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Trauma Responses - Tonic Immobility

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In Steven Taylor's book The Clinicians Guide to PTSD, there is a bit about it.

It does say it is related to peritraumatic dissociation. Although it does seem very linked to animal behavioural studies.

I think it can help people who've experienced reactions during trauma that they can't explain. It help's us to explain it to ourselves I guess.

But one part of me says, I wish they'd just list survival techniques, without having to catogorise and label and re-label each one. It gets so confusing.
 
Finding this a very interesting subject. I most definately have had frequent experience of tonic immobility though I've never been able to describe to any professional the experience and therefore have never held the language or terminology for what it is called. In fact I think I tagged its experience with my own inaccurate label of what word I thought somewhat fit.

I always use to think of it as a fugue-like state that I wasn't sure whether was a gift from HP or a curse do to it's effectiveness in blotting out reality and the ease in which to forget the following day that its experience and the threat ever even occurred whether it was my actual then experience of trauma or my full re-experiencing of a trauma.

As for effectiveness, Wow, it is perfectly decribed well to compare it to a significant dose of valium. As it definately aides in immediate survival.

Great thread Nicolette, I hope this gets lots of interest and discussion. :tup:

I have linked an article here on Tonic Immobility that I will return to read with more time. I lack all the language and learned info. on such subject, but I know without doubt that this explains alot, ...and something I'd never understood, just accepted and sometimes even held deep appreciation for.

Here's a link:

Traumatic Events and Tonic Immobility
[DLMURL]http://www.ucm.es/info/psi/docs/journal/v11_n2_2008/art516.pdf[/DLMURL]
 
I always just thought I froze, but after reading the link above I think it's more likely that it was tonic immobility.

It started, when I was very young and my mother was beating me.

When I have flashbacks of the sexual abuse, I am just laying there, numbing emotionally and physically and I can't physically move. I think I just dissociate.
 
I need to read this thread in more detail when I'm feeling a bit more intellectual, but this is, even at first glance, very validating for me too.

I think I still have a lot of confusion and contradicting memories about my childhood responses to trauma, but from what I do recall, tonic immobility may account for a lot of the lack of subjective experience that is attached to a lot of my event memories.

Most recently, I experienced a recent assault which I am positive evoked this state in me. To experience such a state with an adult intellect and a reasonably high degree of self awareness of survival mechanisms was a very surreal and, currently, a very disturbing, experience for me, but the numb, floating, emotionless state of paralysis that I vividly recall would certainly seem to be indicative of tonic immobility.

There have been some great threads here recently...

Maddog
 
Here's a link:

Traumatic Events and Tonic Immobility
[DLMURL]http://www.ucm.es/info/psi/docs/journal/v11_n2_2008/art516.pdf[/DLMURL]

This is the same document I took my opening content from. Good work Hope as the one I found only had one page - you found the entire version which I plan on reading.
 
For Meadowsweet - out of the document


Tonic immobility is an adaptive response when one does not perceive the possibility of escaping or of winning a fight. In effect, as predators tend to react basically to the movement of their prey, if the latter remain immobile instead of struggling or fighting, the probability of escaping increases because the predator often is distracted and temporarily releases its prey (Bracha, 2004; Marks, 1987; Moskowitz, 2004).
 
This is the same document I took my opening content from. Good work Hope as the one I found only had one page - you found the entire version which I plan on reading.

Yes, about 10 min.'s ago I figured this out, til then I hadn't known. I'm glad that it is helpful. :) I haven't yet read it either, but still planning to.
 
I can't recall right now the example given as a human example of the same but I am interest if others have heard of it?

Explorer David Livingstone in 1844. Him in the a Lion's jaws being violently shaken and thereafter almost immediately him going limp and numb, though still fully aware. When he later wrote of his experience he was in "a sort of dreaminess" with no terror nor sense of pain.

Perhaps read, "Fear Itself," Dozier

Livingstone\'s tonic immobility in the Lion\'s Jaws.jpg
 
For Meadowsweet - out of the document


Tonic immobility is an adaptive response when one does not perceive the possibility of escaping or of winning a fight. In effect, as predators tend to react basically to the movement of their prey, if the latter remain immobile instead of struggling or fighting, the probability of escaping increases because the predator often is distracted and temporarily releases its prey (Bracha, 2004; Marks, 1987; Moskowitz, 2004).

Thankyou Nicolette,

This is something I recognise has happened to me. It helps to take some of the self blame, shame and guilt away.
 
I most definately have had frequent experience of tonic immobility though I've never been able to describe to any professional the experience and therefore have never held the language or terminology for what it is called. In fact I think I tagged its experience with my own inaccurate label of what word I thought somewhat fit. I always use to think of it as a fugue-like state

It's always the interesting subjects that are difficult for me to participate much personal stuff, because of shame and fear.

I'm a little blown away with possibility now having an understanding of what my experiences of drifting off to a very dreamy like state during traumas though while conscious, yet having lost all energy, worry and threat as if I were drugged, and enjoying that safety.

Sometimes during and or immediately following all the abuse and threats I would end up just lying still while unable to move and for way too long a period of time and think absolutely nothing. Other times in bits, here and there, I'd lay questioning myself as to whether I was crazy, because why on earth could I not just get myself up, leave or even reach my arm out or move in a way just to prove to myself that I could. And, I'd lay that way too long in some trance and while unable to move, though aware and helpless and considering myself a lunatic for such helplessness and weakness.

That and more, much of which I am too ashamed to put into words, I'd feel horrible shame for being in such a state while those in the house went absolutely crazy with yelling, screaming, threats, hatred and coming in to get me and calling me out. Since at that time such insanity happened so regularly, I'd find myself in that condition lots in order to just survive while I remained to live there.
 
I suffer from Hypertonic Immobility caused by rape when I was aged 12. Judging by what I have
read in the responses here, none of your experiences are correct.

The sequence goes like this ….

Freeze …Listen for the danger … Fight – Should I stay and fight … Flight – Should I flee – Fright – Either too young, disabled or elderly and unable to use the first three survival responses, then the mind shuts the body down but it does not drop as in playing dead or playing possum. It does not faint or become limp.

Thing is, most animals lose interest in seemingly dead bodies. Humans are the only ones who tend to stay interested in them.

There is one pretty disturbing feature about this condition which nobody here has mentioned so I would say that what you think you have experienced as TI, isn’t. It’s a very rare condition.
 
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