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Chapter 1
How Traumatic Stress Creates Maladaptive but Self-Protective Brain States
OR WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO SMALL PEOPLE
Fightâflightâfreeze: When the brain registers âthreatâ
The small kitten, his heart beating rapidly, bit and clawed me as I struggled to bathe him in the kitchen sink. He was covered in grease from sleeping in the underbelly of parked cars and his coat was teeming with fleas. I had been feeding this little stray for a couple of days, and now it was time to give him a name, and a âforeverâ home. I decided to call him âBuddy.â But before I could allow the filthy little thing to live with me in the house, I had to give him a bath. Though I washed him gently, Buddy fought the entire time. I consoled him as I scrubbed, assuring him that the only way I could let him stay inside and keep him safe from predators would be if he were clean. He didnât agree.
When Buddyâs violent fussing and fighting didnât knock me off my course of action, he tried the escape tactic. He began flailing his limbs in rapid motion, but his feet just couldnât quite get a sure grip on the wet, soapy porcelain. By this time, his heart beat more wildly. I just held tighter and continued washing, all the while getting as wet as he was while I used my body to contain him. Throughout, I kept telling him how clean he would be and how good he would feel after his bathâŚas if he could understand what I was saying to him.
What Buddy did next surprised and scared me. He closed his eyes and just went limp. I no longer felt his heart pounding. I wasnât sure if I could feel it beating at all. I wondered if this little guy, who recently had come from such a rough place, had just died. Could he have had a heart attack or something? I rinsed him and wiped him dry, all the while calling his name again and again. I continued whispering âBuddyâ and rocked him in my arms. Suddenly, he opened his eyes, looked at me, and began purring. When I set him down on the floor, he licked his paw and was ready to play.
Itâs important to look at how similar people are to animals. We can learn much from our fellow mammals, especially how they react to stress. Mammals and humans share common reactions to traumatic stress.
What Buddy demonstrated above was fightâflightâfreeze, or survival response to traumatic stress, and then unexpected forgiveness when he was in his right mind. The situation started out badâŚended good. This first bath for a feral kitten who was willing to risk contact with humans to keep from starving to death was like a near-death experience for the little guy. By the way, I never bathed Buddy again. I didnât think I could put him through that experience a second time.
Since humans and other mammals, such as cats, share certain similar brain structures and brain responses (Figure 1.1), it is no accident that humans react to danger in much the same way animals do. Variations of such responses can be influenced by a humanâs personality, threat reaction style, and pre-experience of living life dangerously.
Figure 1.1 Humans and animals have similar stress response systems
Human and animal stress response systems
Buddy didnât think and plan what he was going to do, step by step, to get me to stop bathing him. Because he was no more than seven to nine weeks old, the thinking part of his brain wasnât that developed yet. Further, he hadnât been on the planet long enough to learn from other cats how to look pitiful and seek out sympathetic humans. He showed up at my house because he was hungry, and because other neighbors had been running him off. I may have been his last resort.
During the bath, a desperate, primal need to survive kicked in for him. Buddyâs style of defensiveness, likely due to his species, gender, and personality, was to thrash, bite, scratch, and make scary noises in his throat. How did he know to do that? His feline genetic coding likely pre-programmed him to initially resist in the way he did. He reacted to clear, probable, and present danger. There was no thinking to it because he wasnât using that part of his brain. Instead, he went into his first automatic response: defense (fight) against something that for him seemed life threatening. It wasnât just soap and water, but soap and water administered by a human he had only recently met that frightened him.
When Buddyâs fighting failed, he began evasive maneuvers: escape from the danger he couldnât stop from happening. I remember his heart beating even faster in this phase than it did in the initial fight phase. I wonder if the momentum or the desperation to live after one resistance maneuver fails involves even more of the bodyâs determination and energy to survive. If you canât beat them, run from them.
When Buddyâs evasive âflightâ also failed, he had no other choices but to surrender or go into a freeze state, a state of non-deliberate, non-reaction. This is an avoidant âjust give up, give in, prepare to dieâ phase because resistance is futile. His heartbeat slowed, his senses shut down, and he slipped into a state of submission, maybe even semi-consciousness, or dissociation. He checked out, became dead-like, and his body and mind checked back in when his brain told him that the danger was over, and he had survived. If death does come when one goes into a freeze stateâlessening some of a shock to the system, alleviating pain, easing the terrorâthen the transition toward the afterlife might not be so bad after all.
Understanding three major divisions of the brain
Figure 1.2 Major divisions of the human brain
Physician and neuro-scientist Dr. Paul D. Maclean (1990) was the first to propose a triune (three-part) brain model of the major divisions of the human brain (Figure 1.2). It is an accepted scientific fact that the brain develops from the bottom of the head to the top of the head. The bottom of the head includes the fightâflightâfreeze center, or survival response center, that is common among all living, breathing things. Inside the middle of the brain, where it cannot be seen unless the brain were split down the middle, is the seat of our emotions and feelings. On the top of the brain is the smart or thinking part of the brain. This is the highest part of the brain. The smart part of the brain is supposed to mature to a point that it controls or overrides strong emotions, feelings, and automatic responses that originate in the lower, more primitive parts of the brain like the emotional and fightâflightâfreeze centers. This explanation of brain division and function is extremely simplified for the purpose of introducing the reader to basic, beginning neuroscience.
