Nervous Systems in Context
Understanding the body’s Response to Systemic Oppression
For those working with the nervous system or the vagus nerve, we’re familiar with these responses:
Fight – Mobilizing energy to confront or overpower a perceived threat.
Flight – Using energy to escape or avoid danger.
Freeze – Becoming still or immobile when neither fighting nor fleeing feels possible.
Fawn – Suppressing authenticity or pleasing others to maintain safety and connection.
But recently I read about Pacification / Appeasement, a coping mechanism that doesn’t stem from, or lead to, inner regulation or strength, but instead signals the need for systemic change.
This response often arises in relation to institutions, systems, or authority structures, places where direct resistance feels unsafe or futile. Instead of fighting or fleeing, people (or entire communities) may comply, appear calm, or suppress their truth, vitality, and authenticity to survive within oppressive or rigid systems.
It’s a collective and adaptive response to power imbalance, a way of maintaining safety or stability under overwhelming external control—think bureaucracies, colonial systems, or workplaces with strict hierarchies.
And this is what so many people live every day: people of colour, Indigenous people, people with disabilities, queer and trans folks, working-class and low-income communities, migrants and refugees, elders, including white women (think of simply going to the mechanic...), anyone whose existence, needs, or dignity are made risky by dominant systems.
Imagine, for example, a person of colour being stopped by the police: the nervous system’s safest strategy in that moment may be pacification/appeasement.
As Nkem Ndefo writes:
“The cure for appeasement is dismantling power structures, no amount of nervous system regulation will do that. Power structures won’t dismantle themselves; people need to do that work. Regulating our stress responses whenever we feel more safe is important, though, in that it helps us build capacity for the long-haul work of liberation.”
To be clear: appeasement is a survival strategy. People are squeezed between two harms. If they show visible stress or anger, systems that hold power may punish them. If they stay silent, the cost is exhaustion, degradation, and shrinking of the self. Nervous-system regulation helps individuals survive and build capacity, but it does not change the structures that make appeasement necessary. Real change requires shifting power, transforming institutions, policies, and cultures.
That transformation must include trauma-informed societies and institutions: places that understand how chronic stress and historical harms shape bodies and choices, that prioritize safety, repair, and redistribution of power, and that design systems so people don’t have to appease to survive.
Regulation + structural change = liberation we can actually live inside.
This is also why I’m so devoted to ancestral healing: it opens a doorway to understanding how harm is passed down, often unconsciously, through bodies, families, and institutions. It helps us see that behind domination, there is disconnection; behind prejudice, unhealed pain. When we begin to tend to our lineages and remember, from within, where the rupture began, we grow the capacity to stop repeating it.
This work isn’t just about personal healing. It’s about freeing our ancestors from the patterns of fear and control they couldn’t escape, and building cultures rooted in dignity, reciprocity, and belonging for all.
#MentalHealth #Racism #SystemicRacism #StressRelief #Anxiety #TraumaHealing #Resilience #NervousSystem #MindBody #EmotionalHealth #SelfRegulation