Who Created the Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn Model? The Real History of the 4Fs

Ask where the fight, flight, freeze, fawn model comes from and you will usually be told "Pete Walker". That is about a third right.

The 4F framework was not designed. It accumulated, across roughly a hundred years, from three sources that had little to do with each other — a physiology laboratory, a body of research on immobility under threat, and a psychotherapist's clinical writing on complex PTSD. Each contributed a different piece, and they carry different amounts of evidential weight, which is the part that usually gets lost.

For anyone deciding how much to trust the framework, that history is the useful thing to know.

1914–1915: Cannon, and fight-or-flight

The Harvard physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon described the reaction in 1914 and wrote in 1915 of "the necessities of fighting or flight" in *Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage* (Appleton, 1915).

Cannon's work was physiology, not psychology. He was documenting what the sympathetic nervous system does to an organism facing threat: adrenaline release, cardiovascular changes, digestion deprioritised, the body mobilised for exertion. He was not describing personality patterns, and he was certainly not proposing a typology of trauma survivors.

This is the best-established component of the modern model by a wide margin, and it is also the one whose meaning has drifted furthest. Cannon's fight-or-flight is a description of an acute physiological state lasting seconds to minutes. When the 4F model uses "fight" to mean a person's characteristic way of relating to conflict over a lifetime, it is using the word for something Cannon never studied.

The 20th century: freeze gets added

Cannon's binary left something out that anyone who has been badly frightened knows: sometimes nothing happens. No fighting, no fleeing — immobility.

Immobility under threat has a long history in animal research, and its application to humans developed across decades rather than arriving in a single paper. A useful marker is H. Stefan Bracha's 2004 paper in *CNS Spectrums*, which argued directly that Cannon's formulation was incomplete for humans and proposed that "freeze, flight, fight, fright, faint provides a more complete description of the human acute stress response sequence" (*CNS Spectrums*, 9(9), 679–685, doi:10.1017/s1092852900001954).

Two things are worth noticing there.

The order is deliberate: Bracha put freeze first, arguing that initial immobility typically precedes any decision to fight or flee. And the model has five elements, not four — his particular contribution was arguing that fear-induced fainting is a distinct human-specific response to inescapable threat rather than a general mammalian one.

So the expansion beyond fight-or-flight happened in the peer-reviewed literature, independently, and it did not produce four categories. Bracha's version is not the one that became popular, which is itself informative about how these frameworks spread.

Meanwhile, involuntary freezing in humans has become genuinely measurable. Studies of assault use validated instruments for tonic immobility and find it common and consequential — its severity predicting later dissociative symptoms and negative post-traumatic beliefs (doi:10.1002/jts.23182). The freeze component has real empirical grounding.

Pete Walker, and the fourth F

The framework as it is used today comes from Pete Walker, a psychotherapist specialising in complex PTSD, through his writing — his article *The 4Fs: A Trauma Typology in Complex PTSD* and his 2013 book *Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving*.

Walker's contribution was twofold and both parts matter.

The fourth response. He describes fawn types as those who "seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs and demands of others", acting "as if they unconsciously believe that the price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences and boundaries". Appeasement as survival strategy: moving toward the threat rather than against it, away from it, or into stillness.

The shift from state to type. This is arguably the larger move and the less noticed one. Cannon and Bracha described states — what happens during an incident. Walker described types: characteristic, durable patterns of relating shaped by what a person had to do repeatedly in childhood. That is what makes the 4F model useful for self-understanding, and it is also what takes it furthest from the physiological research it borrows its vocabulary from.

One point of precision. Walker is very widely credited with coining "fawn", and his work is unquestionably why the term is in circulation. On his own page setting out the typology, however, he presents the model as his framework without explicitly claiming to have originated the word. We have not been able to verify a coinage claim from the primary source, so we do not make one here. What is beyond dispute is that the four-part model, and fawn's place in it, is Walker's.

What the framework is validated to do

Directly, because a lot of material on this topic is vague about it:

Reasonably established:

• Sympathetic arousal in response to threat — Cannon onward, standard physiology.
• Involuntary immobility under threat, measurable with validated instruments and associated with later dissociative symptoms.
• Appeasement as a recognised response to inescapable threat, described consistently across clinical literature.

Not established:

• That there are exactly four types. The number is a clinical choice, not a finding. Bracha proposed five; other writers describe "flop" or "friend" responses.
• That people have a stable primary type. There is no validated instrument that assigns one, no established prevalence figures, and no diagnostic manual that recognises the categories.
• That the 4F categories predict anything measurable — treatment response, prognosis, or behaviour on any task.

Actively contested:

• Much popular 4F content explains the model through polyvagal theory. That framework faces serious challenge in the physiological literature: Grossman set out fundamental problems with its five core premises in *Biological Psychology* (doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108589), and a 2026 evaluation in *Clinical Neuropsychiatry* co-signed by thirty-nine specialists concluded that major tenets are unsupported (doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20260110). A 4F explanation resting on ventral and dorsal vagal circuits is resting on contested ground.

None of that makes the model worthless. A framework can be a good instrument for noticing things about yourself without being a validated classification — most useful psychological vocabulary is in that position. The distinction that matters is between "this gives me language for a pattern I recognise" and "this is a diagnosis". The first is what the 4F model is for. The second it cannot support.

Why this matters for how you use it

If the 4Fs are a validated taxonomy, then finding your type is a fact about you and the interesting question is what follows from it.

If they are a descriptive clinical framework — which is what the history actually shows — then the model earns its keep differently: as a way of noticing that your reaction to a raised voice, your difficulty making decisions, and your inability to say no to a colleague might be the same pattern rather than three separate personal failings. That recognition is genuinely valuable. It is just not the same as a diagnosis, and treating it as one leads people to over-explain themselves with a category.

Our own quiz is built on Walker's framework and is best understood on those terms: a structured prompt for self-observation, not a test with a true answer. It takes about two minutes and runs entirely in your browser.

To read the model itself rather than its history, start with fight, flight, freeze, fawn explained, or the individual fight, flight, freeze and fawn pages. For what the healthy version of each looks like, see the counterpart to each response.

Sources

• Cannon, W. B. (1915). *Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage*. New York: Appleton.
• Bracha, H. S. (2004). Freeze, flight, fight, fright, faint: adaptationist perspectives on the acute stress response spectrum. *CNS Spectrums*, 9(9), 679–685. doi:10.1017/s1092852900001954
• Walker, P. (2013). *Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving*. Azure Coyote. See also *The 4Fs: A Trauma Typology in Complex PTSD*, pete-walker.com
• Barbano, A. C., et al. (2025). Posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, posttraumatic cognitions, and dissociative experiences following rape. *Journal of Traumatic Stress*, 38, 963–975. doi:10.1002/jts.23182
• Grossman, P. (2023). Fundamental challenges and likely refutations of the five basic premises of the polyvagal theory. *Biological Psychology*. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108589
• Grossman, P., et al. (2026). Why the polyvagal theory is untenable. *Clinical Neuropsychiatry*, 22, 100–112. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20260110