Shari B. Kaplan, LCSWIntegrative Mental Health

When Global Chaos Keeps You in Fight-or-Flight

12 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, Shari B. Kaplan, LCSW explains how relational stress and trauma—particularly from overworked or traumatized parents—can program the body’s fight‑or‑flight response. She expands this to include chronic and traumatic stresses stemming from the broader political and environmental climate, arguing that pervasive global chaos creates a pervasive sense of unsafety and powerlessness that keeps individuals stuck in hyper‑arousal. Kaplan emphasizes that clinicians should help patients "scale things down" by grounding them in the immediate present, focusing on what is happening right here and now, to break the cycle of chronic fight‑or‑flight.

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Whether you have had relational stress or trauma through parenting and growing up with parents who were maybe overworked, overstressed, or parents who had trauma themselves, that's gonna affect your body's fight or flight. And then you, if you fast forward through all the many different chronic or traumatic stresses that happen in our political environment, And our world environment, I think there's a huge sense of I'm not safe and I'm powerless. And I think that when we have so much global chaos going on, I think that's when people start getting stuck in fight or flight. So I think that we have to help patients scale things down to what's happening right here and right now.