hi friend,
When I was nineteen years old, I held a brain in my hands for the first time.
A human brain, once home to a wild electric energy — a beehive of synapses that gave birth to a full human person.
As I sketched her amygdala, traced her arcuate fasciculus, I wondered who she had been, before some precocious premed student came along and dismantled her anatomy.
Had she felt joy and grief equally?
Had she run a business, baked for those she loved, marched in protest? Had she built community, broken bones, raised her babies?
I’ve always loved social neuroscience. I’m fascinated by how we see each other — by the way our brains reshape over time to encode fear, pleasure, pain, and delight.
But that day in that neuroanatomy lab, something rearranged itself in my own brain.
It was one thing to know the brain as the seat of all we think and do and breathe — but entirely another to feel its gravity — to sense that all our tenderness and terror, our love and our fear, live inside the same delicate folds I held in gloved hands.
So if you’ll bear with me — let’s get a little nerdy with some neurobiology for a minute 🤓🧠
When our partner raises their voice, when our caregivers withdraw affection, or when our boss sends that “we need to talk” email — our bodies don’t know it’s about the budget or the dishes or that staff meeting.
Because our bodies — these exquisite, overachieving, fragile little systems — don’t differentiate much between danger and disagreement.
Those moments of conflict don’t just feel dangerous. To our bodies, they are danger.
Our autonomic nervous system — the body’s unconscious control center — jumps into action. It react as though we’re facing down a saber-toothed tiger — heart racing for better blood flow, pupils dilated for superhuman focus, quick breaths for quick oxygen.
The sympathetic branch (our “fight-or-flight” mechanism) floods us with adrenaline, while the parasympathetic (our “rest-and-digest” mechanism) takes a back seat. We can’t, as it turns out, fight a saber-toothed tiger and make ourselves a nice afternoon snack at the same time.
So our body chooses one of four fear responses instead: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
Fight: fight back.
Flight: run away.
Freeze: go still and hypervigilant.
or Fawn: appease — and hope to stay safe.
These reactions happen before thought — before language, logic, or reason.
The amygdala (the fear center of the brain) takes the driver’s seat, instead of the normally cool, calm, and collected prefrontal cortex.
Which is why conflict so often feels like it hijacks us — because it does, in a literal, biological, evolutionary sense.
So — that trembling we feel before a hard conversation?
The 3am stress-replay of a community stakeholder meeting gone wrong?
The sudden urge to fix everything right now or disappear completely?
That’s our bodies doing their normal, mundane, biologically-wired job.
You aren’t broken.
You aren’t bad at conflict.
We’re just built to stay alive — even when what’s at risk isn’t our lives, but our belonging.
