The trick to accessing different fear responses isn’t about forcing your foremost instincts into a different shape — it’s about creating the right conditions for that shape to form. When you understand where other possible instincts come from well enough, you can find ways to engineer the circumstances that have led to that response for you within the more controlled container of play — or even just in the space you get ready to play in.
That’s how I started my original response to a question I got in preparation for one of my “Playing with Fear” classes:
How would you prepare for a scene if the goal is playing with a different fear response than your natural response (ie. fight vs fawn)?
Aaaaaaaaaaand then my response kept going… and going… and going (which is normal for me), and I realized this one may be worth making into a full writing. After all, this person is far from the only person out there wondering this.
Our natural fear responses developed for survival, but in consensual fear play, we sometimes do wish to explore different responses than the ones our instincts for survival might lean toward — as a way to embody something new, to feel empowered by confronting a fear you usually flee or freeze around, to experience a different kind of adrenaline rush or a more vulnerable version of yourself, or any number of other reasons. And while we can’t fully control how our bodies react to fear, we CAN do some things that invite other different kinds of responses in our scenes… as long as we can determine what those “some things” might be.
Disclaimer
Before I go any further, I should mention that each fear response type has some particular extra risks when it comes to both consent and play. I’ve gone over some of them—along with tips on how tops can respond to bottoms’ fear responses in order to either escalate or de-escalate a scene—in a different writing a handful of months back, so I’m not going to do it again here. But please, whether you’re a top OR a bottom, if you don’t feel you understand the risks you’re taking on any time you play with fear responses (including but not limited to the one(s) you’re trying to create), please pause and do that + consider finding other stuff to read on this too and/or coming to classes like mine or similar to mine as well. Your well-being is worth it, both you-singular as a bottom or top and you-plural as a top/bottom relationship.
It’s also important I mention that ANY time we are reflecting on times we’ve felt fear, we may also be drawing up memories of trauma that aren’t the most pleasant, which can impact a whole variety of things in your life if you’re unprepared for that. If you don’t currently feel you have the emotional resources to look objectively at information from these memories, and/or if it may do you harm to recreate some conditions in the ways suggested below, please don’t do that. When a fear response becomes a trauma response, mimicking what caused that l response again can sometimes have brutally unexpected consequences, so consider this advice high-risk and please don’t go about this if you are even slightly unsure about this + haven’t yet talked to your mental health support system about if you’re ready. Even then, I suggest coming up with a trauma response aftercare plan, even just for caring for yourself after reflecting on these things if nothing else.
Finally, this is meant as a guide to reflecting on and altering your usual fear response in the context of consensual play, not overall. If you’re looking for a more permanent change in your thought + behavioral patterns for other situations, please please consult a personal therapist with some experience assisting with that sort of thing.
I want to start by acknowledging something important: our natural fear responses (fight, flight, freeze, or fawn) developed to keep us safe and evolutionarily, they activate for a reason. They’re survival mechanisms that often stem from quick threat analysis. They’re not flaws that need to be fixed.
But trying to alter your primary fear response for a scene is certainly possible, because we are all capable of experiencing all of those—and in small or large ways, likely we all have done just that (albeit with a WIDE range of intensities). And that’s because fear responses are highly situational, which means that to tap into your desired response, you can create a situation things purposefully sets up some of the triggers that evoke that response in you.
There are ways to do this that are more general, and ways that are more specific. But what can be most independently powerful is going to come from your own associations, which I can’t tell you, because they’re inside of your head and—much to my chagrin—I am not (yet) a mind-reader.
The art of emotion-based self-research
You start by giving yourself permission to be curious about your own reactions in both your present and in the past, and both in kink and in daily life. Then, grab a notebook or set up a Notion page or Google Drive or something else where you can start collecting these moments. (Side-question: Would y’all use a Notion template for something like this if I offered one?)
