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Chapter 6

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF SHOCK

A young man hiked into the desert and was working his way through a narrow crevice when a boulder fell on his arm and trapped him. Not only did he have to face the physical pain of having his arm smashed, but as time passed, he had to face the almost unbearable reality that there was no way of getting the rock off his arm and there was almost certainly no way someone was going to find him. So his only choice for survival was to apply a tourniquet and then sever his arm in order to make his way to freedom.

Thankfully, few of us ever have to face such a physically frightening and brutal circumstance for survival, but we’re often faced with having to sacrifice something we want in our lives for the sake of something more important. In the midst of a home fire, people will do anything to save their children and then their pets in preference to their possessions. More along the lines of the hiking example, every day people around the world choose to drink dirty water that has a good chance of making them sick, because, ironically, they need the water to survive. So they choose the lesser of two evils.

In fact, the entire body operates in this way. Any time it endures a lack of nutrients, for instance, it asks the same question we would ask with a limited budget: if I only have so much, what do I have to spend money on, and what can wait? Just like a human with a credit card, the body will borrow from its own resources—like the minerals in the bones—to make sure that day-to-day function goes on as well as possible, even though that may make its long-term foundation a little more shaky. Maybe the body needs calcium to keep muscles contracting, including the heart. Probably worth stealing a little calcium from the bones if it’s not getting the calcium from its diet, right? But what happens if that occurs on a regular basis?

As we’ve discussed, the physical body isn’t the only part of us that uses this principle of “the lesser of two evils.” While we always prefer ideal options from which to make our choices—happy and pristine surroundings, perfect nutrition, wise teachers, kind friends—circumstances are often far from ideal, and we have to do the best we can in the situation. Adults sent into war, children sold into slavery and indeed the child at home being physically, sexually or emotionally abused—all these instances may call for choices of sacrifice: “If I want to function from day to day, I cannot live in a state of shock. So ‘someone else’ will handle getting abused while ‘I’ handle daily living.”

In effect, the abused child basically sacrifices part of her connection to her true self, her soul, in order to preserve it. By separating her true self from the abuse, this aspect of her life is able to keep its attachment and its control over other parts of the child’s life. It’s wonderful that our true essence can be preserved in this way, and that this allows it to continue taking part in our lives. But there are consequences to this splitting.

After all, our souls are really the life force that makes us individuals rather than just a biological entity or part of a collective mind. This life force is what allows us to have what many people call “God-given talents,” whether these are for learning, for creating or for having a good sense of humor. This essence also knows how to deeply love and respect itself and others—something that seems to be missing in so many people who have suffered from shock.

The potential for shock is around every corner, from the moment of conception to birth to the patterns we’re exposed to by our parents, teachers and the media. No child completely escapes the impressions of stress and trauma, even if he or she is only affected to a small extent. But picture the child who has experienced minimal trauma, from a loving conception to an easy delivery, from harmony in his home and classroom life to encouragement in learning and doing. Perhaps most important of all is regular assurance from both word and deed that he is loved and respected. Picture that child and know how eager he is to learn; how happy he is to show affection; how readily he laughs. This is the structure of the generally uninhibited soul.

The soul is inhibited to some degree simply by being in a physical body. The body gives it limitations and frailties. And while most parents would love nothing better than to give their children this idyllic kind of environment, the challenges of everything from global and household economics to jobs, politics, relationships, health, housekeeping and other errands seem determined to keep them from doing so. But the younger the children without substantial abuses in their lives, the more we see those brilliant soul qualities shining through their eyes.

As we get older, though, trauma and shock play their role in teaching us, either directly or indirectly. Subtle traumas happen even in simple instances like heading into middle school for the first time and being laughed at for being different in some way and so, as a matter of protection, we start to learn how to fit in rather than being that unique self that had so much light in it. This is when trauma teaches us directly. Then we may teach our own children years later that they need to learn how to fit in and we encourage them to hide their true selves, because we fear for their safety. Now trauma is reaching the child indirectly through us as parents.

As we split away from the soul—either in subtle ways, as with shadows, or in substantial ways, as with shock—trauma and shock really are the only other elements available to control how we function. They are the default programming when the soul isn’t making choices.

