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Key points
- Fighting is not our default state; we fight when we don't feel safe.
- We must respect the downsides and ripple effects of rallying ourselves to fight, even when necessary.
- As social mammals, we evolved a capacity to trust that optimizes our health, well-being, and survival.
When we fight for our fair shot, defend our just and sacred rights, or protect what we already have and should have, even when it's necessary and the right thing to do, we must appreciate that fighting, defending, and protecting emanate from bodies that don't feel safe.
"When we fight, we win!" Kamala Harris's battle cry at the 2024 Democratic National Convention rallied the crowd, inspiring us to get up, come together, and take action. What effect does fighting actually have on us?
Although intended to energize, motivate, and unite around a vision of hope and joy, we must consider the effects fighting has on our individual and collective physiology, its downsides, and its ripple effects.
Our cultural heroes, legends, and leaders tell us that we can overcome anything and anyone as long as we keep fighting. Our greatest champions in sport encourage us to fight through fatigue, pain, fear, failure, and the constant battle with our opponents, primarily within ourselves. Our most influential icons in business speak of how only the paranoid survive, not being in the company of being fair, and that it's not enough to succeed but our competitors must fail.
Are the voices we hear from most often, whether in politics, business, or sports, reverberating from bodies mobilized in states of threat, primed to attack, defend, and protect? Are their messages leading us out of our bodies, steering us away from connection, and ripping apart our biological basis for trust?
The culture in which we live, learn, work, socialize, and play is highly competitive, evaluative, dynamically changing, combative, and unpredictable. The voices that rise to the top resound from bodies that can mobilize, remain mobilized for more extended periods than everyone else around them, and channel their mobilization toward overcoming the challenges, critics, and competitors along their climb to greatness.
Simply put, the fighters win! Their successes echo the call to fight, never give up, do whatever it takes to win, and steadfastly protect what we achieve. However, we must understand that these messages promote danger, disconnection, and distrust, contradicting our biological need for safety, trust, and belonging.
A call to fight might rally us together in the short term to battle for someone who needs our help or something that benefits the greater good. Yet, fighting is not our default or optimal state. We fight only when we don't feel safe. And when we fight, we have already separated ourselves from the other side, promoted physiological states of defense, and compromised our capacity to listen, hold alternative perspectives, solve complex problems, see our commonalities, experience empathy and compassion, and come together as a whole community, country, and world.
A Fight for Safety and Trust
We are designed to trust. As social mammals, we evolved a unique capacity to trust each other, suppress our defensive strategies, and optimize our health, resilience, and survival through communication, cooperation, and co-regulation of our physiological state (i.e., physiological trust).
Through trust, we shift our physiology to support caring for, collaborating with, and joining together instead of fighting for, defending against, and protecting ourselves. Simultaneously, by engaging in supportive, trustworthy, and playful interactions, we regulate our internal environment in healthful, restorative, and homeostatic ways.
In a sense, we are confused and need clarification about what we are fighting to win. The fight to win, defend, and protect is our inherent birthright and the biological imperative of:
• Feeling safe
• Trusting each other
• Expanding safety and trust inward and outward throughout our families, friendships, colleagues, neighborhoods, schools, communities, strangers, politics, and beyond.
Whether we call it healing, growth, inclusion, forgiveness, equality, giving voice, or coming together, we must replace fighting, defending, and protecting with safety, connection, and trust.
A New Message
When in a physiological state supporting feelings of anger, fear, or detachment, we compromise the function of higher brain circuits necessary for optimal communication, listening, collaboration, clarity, problem-solving, creativity, holding alternative perspectives, and seeing the bigger picture.
If we acknowledge that fighting for, defending against, and protecting our safety are adaptive attitudes, behaviors, and strategies emanating from physiological states of threat, we can appreciate that it's time for new political, societal, and world messages and voices that align with our biological need for safety, connection, and trust.
Can we acknowledge that fighting is not our default or optimal state and emanates from a physiological state of threat and mistrust, not safety and connection? Can we respect that states of defense (i.e., fight, flight, withdraw) were designed to initiate short-term survival-based strategies and behaviors and not to be lived in over the long term? Can we appreciate that being chronically called upon to fight for, defend against, or protect ourselves triggers bodies into chronic states of threat, broadcasting danger, distrust, and disconnection and reinforcing an expansive feeling of separation, suspicion, and fear?
The pathway toward trust begins with how we relate to what we feel inside our bodies. Suppose we accept our bodily feelings as representing shifts in our physiological state instead of meaning we must fight for, defend against, or protect ourselves. In that case, we can fluidly, seamlessly, and physiologically experience empathy and compassion and foster trust. Trust in ourselves and trust in each other.
If we recognize how our physiological state influences our actions, reactions, and interactions, and respect our shared need to feel safe and connected, a better mantra for the 2024 US Presidential Election might shift "When we fight, we win" to an embodied, biologically grounded message: "When we trust each other again, we all win!"
Perhaps we can all win by seeing ourselves in each other, recognizing our common longing for belonging, and finding ways to fight, defend, and protect a little bit less and trust each other again a little bit more.
References
Porges, S. W. (2024). Polyvagal Perspectives: Interventions, Practices, and Strategies (1st ed.). W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
