This is a sideblog for me to reblog/suggest recovery/healing strategies, and to write journal entries exploring my current PTSD recovery. ****MAJOR TRIGGER WARNING FOR THIS BLOG: detailed discussions of sexual abuse, CSA, and trauma**** Please do not read or follow if you do not want to see this content. Feel free to ask questions if you like.
“Traumatized people are often afraid of feeling. It is not so much the perpetrators (who, hopefully, are no longer around to hurt them) but their own physical sensations that now are the enemy. Apprehension about being hijacked by uncomfortable sensations keeps the body frozen and the mind shut. Even though the trauma is a thing of the past, the emotional brain keeps generating sensations that make the sufferer feel scared and helpless. It’s not surprising that so many trauma survivors are compulsive eaters and drinkers, fear making love, and avoid many social activities: Their sensory world is largely off limits.”
— - Bessel van der Kolk “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and the Body in the Healing of Trauma
“You deserve to be okay. You deserve to know that a day in which you can just barely get out of bed because you are sad, or sick, or simply not ready to see the outside is not the end of the world. You deserve to know that moments of weakness do not make you fundamentally weak, only fundamentally human, and that sometimes we’re not going to be effusively happy, and that is okay.”
Being traumatised means continuing to organise your life as if the trauma were still going on - unchanged and immutable - as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.
Bessel Van Der Kolk, “The Body Keeps The Score” (via not-painted-anymore)
The science is strong, a solid foundation for trainings and fair investigations.
As a psychologist who has researched the neurobiology of trauma and regularly teaches military and civilian police and prosecutors, higher education staff and others, I can expand a public conversation started in The Atlantic, by the unfortunately titled and highly misleading September 2017 story, “The Bad Science Behind Campus Response to Sexual Assault.” In fact, the science on the neurobiology of stress and trauma is actually quite good, and the real issues are how that science is taught to university staff who aren’t scientists and how they, in turn, apply that teaching on their campuses.
There are two parts to author Emily Yoffe’s discussions of neuroscience, one on sexual assault victims’ behaviors and the other on their memories, and I address both here. For each, I begin with realities of sexual assault—realities known all too well by millions of people who have been sexually assaulted, and by victim advocates, clinicians, and investigators who truly listen and have been documenting them for decades. Then I cite well-established science on the neurobiological causes of those realities.
Whether or not you’ve read the article, this post will bring clarity to issues that she has clouded with confusion and alarmist claims.
One extreme reflexive response that, contrary to the article’s claim, people definitely experience, is tonic immobility. It’s a fear-based state of rigid paralysis, which can render one mute as well (and is very different from the transient freeze response associated with detection of an attack). While research is still accumulating on how often tonic immobility occurs during sexual assaults, much is known about what can trigger it, like being pinned down and terrified. And we know from direct reports that it happens to soldiers too, even if they’re less likely to tell anyone.
Sometimes people experience collapsed immobility, a different survival reflex that sends heart rate and blood pressure plummeting. The brain’s loss of oxygen brings on faintness or even passing out as the body goes limp. Again, extreme fear and physical restraint, both features of some sexual assaults, can release this evolutionarily old response. (A brief YouTube video shows someone going in and out of this terror-triggered state on an amusement park ride.)
In 2015 the Harvard Review of Psychiatry published a thorough review of behavioral and neuroscience research on tonic and collapsed immobility (and freezing) in animals and humans. That peer-reviewed article includes multiple examples of how people have experienced those extreme reflex responses, drawn from lead author Kasia Kozlowska’s many years of clinical work, and references over 200 scientific publications, including many neurobiological studies.
Of course, the reflexive “cornered animal” response also exists, and people sometimes respond with “fight or flight” behaviors that may thwart a sexual assault. But many don’t, and not because there’s something wrong with them or they’re to blame, but simply because of how brains respond to being attacked.
Habit responses may include effective ways of fighting or fleeing, perhaps first learned in battles with siblings or on the playground. But the habitual behaviors that emerge during sexual assaults are commonly passive ones, which can avert additional violence or retaliation but tend to be ineffective at stopping assaults.
For example, habits of submission learned from childhood experiences of sexual, physical, or emotional abuse can suddenly reappear when a perpetrator becomes violent or ignores yet another clearly implied or unmistakable “no”. Especially common are habitual behaviors socialized into girls and women for nicely saying “no” to unwanted advances, or for clearly sending that message without actually saying “no” (to avoid hurting feelings or incurring wrath). Also common during sexual assaults are habits we’ve all learned for politely dealing with aggressive people, especially those with power over us.
This is so important. Many survivors have spent months or years not being allowed to express anger or being made to feel ashamed for experiencing anger.Â
So if you know a survivor, and you tell them that they “can’t” or “shouldn’t” be angry, that will almost certainly be triggering, and it’s really cruel.Â
Telling survivors that they need to “get past” their anger or to “be the bigger person” or “holding onto anger is like holding onto a hot coal” or “anger is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die” or that “healing is only possible with forgiveness” or that “forgiveness will set you free,” or that “being angry means the abuser still has control,” or that experiencing anger makes the survivor as bad as the abuser, or whatever else– that’s culturally imposed abuse apologism and if you want to be an ally, you need to unlearn resorting to those platitudes when trying to comfort survivors.Â
It’s okay to experience anger. It’s literally the natural reaction to boundary violation, and when someone’s boundaries have been repeatedly violated and broken down for years, it’s important for a person’s health to be able to experience and express that anger. It honestly really is.Â
People just want abuse victims that are soft and kind and gentle, the kind of victims who validate their beliefs that “everything happens for a reason”. It doesn’t occur to these people that abuse actually damages people, that it could turn victims bitter and resentful rather than into poster-children for resilience and inner-strength. Victims don’t just exist to pay homage to your worldview that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” as if abuse could ever be a positive or an experience to be grateful for.Â
When we are at that point of just about to lose it, before we have gone into reaction mode or dragged out our usual arsenal of habits, we can pause. We can interrupt that momentum. Instead of joining whatever we meet with our bundle of preconceptions, self-absorptions, fixed views, and programmed responses, we can immediately join it with meditation. We can insert awareness and compassion.
stop believing that you ran out of time to shape yourself into who you want to be! stop believing that its ruined! stop believing you don’t have potential! you are not a fixed being! you have endless opportunities to grow.
There are a lot of necessary and brave reports of sexual assault flooding our news feeds and social media. If you're a survivor and it's wearing you out or triggering you please remember self care. Logging off for a while is ok. Not engaging with the debates for a while is ok. Whatever keeps you healthy. I've realized that I am way more on edge and full of adrenaline lately and I think it's because there's all this extra triggering stuff to process. I hope you are all well ❤️
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