The Nervous System

Our nervous system is made up of our brain, spinal cord, and nerves which travel throughout the body.   This system receives information from all around us, through our sensory system, and from inside our body, and that causes a response.  These responses can be voluntary, or involuntary through the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS).  The nervous system also controls everything the body does from breathing, to walking, to thinking and feeling. 

Our nervous system signals us and evaluates situations for safety and security or threat and danger.   When our body perceives a situation of threat or danger, the ANS will cause the body to respond in the following ways:

• Fight -Aggression, shouting, hitting, biting, kicking, swearing-anything to fight off the danger.

• Flight- Elopement, fleeing, hiding, avoiding, anything to get away from danger.

• Freeze- Shutdown, dissociate, block out, disconnect, anything to stop the danger from hurting us.

• Fawn- Disregard for what we need in order to please the other person to keep us safe.  

Usually, a person's first response to threat or danger is fight or flight and if that doesn't work freeze or fawn may be used, however when threat is chronic the nervous system learns to freeze first.  That is why we must institute trauma-informed practices for autistic individuals, because what may be viewed as compliance actually is the student in the freeze or fawn state.    Once the nervous system is chronically triggered into these states, it will become more sensitive to trauma, and thus more easily triggered by situations that were formerly benign to the student, which may look like heightened sensory overload or in cases of dissociation ignoring sensory input altogether.