SYMPATHETIC AND PARASYMPATHETIC: SEEKING BALANCE
As we’ve discussed, the psyche will send the true self into hiding in the face of trauma and bring in an expert from the circus to handle the stress. Giving up this power over one’s life has its own cost, but it’s a better option than giving up life altogether due to sympathetic or parasympathetic overwhelm.
However, these systems will also try to retain homeostasis on their own. For instance, when the sympathetic system is activated, the body attempts to counterbalance this by activating the parasympathetic system, and vice versa. So if someone’s revved up with anger (sympathetic), he might want to smoke a cigarette or eat a comfort food (parasympathetic) as a natural response for homeostasis. Robert Scaer describes this process in The Trauma Spectrum:
The autonomic nervous system of the trauma victim…is characterized by a state of instability, sensitivity, and a cyclical abnormality of its normal state of regulation. Homeostasis may be disrupted by excessive and disproportionate stimulation by one limb of the autonomic nervous system, a state that is characteristic of the trauma victim. Assaulted by internal cues of threat, the victim experiences repetitive episodes of sympathetic arousal that in turn reflexively trigger deep parasympathetic dissociation. The trauma victim lives in a state of involuntary and disruptive autonomic instability and cycling.5
SYMPATHETIC AND PARASYMPATHETIC: AN EXAMPLE
The Runaway Bride was a widely publicized story that gave us a perfect example of sympathetic and parasympathetic responses in action. It was the story of a beautiful young woman engaged to a wonderful man who was in love with her and wanted to marry her. Just before the wedding, she suddenly disappeared, to the amazement of everyone in her life as well as millions of TV viewers. The runaway bride, Jennifer Carol Wilbanks, ran away from home in Duluth, Georgia on April 26, 2005, in order to avoid her wedding with John Mason, her fiancé, on April 30. Her disappearance sparked a nationwide search and intensive media coverage.
She finally turned herself in after three days with the whole world searching for her. What was the problem that caused her to run away the day before a wedding that she had dreamed of her whole life?
If you look at her eyes in the photos, she clearly looks terrified and yet she could only smile and say she didn’t know why she ran away or even where she went. Sympathetic and parasympathetic shock is like being on either side of a teeter-totter, going back and forth from one to the other. That is what happened with her. She was riding buses, getting on and off of them for days. This is sympathetic shock: lots of movement, like constantly running away. While on the buses, she moved into parasympathetic shock, which is like being “paralyzed.” She spent hours and days riding and staring endlessly out the windows. She reported that she didn’t remember where she went or what she saw.6
After she was finally discovered in a bus station, it was revealed that she had anorexia, a disturbing eating disorder in which a person eats very little because she feels fat. She had a great deal of shame about this condition and the constant stream of lies that accompanied it. As the wedding date approached, she unconsciously realized that getting married would reveal her long-held secrets, lies and shame to her new husband. That was more than she could bare and, at that point, her shock was activated and other forces took over so that she could escape without knowing consciously what she was doing.
CATATONIA: SYMPATHETIC AND PARASYMPATHETIC EXTREMES
These two propensities, the fight/flight sympathetic response and the freeze parasympathetic response, establish the basis for panic on the one hand and depression on the other. Stanley Keleman has worked on this formulation for many years, expressing that the first response to any stress or challenge is always arousal.7 When that arousal is not containable—if it is so intense that it becomes “unboundaried”—the person becomes overwhelmed. There’s too much excitation and not enough form, structure, context or containment. At the extreme, this becomes panic. To protect oneself from being overwhelmed or panicked, a person sometimes responds by holding it in, waiting, stiffening, squeezing and constricting: this is the freeze response, which heads in the direction of depression.
When there’s too much excitation without form or containment, there is panic. When there’s too much constriction and containment without a flow of activation, you have numbing, in which nothing can be aroused. This is depression.
The psychopathology labeled catatonia is an extreme example of the unresolved freeze response.8 The catatonic stupor symptoms of immobility, rigid and waxen mask-like face, fixed and unfocused gaze or stare and lack of reaction to stimuli nevertheless accompany evidence of alertness: despite their apparent unresponsiveness, they often have a surprising level of mental functioning with awareness of events going on around them.9 No longer considered solely a subtype of schizophrenia, these symptoms are present in about 10 percent of psychiatric inpatients, most often following situations in which the individual felt him or herself to be under profound threat (real or imagined) from internal or external perceived sources.10 This is experienced as unbearable anxiety.
Depression is much more common than catatonia and psychologist A. K. Dixon linked the immobility response (which he termed arrested flight) with such depression symptoms as social withdrawal, reduced eye contact and psychomotor retardation.11 So depression is conceptualized as a last-resort defense strategy, triggered by imminent, inescapable threat. Indeed, psychologists Paul Gilbert and Steven Allan suggest that such a blocked motivation for flight—the arrested flight—results specifically from feelings of entrapment and defeat.12 Andrew K. Moskowitz suggests that this pattern of anxious depression follows a specific cluster of experiences: “a perception of inescapable but at the same time amorphous danger, a sense of defeat and entrapment, and a sensation of imminent doom.”13 This is very much like the learned helplessness we see in animals.
A powerful and all-too-common example of this learned helplessness is the story of Stella. Stella is an overweight, master’s level therapist who sat in our group session, completely in shock. She stared out the window, couldn’t remember the practice we were supposed to be doing and couldn’t connect with the other students. She walked around with a fake smile plastered on her face and the “shock-eyed stare” that is very familiar to us. Even though she is a very intelligent woman with a college degree, Stella couldn’t perform even the simplest of practices. When it was her turn to “be the client,” she described a deep depression which had plagued her for years. She had very little motivation to keep her private practice going even though clients were calling to try to schedule sessions with her.
Beginning her session, she was depressed about not being able to maintain any intimate relationship, with twenty-five years of sexual abstinence, fear of men and distrust of women. Stella had been having intrusive flashbacks of a naked man’s rear end in her face. When we regressed her, she went back to a scene at age five, in bed with her father while her mother is standing in the doorway, glaring at her. She is wearing something very skimpy and is feeling, on one hand, that she likes the attention and being close to her daddy and on the other hand she is nauseated and filled with fear.
In the next scene, her father is kissing her with the smell of alcohol on his breath. Then he begins to force his penis into her mouth, as she is gagging, cannot breathe and fears she will die. As a way to get her out of the immobility of the parasympathetic shock, we instructed her to get into her body through movement. We told her to get up from the frozen shock posture she was in while reliving her abuse. We taught her some deep breathing and some bio-energetic