What emerges from the research, however,22 is evidence that stereotypies occur not only in toxic environments, but in more neutral environments as well.23 This is not to say that this second group of animals is free of distress, but that the distress is not always so evident. There is some thinking that stereotypies are a result of the thwarting of the animal’s natural instincts. And, of course, all captive animals are subject to this. What could be more of a natural instinct than to be free? We find this thinking not only in animal welfare, but in prison welfare as well. Activists fighting inhumane treatment in prison systems have spoken out against the use of excessive isolation.24 The common denominator within these varied environments is lack of freedom, social inhibition, and sensory deprivation.
Fear not only robs us of our capacity to play; it also holds us in a form of confinement that restricts the freedom of our minds. Fear, metaphorically, is the great captor, and—just as in more literal forms of captivity—its effects are devastating to our vitality and well-being.
Submission and Freedom
“Never tap out.” This is a phrase that came from a patient of mine who wrestled for sport beginning in high school. She came to see me when she was thirty years old. Her name was Janie, and her experience with wrestling came to be quite meaningful to our work.
Never tapping out, as I came to learn, was what Janie’s high school coach had demanded of her. Tapping out was like saying “uncle.” It was an admission of mental defeat, a recognition of fear’s power to make you run away. Her coach required that his wrestlers never give up. He would say, “You keep fighting until you can’t fight anymore. You don’t let yourself get pinned.”
For Janie, never tapping out represented an unconscious refusal to admit that someone had the power to make her submit. What I came to learn was that this battle against submission began early in her relationship with her mother. Being apart from her mother was unbearable for Janie, even up to her teens. Early on in our work, Janie talked endlessly about how wonderful her mother was, how caring, thoughtful, and giving she was. Janie’s mother’s love, however, was narcissistically suffocating, fostering helplessness, dependence, and ultimately, submission. Although I could easily see there was something unhealthy in this dynamic, it took Janie a long time to realize this.
Submission, we discovered, was a complicated experience for her. This is true for all animals, but particularly so for human beings. In my view, it is a strong contender for what we as a species might fear most—not only biologically, but psychologically, as well. In speaking of the experience of submission, it is impossible to conceive of it without invoking an “other.” We submit to someone, or because someone demands it of us. It is what happens when a person persuasively asks that we hand ourselves over to them. And it is activated in us equally in experiences of “love” and domination.25
In submission, there is something being done to us that overpowers our humanity and renders us mere animals fighting for our lives. We are, however, a very particular kind of animal—one that appears to be sensitive to loss of freedom, not just in terms of physical confinement, but in terms of psychological confinement as well.
Related to the human experience of submission is the neurobiological response of tonic immobility. Under extreme stress and fear, when the life of an animal is at stake, its nervous system can literally shut down. In laboratory settings, this experience can be induced by repeatedly flipping a frightened animal onto its back and holding it there. Eventually, the animal will stop fighting and go limp. It is a shutting down of the nervous system. The evolutionary value of this particular response to trauma is worth considering. From one angle, it is a form of playing possum, of fooling a predator into thinking that you as prey are dead. But it is also, potentially, a way to keep the nervous system from becoming overwhelmed by terror.
As human beings, we have our own version of this. It happens during violent sexual attacks and is sometimes called rape paralysis. Similar to tonic immobility, it is a fear response that occurs at the height of threat, when escape is impossible. In some cases, this type of fear response has prevented the completion of the act—cases in which, without the fight and violence of the act, the rapist loses interest or is unable to finish.
Not surprisingly, victims of rape who have experienced this form of paralysis feel shame about what has happened to them. The inability to stop this terrible thing from happening, the feeling of responsibility, and the sense of worthlessness that comes naturally when someone is treated with such contempt, all form the bedrock of this shame. The shame attached to this protective neurobiological strategy is cited as one of the reasons victims of sexual assault do not come forward to report what has happened. Loss of freedom, powerlessness to stop abuse, and the experience of someone being robbed of their personal sovereignty combine to make them feel less than human.
Survival operates for us in neurobiological systems far removed from our higher-level cortical brains. And when our survival is at stake, our biology willingly sacrifices our dignity and well-being for our continued existence. Fear and the biological longing for survival promote both our resistance to submission and our eventual acquiescence to it. On the one hand, when the demand for submission is upon us, we will fight tooth and nail to resist being harmed, restrained, or confined. On the other hand, when our fear becomes overwhelming, and when both escape and resistance fail, our nervous system opts for some form of neurobiological shutdown. In other words, our survival instincts resist being dominated, physically and psychologically, until they don’t. If fighting against physical and psychological submission begins to threaten our existence, then our biology has no other option but to submit.
For a child living in a psychologically toxic environment, escape is impossible. The utter and absolute dependence of a child upon a parent requires that the child maintain a “positive” relationship with that parent, regardless of how much pain they experience in doing so. And if submission is required, then little else is possible. Eventually, the will to resist submission yields to the pressure of fear and the need to maintain connection with the parent. This is when our mind begins to pull us away from life.
Like a turtle, my patient April pulled her head inside her shell, away from danger. The submission she offered to her father was in form only, devoid of what was most real in her. As a defense, this worked quite well. The problem, however, is that, when such defenses become mobilized chronically, they tend to get stuck. April carried with her the imprint of a fear that kept her distant and remote. Unlike a turtle’s responsive relationship to environmental threat, April lost the ability to poke her head back out again. Fear had indeed found a way to keep her safe, but the woman who came to my office that first day was also empty and depressed.
April was unable to let anyone see who she was. Deep connection was unavailable to her. She suffered alone. Not only that, but April also lacked awareness of her own needs. The longing to connect, to feel close, was kept from her awareness. The self that she kept hidden remained safe, but profoundly alone. And, as we began to get in touch with her inner world, we found a richness of emotion, self-expression, and vulnerability intermixed with the areas of pain from her early childhood.
Inside her mind was a fragile creativity that she had unconsciously protected for all those years. And, although she kept herself hidden to avoid captivity, her fear became a new prison. Freedom, she and I discovered, came not through avoiding her pain, but through accepting it.
“Could you be in a state of fear without feeling afraid?”
—Ralph Adolphs
A woman with the initials SM went to a hospital in Los Angeles one day because she was having blackouts. While there, she met a neuroscientist from USC by the name of Antonio Damasio. As he interviewed her, he noted something quite unusual: she reported that she had no