Survival responses – fight, flight, or freeze (and sometimes ‘befriend’). Options in a magazine quiz. Don’t need to take a test to know I’m a flee-er, unless of course I’m freezing.
Do you remember the poster for The Runaway Bride? Julia Roberts in a wedding dress, putting on her sneakers. I identified with that picture. Was my syndrome well known enough that they were making movies about it now? Were there others who devoted considerable energy to finding the escape hatch in every relationship?
When I’m asked about the best moment of my life, I remember striding down an airport corridor in my Chelsea boots and feeling elated. I was en route from Austria to the US. On my layover in London, I called my British fiancé to tell him I was going to America.
“How long for?”
“The rest of my life.”
If you’re a flee-er, you’ll get why that was so exhilarating. (If you knew the fiancé in question, you would also consider it an extremely smart move.) No regrets. Moving on. Don’t look back. Make new friends and let them take the place of family.
When the survival responses take hold, you still think you’re in control. In fact, for a trauma survivor it is imperative to delude ourselves into thinking we are in control because lack of it is how we got hurt in the first place. We need the illusion that we have choice, and that choice just happens to be… fight, flight, freeze or befriend.
Another Harvey Weinstein survivor tells me she endured his serial rape by making herself as unattractive as possible, “lying there like a stone.” In my professional life, we call this ‘tonic immobility,’ an involuntary reaction of the body to sexual assault. In her life, she has to see this as a choice because to contemplate the alternative – her complete lack of power in that situation – is terrifying.
My narrative is that I moved to the US to pursue a career in Hollywood. It also happened to be the other side of the world from a childhood that at 56 years old I am still trying to escape.
Recently, I returned to Europe for my mother’s 80th birthday. It was also the occasion I chose to tell her about my childhood sexual abuse (CSA). The truth is that the CSA is not the root of my trauma, although it has done enough damage to obscure the fact that there were other reasons I froze throughout the experience and continue to freeze if there is unwanted physical contact with a man… and sometimes during very-much-wanted contact. My boyfriend of 5 years recently put on his own sneakers. The Harvey Weinstein revelations have surfaced too much in my life and it turns out it will take longer than my boyfriend has patience for to put the cork back in that particular bottle (so to speak).
Freezing is the survival response of last resort. Can’t fight ‘em, can’t outrun ‘em, then let’s play dead. When you are a child, the angry adult holds all the cards and you are clean out of options. When your physical and emotional boundaries are routinely trammeled, your default freeze mode then makes you a prime target for pedophiles like my uncle (who was a trammeled child himself.) And Harvey Weinstein.
At the 80th birthday, my mother and siblings overcompensated for the discomfort of having to receive my uncle by giving him a fulsome welcome, while I sat to one side and watched the perpetrator of my abuse enjoy the full sun of my family’s embrace. I guess under stress they adopted an old and familiar pattern – excluding the victim of the abuse. In my head, “Go back to America, this is no longer your life. You made sure that it wasn’t.” Only for the first time, I realized that this was not a choice.
Running. Running for my life.
The truth is that my running is not a quirk, a discoverable trait of trauma, it is an imperative that is unqualified: Flee or die trying.
In the deepest, survival part of my brain there is still a circuitry that was formed during trauma and continues to flash and crackle with the message that I will die if I do not get away. Airport corridors, closing doors on relationships, feel like taking a great gulp of fresh air after near suffocation.
No wonder we cling to our perceived choices despite all the evidence that we are operating from the trauma playbook. No wonder we refuse to identify as victims, as powerless pawns of perpetrators. And no wonder our trauma responses are so entrenched because our brains insist that it is quite literally a question of life and death; we are fighting, freezing, befriending, running, for our lives.
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