, then consider how likely it is that every one of those steps will occur.
Q: What does it mean to get actionable?
A: It means identifying a supportive, concrete next step, such as seeking information, consulting someone, or checking an assumption.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. Trained in EMDR, psychodynamic, and somatic modalities, she is licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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