Aspects of the collective mind come to us in the form of archetypes and guide our thinking. In this book we’re describing these as circus characters. This helps us to deal with ongoing trauma, because we’re now accompanied by a powerful companion (identified as a part of ‘me’ that I don’t quite control). This could be the Muscle Man, the Fat Lady, the Clown or others. But whatever form these archetypes take, its original intention is to act as a protective bodyguard for the traumatized person to hide behind.

Having this bodyguard comes at a steep price, however, because when there is any perceived threat having to do with the original trauma—the trauma that created this relationship—then the bodyguard takes control with or without current permission, because permission was given with the original agreement.

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF SHOCK

Perhaps the most important key to understanding shock is understanding our built-in system for handling stress. This system is designed to protect us and, as with the “lesser of two evils” we mentioned, the results of having this system work for us aren’t always ideal, yet they are more ideal than the alternative, which is basically death by stress due to a loss of homeostasis. But when we’re pushed too far, to the point of trauma and shock, you can see the lasting results of this protective system in our behavior.

This profound influence on human behavior is found within the deep evolutionary streams of human nature, flowing through the hormonal and nervous systems, regulated by the instinctual “reptilian brain” (limbic system). That part of the brain controls emotional thought, including rage, fear, aggression and arousal. The influence of these systems is especially direct as imminent threat increases. Importantly for us, the “new brain”—the prefrontal cortex and especially the hippocampus—can moderate that influence, putting the reality of a threat into context and making mindful, conscious choices of behavior.

So in animals having both parts of the brain to work from, nature combines the two to deal with danger. First there’s an old brain (reptilian brain) assessment of a situation. This assessment asks, “Is there reason to turn up the stress response system?” The reptilian brain may determine that there is reason for a stress response, but the new brain may provide context to the situation and thereby eliminate the need for the stress response. However, in those who have suffered from shock, the new brain cannot provide that context so the reptilian brain’s decision remains and can only provide two basic types of response: fight/flight and freeze. Let’s take a look at a zebra in the wild as an example.

ORIENTING RESPONSE

Engaged in its daily activity, a prey animal like a zebra has an “early warning system” that senses a potential threat. Perhaps it is grazing when it suddenly hears something hidden in the nearby grass. It enters a state of “alert immobility,” becoming almost entirely motionless, and focuses its attention on sensory cues regarding the threat (typically sight, sound and smell). If no danger is detected, the zebra resumes normal activity without wasting energy on a fight or flight response. If danger is imminent, then fight or flight is initiated.

THE FIGHT OR FLIGHT RESPONSE

The sympathetic response (fight/flight) is most easily understood as an upsurge in emotion. In people, these emotions are experienced as coming “up”—anger, fear, excitement, desire, hatred—and, if expressed, involve movement toward the problem (fight) or away from the problem (flight).

So perhaps our zebra spots a lion. Immediately, the instinctual fight or flight response is activated and stress hormones are pumped into the body by the sympathetic nervous system to put all available energy into survival. Norepinephrine immediately calls into action certain centers in the brain to respond, including the amygdala (the center for emotional memories) and the hippocampus (the nerve center that provides a conscious structure and context for “declarative memory”—a form of memory relating to facts and events in cooperation with the cerebral cortex). Adrenaline surges and glucose is mobilized from the liver to provide energy to activate the heart, lungs, arms and legs in order to optimize impending fight or flight. Endorphins are released in the brain to create stress-induced analgesia (to reduce any pain).

If the zebra in our example survives the threat on its life, it then discharges the stress hormones in its body and resumes its normal daily activities. The discharge is primordial, reflexive and totally somatic, ranging from twitching movements to violent shaking. And a record of the successful survival experience is etched in the hippocampus to make future threats more survivable.

As we’ve indicated, you can see the lingering effects of this stress response system in those who have reached this overwhelming point (trauma or shock). In these cases, the sympathetic stress isn’t shaken off in the natural way, and the sympathetic “symptoms” can be seen in behavior years or even decades after the traumatic event. Over time, the non-discharged nervous system response becomes deeply embedded somatically and is what we call shock. People who experience sympathetic shock are often involved in frantic, constant movement, talking quickly with run-on sentences and no opening for anyone else to get a word in edgewise. This is often accompanied by compulsive working, spending and shopping. Other nervous or anxious habits can include tics, insomnia, smoking, frequent accidents or the need to control. There can also be physical symptoms such as ulcers, allergies, temporomandibular disorders (TMD), gastrointestinal distress and hypertension. These are all attempts by the body/psyche to “drain the swamp” of excess energy that has become dangerous to homeostasis as it builds up with nowhere to go.

