here’s the deal. everyone has lied to you, like your biology teacher. the options that your body has in the event of danger are not “fight or flight” they are “fight or flight OR FREEZE!”
Freeze means exactly what it sounds like – you freeze, you often dissociate, even if part of you is saying ‘move, do something, say something’ you are frozen! it is an involuntary, self defense, play dead type of reaction left over from when we were trying not to be eaten by tigers or whatever. it’s also a way for your body to take stock of the danger and figure out wtf is happening and wtf to do.
Animals do it all the time. if you see a video of a lion chasing a gazelle and the gazelle suddenly stops running and falls down and just lays there, it is frozen! it is frozen bc it’s nervous system has decided this is the thing that is most likely help it to survive
So if you were in a situation where you were in danger, like if someone was hurting or assaulting you, and you just froze and couldn’t move or fight back? That’s why. It’s not your fault. It’s involuntary. you are not to blame for what happened. 💜
A fourth stress response exists even, the “fawn” response. This is a dog rolling over and showing its belly to a threat – submissive, subservient behavior aimed at convincing the threat that you’re not a challenge to their dominance and that they should not kill you because they’ll benefit more from keeping you alive to serve them (some species may not have this one, but humans definitely do – “nervous laughter” is another example of the fawn response kicking in when a person’s under stress, these don’t only apply when you’re in a literal immediate life-or-death situation but the greater the perceived danger the stronger and less consciously-overridable the stress response is).
So if you’ve been in a situation where you were in danger, and found yourself complying with your attacker, going along with things you didn’t want to go along with, and afterwards you wonder what’s wrong with you that you just went along with it? That also doesn’t mean it’s your fault or that you deserved it, or that you’re weak or cowardly or whatever. You had an instinctive stress response kick in and override your usual conscious determining of what to do. It’s VERY hard to break out of that state by will alone in an actual survival situation, next to impossible unless you’ve actually been trained at it (and I mean intentionally trained to not hit adrenaline overdrive and thus retain your usual rational response ability; too much adrenaline literally shuts down your higher reasoning temporarily and forces you into an instinctive mode where you don’t get to consciously pick which stress response gets used to keep you alive – also it’s possible to end up cycling through a few of them in any order if your first one doesn’t reduce the perceived threat to survival).
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