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
Very good Znum. Yes, I would say that from what I am learning that this sounds somewhat correct. And, your comments reassures me of this:
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.
So thank you!
Nope, never have I been able to describe my fear and stress responses using any words like Freeze, Flee, Fight, immobility, tonic, etc., etc. before to any professional and now I've learned that I have not done very well earlier here either in communicating my chronic horrific personal mirrored experiences and silenced cycle with such.
In Steven Taylor's book The Clinicians Guide to PTSD, there is a bit about it.
Split the bit and you get this:
"In humans and many other animals there are four distinct, biologically based fear responses, which often proceed in the following sequential pattern: (1) freezing, (2) fleeing, (3) fighting, and (4) tonic immobility (Bracha, Ralston, Matsukawa, Williams, & Bracha, 2004; Gray, 1988)." Source: Clinician's Guide to PTSD, Steven Taylor, Barbara Rothbaum
The sequence goes like this ....
From my experience and IMHO, I'd say there is additional order and continuation to things after tonic immobility and its very traumatic sequence.
Thereafter is where I mostly landed while commenting earlier. And, likely a disordered time and place related and yet after the fact.
Personally, I prefer the sequence freeze, flee, fight, piss oneself and then tonic immobility.
Having said this, I just realized that what I am acknowledging now in clinical words, plus my own experience here:
freezing, and next attempting to and/or helplessly wishing to be able to
flee and failing miserably, as well as the
fighting and going down all the harder, ...all actually precede #4
tonic immobility.
Anyhow whatever clinical wording is selected for us survivors and Ptsd suffers with all its attempts at supreme clarity and frequency doesn't change a thing of my experience. I'll admit to cycling repetitively through freeze, flee, fight responses if I mustn't deny pissing myself when every hope and attempt fails and additional threats, danger and attacks continue and prevail and all in the same date and very same long, continuing length of time inevitably leading to a catatonic TI despair.
but it does not drop as in playing dead or playing possum. It does not faint or become limp.
When this happens I've passed through and beyond one stage of tonic immobility into a different stage of tonic immobility...
"If fleeing or fighting are not viable options, then tonic immobility occurs. The latter is a "play dead" response,
which often occurs when entrapment is perceived or when there is direct physical contact with a predator (Moskowitz, 2004). Unlike the freeze response, tonic immobility is an involuntatry state of profound, reversible motor inhibition." Source: Clinician's Guide to PTSD, Steven Taylor, Barbara Rothbaum
...by then I've continued through additional sequences of events very much mirroring the quote mentioned just above and which includes severe motor inhibition for me.
Severe (yet still not special or as rare as we may sometimes like to think ourselves) is just as real, credible and worthy as are earlier, as well as, those yet unknown later points in stages of severity of things.
---
This next statement is IMHO is too entirely self-centered
of me :D ...and
for me, :D and not being voiced here out of
much paranoia. :roflmao:
@ myself...:D...;) (lol)- I am not a slow poke or loser at embracing Ptsd recovery, I have simply been rather unlucky and dealt a hand of trauma and neglect, Ptsd complex in nature starting in preschool and continuing while running simultaneous with (once-upon-a-time) longstanding, habitually minimized, dismissed and undiagnosed, concurrent illness's, and seemingly non-stop boulder-like obstacles. - Now that is a mouthful.