I don’t mean the big-T level traumas, because those are a much more dangerous thing to do this with. What I am referring to are all the tiny instances where your bodymind chose a different path than usual, and especially times this has arisen during consensual play (which does mean that the more play you bottom for over time, the more you can collect this kind of data and get better at creating these conditions). When do you surprise yourself with your response to a threat to your body, mind, safety, or prized skills + possessions (even if YOU know there’s no real danger in actuality)?
The idea here is that the more you can get “in the weeds” with these experiences, the better you can create a personal “fear response profile” for each type of response you’re interested in exploring… And these can be given to your top as ammo against you, or they can be used in your own pre-scene process to prime yourself for the experience you want.
Don’t judge these memories or try to analyze them yet — just notice and list them. Where memories you’re willing to spend time in pop up, write them down with as much sensory detail as you can remember and consider general questions like:
- What preceded the reaction? Did you feel overwhelmed? Startled? Weak?
- What did this response lead to you feeling in the body? What muscled clenched? What postures changed? What did the temperature feel like? How was your breathing? (Find some body awareness training exercises in the “Submission Beyond Limits” Workbook)
- What thoughts ran through your head? “I can’t stand this anymore,” “They can’t keep getting away with this,” “I want to wake up now,” etc.?
- Are you normally in a certain location when you feel this? What about your mental state? Do you tend to be hangry, tired, or any other similarities?
- Was feeling this more common during a certain phase of your life, and if so, what are some sensory details about the atmospheres you frequently spent time in back then? Music you listened to? Clothing you wore? Smells or food/drinks you had around you often?
In particular, then, there are some fear response-specific questions you might include for each of the big four options there.
For accessing FIGHT
- When are times you’ve felt the urge to defend yourself even slightly, either physically or verbally?
- What sensations did you notice in your body at times you remember yourself as being defensive, with or without feelings of fear being attached to that? Clenched fists, raised voice, adrenaline rush, tears?
- What environmental factors were present at times this has happened? Were you cornered? Feeling physically threatened? Provoked?
- What words or actions make you feel those sensations or do those things?
For accessing FLIGHT
- When have you felt the strongest urges to escape? At times when you’re in a crowded room? A confrontation? An overwhelming sensory environment?
- What did your body feel like at those times? Did you get jittery, light-headed, or find your legs ready to move?
- What triggered this sense of a need to run/leave quickly? Was it a sense of suffocation? Weakness? Danger?
- Are there locations you frequent (or remember) where you feel you’ve had a stronger-than-your-average awareness of exit routes and emergency escape options, even if you haven’t consciously wanted to leave? What makes these locations similar?
For accessing FREEZE
- Have you ever felt stuck or paralyzed in fear? What situations have left you unable to act, even when you wanted to?
- What do those moment feel like to you internally? A sense of numbness? Tunnel vision? Mental blankness?
- When has staying quiet and blending in felt like your strongest option?
- What situations make you tense up without a desire to defend yourself and/or lead to you staying as still as possible?
- How does your breathing change in these kinds of circumstances?
For accessing FAWN
(which you should consider making an unintentional consent violation plan for and have a serious conversation with your top about first, as fawning by its very definition makes you instantly less likely to alert them to feelings that you’re being harmed, and that represents an added risk that tops should get to give informed consent to as well.)
- In what situations have you not wanted to follow what’s expected of you, but still found yourself feeling like compliance was the only option that could possibly turn out in anything other than harm and/or suffering?
- When does going out of your way to accommodate someone or allow something to happen come from feeling like you’ll be unsafe if you don’t?
- How does your voice change when trying to appease someone? What body language cues emerge? Do you have a “fake smile” that feels different than your real smile? Go-to tricks to “turn on the charm” artificially?
- What kinds of threats make you generally more inclined to “go along with it” than to resist, defend, or leave?
Then, go through each of those fear response pages again and add questions like:
- When you experience this response, what does it make extra difficult to contend with in terms of what allows you to feel safe? Does your aggressive response to fear make it tougher for you to open up + show people other “negative” emotions? Does your flight impulse lead to either dissociation or hypervigilance that can take you out of a present moment, or lead to you isolating yourself when you need aftercare? What are ways you or your top could maybe negate the complicating impacts you experience here?
