This post seeks to explore the freezing
response in trauma in order better understand why a survivor of
trauma at Hephzibah
House (HH) would have experienced confusing and constricted
responses to threat. Survivors of HH specifically report that their
responses to threats become flattened or frozen after leaving HH,
specifically reporting a freezing response to threatened sexual
assault.
Review of the Survival Response
When confronted with a traumatic or
threatening situation, as discussed at length in a recent post, the
brain of a person responds by activating a survival response which is
profoundly physical in nature. If a person stopped to think about
and plan a response to the threat, chances are that they would not be
able to respond quickly enough to survive the threat. The brain's
analytical or critical thinking faculties suspend momentarily, and
lower brain structures kick in, enhancing the speed of physical
response.
Before advances in science allowed
better observation regarding the brain's response to threat, science
took note of the “fight or flight” response. When faced with a
serious threat, the body started into a cascade of hormones and
neurotransmitters which enable the body to flee or to fight. The
autonomic nervous system (the automatic system that governs
unconscious physical response) shunts blood away from the gut and to
skeletal muscle and brain, as the body releases hormones that raise
blood pressure, heart rate, and blood sugar as they also speed the
response of nervous tissue. It makes energy and oxygen available to
the systems of the body that play the greatest role in either running
from or resisting a threat.
Please take note: The
mind processes psychological threat or perceived threat in the same
way that it does a physical one, and the same cascade of
neurotransmitters and hormones plays out, even if an individual is
not in a situation where they would need to physically run or fight.
The mind and body processes these threats in the same manner. Also
note that these are not chosen responses but are deeply
physiologic, and they actually bypass critical thinking or choice.
Chronic Stress
Those who cope with chronic experiences
of trauma are often faced with these types of responses on a regular
basis. The body cannot maintain this high level of energy and stress
for long periods of time, and over time, the body learns to adapt
because the pressure and stress becomes to great. The Doctrine Over Person response, redacting one's personal history and preferences,
demonstrates one way in which a person adapts to the high level of
stress created within a system of thought reform or spiritual abuse.
And as previously discussed, some of these responses that result in a
psychological change result from a physiologic cause.
Please recall our previous
discussion of dissociation which can occur as a coping mechanism
in response to trauma, a creative response of the mind which in some
way removes the affected person from the threat. In the presence of
an extreme threat, dissociation allows a person to feel emotionally
removed somewhat from events so that they can appropriately respond
to immediate and limited threats. However, in situations where a
person operates under daily threat and constant pressure,
dissociation becomes that affected person's new “normal state.”
People remain in this altered
state of consciousness, and the experience also alters the normal
growth of children by their normal inhibiting the development of the
full scope of their problem-solving and analytical thought. A
prolonged trauma state also interferes with the adult's ability to
maintain high levels of thought, as is true in depression and other
conditions that affect blood flow and activity in the brain and mind.
This sense of feeling a little removed
from reality becomes a type of escape from the overwhelming pain that
the traumatized person experiences all the time. When chronic, this
state of mind which is normally a healthy coping mechanism becomes
problematic. People who develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (when
the survival response fails to shut down after a threat has passed)
and people who exit high demand groups that demand their compliance
(including spiritually abusive Evangelical Christian groups which use
manipulation against their followers) remain in chronic dissociative
states. Spiritual abuse does constitute a type of psychological,
emotional and spiritual trauma, producing the same types of symptoms.
It creates a dreamlike
sensation that suppresses a full state of mental acuity which
allows the person under pressure to continue to function and remain
productive.
Consider also what takes place in the
brain and body when it must operate under constant high stress. The
body resets itself and changes the way that it responds to certain
hormones and neurotransmitters. Think of an unfamiliar noise that
you hear in an new environment that is a part of it. If you grew up
in the country away from traffic and then moved to a city where you
could hear the sound of the traffic in your bedroom at night, for
some time after relocating, that sound acts as a disturbance –
until your brain learns to adapt.
A similar adaptation takes place in the
body's production of neurotransmitters/hormones, its responses to
those chemicals and how it responds to impulses related to stress.
(An adaptation of the body we associate with high stress that is
affected by these hormonal changes can be hypertension.) When under
constant high levels of stress, the body readjusts its baseline to
maintain function, but that function has been altered and is not
ideal. The brain no longer responds to stress in the normal way.
Some neurochemical production drops, some increases, and the degree
of physical response can change also. There is so much cortisol all
the time, it essentially becomes meaningless to the normal systems,
so the body adapts to maintain the ability to respond immediately to
serious threat, preserving that survival response as much as
possible. But consider that chronic stress alters that system and
how well it responds.
