When people talk about the fight response, they usually imagine anger. Shouting. Aggression. Conflict.
I have come to think it is often something else entirely.
This week both my son and I found ourselves in fight. Not because we were under attack. Because our nervous systems were overwhelmed. Because we were both, in our different ways, trying not to lose the thread back to ourselves.
For me it was a courtesy car.
After my own car was involved in a hit and run, I was given a replacement vehicle. To most people this would be a minor inconvenience. To my nervous system it became a week-long lesson.
Nothing was where I expected it to be. The fuel cap worked differently. The controls were different. The sounds were different.
Then there was the speeding alarm. A constant beeping every time the car believed I had exceeded the speed limit.
I understand why it exists. I understand the law. I understand the intention.
Yet my nervous system did not experience it as a helpful safety feature. It experienced it as relentless interruption. Every beep pulling me further from the task of driving. Every beep pulling me further from myself. Every beep costing something I didn’t have to spare.
Meanwhile my son was having his own battle.
We were transitioning from an iPhone 7 to an iPhone 13. Again, nothing dangerous. Nothing dramatic. Just change. Yet what looked like a simple upgrade from the outside felt entirely different from the inside.
Passwords. Settings. Unknown screens. Different behaviours. Familiar routines suddenly no longer working in familiar ways.
And with each unexpected obstacle I could feel his nervous system moving closer to fight. Not because he wanted to be difficult. Because his system was trying to protect something. Predictability. Safety. Control. The things that allow a nervous system to settle.
Watching him, I realised something uncomfortable. I was doing exactly the same thing.
One of the things I noticed this week is that I had been swearing more. Not because I had become an angrier person. Because my nervous system was closer to the edge. The swearing is not the problem. It is information. A signal that my system is working harder than usual to manage the demands being placed upon it.
But what I really want to tell you about is what was underneath the swearing. Underneath the frustration with the speeding alarm and the unfamiliar controls and the constant interruptions.
I was trying not to lose it.
Not composure. Not patience. Not my temper.
The thread back to myself.
After everything it took to find that thread — over decades of refusal and returning, the dark night, the pen and paper, the zawiya built from nothing — the fight was the soul saying: I cannot afford to lose what I have found. The ground beneath me. The seat of self. The stream that fills from inside. The place I have spent years learning to find my way back to.
The speeding alarm was not the problem.
The problem was that I was already carrying more than I realised — the placement breakdown, the health worries, the uncertainty, the sensory load, the exhaustion — and the alarm was the thing that revealed it. The final straw on a load that had been accumulating silently for weeks.
And in that moment — in the middle of the fight, in the middle of the swearing and the frustration and the desperate effort not to lose the thread — what I wanted more than anything was a companion.
Someone to hold me. Not fix me. Not advise me. Not tell me it was a beautiful evening and I should go for a walk. Just hold me. The way the Sufi masters understood that a regulated soul offering its presence to another is one of the most powerful things one human being can give another.
I wanted to not be carrying it alone.
And then something happened that I wasn’t expecting.
My son came.
Not with solutions. Not with advice. With a gentle voice. With are you anxious mum? — asked before he told me about his own anxiety. With cushions fluffed and a footstool moved in my direction and his demands quietly, deliberately lowered.
He had learned the language.
Everything I had poured into him — the nervous system knowledge, the low demand approach, the checking in, the gentle voice, the attention to what another person’s body might need — came back. Not as repayment. As relationship. As the proof that what we had built together was real and mutual and alive.
A fifteen year old boy who had learned to love his mother the way she had loved him.
I sat with that for a long time.
Because this is what the fight was trying to protect. Not just my own ground. The ground we had built together. The language we had made. The home we had created where nervous systems are named and cushions are fluffed and demands are lowered without anyone having to ask.
Fight is love with nowhere to go.
And love that fights to protect what it has built — that is the Punk at its most naked and most honest.
Not the Punk of manifestos or music or visible rebellion. The Punk of the nervous system at its limit, drawing a line around the thing it cannot afford to lose. The ground. The thread. The seat of self that took over decades to find.
I used to think the Punk and the Sufi were the two halves of my public identity. The refusal and the surrender. The noise and the stillness.
I understand now that they were never public at all. They were always this — two forces holding the same thing together. The Sufi keeping the thread to Allah. The Punk keeping the thread to self. And in this moment, in this ordinary living room, with a speeding alarm and an unfamiliar phone and a fifteen year old boy arriving with cushions — both threads held.
It arrives when what you love most feels most at risk. When the thread feels thinnest. When the accumulation has reached the point where one more beep, one more unfamiliar screen, one more demand is genuinely one more than the system can hold.
And the question that matters is never — why such a big reaction?
It is always — what is this soul trying not to lose?
