Selective Mutism - A possible explanation: The "unsafe world" model

[Calmdown]

I found an interesting study about selective mutism, it mentions an "unsafe world" model.

Betrayed by the nervous system: a comparison group study to investigate the ‘unsafe world’ model of selective mutism - Journal of Neural Transmission

Abstract The study presented in the following verifies some assumptions of the novel ‘unsafe world’ model of selective mutism (SM). According to this model, SM is a stress reaction to situations erroneously experienced via cognition without awareness as ‘unsafe’. It assumes a high sensitivity to...

link.springer.com

According to this model, SM is a stress reaction to situations erroneously experienced via cognition without awareness as 'unsafe'. It assumes a high sensitivity to unsafety, whereby the nervous system triggers dissociation or freeze mode at relatively low thresholds.

Only if we feel safe enough, it is possible to engage in social connectedness, including making eye contact, listening and talking to people. Inability to speak, poor gaze, low facial expressivity, stiff body postures, limited motor behaviours, changed awareness of the sound of the human voice, are all symptoms of SM that can be explained by a stress reaction. According to the Polyvagal Theory, children and adolescents with SM have difficulties in re-establishing safe, calm states that would promote normal social communication (Heilmann et al. 2012). Instead, their bodies are in constant stress mode. High sensitivity to external stimuli like noise and lights as well as internal stimuli like ingested food may all be emergent properties of this physiological state of stress (Porges 2010).

This relates to how I even feel today as an adult despite not going mute anymore. There was only one therapist who understood my behavior as a sign of a constant feeling of not being safe. Now looking back it even makes more sense.

There is much talk about a high sensitivity to stimuli as a cause, but a possible connection to trauma is pretty clear to me.
Then I also found this:

Various factors can influence the process of distinguishing safe from unsafe contexts (Porges, 2011). In our study, for example, five mothers of the SM group stated that their child had experienced physical or sexual abuse; none of the mothers in the control group reported any abuse. A study by MacGregor et al. (1994) showed corresponding results. Experiencing abuse and maltreatment during childhood has life-long health consequences (e.g., Boeck et al. 2016). It causes stress and may lead to the perception of unsafety. However, recent studies did not show a clear link between trauma and SM (Muris and Ollendick 2015). This may stem from the assumption that abuse is only one of several risk factors for SM.

To me this indicates that selective mutism can indeed be a reaction to trauma, but trauma is not the only possible cause.
I think the classification as an anxiety disorder like social anxiety is more obfuscating than helpful.
Selective mutism is pretty rare and I think it is difficult to get a definitive conclusion with low samples, there might be different groups of affected children with different causes.
Therapists should neither jump to the conclusion that trauma caused it nor rule it out.


In elementary school there was a classmate who suddenly stopped talking in class just like me all the years before. His parents recently separated. For him luckily it got better with time.
I don't know that much about my early childhood, but my mother mentioned how "once" she yelled at me when I was a baby. I know very well how she exploded all the time. An emotional unstable and potentially dangerous mother is already enough to get a constant feeling of not being safe, but there is more. However this is not only supposed to be about me.
Most therapists could not make sense of it and often even ignored the topic completly, this is why I think it is important to look at it from another angle.

 

[arfie]

i was near adolescence before i started talking as a child in the 60's. i started school as, "retarded" because of it. i was moved to gifted math and science before i was talking routinely. i stuttered like a mad dog when i did try to speak. at 70. the stutter still arises when under duress.

this topic never did make it into my therapy sessions, but rather peculiar things have been happening since i stopped fighting the quirk and let myself get comfortable with falling back into mutism/stuttering when the defect arises. perhaps the most profound peculiarity is that i listen more closely and i am far less prone to the hyper-expressive blurts of trying to force my way past ^it^.

my attempts to find clinical explanations for this failed miserably in the 80/90's, but? ? ? this sounds closer than anything i have encountered so far.

 

[Survivor3]

Hi @Calmdown thanks for opening a thread on this as its a subject very close to my heart. I have suffered (I think)??! From selective mutism alot in my life. The reasons for this include my father's violent abuse throughout my childhood, violent attacks that nearly killed me and other abuse/humiliation. Talking was really difficult for me to the point of having seizures sometimes.

 

[Ecdysis]

Thanks for this thread. I struggle with this too.

 

[Lost in the Woods]

Thank you for posting this. SM is something I have struggled with as an adult but not as a child. For me it goes beyond speech, I can't form the thought that can be verbally expressed.