Fight, Flight, Freeze, Appease: Master Your Survival Reactions

The world is changing fast. Thank goodness! Change can be your friend who brings a better life, if you learn to manage your own survival reactions. People who react in survival mode can make every danger worse. But don’t worry! When you understand how life works to make yourself feel safe, you won’t join the escalating chaos. You’ll be a source of hope and solutions for a future that’s here now as your life just keeps getting better. Join us Sunday Feb 1, 2026 for free empowering talk on what it means and what to do when you find yourself reacting in fight, flight, freeze or appease.

Your human self is both extremely powerful and deeply vulnerable. Power means you can take action to make what you need happen, which is great! But people feel weak and scared when they don’t understand that their power is also vulnerable. Vulnerable means your power can be hurt and stop functioning. For example a car is powerful, and easily damaged so you need to take good care of it. Don’t let the oil run out, don’t puncture the tires, don’t put dirt in the gas tank, don’t shift into reverse while driving fast. Your human energetic body is even more powerful than a car with even more ways it can get hurt. That’s actually a good thing! Because everything you need to take care of yourself is freely given by the Universe. Your human needs are gifts that lead you to where you belong to be happy and thrive.

So why are people weak, injured, and scared, when they could be strong, healthy, and happy? That’s the vulnerable effect of holding onto false negative beliefs. People like to think they can think, say and do anything they want and still be totally successful. Beliefs generate life experience, so when people hold onto beliefs that will never work, they feel bad and turn negative. Beliefs are your stories about your life, for what you think is true and what you expect will happen. If you don’t believe that something good is possible, then you’ll keep doing something bad instead, until life seems so hopeless that you just want to kill or die. Struggling people are full of blame and anger at someone who is actually themselves.

Today we see people who believe all kinds of crazy things, many of which will never give them a good life. People get horrible ideas from bad training and abuse, resulting in pain, paranoia, persecution, and pessimism. Fortunately, the Universe really is a wonderful place that always wants to give you a great life forever. You just need to find the right beliefs that connect you with the good life that you always wanted and deserve. True effective beliefs are like clear instruction manuals for life. They set you up to feel happy, think clearly, and act powerfully – even when everybody else is failing in their own points of view. True beliefs work because they let the living loving Universe guide you to safety and success on your own unique terms.

But won’t other people’s failure and chaos mess you up? No, because everyone is in their own consciousness experiencing their own universe. Parallel realities are not fantasy or escapism. If you let everyone run their own life their own way, then you can too. You’ll be attracted to what you need to grow successfully, and what’s bad for you will be naturally repelled – unless you believe you must hold onto the past! False beliefs of neediness cause people to stay in toxic relationships and codependent situations. Survival personalities develop around the four major survival reactions of appease, freeze, flight or fight. None of these defenses make life work because they reinforce the original false assumption that the Universe is dangerous, when it’s really guiding you out of danger and into limitless prosperity.

For this meetup, recall the defensive behaviors you go into when your safety feels threatened. Do you think you’re bad for reacting badly? Can you stop and apologize, or do you get stuck in shameful escalations? After some check-ins to share and relate, I’ll explain the four survival reactions and how they get triggered when you hold onto false beliefs that make you scared of life. We’ll see how negative beliefs use fear to corrupt your divine personality, and how you can reclaim fear as your own emotional feedback to find and fix beliefs. We’ll close with a guided meditation to heal inner selves that got stuck in survival, so you can return to your higher self’s guidance for a happy healthy time on Earth.

Welcome! Our Inner Selves Mastery spiritual support group is free online every Sunday 11am-130pm EDT, with the last 30 minutes for a guided meditation. If you can’t stay you can get the recording. You can signup here for this meeting and visit www.signupISM.com for all events, newsletter, videos, and more.

Best wishes,
Carl Johann Schroeder
Inner Selves Mastery
spiritual teaching and coaching
quick-links at www.signupISM.com