Yes, my difficult child is a runner. His go to reaction when panicked is to bolt. Caused a lot of scary issues when young (all those running aways from school, hiding, police searching him, search and rescue teams, drag searching him from the rivers and so on), but of course as an adult you can trust more to him keeping safe while on the run. Even when he is cornered and can't flight and has to fight, his weapon of choice is his tongue. He may be destructive to property when retaliating and that can sometimes feel scary (cutting your clothes or even slashing your tires for example did feel personally threatening), but to be honest, that too is mostly in past now (getting from teens to twenties has matured him a lot too.)
Of course my kid has also worked hard with his sport psychiatric with getting out of the reactive aggressiveness, passive aggressive, retaliating and aversive conflict solution methods and is working towards proactive assertiveness. Far from perfect, but he is making some progress (especially when not over stressed) and in fact is already rather good at recognising his behavioural models, especially after first panic has faded. Of course he seems to have also developed self harm to be one of his coping mechanism that is of course very bad, but he is at least trying to work with his issues, that is huge positive.
With your son the biggest issue seems to be, that he himself is not ready to work with self development, so only thing you can do, is deal with his reactions in the way that is not harmful to you. My kid's willingness to work with his issues changes that ball game completely. With Dstc's daughter ruling about that is still very much out. She is very young and while clearly quite nasty at times, doesn't seem to be dangerous. And she certainly has enough time to mature and learn to cope better than she currently is. And Dstc is doing great job learning to deal and relate to her now in the way, that doesn't escalate situation in unnecessary ways and especially is healthy for herself.
