Are you a Fighter or Flighter?

Are you a Fighter or Flighter?

400 400 The Alive Institute

The Fighter & The Flighter

Many articles have been written recently about attachment styles of relating. I believe there are two primary archetypes within relationships that could be referred to as The Fighter and The Flighter.

  • The fighter is a love seeker
  • The flighter is a love avoider

The fighter anxiously moves toward their partner, with a compelling need for intimacy.

The flighter feels engulfed and pushes the partner away, to protect from intimacy,

Eventually neither can stand to be in each others company. Communication breaks down completely. The relationship becomes frozen as both people unconsciously display their respective killer organizing principle’s to put an end to the pain of how they the relate.

The Kop Out

The killer organizing principle (KOP) is when there is vulnerable space between two people and one person instinctively shuts down and brings in the killer organizing principle and says ‘stop the conversation, go home, I’m killing the deal.’

The person who ‘kops out’ of the relationship is fueled by unrealized and unresolved shame and presents a principal that is organized with the sole purpose of killing the relationship off. The kop out provides temporary relief from the intensity of the fighting.

The remedy for the kop out is for both parties to pause their emotional reactive mind states and give each other the space to relax the sympathetic nervous system before responding to each other with emotional sobriety.

Identify your fight or flight mode to become more aware of how to sympathize with yourself and ergo your partner. It’ll help when you feel left out in the cold. The freezing feeling of isolation need last as long if you allow your emotions to thaw out.

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