Which Mental Lock Can Paralyze You Into Not Acting on a Good Idea?
Source: Wellness mil
About everyone is familiar with the fight or flight response—your reaction to a stimulus perceived as an imminent threat to your survival. Nevertheless, less well-known is the fight-flight-freeze response, which adds a crucial dimension to how y'all're probable to react when the situation confronting y'all overwhelms your coping capacities and leaves you paralyzed in fear.
Here, in cursory, is how the survival-oriented acute stress response operates. Accurately or non, if you assess the immediately menacing strength every bit something you lot potentially have the power to defeat, you go into fight fashion. In such instances, the hormones released by your sympathetic nervous organisation—peculiarly adrenaline—prime you to do boxing and, hopefully, triumph over the hostile entity.
Conversely, if you view the antagonistic strength equally besides powerful to overcome, your impulse is to outrun it (and the faster the ameliorate). And this, of class, is the flight response, too linked to the instantaneous ramping up of your emergency biochemical supplies—and then that, ideally, you can escape from this adversarial ability (whether it be human being, fauna, or some calamity of nature).
Where, in what you perceive equally a dire threat, is the totally disabling freeze response? Past default, this reaction refers to a state of affairs in which you've concluded (in a matter of seconds—if non milliseconds) that you tin can neither defeat the frighteningly dangerous opponent confronting y'all nor safely commodities from information technology. And ironically, this self-paralyzing response tin can, in the moment, exist simply as adaptive equally either valiantly fighting the enemy or, more cautiously, fleeing from it.
Consider situations in which, realistically, there's no way yous can defend yourself. You have neither the hormone-assisted force to respond aggressively to the inimical forcefulness nor the anxiety-driven speed to free yourself from information technology. Yous experience utterly helpless: Neither fight nor flight is feasible, and in that location's no one on the scene to rescue you.
Say, you're attacked past a ferocious dog who'south sunk his teeth into your cervix and you lot're totally at his mercy. In such an alarming instance, you'd experience trepidation, panic, horror, dread. And these farthermost feelings would be then fraught with anxiety, then laden with terror, that almost no one is "gifted" with the resource required to stay fully in the nowadays—which is precisely what'south needed to "procedure" emotional and concrete completion, or release, of what so frighteningly besieges you.
Nether such unnerving circumstances, "freezing upwards" or "numbing out"—dissociating from the here and at present—is about the only and (in diverse instances) the best affair you tin practice. Being physically, mentally, and emotionally immobilized by your consternation permits you non to feel the harrowing enormity of what's happening to you, which in your hyperaroused country might threaten your very sanity. In such instances, some of the chemicals you thereby secrete (i.e., endorphins) function as an analgesic, so the hurting of injury (to your torso or psyche) is experienced with far less intensity.
- What Is Trauma?
- Find a therapist to heal from trauma
Additionally, if you're not putting upwardly a fight, the person or animal aggressing confronting y'all simply might lose involvement in continuing their set on. But whatever the provocation, if y'all can't make the assailant disappear, y'all're much improve off "disappearing" yourself, by blocking out what's much also scary to accept in. So, in its ain fashion, the freeze response to trauma is—if but at the time—equally adaptive as the fight-flight response.
For a small kid, the developmental capacity to protect is markedly express. Then, rationally or not, he or she would likely to experience a whole host of situations as threatening to survival. Just a look of rejection or scorn in the eyes of a disapproving parent, for example, can make him or her feel uncared for, unloved, and abandoned, compelling the feeling of numbing out. And this is why the freeze response occurs far more commonly in children than in adults.
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Such "paralyzing" psychological phenomena as phobias, panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and diverse feet states tin frequently be understood every bit symptoms of a freeze response that never had the chance to "let go" or "thaw out" once the original experience was over. And many features of post-traumatic stress disorder directly relate to this kind of unrectified trauma.
Though it's almost always entirely unconscious, some circumstance in the here-and-now can remind you of a trauma suffered years (sometimes, many, many years) ago. Never fully "discharged," the original fear or panic linked to that memory compels you to react to the current-day trigger as though what happened in the past is happening all over again. And so your original reaction of self-paralysis can't help but repeat itself. Your listen goes completely blank, your rational faculties missing in activity.
What was adaptive every bit a child, dissociating from an event vastly beyond your capacity to handle, tin become frustratingly maladaptive as an adult. Paradoxically, at its extreme, a reaction of dissociation could exist not at all life-preserving but, in fact, life-threatening. For when you're stymied by inappropriate, exaggerated fear, you're in no position to act sensibly to any might exist menacing you.
It's been postulated that dissociating in the midst of a traumatic feel is the foremost predictor for developing PTSD symptoms later on (see, east.g., van der Kolk & van der Hart, 1989). And, as already pointed out, immature children are particularly tending to dissociate during episodes of trauma. So, for instance, a child who "froze" during incidents of frightening family abuse is, equally an developed, especially susceptible to feel the freezing reaction once again. And sometimes the current stimulus for such retraumatization isn't anything specific. It may only emanate from beingness in a state of highly exacerbated stress, which itself serves as an unconscious reminder of the acute stress linked to the initial trauma.
So if any of the in a higher place descriptions depict yous (or someone you care about), I tin can hardly overemphasize how useful information technology might be to seek professional help. That manner you lot can finally "put to remainder" what, at the time of its beginning occurrence, you weren't able to. Past combining psychology with basic principles of biophysics, what a large variety of trauma resolution methods make possible (east.grand., Sensorimotor Processing, Somatic Experiencing, etc.) is the opportunity to release the remainder tension (or internal energy) that was left unresolved even after the actual trauma was over.
Finally, many chronic, stress-related diseases are now postulated by trauma experts as representing somatic manifestations of by unrectified trauma. Information technology may, therefore, be invaluable to find a qualified practitioner to assist you in locating but where in your body this frozen free energy withal resides. And and so help yous—at long last—to discharge information technology.
Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolution-the-self/201507/trauma-and-the-freeze-response-good-bad-or-both
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