Excessive sympathetic branch activity can lead to increased energy-consuming processes, manifested as increases in heart rate and respiration and as a pounding sensation in the head.¹ Other symptoms include muscle tensing, clenching or grinding of teeth, tachycardia (irregular heartbeat), excessive sweating, pallor, tremor, startle, hypervigilance, panic, rage and constipation. Over the long term, such hyperarousal may disrupt cognitive and affective processing as the individual becomes overwhelmed and disorganized by the accelerated pace and amplitude of thoughts and emotions, which can be accompanied by intrusive memories as well.

FREEZE RESPONSE

Opposite to fight/flight, the parasympathetic action (freeze) is described as coming “down.” Human emotions include disappointment, grief, shame, guilt and despair; or in a positive sense, contentment, peacefulness and satisfaction. These feelings involve a decrease in tension, a drawing of energy inward with a tendency toward introspection. Laughter and tears are both usually a sign of parasympathetic activity, because both reduce tension. Other physical symptoms may include heart palpitations, nausea, dizziness, indigestion, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, incontinence, social isolation and withdrawal, substance abuse, constricted affect (a lack of apparent emotion), denial, cognitive impairment and dissociation.

In the case of the zebra we’ve described, if the fight or flight is not successful, at the point of recognizing defeat and impending death he goes into a state of helplessness and hopelessness. Physiologically, this is the freeze response. It appears as “feigning death” because of the sudden and extreme immobility, which is a last-ditch effort for survival because a lion will not eat an animal unless she kills it first. If the zebra convinces the lion that he has just dropped dead, the lion walks away and the zebra lives. The stress hormones are not discharged, as they would be after a successful fight or flight. Instead, they are counteracted by a new cocktail of hormones activated by the parasympathetic nervous system. The pulse and blood pressure, previously elevated by stress hormones, are now forced to drop precipitously. In fact, the overall vital signs drop so sharply that there is a danger that the animal will fail to recover even if allowed to do so. About one-third of animals who feign death like this die before they can recover. The endorphins released in response to a threat persist during freeze/immobility, rendering the zebra analgesic in the face of the injury from the attack. At this point the zebra is in a state of passive dissociation—not unconscious, but in an altered state of “suspended animation.”

If it so happens that the zebra survives the encounter after entering a freeze state, it enters a discharge sequence similar to the discharge of the stress hormones. The experience of escape is stored in procedural (unconscious) memory, increasing confidence and resilience for future threatening experiences.

If hormone discharge is blocked without causing death, however, the zebra suffers chronic physical symptoms of immune deficiency and a shortened lifespan, and behaviorally suffers depression and neurosis. You can see in people that excessive parasympathetic branch activity leads to an increase of energy-conserving processes, such as decreases in heart rate and respiration and a sense of ‘numbness’ and ‘shutting down’ within the mind. Such hypoarousal can manifest as numbing, a dulling of inner body sensation, a slowing of muscular/skeletal response and diminished muscular tone, especially in the face. Cognitive and emotional processing are also disrupted.

One example of this is animals in cages whose freedom of movement is severely restricted. Their resignation to “inescapable” trauma is called the defeat response, or learned helplessness, and represents a state of adaptation to living indefinitely with life-threatening trauma without further attempts to escape (fight or flight). Learned helplessness is the persistence of the non-discharged parasympathetic freeze response. We know this because blocking the parasympathetic nervous system (with a drug) also blocks the development of learned helplessness.² Here, unable to discharge and complete the process of recovery from the freeze response, the experience of inescapable threat is consolidated in procedural memory, reinforcing the tendency to freeze in the future.

