When the People You Need Most Walk Away – Understanding Fight Response and Founder Isolation

Written by Stuart Shearing, Founder, The Resonant Leadership Program

Stuart Shearing, Founder of The Resonant Leadership Program, combines coaching, neurobiology, and systems design to help male founders navigate post-investment pressure without burning out. Working with just six founders annually, he prioritises nervous-system regulation before business strategy, because calmer founders make better decisions. 

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There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes when you finally stop pretending you’re fine, and the people around you take a step back. You’ve just closed Series A. The board wants 3x growth. Your co-founder is talking about moving aside. You’re managing investor expectations, trying to scale the team, and making decisions that affect people’s mortgages and their children’s futures. And you’re doing it while appearing completely in control.

Then something cracks. You snap at your leadership team over something trivial. Your partner says, “You’re being aggressive,” and you genuinely don’t understand what she means. You feel irritable all the time, like your skin doesn’t fit properly. And when you finally admit you’re struggling, people seem to retreat.

Not dramatically. They don’t leave. But there’s a subtle withdrawal. Conversations become more careful. Your team starts handling you differently. The very moment you most need someone to lean in, everyone seems to be leaning away.

Here’s the dangerous part, it’s easy to interpret this as proof that you were right all along. That vulnerability is a weakness. That people can’t handle the real you. That the only safe option is to put the mask back on, return to “I’m fine,” and handle everything alone.

But that’s not what’s actually happening.

What your nervous system learned

If you present as decisive, controlled, sometimes intense, there’s a good chance your nervous system learned early that your fight response keeps you safe. Maybe you had a father who operated in this way. Maybe your early environment rewarded performance and punished vulnerability.

Your nervous system isn’t wrong. It developed a strategy that worked. The problem is that the strategy that kept you safe at fifteen is now creating the isolation you fear most at forty-five.

Here’s what’s actually happening, mammals shake off trauma. Watch a gazelle that’s just escaped a lion, it literally shakes, discharging the stress from its system. Humans store it. We hold tension in our bodies, carrying the accumulated stress of years in our shoulders, our jaw, our gut. This isn’t metaphorical, it’s physiological. The trauma is embodied.

When stress builds beyond a certain threshold, your nervous system defaults to its learned response. For you, that’s probably fight. You become irritable. Sharp. What you experience as “being direct” appears to others as aggression. What you experience as “maintaining standards” reads as anger.

You’re not broken. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it learned to do. You’re in fight response, and you might not even know it because this is your baseline.

Why do people step back?

Here’s the part that’s hard to hear and essential to understand, when you’re in fight response, you trigger other people’s nervous systems.

This isn’t conscious. When you snap, when your jaw tightens, when your voice has that edge, their nervous system reads threat. And if they’ve experienced aggression before, their system goes into protection mode. They withdraw. They become careful. They create distance.

They’re not abandoning you. Their nervous system is protecting them just as yours is trying to protect you.

This is nervous system to nervous system communication, happening faster than conscious thought. Two survival strategies running into each other. Neither person is wrong. But the result is the same, you feel abandoned at the moment you most need support, which confirms your belief that showing vulnerability is dangerous.

The biological pattern

Here’s what most people don’t understand, trauma isn’t just learned through observation. It’s passed down biologically.

Research on epigenetics shows that traumatic stress changes how genes are expressed, and those changes can be transmitted through sperm. Your father’s stress response, and his father’s before him, may be encoded in your DNA. Not the events themselves, but the nervous system’s adaptation to them.

Studies of Holocaust survivors’ children show altered stress hormone profiles, despite never experiencing the trauma themselves. The same pattern appears in descendants of famine survivors, war veterans, and refugees. The body remembers what the mind never knew.

This is cellular. Your baseline stress response, your threshold for fight activation, your nervous system’s default settings, these may have been influenced before you were born. And if you have children, you’re potentially passing it forward through the physiological state you’re in during their early development.

The pattern can end with you. But only if you address it at the level where it lives, in the nervous system, not just the mind.

What actually works

Working exclusively with founders over the past two decades, I see this pattern constantly, men who’ve built successful companies, closed funding rounds, appear completely in control, and their Heart Rate Variability data shows they haven’t been in a regulated state in months.

You can’t think your way out of a nervous system state. This is why purely cognitive approaches often fail, you’re trying to think your way out of a pattern that may be encoded at the cellular level.

Somatic practices, such as breathwork, specific physical movements, and working with sound frequencies, help discharge what the body’s been holding. This isn’t meditation. You’re working directly with the nervous system’s stress response.

A founder I worked with, let’s call him James, closed his Series B while his marriage was ending. His HRV data showed he was spending 18 to 20 hours per day in sympathetic activation, essentially permanent fight or flight. After eight weeks of somatic work, breathwork, sound therapy, and learning to track his own nervous system states, his wife said something that stopped him cold. “You’re different. I can actually reach you now.” He hadn’t become softer. He had become regulated, and regulation changed everything.

The choice point

Right now, you’re at a choice point. You can put the mask back on, return to “I’m fine,” and handle everything alone. You can go dark and decide that vulnerability was a mistake. Or you can go through, understand that your nervous system is running a pattern that made sense once and doesn’t serve you now, and learn to regulate.

The people you need most didn’t walk away because you’re unlovable. They stepped back because your nervous system was broadcasting a threat, and theirs responded. That’s not a judgment. It’s physiology. And physiology can change.

But only if you stop saying “I’m fine” long enough to do the actual work. If you’re reading this and recognising yourself, that recognition is the first step. The second is reaching out.

Follow me on LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info!

Read more from Stuart Shearing

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Stuart Shearing, Founder, The Resonant Leadership Program

Stuart Shearing is the founder of The Resonant Leadership Program, working with just six male founders annually through a twelve-month programme combining coaching, neurobiology, and systems design. His approach integrates nervous-system tracking, somatic practices, and strategic frameworks to help post-investment founders navigate board pressure, team dynamics, and scaling challenges without sacrificing their health or effectiveness. When founders are regulated rather than reactive, they make better decisions, build stronger teams, and create sustainable companies.

After 20+ years building businesses and experiencing his own burnout, Stuart now operates from rural Portugal, where he's built a Celtic sweat house used in private immersions with founders. For every founder Stuart works with, he mentors two young men (18-25) through The Foundation Programme—teaching them to manage stress and build resilience before crisis hits.