The Three Modes of the Bear

In our lessons and talks, we’ve explored many faces of the Bear, our survival intelligence. It’s the part of the brain benzos were designed to tranquilize, to keep sedated. But when the medication fades and the nervous system remains dysregulated, the Bear often wakes up more alert than ever, pacing, watching, reacting.

We’ve examined the Bear’s behaviors: what triggers him, reinforces him, or calms him. But now it’s time to go deeper, into the three core modes the Bear uses to protect us.

Most people in benzo withdrawal don’t realize they’re still operating in survival mode. They may not be having full-blown panic attacks or daily breakdowns, but the Bear is still in charge. The nervous system, shaped by trauma and chemical injury, defaults to protective patterns that can feel normal on the surface but are actually rooted in fear.

I call these the Three Core Bear Modes:

• Guard Mode — control, micromanagement, hypervigilance

•  Survival Mode — panic, urgency, impulsive reactivity

• Hiding Mode — shutdown, detachment, despair

These aren’t character flaws or personal failings. They’re survival strategies, hard-wired into the brain and body to keep us safe. But over time, they stop being protective and start becoming prisons. Understanding these modes, what they are, why they exist, and how they function, is one of the most important steps in learning how to lead the Bear, rather than be ruled by him.

What Are the Bear Modes?

The Bear Modes are survival intelligence patterns, built-in responses the brain uses to protect the system based on how severe or immediate the perceived threat is (such as symptoms, intrusive thoughts, or trauma triggers).

Each mode has its own:

• Nervous system state

• Psychological traits

• Behavioral patterns

• Internal parts (adaptive patterning)

The goal here isn’t to eliminate the Bear. It’s to understand how it operates and how to bring conscious leadership to these unconscious defense loops.

Guard Mode: The Bear’s Watchtower

Guard Mode is the Bear’s default stance, not attacking or hiding, just watching. Always alert. Always scanning. It’s where many trauma survivors and benzo withdrawal students live for months or even years without realizing it.

This isn’t the panic of an emergency. It’s the constant mental rehearsal of an emergency that hasn’t happened yet. Here, the nervous system is in chronic hyperarousal, a low-grade sympathetic dominance (fight/flight) state. This is marked by elevated cortisol, glutamate, shallow breathing, muscular tension, anxiety, and more.

Psychological Traits display in things like perfectionism and rigidity, compulsive planning and over-responsibility, hypervigilance masked as logic, emotional suppression and fear of vulnerability.

In Guard Mode, the Bear’s behavioral patterns include things like obsessive symptom tracking, “Google looping” or over-researching protocols, fear of calm moments (“windows”) as suspicious, controlling food, sleep, supplements, overanalyzing everything, avoidance disguised as preparedness, and more.

Guard Mode is not about chaos. It’s about control.

It’s the Bear trying to manage life into submission. But the harder it clenches, the more freedom, joy, and connection slip through its paws.

Survival Mode: The Bear’s Alarm Bell

Survival Mode is when the Bear believes the threat is no longer hypothetical. It’s here!

This isn’t the scanning or calculating of Guard Mode. It’s the Bear charging through the woods, adrenaline pumping, chaos unfolding, heart pounding, all systems lit up in red!

This is a state of acute hyperarousal, where the nervous system is flooded with stress hormones: cortisol, norepinephrine, and glutamate. The body locks into fight-or-flight with sharp, destabilizing edges.

Breathing is shallow or rapid. Muscles tremble. Thoughts race. Panic looms. It’s the full-body siren call: “You are in danger.”

Psychological Traits often include catastrophic thinking, irrational urgency, emotional outbursts, paranoia, agitation, racing thoughts, or complete dissociation.

In Survival Mode, the Bear’s behavior may include frantic reaching for reassurance, compulsive messaging in groups, jumping from protocol to protocol, making appointments with every specialist in a week, crying spells, isolation, desperation, or sensory overwhelm.

Where Guard Mode is about control, Survival Mode is about escape.

There is no plan here, just the instinct to run, hide, or fix something now.

This is not a personality flaw. It’s a biological override.

The tragedy of Survival Mode is that while the Bear thinks it’s saving you, it’s actually exhausting you, burning your reserves, and reinforcing the false idea that you are broken or doomed. It’s reinforcing those old reactive pathways, unless you’re really demonstrating your leadership.

The key to healing isn’t fixing everything at once. It’s helping the Bear see that the fire has passed, and it’s safe to rest, even if the chemical withdrawal has tripped his alarm. False alarms happen. This isn’t new to the central nervous system. It is our reaction, especially our sustained reaction, that communicates safety or distress back to the Bear.

Hiding Mode: The Bear’s Cave

The last of the three modes is the Hiding Mode (aka The Bear’s Cave), his final strategy. This is his ultimate retreat. When fighting or running doesn’t work, and scanning has worn thin, the Bear curls inward. It withdraws. It shuts the world out. It pulls you down into silence, isolation, and emotional numbness, and even dissociation. It depresses you.

Like a breaker box flipping its switches and cutting off the power, it disconnects.

This is the nervous system’s collapse response, not fire, but frost.

Energy drains. Motivation disappears. The mind goes flat. The nervous system tilts into hypoarousal, marked by fatigue, derealization, emotional blunting, digestive shutdown, and feelings of hopelessness. It can look like apathy, but underneath is deep exhaustion and fear.

Psychological Traits include emotional disconnection, shame, guilt, defeat, self-loathing, despair, and the quiet belief that things will never get better.

In Hiding Mode, the Bear’s behavior may look like giving up on healing efforts, avoiding friends or community, spending excessive time alone or in bed, not reaching out for help, avoiding eye contact, numbing with screens or food, or obsessing over past regrets and loss. It’s a state of hopelessness, or loss of hope.

But this isn’t laziness or a lack of willpower… It’s self-preservation through withdrawal.

The Bear retreats to its cave when it believes everything outside is too dangerous, too overwhelming, or too painful to face. It tries to protect you through silence and shutdown, by lowering your needs, your hopes, and your expectations.

Survival in real natural settings with predators often comes down to a freeze, fawn, or flop response. This isn’t perfect, but it’s what the survival system has learned over millions of years of evolution.

Hiding Mode doesn’t scream like panic.

It whispers: “What’s the point?”

But you are not hopeless! You are healing.

The Bear doesn’t need punishment. It needs leadership.

To gently coax it from the cave, you’ll need consistency, warmth, movement, and small, manageable acts of courage daily.

You don’t have to blast the door open or drag him out of the Cave.

You just have to knock, again and again, gently with love and intention. You have to show him you’re safe and that there is hope, but of course, real hope has a path forward. And that’s where our work together comes in.