Because when you can answer that question — when you can see clearly what the fight was protecting — something shifts. The frustration doesn’t disappear. The speeding alarm doesn’t become less irritating. But the fight becomes legible. It becomes information. It becomes the soul’s most honest communication about what matters most to it.
And sometimes — if you are very fortunate — the answer to that question arrives not through your own understanding but through a gentle voice and a fluffed cushion from the person who learned everything they know about gentleness from you.
That is the gift the fight gave me this week. Not the lesson. The love.
Turn to look at the world. This one is for everyone whose anger was a boundary violation. Fuck the world.
Zawiya Discussion
The Wide Lens — Somatic, Intersectional & Systemic
The fight response is one of the most misunderstood experiences in the neurodivergent world. It is pathologised in children, medicated in adults, managed in classrooms, and punished in institutions. What it rarely is — in any of those settings — is listened to.
The concept of allostatic load helps us understand why fight arrives when it does. Every demand, every unexpected change, every sensory interruption, every administrative battle, every beep of a speeding alarm adds to the cumulative burden the nervous system is carrying. When that burden exceeds available capacity the nervous system responds. Not with bad character. With biology. The fight response is not a choice. It is a survival mechanism doing exactly what it was designed to do — protecting what matters most from one more demand it cannot absorb.
The differential cost of demands across different nervous systems is also poorly understood. The assumption that everyone has the same margin for error — the same spare capacity to absorb interruption, uncertainty, sensory input, and change — is baked into the design of almost every institution. It is not a neutral assumption. It actively disadvantages anyone whose nervous system processes the world differently. And it means that what looks like an overreaction from the outside is almost always a completely proportionate response to an invisible accumulation nobody else can see.
But what this post asks us to consider goes beyond the neuroscience. It asks us to look carefully at where the most sophisticated nervous system support actually came from in this particular week. Not from a professional. Not from a system. Not from a therapy or an intervention or a report. From a fifteen year old boy who had absorbed a language of gentleness over fourteen years and offered it back in the moment it was most needed.
That is a radical repositioning of expertise. The knowledge that matters most — the knowledge of this specific nervous system, this specific soul, this specific moment — did not live in a filing cabinet or a clinical assessment. It lived in a relationship. Built slowly, imperfectly, faithfully, over years. And it came back not as information but as love. As a gentle voice and a fluffed cushion and demands quietly lowered.
This is what the system cannot measure and does not try to. The reciprocal care that grows in a home where nervous systems are named and tended and taken seriously. The expertise that lives not in credentials but in attentiveness. The therapy that happens not in a clinic but in an ordinary living room on an ordinary difficult week.
The Devotional Lens
When Maryam — in the Islamic tradition — was in her most exhausted and vulnerable moment, alone and in pain, the Divine did not send theology. It did not send instruction or doctrine or a programme of recovery. It sent dates and running water and the simplest possible physical comfort. Shake the trunk of the palm tree toward you and fresh ripe dates will fall upon you. Eat and drink and cool your eyes.
In the Jewish and Christian traditions, the same truth arrives through a different story. The Prophet Elijah fled into the wilderness — exhausted, broken, asking to die. And what the Divine sent was not a vision or a revelation or a theological answer to his despair. An angel came and touched him and said: Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you. Bread. Water. Rest. The most ordinary physical tenderness in the moment of most complete depletion.
Two traditions. Two stories. One understanding. That the soul in its most depleted state does not need explanation. It needs tending. It needs the cushion fluffed and the footstool moved and the demands quietly lowered. It needs someone to ask — gently, before anything else — are you okay?
In the Islamic tradition this quality of attentive, responsive care is called Khidmah — service. But Khidmah in its deepest sense is not servitude. It is the overflow of love expressed through action. It is what happens when one soul has been so genuinely seen and tended that it learns, naturally and without instruction, to see and tend in return.
The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ taught that the most beloved of people to Allah are those who are most beneficial to others. Not the most knowledgeable. Not the most observant. The most beneficial. The one whose presence makes things easier. Whose arrival lowers the demand. Whose gentleness creates space for another nervous system to settle.
A fifteen year old boy who learned this not from a lecture or a religious class but from fourteen years of being loved carefully — who became, in one difficult week, the most beneficial person in the room — is living this teaching more completely than most adults ever manage.
That is not coincidence. That is the fruit of Khidmah flowing in both directions. Tended carefully enough, for long enough, with enough faithfulness — love learns to return to its source.
And the fight that felt like loss — like the thread about to slip — turned out to be the moment that proved the thread was stronger than it knew. Because it brought him. And he came.
Questions
What is the fight in you actually trying to protect — and have you ever been given the space to answer that question honestly, without the response being managed or medicated or explained away?
Who in your life has ever offered you the equivalent of the cushion and the footstool — the simple, unglamorous, perfectly calibrated tenderness that asked nothing and gave everything?
What have you poured into someone you love that has already begun, perhaps without you knowing it, to find its way back to you?