Such prolonged exposure to elevated levels of stress hormones within the context of the non-discharged freeze response creates damage to the brain’s hippocampus. And indeed, you can then imagine the impact on people who suffer regular abuse. Smaller hippocampal volumes, for instance, are reported in female adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. This kind of damage leads to a loss of neurons and synapses (up to 18 percent), and results in corruption of thought processes and learning, particularly deficits of encoding short-term into long-term memory, and of envisioning future events that are different from the past.³

The traumatic experiences, then, etched in procedural memory but not converted into long-term memory, interfere with current working memory. In this case, past threats are perceived to be present threats, suggested by intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and hypervigilance. Not only does this obscure the ability to distinguish between past and present, but the repertoire of survival skills remains confined to those skills that were acquired up to the time of the trauma and people in this circumstance lack the resilience to learn new strategies. You could say that an aspect of these individuals is frozen in the past, because they lost part of (or much of) the connection to their essence at the time of the traumatic, shock-inducing event. In circumstances related to that trauma, at least part of their true selves is only connected to them in the past, while part of the present ego-self is a replacement from the archetypal members of the circus.

The Polyvagal Theory of Stephen Porges proposes two branches to the vagus nerve: one associated more with the older, reptilian brain and one associated with the more recent mammalian brain. He suggests that this dual nerve system gives us the freeze response on one hand and a calming effect on the other. While the polyvagal system directly operates only with the parasympathetic side of things, this control also operates indirectly as a “brake” on the sympathetic system, thus controlling both through its veto power, so to speak. Porges’s work documents how the body, through the vagal nerve system, determines whether parasympathetic activation triggers disappointment and shame on the one hand or contentment on the other.⁴

The good news is that, in cases where either the fight/flight or freeze response hasn’t been discharged correctly, the discharge can be facilitated therapeutically and damage to the brain and memory can be repaired. The hippocampus is part of the limbic system and is especially susceptible to hypoxic and ischemic damage (obstruction of the blood supply). Yet it is the only known region of the human brain that can replicate new neurons. Long-term potentiation (LTP) is defined as an increase in strength of synaptic transmission with repetitive use that lasts for more than a few minutes. In the hippocampus, LTP can be triggered by less than 1 second of intense synaptic activity and lasts for hours or more. This may account for the memory re-acquisition and re-contextualization that is possible when healing trauma. Through techniques such as catharsis, titration of threat cues, unwinding of bound undischarged energy and reprogramming of the perpetual fight/flight or freeze response, effective facilitation can indeed reverse the damage done and return the individual to a state of resilience and homeostasis.

Nature has given us this necessary and useful ability to enter fight/flight or freeze for self-preservation. It also gives us a way to shake off these states when they are no longer useful for us. In our zebra example, that survival after stress, which includes successful discharge of the excess stress hormones, results in increased confidence and resilience for future stressful experiences. Unfortunately, we don’t always do this effectively, even when facing a one-time trauma, much less when facing ongoing traumas from experiences like war or abuse. We become stuck on either end of the spectrum of sympathetic or parasympathetic—often moving between the two, though most people will tend toward one or the other, as we see in consistent personality traits.

SYMPATHETIC AND PARASYMPATHETIC: SEEKING BALANCE

As we’ve discussed, the psyche will send the true self into hiding in the face of trauma and bring in an expert from the circus to handle the stress. Giving up this power over one’s life has its own cost, but it’s a better option than giving up life altogether due to sympathetic or parasympathetic overwhelm.

However, these systems will also try to retain homeostasis on their own. For instance, when the sympathetic system is activated, the body attempts to counterbalance this by activating the parasympathetic system, and vice versa. So if someone’s revved up with anger (sympathetic), he might want to smoke a cigarette or eat a comfort food (parasympathetic) as a natural response for homeostasis. Robert Scaer describes this process in The Trauma Spectrum:

The autonomic nervous system of the trauma victim…is characterized by a state of instability, sensitivity, and a cyclical abnormality of its normal state of regulation. Homeostasis may be disrupted by excessive and disproportionate stimulation by one limb of the autonomic nervous system, a state that is characteristic of the trauma victim. Assaulted by internal cues of threat, the victim experiences repetitive episodes of sympathetic arousal that in turn reflexively trigger deep parasympathetic dissociation. The trauma victim lives in a state of involuntary and disruptive autonomic instability and cycling.⁵

SYMPATHETIC AND PARASYMPATHETIC: AN EXAMPLE

The Runaway Bride was a widely publicized story that gave us a perfect example of sympathetic and parasympathetic responses in action. It was the story of a beautiful young woman engaged to a wonderful man who was in love with her and wanted to marry her. Just before the wedding, she suddenly disappeared, to the amazement of everyone in her life as well as millions of TV viewers. The runaway bride, Jennifer Carol Wilbanks, ran away from home in Duluth, Georgia on April 26, 2005, in order to avoid her wedding with John Mason, her fiancé, on April 30. Her disappearance sparked a nationwide search and intensive media coverage.

