When You Get Scared, Are You an Opossum or a Skunk?
There are many “normal” ways to respond to stress. All of them have examples in the Animal Kingdom.
In child psychiatrist Bruce Perry’s landmark book on trauma and healing, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, he describes the case of Amber, an unconscious teenage girl whose doctors did everything they could think to do to revive her. She had no heart problems, no abnormal toxicology screens. Teachers had found her passed out in the bathroom, and no one knew why.
Through careful, attuned questioning of the girl’s mother, Dr. Perry discovered that the man who had sexually abused Amber when she was a young child had, just the night before, contacted Amber. Dr. Perry developed a theory — albeit, a strange one:
What if Amber had overdosed on fear?
Perry describes dissociation as a primitive, brainstem-based response to trauma that can feel like extreme daydreaming, sleepwalking while awake, or watching oneself from above one’s body. He would later learn that Amber’s dissociative episodes were so intense during her abuse, she came up with vivid storylines to escape into that were often hard to distinguish from reality.
On this particular day, Amber’s extreme fear tripped her brain into a whole new…
