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Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
A small child cannot fight an adult and cannot leave the house. When trying to connect has already failed and the other two doors are locked, what remains is numbing, drifting off and going still. People carry that for decades as evidence of their own cowardice. It is worth saying to yourself in plain words: the options that would have kept my dignity were not available to me.
'We know what his soul whispers to him' (Quran 50:16). The verdicts you deliver against yourself in private are already heard, and already understood better than you understand them.
ق
وَلَقَدۡ خَلَقۡنَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ وَنَعۡلَمُ مَا تُوَسۡوِسُ بِهِۦ نَفۡسُهُۥۖ وَنَحۡنُ أَقۡرَبُ إِلَيۡهِ مِنۡ حَبۡلِ ٱلۡوَرِيدِ
We created man––We know what his soul whispers to him: We are closer to him than his jugular vein––
Qur’an 50:16read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta analysis of early life adversity and stress found that people who had experienced early adversity showed a blunted rather than heightened cortisol response to social stress, which the authors read as a long term recalibration of the stress system. That fits a system which learned early that mobilising was no use. It is a group level average and settles nothing about any one person's history.
Bunea IM, Szentágotai-Tătar A, Miu AC. (2017). Early-life adversity and cortisol response to social stress: a meta-analysis.. Translational psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Bodies choose from what is actually possible, and when nothing is possible they choose going still.
If working out what happened to you as a child brings up more than you can hold, do that part with a trauma trained therapist rather than alone.
Freezing is not something you decided on. It is what was left once the other options had gone.
Breath does not always calm. For some people it opens the door to feeling, for others it puts a little distance in. Find out which it does for you today.
Trauma sleeplessness usually has two layers: night itself carries meaning, and the body's clock has moved. Both need attention.