FLIGHT OR FIGHT

[ Introduction ] [ Energy Movement ] [ How We Got There ] [ Fight or Flight ] [ More Contact ] [ Incipient Armoring ] [ Chronic Armoring ] [ Tools of Therapy ] [ Therapeutic Process ] [ Acting Out ] [ Concluding Remarks ]

Encountering frustration, rejection, lack of love, and verbal abuse, the child can become hurt and enraged.  But it learns, verbally and more important non-verbally, to suppress its anger, sadness, and frustration.  To express it means inviting an even more disproportionate response from the parent, with all the rejection and fear that is implied.

When experiencing these feelings, the child's autonomic nervous system goes into a flight-or-flight response.  An analogy would be that to an animal cornered in the wild.  Obviously, it is not realistic for the child to take flight and run away from home although, as we shall see below, that is what the child does internally when it shuts down.  While reacting with rage and aggression to fight might be an initial response, the child soon learns doing this just brings him more punishment.

There are countless experiences that people can attest to that when they were children and being physically punished, they learned that as long as they kept crying they would continue to be hit until finally they learned to push down the tears, hurt, and rage and be perfectly still.  Only in this way would the parent quit their corporal punishment.  Also, by doing this the child was able to exert some type of control over the situation and feel they had gained some type of mastery.  The child can only successfully stop the expression of these feelings by tightening up and contracting those muscle groups involved in that particular emotional expression.

Before you start to think this does not describe the vast majority of our society, let's look at one of the most common exercises taught to parents to control their children and to keep them from expressing emotions that the parents don't like: the time out.