There's a fourth trauma response, and it looks like helpfulness
Fight and flight get the airtime, but the response most likely to go unnoticed is the one that seems the most agreeable.
Everyone knows fight, flight, and freeze. The therapist Pete Walker, in Complex PTSD, adds a fourth: fawn. It's the response of a child who learns early that protest brings worse punishment, so she trades her boundaries for a truce — becoming endlessly accommodating, endlessly useful, endlessly agreeable, because agreeableness is the only currency that has ever bought safety.
Walker's insight is that fawning isn't a personality trait. It's a survival strategy that calcified, and it can look so functional from the outside — the reliable coworker, the low-maintenance friend, the partner who never seems to need anything — that it's often mistaken for health. The tell is internal: a fawn type frequently doesn't know what they want, because wanting anything was once dangerous.
Recovery, in Walker's framing, starts with a small, almost illegal-feeling act: noticing a preference and saying it out loud before checking whether anyone minds.