Consider the person who is reacting to a situation with what we commonly refer to as âroad rage.â When people have âlost their mindsâ and are cell-phone-recorded pounding the living daylights out of someone who cut them off in traffic or dinged their car door as they were opening theirs, their violent, over-the-top outburst likely wasnât planned or thought out. In other words, the smart part of the brain wasnât dictating their reaction, but the emotional and fightâflightâfreeze centers were. Common sense should have told them to control themselves and act in a mature, grown-up fashion, but that system was not engaged. Their action was triggered by something in the deeper, darker, lower recesses of the brain that didnât get mediated by the higher, thinking part of that same organ.
The emotional and fightâflightâfreeze centers of the brain donât thinkâthey react. The job of the top, smart part, or highest part of the brain is to think and to control the emotional reactions of these lower centers. The highest part of the brain is about self-control. It uses critical thinking to plan, to figure things out, and to respond with good common sense. This part of the brain is supposed to mediate whatâs going on in the lower, non-thinking emotional or fightâflightâfreeze centers of the brain, and just say ânoâ when necessary. When it doesnât or âcanâtâ stop the lower parts of the brain from doing their emotional thing, then people can get caught up âin the heat of the momentâ and say or do things that they, hopefully, will later regret.
I grew up with the term âhair-triggerâ temper to describe someone who could easily and quickly âlose itâ and become irrationally abusive or violent almost with no warning. The term did not refer to people who were under the influence of drugs and alcohol at the time of their outburst. Drugs and alcohol can cause the smart part of the brain to cease making good decisions, so people make stupid ones. Drugs and alcohol can also shut down the smart part of the brain completely so that the more non-thinking emotional and fightâflightâfreeze centers of the brain are the systems in charge. How scary.
Even memory is a smart part function. When lower parts of the brain override the smart part, people often have no memory of what they said or did. Thatâs because, during that reactive incident, the âbossâ of the brain was nowhere to be found.
When the smart part (thinking part) of the brain does override the fightâflightâfreeze stress response (survival) part of the brain
When a human is in a frightening situation and can still figure out a way to survive, then the smart part of the brain has kicked in to override the terror of the emotional part as well as the fightâflightâfreeze part of the brain. In fact, a little bit of âfightâ to survive is likely intact. So, the âfighting spiritâ when bad things happen to good people is not a bad thing at all.
Most of us have heard about, witnessed or seen in movies or on TV how someone has played dead to keep from getting killed by another. An example would be the one living soldier on a battlefield of the dead whose only chance for survival was to not move a muscle. This isnât the same as the freeze state of submission. The soldier who consciously decides not to move and is able to control his body and his breath is thinking what to do, and how and when to do it. Heâs thinking how to look really, really dead.
Years ago, I worked in therapy with Vietnam veterans who had survived fire fights during that war, but had lost the battles. They had to play dead to keep from getting finished off by the enemy, who would look for survivors soon after the smoke had cleared. Some of the soldiers even told me that they had smeared the blood of nearby deceased soldiers onto their own bodies to complete the ruse. The smart part of the brain of the âpretending-to-be-deadâ soldier was still very much in charge.
I remember when I was a young child and was scared to go to sleep at night in my birth home. I was especially frightened if my father was working the night shift at the local air force base. My mother, who suffered from mental illness, was the only adult in the home then, and I was afraid of her. If I went to sleep, then I could no longer protect myself from harm, nor escape from it, either. Traumatized children can have problems falling asleep and staying asleep if they developed, through practice, a nocturnal hypervigilance. When bad things happen to small children as they sleep, it is common for them to resist sleep. It is hard for the brain to let down its guard in children who havenât been safe when they rested. Their brain masters the art of survival: just fight sleepâitâs safer that way. Hypervigilance becomes a habit that is hard to break, even when the child has been moved to the safety of trustworthy caregivers.
Though as a young child I couldnât identify it consciously, I knew, on some level, that I was in danger of a birth mother who could kill me in the night. This innate, unconscious knowledge caused me to resist sleep for as long as I could. My mind did not allow me to recognize that the danger during the sleeping hours was my mother. Instead, I imagined it was monsters in my closet, or snakes under my bed, or the worst enemy of all, the devil. Mother was supposed to be the earthly, physical representation of a loving God. She was supposed to protect me, love me, keep me safeâŚnot be my worst, deadliest enemy. When my sister was born, my anxiety intensified. Beyond my own struggle to survive, I also sensed that I needed to keep my little sister alive as well.
I was predominantly a âfightâ kid. âFightâ kids donât give up easily. It is fortunate when the oldest child in a violent home is the scrappiest. The younger, more helpless siblings stand a better chance of survival. Unconsciously, the scrappiest child may act as the decoy (as I did) in attempts to divert potential predators from their younger, smaller siblings. I suppose humans share that protective instinct with anima...
