I’ve been reading Robert Scaer’s book The Body Bears the Burden, about how the brain and the body interact in times of stress and trauma. It is absolutely fascinating reading, and I’m surprised it’s not a best-seller. It really clears up a lot of confusion for me and gives great insight into how the body’s experiences can shape the brain’s activity. He talks about the fight/flight response and the body’s instinctive freeze response, too. I’ll have to write more about it, when I go through it again. My head’s kind of whirling right now.
One thing that I immediately got… After reading just a bit of his book, I can now let myself off the hook for freezing “like a deer in headlights” when I’ve been in situations of high-threat. I am usually pretty hard on myself for being a ‘wuss’ when I freeze up in times of intensity. It doesn’t happen all the time, but now and then it does, and then I tear myself a new ___ (well, you know) for days after, beating myself up for not speaking up, not stepping up, not being as capable as I would have liked to have been. Turns out, I don’t necessarily have any control over freezing up. It’s instinct. Instinct that’s designed to keep me alive.
Yeah, I’ll have to write more about this later. It also ties into my paper about A Perilous Relief, which I’m in the process of researching. (See the link on the left for a current table of contents that will take you to what I’ve written so far.) There’s only one problem — I have to keep going back over it to re-read sections, because my attention span leaves a little to be desired… but I don’t realize I stopped understanding what I just read, until a few pages past the point where my brain stopped parsing the information.
Apparently, according to my neuropsych, this is not uncommon with TBI. So, I’ll just have to factor it into my research and leave myself plenty of time to digest everything I’m taking in. Lucky for me, it’s fascinating stuff, so I don’t mind taking my time with it. I don’t mind at all.
Broken Brain - Brilliant Mind 