She finally turned herself in after three days with the whole world searching for her. What was the problem that caused her to run away the day before a wedding that she had dreamed of her whole life?

If you look at her eyes in the photos, she clearly looks terrified and yet she could only smile and say she didn’t know why she ran away or even where she went. Sympathetic and parasympathetic shock is like being on either side of a teeter-totter, going back and forth from one to the other. That is what happened with her. She was riding buses, getting on and off of them for days. This is sympathetic shock: lots of movement, like constantly running away. While on the buses, she moved into parasympathetic shock, which is like being “paralyzed.” She spent hours and days riding and staring endlessly out the windows. She reported that she didn’t remember where she went or what she saw.⁶

After she was finally discovered in a bus station, it was revealed that she had anorexia, a disturbing eating disorder in which a person eats very little because she feels fat. She had a great deal of shame about this condition and the constant stream of lies that accompanied it. As the wedding date approached, she unconsciously realized that getting married would reveal her long-held secrets, lies and shame to her new husband. That was more than she could bare and, at that point, her shock was activated and other forces took over so that she could escape without knowing consciously what she was doing.

CATATONIA: SYMPATHETIC AND PARASYMPATHETIC EXTREMES

These two propensities, the fight/flight sympathetic response and the freeze parasympathetic response, establish the basis for panic on the one hand and depression on the other. Stanley Keleman has worked on this formulation for many years, expressing that the first response to any stress or challenge is always arousal.⁷ When that arousal is not containable—if it is so intense that it becomes “unboundaried”—the person becomes overwhelmed. There’s too much excitation and not enough form, structure, context or containment. At the extreme, this becomes panic. To protect oneself from being overwhelmed or panicked, a person sometimes responds by holding it in, waiting, stiffening, squeezing and constricting: this is the freeze response, which heads in the direction of depression.

When there’s too much excitation without form or containment, there is panic. When there’s too much constriction and containment without a flow of activation, you have numbing, in which nothing can be aroused. This is depression.

The psychopathology labeled catatonia is an extreme example of the unresolved freeze response.⁸ The catatonic stupor symptoms of immobility, rigid and waxen mask-like face, fixed and unfocused gaze or stare and lack of reaction to stimuli nevertheless accompany evidence of alertness: despite their apparent unresponsiveness, they often have a surprising level of mental functioning with awareness of events going on around them.⁹ No longer considered solely a subtype of schizophrenia, these symptoms are present in about 10 percent of psychiatric inpatients, most often following situations in which the individual felt him or herself to be under profound threat (real or imagined) from internal or external perceived sources.¹⁰ This is experienced as unbearable anxiety.

Depression is much more common than catatonia and psychologist A. K. Dixon linked the immobility response (which he termed arrested flight) with such depression symptoms as social withdrawal, reduced eye contact and psychomotor retardation.¹¹ So depression is conceptualized as a last-resort defense strategy, triggered by imminent, inescapable threat. Indeed, psychologists Paul Gilbert and Steven Allan suggest that such a blocked motivation for flight—the arrested flight—results specifically from feelings of entrapment and defeat.¹² Andrew K. Moskowitz suggests that this pattern of anxious depression follows a specific cluster of experiences: “a perception of inescapable but at the same time amorphous danger, a sense of defeat and entrapment, and a sensation of imminent doom.”¹³ This is very much like the learned helplessness we see in animals.

A powerful and all-too-common example of this learned helplessness is the story of Stella. Stella is an overweight, master’s level therapist who sat in our group session, completely in shock. She stared out the window, couldn’t remember the practice we were supposed to be doing and couldn’t connect with the other students. She walked around with a fake smile plastered on her face and the “shock-eyed stare” that is very familiar to us. Even though she is a very intelligent woman with a college degree, Stella couldn’t perform even the simplest of practices. When it was her turn to “be the client,” she described a deep depression which had plagued her for years. She had very little motivation to keep her private practice going even though clients were calling to try to schedule sessions with her.

