Are you stuck in fight, flight or freeze?
Your Ability to Respond to Threat is a Life-saver
But if you Get “Frozen” There, You May Have PTSD.
You are walking alone on a mountain trail at
dusk, returning to your car a little later than
you’d planned. You’ve always known it’s bear
and cougar country, but you’ve never had a
bad experience with a wild animal, so you’re
not concerned.
Suddenly, you hear a loud snap of a twig
behind you. Your heart rate increases; eyesight
and hearing become more acute; your head
whips around towards the sound, and your
muscles tighten as blood flow to them increases. Without conscious thought, you
instantly assess the possible threat and choose to flee or fight.
You may have picked up a stone or limb as a weapon or begun to run before you even
think. Reading this you may have noticed increased heart and respiration rate, a tingling
of the skin, increased perspiration, and a sense of alertness. Your imagination just now
may have offered images of escape routes or ways you could fight off the imagined
attack.
Highly stressful or life-threatening experiences arouse vast
amounts of survival energy and emotion — the wellknown fight-or-flight response, shared with all animals.
Our lower or reptilian brain and sympathetic nervous
system arouses instantly to maximize our chance of
survival. Merely thinking about such a situation activates
the same responses. When it takes control, our bodies
respond far more rapidly than normally to assess the
danger and to fight or flight.
Your nervous system’s response to threat has worked quite well. The proof is that you’re
alive and reading this.
We can remember what
animals never forgot.
Think of an animal in the wild — a rabbit, for example. It may be calmly eating one
moment at the edge of a meadow, and running for its life from a wolf the next. Imagine
if that happened to you! That would be pretty traumatic, having a hungry animal
determined to catch, kill, and eat you! Yet if the rabbit escapes, then within minutes it
will be back to normal life, not traumatized.
Those who have been able to closely observe wild animals notice that during the time
immediately following such a chase, a prey animal will “discharge” that powerful “flightfight” energy by twitching, shaking, jumping, running around vigorously, even making
some noise or head-butting some of its own kind in mock-battle. After such discharge,
the animal returns to normal.
Were it not for this ability to rapidly discharge adrenalin and excess survival energy, the
animal’s ability to meet future threats would be reduced and they would not long
survive in the wild.
People can get “frozen” in an incomplete biological response
to unavoidable threat. That is PTSD.
Until recently, my life’s experience had always been threatened with a sense of rejection
and abandonment. With Paul’s guidance and my own reflection, I have found the
awareness of who I am internally, the inner-strength I hold, and the ability to express my
emotional and physical being with those around me.
— S.C., 22 year old female interior designer
But there is a difference between such responses in modern humans and animals. Even
though animals in the wild routinely experience life-threatening situations, after the
danger has passed, they quickly return to normal, whereas humans sometimes are stuck
with trauma or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In other words, they are stuck in
some combination of the nervous system’s fight, flight or freeze response.
It is like having both the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal pressed to the floor at the
same time. The person may think they got over the experience, but if they were unable
to avoid the danger and didn’t have support to shake off the strong charge of sensations
and emotions afterward, that vast amount of survival energy can become stuck in their
nervous systems. Weeks, months, or years later, often without even a conscious
connection to the traumatic experience, many different kinds of symptoms may appear.
Such symptoms are normal for a person with an over-stressed nervous system. They have
lost resiliency, the natural ability to flow easily between the many moods and energy
states necessary to live a full and rich life.