The Preventative Response

Over years of working with clients, I noticed a recurring phenomenon that I initially had no explanation for.

People could escape a situation.  They could avoid the harm altogether.  Sometimes the feared outcome never actually occurred.

And yet something persisted.

The nervous system continued responding as though the threat remained.

What I eventually began to notice was that the familiar fight, flight and freeze responses were not always where defence began.

There was often an earlier response.

A movement away.
A turn of the head.
An impulse to block or interrupt.
A change in posture.
A subtle attempt to prevent what was happening from progressing any further.

I came to call this the preventative response.

These responses can be so small that neither the person nor the practitioner recognises their significance.  Attention naturally goes to the larger event — the fear, the escape, the fight, the freeze, the aftermath.

But the nervous system may have begun organising defence much earlier.

Recognising that changed the questions I was asking.

Instead of looking only at how a person survived what happened, I became interested in what their nervous system had been attempting to do before survival became necessary.

That observation eventually became an important part of the Biological Completion Model.

It also raised a much bigger question:

What happens when an early defensive response never gets to do what it was organised to do?

That question led somewhere I did not expect.

And it changed how I understood why trauma can persist.