My PTSD Recovery Diary

You are allowed to take up space

You are allowed to have a voice

You are allowed to leave whenever you feel unsafe or uncomfortable 

You deserve more than someone who doesn’t respect you

You are allowed to put your own needs first

As a psychologist who has researched the neurobiology of trauma and regularly teaches military and civilian police and prosecutors, higher education staff and others, I can expand a public conversation started in The Atlantic, by the unfortunately titled and highly misleading September 2017 story, “The Bad Science Behind Campus Response to Sexual Assault.” In fact, the science on the neurobiology of stress and trauma is actually quite good, and the real issues are how that science is taught to university staff who aren’t scientists and how they, in turn, apply that teaching on their campuses.

There are two parts to author Emily Yoffe’s discussions of neuroscience, one on sexual assault victims’ behaviors and the other on their memories, and I address both here. For each, I begin with realities of sexual assault—realities known all too well by millions of people who have been sexually assaulted, and by victim advocates, clinicians, and investigators who truly listen and have been documenting them for decades. Then I cite well-established science on the neurobiological causes of those realities.

Whether or not you’ve read the article, this post will bring clarity to issues that she has clouded with confusion and alarmist claims.

One extreme reflexive response that, contrary to the article’s claim, people definitely experience, is tonic immobility. It’s a fear-based state of rigid paralysis, which can render one mute as well (and is very different from the transient freeze response associated with detection of an attack). While research is still accumulating on how often tonic immobility occurs during sexual assaults, much is known about what can trigger it, like being pinned down and terrified. And we know from direct reports that it happens to soldiers too, even if they’re less likely to tell anyone.

Sometimes people experience collapsed immobility, a different survival reflex that sends heart rate and blood pressure plummeting. The brain’s loss of oxygen brings on faintness or even passing out as the body goes limp. Again, extreme fear and physical restraint, both features of some sexual assaults, can release this evolutionarily old response. (A brief YouTube video shows someone going in and out of this terror-triggered state on an amusement park ride.)

In 2015 the Harvard Review of Psychiatry published a thorough review of behavioral and neuroscience research on tonic and collapsed immobility (and freezing) in animals and humans. That peer-reviewed article includes multiple examples of how people have experienced those extreme reflex responses, drawn from lead author Kasia Kozlowska’s many years of clinical work, and references over 200 scientific publications, including many neurobiological studies.

Of course, the reflexive “cornered animal” response also exists, and people sometimes respond with “fight or flight” behaviors that may thwart a sexual assault. But many don’t, and not because there’s something wrong with them or they’re to blame, but simply because of how brains respond to being attacked.

Habit responses may include effective ways of fighting or fleeing, perhaps first learned in battles with siblings or on the playground. But the habitual behaviors that emerge during sexual assaults are commonly passive ones, which can avert additional violence or retaliation but tend to be ineffective at stopping assaults.

So if you know a survivor, and you tell them that they “can’t” or “shouldn’t” be angry, that will almost certainly be triggering, and it’s really cruel. 

Telling survivors that they need to “get past” their anger or to “be the bigger person” or “holding onto anger is like holding onto a hot coal” or “anger is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die” or that “healing is only possible with forgiveness” or that “forgiveness will set you free,” or that “being angry means the abuser still has control,” or that experiencing anger makes the survivor as bad as the abuser, or whatever else– that’s culturally imposed abuse apologism and if you want to be an ally, you need to unlearn resorting to those platitudes when trying to comfort survivors.