The Fight Response - Guardian of Boundaries, Builder of Walls

Part 2 of The Fragmented Self: Learning to honor our anger instead of letting it dominate us

Linnea Butler, MS, LMFT ✨

Jul 03, 2025

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The room falls silent after her words cut like glass. She watches faces turn away, sees her partner flinch, feels the familiar shame that follows her anger like a black shadow.

If you've ever felt the sudden “whoosh” of rage that seems to come from nowhere, if you've caught yourself speaking with a cruelty that shocks you, or if you live with an inner critic so harsh it makes you want to disappear, you've met your fight response.

This is the loudest of our trauma defenses, the one that announces itself like a tornado, leaving debris in its wake and asking questions later.

Fight doesn't whisper. It roars.

Read Part 1 of the Fragmented Self series

The Neurobiological Battlefield

When the fight response activates, your nervous system transforms into a battlefield. The amygdala sounds the alarm, flooding your body with cortisol and adrenaline and priming you for combat. Your heart pounds. Your jaw clenches. Your fists ball up without thought.

The prefrontal cortex - your center of rational thinking and impulse control - goes offline. This is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do when it perceives mortal danger.

Because you can't reason with an enemy when your life is at stake.

In this activated state, the fight response sees threats everywhere. A colleague's constructive feedback becomes an attack on your competence. Your partner's request for connection feels like criticism. Your own mistakes transform into evidence of fundamental unworthiness.

The fight response doesn't just react to external triggers. It can turn the battlefield inward, creating a war zone where every thought becomes ammunition for self-attack.

This internal fight response might manifest as:

A cruel inner critic that never rests
Self-sabotage that destroys what you've built
Self-harm that turns rage into physical pain
Suicidal ideation that sees annihilation as the ultimate escape

The Two-Sided Architecture of Armor

Fight learned its tactics in moments when boundaries were violated, safety was shattered, and the only choice was to resist or be annihilated. It developed its arsenal during times when fighting back was the difference between survival and destruction.

I had a client once tell me that she was “an equal opportunity hater” and that her boundaries were like concrete walls, 6 feet thick and reaching toward the skies.

Picture a castle under siege. The archers take their positions, arrows nocked and ready. The gates slam shut, the drawbridge rises, and every possible entry point is blocked.

This is Fight at work, ensuring that nothing and no one can get in.

But here's what the castle metaphor doesn't capture:

Sometimes the archers are shooting inward.

There's the outward-facing Fight that lashes out at the world. Then there's the inward-facing Fight that wages war against the self with the precision of a sniper.

This internal battle might sound like: You're pathetic. You're weak. You don't deserve love. You're going to ruin everything… Again.

A client I worked with years ago who lived in Fight had shattered her hand twice — first punching a tree, then a car. She never raised her hand or voice to another person, but she turned that same fierce energy against herself when the rage felt too dangerous.

“I couldn't let it out on anyone else," she told me. "It felt like I had this wild thing inside, and if I let it out it would destroy everything."

Feral Cat Wisdom

Fight protects, but it also isolates.

Picture a small cat that's been cornered, fur standing on end, back arched, hissing at the world. Even the kindest stranger offering food and shelter becomes a threat to be faced with claws extended.

The cat doesn't know the difference between past predators and present helpers.

It only knows that survival once depended on making itself as fierce and unapproachable as possible.

Fight operates from this same primal intelligence.

It doesn't have access to nuance or context. It doesn't pause to consider whether the current situation actually requires such intense protection. It simply knows that once upon a time, something terrible happened, and fighting back was the only thing that worked.

When Protection Becomes a Prison

Here's the tragedy and the beauty of the fight response: it's trying to protect something precious.

Beneath all that armor and aggression lies something tender that once needed defending. Maybe it was your innocence, your trust, your capacity for joy, your sense of worth.

Fight appointed itself guardian, like a dragon guarding its treasure, and it has been standing watch ever since.

But guardians can become prisoners of their own vigilance. Fight gets so focused on protecting against past wounds that it can't recognize present safety. It builds walls so high that love can't get in, and authentic connection becomes impossible.

The most heartbreaking aspect of the fight response is how, in it's effort to keep us safe, it pushes away the very relationships that could offer healing.

The Intelligence Beneath the Rage

But what if we could see Fight not as a problem, but as an intelligence to be understood? What if we could recognize the profound loyalty in its protection, even when its methods have outlived their usefulness?

Fight carries the memory of every time you couldn't protect yourself, every boundary that was violated, every moment when fighting back was the only thing that stood between you and complete annihilation.

It holds a deep knowing: You matter. Your boundaries matter. Your safety matters. Your right to exist without being violated matters. Fight would rather see the world burn than let you be erased again.

This is sacred rage. When we can recognize this, we begin to see our fight response not as an enemy, but as an ally whose methods need updating.

Beginning the Conversation

Healing the fight response doesn't mean eliminating it.

That fierce protective energy is part of your life force, part of what kept you alive when gentleness would have meant destruction. The goal isn't to disarm your guardian, but to help it recognize that the war is over.

It begins with the revolutionary act of speaking to Fight with compassion:

“Thank you for trying to keep me safe. I see how hard you've been working to protect me. You did what you needed to do when I had no other options. The danger has passed, and my adult self can handle things from here. It’s okay to rest.”

This isn't about bypassing or minimizing the very real damage that unhealed fight responses can cause. If Fight has hurt others (or yourself), that requires accountability and repair.

But repair works best when it comes from compassionate understanding rather than from shame. When we honor Fight as a part of us that developed for a good reason, we create space for it to evolve.

The Slow Thaw of Fierceness

Healing happens through patiently creating enough safety for Fight to gradually lower its weapons, not by trying to force it.

This might look like:

Learning to recognize the early warning signs of activation before you're flooded. Maybe it's the tightness in your jaw, the heat rising in your chest, or the way your thoughts start racing toward attack mode.
Developing tools for nervous system regulation that can help you pause between trigger and reaction. This might be breathwork, movement, or grounding techniques to help your system remember safety.
Building relationships where Fight can be witnessed and held without retaliation. This often requires finding people who understand trauma and can stay present with your intensity without taking it personally.

As your nervous system gradually learns that you are okay, Fight can begin to differentiate between real threats and false alarms.

Integration, Not Elimination

Fight carries within it the seeds of healthy assertiveness, appropriate anger, and effective boundaries.

The goal isn't to disown anger, because healthy anger gives us vital information. It tells us when our boundaries have been crossed and when something needs to change.

The goal is helping Fight become more discriminating, more proportional, more connected to your adult wisdom than to your childhood wounds.

This is the slow, patient work of helping a feral cat learn to feel safe again. You don't grab for it, kick it out, or try to force it to relax. You simply offer consistent safety, reliable kindness, and the promise that protection doesn't have to mean isolation.

When Fight learns to trust your adult self to handle threats appropriately, it can transform from a reactive guard dog into a wise protector who knows the difference between past and present, between reasonable caution and excessive hypervigilance.

The walls that Fight built were necessary… once.

Now they can become a bridge, back to yourself, back to others, back to a world where protection and connection can coexist.

From my heart to yours,