Previous Threat and Learned
Helplessness
We have also already discussed that
PTSD more frequently develops when a person's efforts to protect
themselves becomes thwarted in some way. The intricate and marvelous
system which involves generating a great deal of emotional energy as
well as physical energy on a purely physical level sometimes fails to
result in a beneficial outcome. That energy must go somewhere, and
releasing that kind of energy is sometimes referred to as “blowing
off steam.” When the release of energy doesn't result in
protection in response to a trauma, if the affected person cannot
find a safe way and an outlet for expressing that raw, hormonally
driven energy, they can tend to turn it inward through negative
emotion that they direct toward their sense of self. It contributes
to the sense of pessimism that accompanies PTSD. When chronic, a
person learns helpless behavior and believes that they are helpless,
whether or not they are truly helpless. Perception becomes
everything.
An example of this on a psychological
level is experienced by a child who witnesses their mother being
beaten by an abusive spouse. The child has an overwhelming desire to
help the mother but lacks the skill and strength to intervene, but
experiences all of the physical response of threat. The child may
also fear being hit by the abusive parent as well in a way that
paralyzes him. If the child never gets an opportunity to work
through and express his fear and helplessness in a healthy way, it
interferes not only with his ability to adapt, but also with the way
his brain responds physically to threat.
The effects of such events do not even
need to be chronic to produce a chronic problem with fear and
helplessness. But, just imagine the psychological toll that watching
this type of situation over and over again has for a young child as
they grow into adulthood. When faced with a similar threat as an
adult, because the child who never has an opportunity to work through
the terror of their own helplessness as a child, they may carry the
perception that they are always and indeed helpless against a similar
threat. (Remember to not discount the physical adaptations of the
body as a response to chronic stress.) Or they may just be
overwhelmed with the memory of their previous experience and could
enter a state of dissociation in response to a similar threat as a
way of protecting their mind and emotions. They may feel as though
“This cant be and this is not
really happening to me.” We actually have two very
plausible rationales for a freezing response through this single
example of previous trauma.
Freezing and Immobility
The freezing response, a response of
immobility when faced with an ongoing threat of harm, occurs in both
man and animals, though not as frequently as the fight or flight
response. But there is a physiologic basis for this as well, and it
is another means of coping with threat.
And we also touched
on the idea that when a person's ability to respond to a threat
is inhibited and they are restrained from responding in some way, the
brain routes and processes those impulses much differently in the
brain. When a person is forced into a helpless position,
the amygdala in the brain activates and would normally send impulses
into the basal ganglia to finish the survival response, resulting in
self protection.
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| The Basal Ganglia and Amygdala |
Consider that when eating, if food that you chewed
never made it all the way down your esophagus, you would not only
fail to obtain energy from the food you swallowed, you would
experience a crisis due to the blockage and would not be able to
continue to eat. In some sense, the trauma response is similar,
because the system of survival gets thwarted promoting the conditions
for the development of PTSD (according to the modern research
concerning trauma). This particular thwarting of the the survival
response and the interruption of the processing of trauma is directly
associated with a freezing response. An immobilization response is a
trauma response, and it is one that is physiologic, not one that
derives from conscious or deliberate choice. And new
research concerning the survival response indicates that there is
a high correlation between pre-existing levels panic and anxiety
prior to trauma and people who freeze in response to threat. We also
know that learned helplessness produces depression and anxiety.
The Freezing Response to Trauma in
the Survivors of Hephzibah House
Our focus in these blog posts
concerning the various aspects of trauma has aimed at understanding
why many of the survivors of Hephzibah
House leave the facility and then experience additional trauma.
Many survivors have reported being raped, including Lucinda
Pennington who serves as an advocate for the facility. Girls at
the home are taught that the freezing response that many people
experience during trauma and rape
in particular is a sinful response, suggesting that
sexual assault was deserved if not solicited by the victim. Bill
Gothard also teaches that the Biblical account of Dinah makes her
culpable in her own rape, for the “power
of crying out” carries a mystical power that will result in a
supernatural outcome. Based on these medical facts related to both
trauma and to the freezing response in the experience of sexual
assault, these teachings promoted within Independent Fundamentalist
Baptist Churches could not possibly be a more poignant example of
condemnation that shifts blame away from men (the aggressor) and on
to women who are believed to somehow solicit their own rapes. And we
have already
discussed the esteem and benefit of the doubt afforded to men
along with the prejudice
against women within this religious system.
As we have explored already, if a young
woman who has exited HH has demonstrated a lack of ability to
adequately protect or care for herself, the effects of general
trauma, thought
reform, childhood
roots of victimization/developmental deficits, the abuse
of gender hierarchy, learned helplessness,
bounded
choice, dissociation,
external locus of control, and
chronic/complex trauma add
to the likelihood if not encourage a freezing response to threat.
Survivors were conditions to fail to respond to threat, and the HH
experience could not have done more to actively promote
immobilization and a freezing response.
In an upcoming final post on this
subject, we will also consider the final consideration of the
compulsion to reenact or re-experience trauma, another notable
feature of PTSD.
