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Immediate reactions

Your immediate reactions

If the event has involved a significant amount of fear and threat this will trigger an inbuilt automatic survival response. The ‘fire alarm’ in our brain called the ‘amygdala’ takes over and enables the body to respond in less than a split second.

This flight, fight or freeze impulse kicks in at such times, fuelling the body with more energy to help do whatever is necessary to improve the chance of surviving. At such times of extreme stress the usual way our minds have of laying down memory is compromised and the memory of what happened might repeatedly play out in fragments (sounds or smells) or in vivid and detailed images.

If you are surprised by your reaction; it’s easy in hindsight to be self-critical. It can help to remember that the body and mind is programmed to take over at such times. Revisiting the events, or playing them over in your mind can be a way of starting to rebuild a feeling of control by trying to gain some sense out of the chaos, gradually adapting to a future that includes the endured disaster experience.

We don’t have to have been there to have a response, seeing these events on the news, knowing someone who was there brings these difficult feelings close.

For further information go to the ‘Fight, flight, freeze response’ within the Trauma and Recovery course which you can access via the courses page of our website.

Common immediate reactions

These include:

  • Panic.
  • Alertness.
  • Disbelief.
  • Nausea.
  • Sweating.
  • Shaking.
  • Shock.
  • Anger.
  • Push past others.
  • Hiding.
  • Confusion.
  • Run to help.
  • Screaming.
  • Loss of bladder control.
  • Dazed.
  • Freeze.
  • Feel numb.
a comic about a historical example of someone dealing with a major incident,
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Transcript

David Livingstone and another person with the following caption.

David Livingstone is maybe the ultimate Victorian heroic explorer. Check out his manly Mustache.

‘I heard a shout; starting and looking half around I saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me, growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier does a rat. The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat.’

David Livingstone with a lion leaping towards him.

David Livingstone with a haze of clouds around his head with the following caption.

‘It caused a sort of dreaminess in which there was no sense of panic or feeling of terror.’

Hand squeezing a person really tightly with the following caption.

Squeeze any human being hard enough and they will disappear.

David Livingstone in long grasses, split with image of another person with the following caption.

The dreamy, stupor state is dissociation, an immobilization or freeze response. Dissociation is one of the strange things about trauma.

If it can happen to our hero friend, it can happen to you.

This is a classic descriptions of dissociation from David Livingstone, writing in 1857 (kandel et al 2000). Leading trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk (2014) states, ‘Dissociation is the essence of trauma.’ After a traumatic event people often drift in and out of dissociation.

James Rhodes (2015), pianist and sexual abuse survivor, states dissociation is ‘The most serious and long-lasting of all the symptoms of abuse ever since then, like a Pavlov puppy, the minute a feeling or situations even threatens to become overwhelming, I am no longer there.’

Some things to think about

Let yourself be aware of how you are feeling reading this information.

  1. What have you noticed about your typical response to fear?
  2. Which of the reactions listed above have you experienced?
  3. Were you surprised by your reaction?
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