The Myth of Normal 26

suppression would seem to be akin to the freeze response that creatures often display when fight and flight are both impossible. The crucial difference is this: once the hawk is gone, the possum is free to go about his business, his survival strategy having succeeded. A traumatized nervous system, on the other hand, never gets to unfreeze. “We have feelings because they tell us what supports our survival and what detracts from our survival,” the late neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp once said. Emotions, he stressed, emerge not from the thinking brain but from ancient brain structures associated with survival. They are drivers and guarantors of life and development. Intense rage activates the fight response; intense fear mobilizes flight. Therefore, if the circumstances dictate that these natural, healthy impulses (to defend or run away) must be quelled, their gut- level cues—the feelings themselves—will have to be suppressed as well. No alarm, no mobilization. If this seems self-defeating, it is so only in a limited sense: on an existential level, it is the “least worst” option, being the only available one that reduces risk of further harm. The result is a tamping down of one’s feeling-world and often, for extra protection, the hardening of one’s psychic shell. A vivid example is given by the writer Tara Westover in her bestselling memoir, Educated. Here she recalls the impact of abuse at the hands of a sibling, willfully ignored by her parents: I saw myself as unbreakable, tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect. [11] [Italics in original.] Trauma Limits Response Flexibility