Tag Archives: survival
When Animal Defenses Encounter a Human Predator: Part III
Spontaneous tonic immobility is common during rape, but it doesn’t discourage many rapists. The problem is that tonic immobility was designed by Nature to deal with animal predators (e.g., big cats and bears), not human ones. Human predators usually don’t … Continue reading
When Animal Defenses Encounter a Human Predator: Part II
Let’s take a closer look at tonic immobility. When does it happen? How does it affect the animal? How does it affect the predator? And, perhaps most importantly for our purposes, “Does tonic immobility have after-effects?” As we will see, … Continue reading
When Animal Defenses Encounter A Human Predator: Part I
Tonic immobility is the ‘last chance’ biological reflex that is triggered when an animal is caught by a predator. Today’s post focuses on a rarely noted fact about tonic immobility — it has 4 possible outcomes, not two: (1) death … Continue reading
Disentangling Animal Defenses From Dissociation: Part IV
Today, we focus on the ‘last chance’ animal defenses — those that spontaneously activate when an animal (which includes us!) is threatened with imminent death. So far, we have examined two ‘last chance’ defenses: (1) the evolution-prepared switch to accelerated … Continue reading
Disentangling Animal Defenses From Dissociation: Part III
My unvarnished opinion is that the dissociation literature’s discussions of animal defenses (1) routinely conflate different kinds of immobility (freezing) and (2) fail to appreciate crucial differences between trauma and biological survival. I have been reviewing that literature lately. The … Continue reading
Disentangling Animal Defenses From Dissociation: Part II
We have no idea where our animal defenses end and our dissociative symptoms begin. The more that I immerse myself in this area, the more I am surprised that the dissociation literature hasn’t thought more deeply about animal defenses. Animal … Continue reading
Disentangling Animal Defenses From Dissociation: Part I
We need to disentangle the phenomena of animal defenses (e.g., freezing, hyperfocus, tonic immobility, etc.) from the phenomena of clinical dissociation (depersonalization, derealization, amnesia, etc.). Animal defenses have been built into us by natural selection; as such, their phenomena are … Continue reading
The Evolutionary Link Between Trauma and Dissociation
As a clinician who wants to understand dissociation, I keep bumping into two fundamental questions: 1. What is the relationship between trauma and dissociation? 2. What is the relationship between dissociation and PTSD? I ended my last post with a … Continue reading
Understanding Dissociation 