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
