In my trauma class we use the concept of the polyvagal ladder to talk about the progression of responses to stress and trauma. It's quite simple but very helpful as a model.

The basic idea is that there are three main states you can be in. You can be at the top of the ladder, where you're functioning optimally. A high enough level of stress (it's different for everyone) pushes you down the ladder and you go into fight-or-flight. Even more stress brings you down to the last state, which is shutting down or dissociating. People who have been repeatedly pushed onto the bottom of the ladder tend to skip fight-or-flight and just go straight to shut down after awhile.

When people have to deal with constant inescapable threat they tend to just stay at the bottom of the ladder and not move up anymore. This occurs in situations like having an abusive parent who lives in the home. The child, who cannot fend for him/herself, faces an impossible dilemma. The person upon whom he/she depends for survival is also actively harming him/her. What can a kid do in such a situation? Typically children "resolve" this by blaming themselves for the parent's abuse. They assume responsibility for what's happening and believe that there must be a reason the parent is acting as such in order to preserve the idea that the parent is, underneath it all, a good and competent caregiver. As my professor likes to put it, "it's better to believe that my parent is good and I am bad, because if my parent is bad and I depend on them for survival, I'm really fucked."

Now imagine that being said in a Chinese accent and you can kind of get the experience of being in my trauma class.

Anyway, I've been thinking about all this in relation to myself, as one does. I think I used to go primarily to the bottom of the ladder and dissociate or freeze in stressful situations. Now why that has been, I can only speculate, but it seems to be my pattern. In more recent years though it seems like I've been shifting somewhat and don't drop down there as quickly, if at all. There are certainly still plenty of situations in which I freeze, but I've been noticing that I sometimes just feel strong emotions that don't get washed away with a blanket of dissociation when under stress. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it's probably healthier in some way for me but on the other hand it kind of sucks to have to feel everything unpleasant. I'm also not sure why the shift has occurred. Years of therapy have helped, I'm pretty sure, but I can't pinpoint what exactly in that process has had an effect.

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