In response to “Iran, a reflection“:
When a person is completely powerless, and any form of resistance is futile, she may go into a state of surrender. The system of self-defense shuts down entirely. The helpless person escapes from her situation not by action in the real world but rather by altering her state of consciousness.
A rape survivor describes her experience of this surrender: “Did you ever see a rabbit stuck in the glare of your headlights when you wre going down a road at night. Transfixed- like it knew it was going to get it – that’s what happened.” In the words of another rape survivor, “I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed…like a rag doll.” These alterations of consciousness are at the heart of constriction or numbing, a cardinal symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Sometimes situations of inescapable danger may evoke not only terror and rage but also, paradoxically, a state of detached calm, in which terror, rage, and pain dissolve. Events continue to register in awareness, but it is as though these events have been disconnected from their ordinary meanings. Perceptions may be numbed or distorted, with partial anesthesia or the loss of particular sensations. Time sense may be altered, often with a sense of slow motion, and the experience may lose its quality of ordinary reality.
The person may feel as though the event is not happening to her, as though she is observing from outside her body, or as though the whole experience is a bad dream from which she will shortly awaken. These perceptual changes combine with a feeling of indifference, emotional detachment, and profound passivity in which the person relinquishes all initiative and struggle. This altered state of consciousness might be regarded as one of nature’s small mercies, a protection against unbearable pain. A rape survivor describes this detached state: “I left my body at that point. I was over next to the bed, watching this happen…I dissociated from the helplessness. I was standing next to me and there was just this shell on the bed…There was just a feeling of flatness. I was just there. When I picture the room, I don’t picture it from the bed. I picture it from the side of the bed.”
That’s where I was watching it from.
