For the person who was traumatised the fight or flight response failed. The individual was overpowered and made helpless, unable to avert trauma by defensive aggression. A maltreated child does not have the resource for flight or to fight and is unable to escape. If the child responds with aggression, the abuse escalates and it is counter productive when PTSD symptoms and reminders occur.
Passive defences to trauma include : freezing, paralysis, retreat into fantasy (dissociation). Predatory immanence lies along a continuum of threat reaching from completely safe to being completely overpowered and bullied. Defensive behaviour takes different forms depending upon where we believe ourselves to be on the continuum. Some of us start to restrict activity (eg movement, engagement and eating) or avoid the aggressor, some of us freeze and hold our breath, such freezing behaviour is associated with systemic changes in physiological arousal, a lowered heart rate, frequent arrhythmia, increased inspiration rate and limits to our depth of breathing.
When escape is limited an animal is tense and ready to erupt into explosive behaviour, struggling, fighting or biting… if this pent up energy is not discharged it may lead to tonic immobility. Or reactions and physiological responses become impacted and oscillate.
Freezing leads to hypervigilance, turning towards the inner world, disengagement from external stimuli, increased anxiety and narrowing of attention.
Dissociation is another form of reaction, a valid response to loss of control and fear of extinction or death. Tonic immobility gives a greatly decreased heart rate, the body becomes restrained, or even catatonic. Endogenous analgesia decreases feeling and leads to blood vessel restriction, even strokes, primal depression may be the result : devitalisation, fatigues, weakness, lack of resistance to illness, lowered immune response. One becomes totally passive, unresponsive, helpless. The parasympathetic NS is activated leading to lowered heart rate, submission, giving up, accompanied by feelings of hopelessness.
Dissociation evolved to help protect animals but it is dangerous for humans. Detachment = lack of engagement, it blocks coping with danger and everyday stressors and conflicts. It also blocks resolution of trauma. Dissociation is a failure to process traumatic experiences. It is akin to a mental flight with physical fight is not possible.
Dissociative detachment : leads to absorption in fantasy, memory goes and time is lost.
Derealisation : existing in a fog, feeling fuzzy, floaty, drifting, feeling the external world is unreal or strange.
Severe dissociative detachment leas to memory gaps, lost time/hypnotic absorption/proneness to fantasy. This reaction is associated with punishment abuse and leads to loneliness and isolation.
Defensive detachment, according to John Bowlby is a common childhood reaction to separation in childhood, failing to recognise an absent mother when she returns. It leads to freezing, stilling, keeping distance, avoidance in an infant who then lacks well developed capacities for self regulation. When caregivers dissociate from a child that child becomes disorganised.
Conflicts in attachment and intimacy set up an approach/avoidance conflict in a person, leading to disorganised attachment and dissociation in later life, especially in relation to betrayals of trust. It also leads to compartmentalisation. Betrayal trauma is a violation of trust that occurs in a situation in which a person doing the betraying is someone the victim cannot afford not to trust.
Knowledge isolation is the term given to the blocking of a victims realisation of the abuse.
Social isolation and separation are associated with self harm, neglect, separation and family chaos. Self harm brings a feeling of self control and alleviates the painful emotional states of dysphoria, it helps a victim of trauma feel alive and change the moods of the pressure of dysphoric (mental discomfort or suffering) experience. Feelings of abandonment and neglect always trigger self harm.
Emerging From The Dark Night 