they are dazed, confused, disoriented and numb to physical or emotional pain. Their sense of self is bewildered and their memory is fragmented. Usually we say the person is “in shock.” The term “shock” is used very often in our language to mean, “I wasn’t present for the experience! I was in shock!” Hospital workers and EMTs are very familiar with this term in regards to accident and trauma victims and commonly utilize “smelling salts” to encourage the accident victims to return to their bodies, to consciousness. But we are learning now that shock not only affects accident victims or people with obvious physical trauma; it also silently and profoundly affects humans (and animals) when the stressor is less obvious, such as psychological, emotional and even spiritual distress.
THE EXPERIENCE OF SHOCK
What is shock? It is a physiological response to any distress that seems intolerable and in which a person feels intensely helpless. It is the body saying, “I can’t deal with this right now; I need a moment to collect myself.” In the case of a car accident, the person usually “comes back” after a brief time. But an individual who is consistently in shock can’t take that moment; they must find a way to keep going despite the disruption, to live their lives in shock. This could be a soldier in a combat zone, a family in the aftermath of a natural disaster or terrorist attack or a child in an abusive home. Here the assault is on the person’s psyche itself and it abuses their spirit, damages their self-esteem and undermines their courage to “come back” from the protective numbness of shock. And so these individuals develop ways of living their lives and doing what needs to be done, in spite of the handicap of constantly being in a state of shock.
The younger people are, the more affected they are by traumatic events. This is the case because youngsters have fewer resources to draw on to “keep going despite the disruption.” A child has only a child’s ways of coping. So when the trauma begins early in life, at such a vulnerable time, the abuse to the spirit is devastating. Worse, when it is perpetrated by someone trusted as a caregiver, shock takes over and becomes necessary for survival. This type of shock, the residue of long-ago traumas, may not look as obviously debilitating as a car accident or a school shooting, but it can nonetheless cause the same amount of internal damage to our spirits and send us completely out of our bodies into a place of numbness and dissociation. The number one factor determining how severe a soldier’s or tornado victim’s long-term PTSD will be is whether they suffered trauma earlier in their lives.1 If the body still needs to “collect itself” even after all these years, then the person is not as resilient when facing a new traumatic event.
In this book we will discuss the two different responses to physical as well as psychological trauma. They are called sympathetic shock and parasympathetic shock.
In order to remember the difference, we think of parasympathetic shock as being “paralyzed,” which helps us to remember which part of the nervous system is being affected. So if you are speaking to your co-worker, friend, children, spouse or anyone else in your life and glance over only to realize that they have been gazing out the window, staring at their cell phones or have been otherwise preoccupied the whole time you have been speaking, the usual response is to react with anger. But if you understand the nature of shock, perhaps you can now respond differently to these dissociative behaviors, which are often symptoms of parasympathetic shock.
A person who is in parasympathetic shock is like a deer caught in the headlights, frozen in time, staring into space and mostly nonresponsive. We have termed this distant look “shock eyes,” which indicates a very low blink rate and a familiar stare of disconnection. This disconnected stare is most obvious in people who have just been in a natural disaster or who have witnessed a horrendous crime. Or, surprisingly enough, have been the perpetrator of that crime. They are walking around aimlessly with shock eyes and are seemingly very calm. After a traumatic incident like this, one might expect these victims to be crying, screaming or otherwise extremely distraught. Curiously, this is often not the case and one must wonder why. This is the same parasympathetic shock state observed in the shooter and described by survivors after the movie theater shootings in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012. We know, too, that this same shock state can be observed in your children, your spouse or even in yourself during seemingly everyday events.
Now, while the person you are talking to seems to be disappearing right before your eyes (parasympathetic shock), you may actually be triggered into your own shock state, perhaps becoming aggressive and frantically trying to get their attention (sympathetic shock). For example, you may have encountered a person talking non-stop without taking a single breath in between sentences, or what we call “shock talk.” Sympathetic shock can manifest in many ways in our lives. It is very common in high achievers, professionals with to-do lists a mile long and folks who have a perfectionist standard for themselves and others. Another common, more socially acceptable term for sympathetic shock is multi-tasking. Juggling many things at one time is socially rewarded but it is personally costly because of how much else has to be neglected.
It is very important to understand that nearly everyone is in shock at different times in their lives and most people go back and forth between sympathetic and parasympathetic shock states frequently. So this book is not just for people who have had obvious trauma in their lives, since those people are often clear that they need treatment and perhaps have sought help from therapists. This book also provides a wake-up call for people who think everything is “just fine” in their lives and one day wake up to discover that their spouses have been having affairs or that their kids have been using drugs or that they have a major disease such as cancer. Or any of the other countless shocking events that indicate perhaps something has been brewing beneath the surface while you have been either in parasympathetic shock, walking around comatose and disconnected, or in sympathetic shock, running around like a rat in a maze or a hamster on an exercise wheel.
Don’t overlook this concept, because you don’t think you are one of the ones with trauma in your life. There are varying degrees of trauma and it is the ability to go into shock or into a dissociative state that protects us and yet also prevents us from seeing what has actually happened in our lives. This is why shock protects us and at the same time disables us by undermining our ability to face the truth. We often call this “the good news and the bad news.”
It is the physiological shock state that serves to protect us from pain, fear or shame, giving us the opportunity to take time to “collect ourselves.” We can observe these shock states during television segments of just about anyone who is being interviewed after a natural disaster, a school shooting or an accident. When asked for details, they often say, “I think I must have gone into shock, because I can’t remember what happened after the explosion (or the shooting or the train wreck).” Quite often the witness and the victim, and sometimes the perpetrator, will use the same words, “I went into shock and don’t remember.” It is how someone like Chris Brown could seriously beat up his girlfriend Rihanna, whom he purported to love immensely, and then apologize profusely, saying he didn’t remember what happened. The concept of shock further explains how singer Rihanna can look into the mirror only to see her previously beautiful face bloodied to a pulp, one eye swollen shut and the rest of her face black and blue from the violence her “beloved” had inflicted upon her and then be ready to accept his promise that it would never happen again.
It is also how a mother can yell and scream at her children and then wonder why they never listen to her. In this book we’ll give the answers to these baffling situations by nurturing your understanding that we can be in shock for much of our lives.
When we use the term trauma, most people think of horrible experiences like those described. But it is important to understand some more common traumatic experiences that happen to all of us. If you are acquainted with a young baby or small child, take a moment to observe how fragile and vulnerable they are. A disapproving look, a loud noise or people around them fighting with raised voices may constitute quite an assault on their little spirits. They may begin to cry, which is their way of letting us know they are disturbed. Now