- What do you feel right now when you think about yourself in those past instances (if anything)? Are these feelings ones you’re ready + wanting to attach to future memories of yourself in consensual play? Where others have been involved, how do you feel about those people now, and are those feelings you’re ready + wanting to attach to your thoughts of those you may play with going forward? Should your top know about any of these possibilities?
- How do your communication patterns change during and in the aftermath of these moments?
- Are there particular things that tend to help you “come back” from this reaction which you can share with your top so that they can better modulate scene intensity when needed?
Priming yourself for your desired fear response(s)
Once you have a clearer understanding of what leads to your instinctive responses, turn your attention to the one you want to explore and ask yourself:
What conditions might help me remind myself what it feels like to move towards this response?
Think about the environment, emotional buildup, or actions that seem to evoke these responses for you and consider what can be done to mimic these in or around your play. (I imagine that for those who are comfortable using AI, you could even paste in some of your journaling observations around a specific response and ask it for an analysis of what conditions create that response in you!)
Sometimes, using these observations just means giving your top that information as a way to help them set y’alls fear play scene up for success. But while maybe giving your ENTIRE fear profile to someone IS okay and desirable for a lot of relationship dynamics, I recognize that this is a super vulnerable thing to do and it won’t always be the right choice for everyone — and the good news is it doesn’t need to be, either. You can still tell your tops what circumstances might make a particular fear response more likely to occur for you, even in more general terms like so:
(An example for freeze:)
“In past scenes, I have found I can very easily lean into a freeze response if it’s directly stated to me (and maybe also proven to me) that any movement or sound will make things “worse” for me, as long as I also feel like the threat of something happening or worsening will indeed go away if I DO stay frozen long enough. Otherwise, I’ll need a moment where I feel particularly threatened, but only after my weakness against you has been proven to me and when I’m sure there are no possible physical or mental exit routes. It happens more for me if the environment feels overwhelming (dim lighting, loud sounds, and sudden movements) and when I’m cornered or pinned down with very little space between us. This tends to lead to me making myself physically smaller and stiller in some way.
When I do that, that kind of thing being noticed and called out directly by my tops can increase fear for me, but only if the observation is accurate — in my experience, when it’s ‘observed’ aloud that I’m feeling or doing something that I’m not actually feeling or doing, I either lose the sense of fear and/or connection with my top, or I start dissociating entirely because it seems to me in the moment like my reactions aren’t ‘correct’ and I spiral into thinking you’re imagining someone else because you’d prefer to play with someone who had the reactions you’re describing. If my freeze becomes a less-effortful ‘flop’ reaction, where I’m no longer trying to control my breathing so hard as when I freeze and/or where I may not tense up if you try to move me, I might need you to be more enthusiastic about the idea of getting your way whether or not I am even cognizant of what’s happening to me anymore, which gives me permission to be present with how helpless and ‘stuck’ I am.”
The more specific you can be with this, the better your top can craft a scene that aligns with your goals and sets you both up for success.
But things like music, clothing + hairstyles, specific smells + tastes, or other small details are often also “anchors” to memory that can help you step into a specific past moment of life and set the conditions for a fear response (if + when it’s possible for you to integrate these details without triggering a capital-T trauma response (or any bad reaction or association that is likely to make you disconnect from something you’re wanting to engage with and/or likely to cause harm to you, your top, or both)). We humans are very suggestible creatures, and our sensory memories often cue reactions for us incredibly subconsciously, but that doesn’t mean you can’t cue them consciously, too!
And using these details doesn’t even have to be a thing that actually comes into the scene itself at ALL, if you want to let your top take the lead on that — if certain songs make you feel powerful or defiant, if a particular outfit makes you feel capable of running, if a certain scent reminds you of a time when you froze completely… integrate those into your preparation for the scene, when you’re warming up your body, getting dressed, or on your way to wherever you’re playing.