Beginning her session, she was depressed about not being able to maintain any intimate relationship, with twenty-five years of sexual abstinence, fear of men and distrust of women. Stella had been having intrusive flashbacks of a naked man’s rear end in her face. When we regressed her, she went back to a scene at age five, in bed with her father while her mother is standing in the doorway, glaring at her. She is wearing something very skimpy and is feeling, on one hand, that she likes the attention and being close to her daddy and on the other hand she is nauseated and filled with fear.

In the next scene, her father is kissing her with the smell of alcohol on his breath. Then he begins to force his penis into her mouth, as she is gagging, cannot breathe and fears she will die. As a way to get her out of the immobility of the parasympathetic shock, we instructed her to get into her body through movement. We told her to get up from the frozen shock posture she was in while reliving her abuse. We taught her some deep breathing and some bio-energetic motions to move the frozen energy into action. As she began to breathe and to move her arms, Stella realized that she had anger frozen throughout her body. Holding all this anger inside for so long actually had been the root of her depression, since it took a great deal of energy to repress these overpowering emotions.

At first she expressed her anger toward her father and the horrendous physical and emotional betrayal that she felt. Then her anger turned toward her mother, who often expressed relief that she didn’t have to have sex with the alcoholic father. The mother, however, was also jealous of her daughter and the sexual attention she was receiving. Because of her inner conflict and unmet emotional needs, she hated little Stella and refused to protect her from the horrible abuse that happened right before her eyes. She was also in a parasympathetic shock state of complete detachment from what was happening and was frozen herself, unable to act.

The mother spoke about times when the father tried to kill her during many of his drunken rages. The father’s sympathetic shock rages, sexual acting out with his five-year-old daughter and out-of-control drinking became unconscious triggers for the parasympathetic shock response of the mother and children who automatically became frozen in his presence.

Stella then regressed to a very early family scene, where her father was in a drunken, angry rampage, waving his shotgun around, threatening the family that he intended to kill them. He was screaming obscenities and shouting over the heads of Stella’s little brothers and sisters. The whole family, including the mother, went into frozen, parasympathetic shock and could do nothing.

Stella was ultimately able to step out of the five-year-old shock state and become the loving, protective mother that she needed at that time. Once she moved out of shock, she was able to see the whole picture and realize that this was not her fault. Stella began to reclaim her adult power and give back the family shame to her parents, the grownups who were supposed to be loving and protecting their children.

Her recovery from these deeply entrenched shock states was not accomplished in one session. That was only the beginning of Stella’s process of waking up to her life and reclaiming the skills that she had as a woman and a therapist. The hypnotherapy done in a therapeutic group is essential in uncovering the deep unconscious memories of what triggered the shock and sent the clients into deep states of depression and learned helplessness. By providing a consistent and healing group atmosphere, we are offering an emotional support system in which the clients feel safer and safer to explore where their shock began and to get loving feedback if they begin slipping back into these shock states. The group becomes the laboratory where the clients can try out their new behaviors as well as a community where they can laugh, have fun and learn to play, often for the first time in their lives.

An alternate form of catatonia, hyperkinetic catatonia, appears with catatonic excitement symptoms of apparently purposeless agitation not influenced by external stimuli.¹⁴ This is an extreme example of the unresolved sympathetic fight/flight response, which typically precedes or follows the freeze response.¹⁵ The important thing to notice here is that there is no clearly recognizable threat to attack or flee. The person with this condition is reacting to a perceived threat that doesn’t actually exist in the present. Instead, it’s a memory from his or her traumatic past. This inability to differentiate past from present leaves the person feeling threatened from all directions and from nowhere.

When the catatonic state becomes lethal it is called malignant catatonia. In such cases there is generally an extended period of frenetic activity (sympathetic response) followed by stupor (parasympathetic response) and then death. In most cases (80 percent) there is no medical cause of death.¹⁶ Psychiatrist Ronald Gurrera argued that a hyperactive and unregulated sympathetic response, released from inhibition by the frontal cortex (via the hypothalamus), accounts for the death process, and suggested that “acute psychic distress” may be responsible for that disinhibition.¹⁷ It is the same process as the zebra who dies following a death-feigning parasympathetic dive. What does that mean in layman’s terms? The person has literally been “scared to death.”

