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August 14, 2022

Trauma, Freeze, and Consent

Tags: Fight or flight, Healing, Shamanic healing, rewiring the brain

It has been said that trauma is a thief. Whatever it was that happened, the worst of it often lies downstream. The events may have been horrific, in and of themselves, but trauma also steals from us our future and our self respect. Like interest on a maxed out credit card the effects of trauma are compounded daily. Especially when it happened early in life. As children we are usually considerably outmatched by our aggressors. The default stress response is to flee or to fight back. But when we are small this is usually not an option. Children facing violence, abuse, or violations of their boundaries and bodies have but one option: to survive it. A third stress response called Freeze takes over. Freeze is a shut down of all physical and emotional responses. It is akin to the opossum playing dead. The goal is to live. We go into shock, into paralysis, and then we dissociate, leaving our bodies to the circumstances at hand.


February 01, 2016

Fight Flight Or Freeze

Tags: Anxiety, SuperCeptor, Highly Sensitive Person, Fear, Spiritual Angst, Depression, Fight or Flight, HPA Axis

One of the most crippling side effects of being highly sensitive is running high levels of anxiety. Sensitives, or SuperCeptors, are highly tuned to pick up on the nuances of their environments, keeping their bodies forever on alert. They are not the only ones, however. Anyone who has been imprinted by a stressful or traumatic period in their life, also has a brain tempered for further stress.

In the first five years of our lives everyone’s brain is being “tuned” for how it is going to react to the world. If those first years are filled with high levels of stress, we develop a brain prepared for more. Unfortunately, this creates a “trigger happy” stress response ready for danger behind every corner.


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