Our thoughts turn into beliefs, even when we think them intentionally
Even with preparation, those of us with a strong default here may find that it’s very easy for our usual fear response to creep back in, regardless of intent. This is normal and sometimes pretty unavoidable, depending. But if that happens, or even if not, one other thing to try might be creating a kind of fucked-up reverse affirmation of the response you want, by consciously thinking through the other fear responses and why they “can’t work” in the situation you’re in — even if this is a memorized statement you’d never think to yourself naturally. You can even go a bit primal here and consider why + when those responses would increase your chances for survival in the wild, as a way to help “script” this for yourself.
Some examples:
“If I don’t fight back, they’ll never stop torturing me. Fawning won’t help me because they’re too good at picking up on it when I’m lying, flight isn’t an option because there’s nowhere to run, and even when I freeze, they continue anyway. I have a chance if I fight and resist until they’re defeated or too tired, but nothing else will get me out of this.”
“If I stay here, I’m forever going to be vulnerable to this. I can’t just appease them no matter what, since they want this to happen to me regardless; fighting is useless because I’m outmatched and they may restrain me completely and cut off my chance to run if I even try to defend myself; and freezing loses me time before it’s too late and I don’t have the energy to get away. I need to remove myself fast or figure out a way to escape inside my head and not feel this so intensely, or else they’ll keep me doing this forever.”
“If I stay still, they might get bored and then the threat will disappear. Fleeing or fighting will escalate the situation if I’m too slow or if I lose, so it’s too big a risk. And if I act like I like the idea of what’s happening, they might actually believe me it could backfire into them thinking they’re doing something FOR me. I just have to pretend I have no reactions, and that will make it be over faster.”
“If I can keep them happy, they might spare me. Fighting or fleeing will only provoke them. Freezing will leave me defenseless against being put in an even worse position somehow. It’s pointless to try anything but doing what they want.”
These internal statements can help override your default instincts and reinforce the response you’re trying to embody by giving it a “logical” reason to occur. We create our own frameworks for life and emotional responses, and—though this may not work overnight—the more you think about how a particular fear response is your only option, the more you’ll actuallybelieve it, too. (There’s also some reason to believe that “subvocalizing” — that is, mouthing the words, barely even whispering them — is more powerful to creating this mental change than thinking them alone.)
Iterate and add data over time!!
Fear play often brings up unexpected emotions or memories we hadn’t recalled before, and the observations your play partner may sometimes include patterns you wouldn’t pick up on on your own. Schedule time after you’ve come down from a scene to process what worked, what felt challenging, and what made these things occur — with your play partner if you’re comfortable doing so, but on your own even if not. Then… Add what you learned into your fear response pages so that you can equip yourself and/or your top(s) with even more info the next time. All this may not work for everyone at first, but the more you work toward it, the better your analysis will be.
Exploring a fear response outside your natural instinct can be super super fun and interesting, and it’s possible for all of us — but it requires self-awareness and A LOT of careful reflection on past experiences.
I want to say once more that while these sometimes might be gleaned entirely from experiences with consensual play and/or memories of minor moments from your past, they may also end up bringing you to memories that are higher-risk to your wellbeing. Please be patient, gentle, and generous with yourself when it comes to considering your present ability to reflect on these things objectively and without re-experiencing harm, and if you don’t feel fully prepared… Don’t do it. A you who isn’t at your best is a you who isn’t as able to communicate about + mitigate OTHER risks, so please, please only spend time analyzing and/or intentionally using anchors from harder-to-reflect-on memories if you have the coping mechanisms you need and—if you’re even slightly hesitant in saying that you do—if you’ve discussed the pros and cons of doing this with your support system first (including with mental health professionals, when relevant).
But when this is done with care and respect towards yourself, reflecting on past experiences can help you to better communicare and collaborate with your top, to set up cues you can prime yourself with in the time leading up to play, and to learn what you brain sees as a logical response + when, so that you can more easily step into whatever your desired mindset is when the time for fear play comes.