DISSOCIATION

While it often has a negative connotation because of its deeper, more complicated levels, dissociation is a valuable tool we all have available to us. It is really just a matter of moving our consciousness from our bodies and emotions, sometimes inward and sometimes to nowhere in particular of which we’re aware. For instance, when we space out while driving or when we lose ourselves in front of the TV. In cases like these, it’s a protective process that allows us to better handle the stresses of life. However, we can also see dissociation from body and emotions from efforts like meditation and prayer.

The more deeply we are stressed or traumatized, the deeper the shock state is embedded and the greater this dissociation becomes. In moderate dissociation, we may flow into neurological experiences such as freezing, losing the ability to think or feel, entering a trance or temporarily leaving the body. As the split becomes more severe, a greater portion of us has gone into hiding by “running away to the circus,” and we have a circus archetype offer its protection by coming in to run the show. We can see that we’ve given up control to “something else” when we give in to an addictive or compulsive urge, or when a patterned behavior (anger, jealousy, shame, loneliness) jumps in as the automatic response to some situation. Someone who is habitually in a hurry, busy-busy-busy, doesn’t make spontaneous choices in every new situation but rather automatically feels urgency even when quiet calm and tranquility would be a rational and healthy choice. Perhaps his or her “Circus Business Manager” is running the show. When this level of control happens too frequently, it disallows the true person or soul from being involved in life, from getting to experience spiritual health, growth and transcendence.

To be clear, when splitting occurs, it is rarely a complete tear. The different parts of the psyche usually remain aware of one another, except in cases like Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder), where the part that has “run away” becomes lost to the remaining part, and each is unaware of the other. Where we do not have a complete split taking place, it is possible to have a variety of experiences.

For instance, a split may lead to a shadow. This means that the archetype is closely aligned with the rest of the personality. This shadow is able to get things done that the usual personality could not do, but wants to get done on some level. On the other hand, you may have a split where both portions are taken over by members of the circus and in these cases, the two elements may have various relationships with each other:

• Competition (My rational good ego tries to impose limits on my overeater by identifying as “The Critical Parent.”)

• Contentiousness (My rational good ego feels self-hatred or deep guilt for what the other did “in a weak moment.”)

• Conspiracy (My rational good ego makes excuses for and thus enables my overeater.)

• Punishment (My rational good ego responds to the overeater by saying, “Since you ate a candy bar, I’m just going to eat a dozen cookies. You’re hopeless.” Or, “Since you ate a candy bar, I’m going to deprive you of dinner tonight.”)

• Violence (Microsuicidal behaviors like dangerous driving, unsafe sex, obesity and non-compliance with medical treatment.)

The relationship can be complementary as well; that is what we are working toward: a well-integrated, mutually supportive set of parts that cooperate synergistically.

The Theory of Structural Dissociation by Ellert Nijenhuis and associates proposes that each aspect of a split can be thought of as a cluster of mental/emotional states, and that we have both an “Emotional Part” (EP) and an “Apparently Normal Part” (ANP) created by this divide.¹⁸ The emotional part takes on the trauma or shock, integrating it into this part of the personality and re-experiencing the trauma or shock when triggered by something that recalls it. The apparently normal part, however, splits off in order to continue running day-to-day operations. It fails to integrate the trauma, does not have a sense of it, and therefore is able to have such a disdainful relationship with the emotional part as in our examples above, where “my rational good ego” is really the apparently normal part. These autonomous parts of the individual share one brain, one heart and one nervous system. Yet they each have separate, identifiable patterns of reactions in the heart and brain.

The emotional part, or emotional personality, carries memories somatically, often pre-verbally, and experiences the memories of traumas as personal to itself. The emotional personality presents with the identity of a child, the arrested-development inner child stuck in time at the point of the original traumatizing event(s). The traumatized individual’s apparently normal part of the personality does not experience memories of traumas as personal, or may have no access to them at all. The apparently normal personality, dissociated from her body and her emotions, presents as, for example, the precocious caregiver, willing to tolerate age-inappropriate responsibilities. She is condemned to live life “on the surface of consciousness.”