Fight or Flight: I Shut Down Whenever Someone Speaks to Me Harshly

Reader’s Question

I am a 25-year-old male from Pakistan. I’ve had a problem for the past 5 years or so. The problem is that whenever anyone talks to me in a harsh manner, I feel my heart start to beat quickly, and my hands and legs tingling, and I shut down and can’t find words to speak. Normally, I can talk to people without problems. But I constantly worry about when there might be a quarrel, because it’s when someone speaks to me harshly that I feel these strange things. I wonder if I have some kind of disease. Please tell me what you think.

Our Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

One would think that if your symptoms were due to some chronic “disease,” you would have them at times other than when people talk “harshly” to you.

The symptoms you describe — e.g., increased heart rate, tingling sensations, etc. — are common indications of anxiety. Anxiety is a kind of fear-like response we have but for which we can’t necessarily identify a specific cause. It’s part of our very basic “flight or fight” mechanisms that we automatically and unconsciously engage when we sense a potential “threat” to our well-being. When we sense that it’s absolutely necessary to go into “fight” mode and we have at least some confidence that we might prevail in a “conflict,” our adrenalin levels increase, and our entire body prepares for “combat.” When we feel “under attack” and either sense that we are ill-equipped to handle the challenge or that to do so would be futile, our bodies go into a very primitive protection mode. Blood flow to the peripheral vessels is reduced due to constriction of the vessel walls (hence the “tingling) and increased around the essential organs. In very primitive times, this was an important survival mechanism. If some wild animal were to attack us, we could potentially survive without a limb or two, but certainly not without our essential organs.

We don’t necessarily think about and plan our responses to situations we intuitively find “threatening.” We simply respond the way we are naturally predisposed to respond. Besides that, there may be some aspects of our early learning experience that “conditioned” us to respond in a particular way. For example, if as a child we found ourselves terrified by frequent or excessive verbal berating from others, we might have learned to fear verbal confrontation of any type. He or she might also have failed to learn sufficient ways to stand up for him or herself and assert his or her legitimate wants or needs.

The good news is that all types of anxiety are relatively simply and easily overcome, even without medicine. There is a wide variety of effective therapy available today for the various types of socially-based anxieties. So, you might want to seek out a counselor who specializes in this type of therapy.