Trauma formation: emotional overwhelm reduces threat perception
Continuing our exploration of the mechanics of trauma formation, in this blog I want to examine the exact moment of emotional overwhelm in more detail. This is the moment that homeostasis—our psychic regulator—is under the greatest stress. This means it’s also the moment when its obscure workings are the most visible.
Homeostasis
Psychic homeostasis works to stabilise the presence of trauma in the same way that physical homeostasisstabilises physical processes, such as through blood coagulation in the event of injury.
In Trauma formation: how fight-flight becomes freeze-fawn I describe how it does this through brain fog, numbness and paralysis. When neither fight nor flight are viable, we flip to two alternative behaviours, freeze and fawn, which manifest at the mental, emotional, and physical levels:
- Mental fog—an inability to perceive workable solutions
- Emotional numbness—shutting out the pain of the survival threat
- Physical paralysis—the effect of undischarged adrenaline
Sacrifice
In Point of no return – the trauma ejection cycle, I describe how homeostasis deliberately sacrifices functionality by reducing our threat perception, making us incapable of grasping how much danger we’re in. It does this to stop us crossing the threshold from being functional to non-functional.
Like a chess player sacrificing a rook to take the queen, homeostasis yields something it wants for something it wants more. In this case, it’s a dilemma of lesser evils: clinging to higher threat perception runs the risk of precipitating complete overwhelm.
That our own processes would deliberately reduce our capacity to function seems to go against all sense. But remember the governing principle: homeostasis always seeks to keep us functioning as well as possible, given the prevailing conditions.
The main threat to survival is not the danger we face, but our emotional overwhelm in the face of it—because overwhelm totally incapacitates us. A sensitive child growing up in a household with an abusive parent blurs out all trace of the abuse and emerges into adulthood believing they had a normal childhood. It’s the only way to survive.
Overwhelm
I’m now seeing another aspect to this moment of emotional overwhelm. Remember that this programming originated with our ancestors who hunted woolly mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers. These were do-or-die moments.
When neither fight nor flight are available, homeostasis must assume the worst—that we’re about to die. Complete overwhelm is the moment we say, “I give up, I just want to die.” How does it keep us from crossing that threshold?
Mental fog, emotional numbness, physical paralysis. In a word: anaesthetics.
Homeostasis shuts down threat perception to keep us alive. The cost is that when we survive, we’re stuck with the fog, numbness, and paralysis. This is important because of the principle that the only exit from the past is by going back through it.
We must return to the inception point of a trauma to fully clear it. Not just the after-effects: the beliefs, feelings, and behaviours; the fog, numbness, and paralysis. We must return to the experience of overwhelm itself—the original moment of shock when what Peter McBride calls the ‘assumptive world’ of our safety (or our ancestors’ safety) was shattered.
Collective anaesthesia
Beyond the individual world of trauma healing, I see this sacrifice of functionality—an unconscious descent into fog, numbness, and paralysis—happening on a global scale.
As our systems—economic, political, medical, legal, educational—are increasingly revealed as unfit for purpose and unsustainable, there is a collective experience of the shock of overwhelm, and its unconscious response: reduced threat perception.
The vast array of datapoints that floods our senses each day acts like a strobe, blinding us to the reality of a species in genetic decline, heading for a mass reckoning with the unacknowledged ghosts of its traumatic past.
Unless we recognise the threat, we cannot respond to it. Trauma literacy—and the deep shadow work it calls us to—is our only lifeline.
Next steps
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Photo by Theo Laflamme on Unsplash