It’s only happened to me in social settings where it wasn’t appropriate to show how overwhelmed I was. When I’d feel the stress build and then the fight/flight response blanket my body, I could usually control it by digging my thumb nail into the palm of my hand as hard as I could or by scrunching my toes – things that wouldn’t be very noticeable even if someone was looking directly at me. Sometimes I couldn’t control it though, and I’d get tremors.

One of my classes in college had a very interesting design. An intimate number of us were put in a dimly lit classroom with no windows and a chair arrangement that changed each week. We were tasked with debating each other at the very end of the class, and so we (and maybe just I) spent the class fretting about the debate and probably not absorbing the material well. When it came time to debate the topic, the door to the classroom was closed and the professor would circle the classroom like a shark, scribbling things down as the students spoke, judging and grading our performance. I was one of the only students who never gave a concluding speech on my position at the end. I could barely think at all, let alone articulate a point. This was all very triggering, and the tremors that I thought were reserved for public speeches with large audiences, threatened to return when I was simply present in this classroom.

I didn’t have the option to drop this class and so I decided that if I was going to get through it, I needed to self-medicate. I couldn’t take the pharmaceutical route at the time, so I started taking half a shot of vodka right before the class and the other half right before the debate. It worked very well. It didn’t give me the courage to speak more and it made me a little less lucid, but the fight/flight response was blunted and the tremors stopped. Someone with a doctorate once told me that alcohol doesn’t help in any situation, and while that’s wise to say to people at risk for addiction, that wasn’t my experience. The elevated stress that I may have experienced in the days following my alcohol consumption was imperceptible when compared to what I experienced in that classroom, which was a very abnormal environment. I didn’t feel human in that class, I felt like a subject. Part of me wonders if that’s what therapy would be like for me. If I’d just feel like an alien that some man or woman with a fancy title was picking and prodding at without a care in the world for the consequences.

So to TLDR that, I think I only feel the need to “fight” this response when I’m afraid of how that response will be perceived by others, which is an awful feedback loop.