Understanding Your Partner’s Survival Response: Why It Matters in Relationships
Episode 35: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
View transcript on Buzzsprout
When your partner shuts down, lashes out, or avoids conflict, it’s easy to take it personally. But what if their reaction isn’t about you at all? In this episode, Amanda breaks down the concept of default survival responses and why understanding your partner’s patterns can change the way you navigate conflict, support, and boundaries in relationships.
What We Cover in This Episode
- The five default survival responses and why they matter
- How your partner’s response patterns shape conflict
- Why awareness leads to better communication
- The line between compassion and accountability
- Using regulation to show up differently in hard moments
What Are Default Survival Responses?
Survival responses are the brain and body’s automatic reactions to perceived threat or stress. These aren’t conscious choices; they’re wired through our nervous system and past experiences. The five primary responses are:
- Fight: confronting or escalating conflict
- Flight: avoiding or leaving the situation
- Freeze: feeling stuck or immobilized
- Fawn: appeasing to avoid tension
- Shut Down: disconnecting emotionally or physically
Your partner’s default response is shaped by their lived experience. It may have protected them in the past but now creates disconnection in current relationships.
Why This Awareness Helps
Awareness of your partner’s default survival response does three key things:
- Decreases reactivity: You stop taking their behavior so personally and start seeing it through a more compassionate, regulated lens.
- Builds stronger relationships: Understanding leads to better communication, more realistic expectations, and a deeper sense of trust.
- Clarifies when to set boundaries: Awareness helps you discern between behaviors that can be supported versus those that require protection.
Context Helps Regulate
Without context, the brain fills in the blanks—usually with worst-case assumptions. When your partner shuts down, it might feel like rejection. When they get defensive, it might feel like an attack. But when you understand that those are reflexive responses (not deliberate jabs), it creates space for empathy and new responses on your end.
Amanda shares examples from her own life—conflicts with her sisters, fights with her husband, and even moments with her five-month-old son—to illustrate how this awareness shifts the dynamic.
From Reaction to Response
For example, Amanda’s fight response clashes with her husband’s flight. She wants to talk things out. He wants to avoid conflict. Before, this pattern led to misunderstandings and spirals. But now, awareness allows them to approach each other with more empathy and create new habits, even if imperfectly.
Understanding Isn’t Excusing
This awareness doesn’t mean you tolerate everything. It doesn’t mean you excuse mistreatment. Compassion for someone’s history and accountability for their impact can coexist. As Amanda puts it, “There’s a difference between intent and impact.”
If someone consistently avoids conflict or lashes out, and refuses to take ownership for the harm that causes, boundaries are necessary. Especially in relationships that aren’t safe or reciprocal.
A Tool for Real-Life Connection
Whether it’s your partner, a friend, a sibling, or a parent—understanding their survival response is a tool. It helps you:
- Stay grounded in conflict
- Respond with less reactivity
- Avoid enabling toxic dynamics
- Build more emotionally safe relationships
This is also part of the work Amanda supports inside the Restore 1:1 Coaching Program and the Regulated Living Membership. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about having the tools and language to do relationships differently.
Three Tangible Takeaways
- Awareness shifts everything: Identify your partner’s (or loved one’s) default survival response. Use that knowledge to respond with more clarity and less reactivity.
- Compassion requires boundaries: You can understand someone’s pain and protect yourself. Boundaries aren’t punishments—they’re clarity.
- You’re responsible for impact: No matter how reflexive the behavior is, you (and they) are responsible for its impact in relationships. Accountability builds trust.
Looking for more personalized support?
- Book a FREE discovery call for RESTORE, our 1:1 anxiety & depression coaching program (HSA/FSA eligible & includes comprehensive bloodwork)
- Join me inside the Regulated Living Membership, a mental health membership and nervous system healing space (sliding scale pricing available)
- Join my Release Class – Monthly guided nervous system regulation class
- Order my book, Healing Through the Vagus Nerve today!
- Download free resources here
*Want me to talk about something specific on the podcast? Let me know HERE.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or qualified mental health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
