I’ve seen absolute fear a few times. I’ll tell you about one of them.
While in the Navy I was stationed aboard a LPD, which is a fairly large ship designed to carry a bunch (about 900, IIRC) of Marines. We were in our third year of operations off the coast of Viet Nam. One of these Marines, who was in his third “tour” was scheduled to go on another operation later that day. This fellow, a corporal, had already been in many battles, and was considered to be a good Marine. He had a Purple Heart, among several other decorations. He was definitely not a coward.
Anyway, I was standing up above, on the boat deck, and heard an odd noise and looked down to see him standing with his arms rigid and hands locked on the railing. He was frozen in terror. His body was totally rigid, shivering and teeth chattering (while rigid), eyes bulging and staring, and unresponsive to anything around him. Another Marine, seargent-at-arms I guess, was trying to get him off the rail by clobbering him on the arms with a nightstick. Fucking idiot. Finally the doc came and gave him a sedative. They put him in the freakin’ brig till we met with a hospital ship.
Yeah, I got issues with the military.
So, my question is;
What possible survival function does this state serve? Fight or flight I understand, but this person could do neither. He was totally incapacitated. Is it to protect his mind? To warn others around him? Everyone there was skittish and really wanted to run away. And there was a distinct odor coming from the man.
Any psych dopers have an answer for me? Opinions from others?
Peace,
mangeorge
Well, it got him out of a possibly dangerous mission!
I’m not being entirely facetious. I’ve never been in a situation where I reacted the way you’ve described but I have been in situations that I didn’t want to be in, I didn’t want to deal with, I didn’t want to think about – I just wanted it all to go away. In my case these weren’t physically dangerous situations, but difficult emotional events, or even relatively minor setbacks that followed a long trial so that I’d pretty much exhausted all my energy and now one more thing cropped up.
Your dismissal of fight-or-flight is a little hasty, IMHO. I think it describes pretty well what was going on – he couldn’t run away (as you said, he wasn’t a coward) and yet he couldn’t, for some reason, face the coming fight. He was unable to choose either alternative so he chose C: None of the above. IIRC, this is what fight-or-flight means – stuck between the two alternatives. In his case it developed into an incapacitating tension.
Freezing up is not an obviously logical response, but neither is drinking yourself to death, or beating your wife, or going postal – all of which are, in some ways, responses to intolerable situations.
My guess is that the behavior has very little real “survival” value but it was, as you suggested, a mental retreat from an unacceptable reality.
There are lots of situations where being ‘paralyzed by terror’ could be advantageous, i.e. a group of people are ambushed, several are killed, most run, the ambushers chase, yet the frozen person might be left behind.
From what I know about the fight or flight response this person demonstrated no positive survival trait but rather a reaction that was brough on by prolonged rejection of his natural instincts for survival.
Organized warfare is completely foreign to our evolutionary state and in most every way contradicts instinct. This individual was forced to subvert his own natural instincts repeatedly (you said he was on his third TOD and had been in many engagements from the sound of it). I would say he was having a very human reaction to an inhuman circumstance and the fact that it took him that long to break means that he, hopefully, had a good chance of eventual recovery.
In modern organized warfare our natural human instincts are subverted in the following ways: We are ordered to fight those who usually pose no iminent threat to ourselves or those/that which we hold dear. We are forbidden to surrender or flee as our instinct tells us, instead allowing others to make such descisions for us.
Surrender reflex is one of the most powerful reflexed for survival that can be easily observed. Often times you can see a group of children tormenting one lone child up until the point that the lone child “surrenders”, usually by crying. This is a reflex that signals the other children to cease and desist and more often than not they do just that. However, in adult warfare where weapons far exceed our ability to observ any such reflex in those we are attacking this reflex is rendered useless. In fact it is doubly useless because those who order us in to war are not those in iminent danger. What reason does a General or Diplomat in the safety of an office have to surrender? They sense no danger for themselves and therefore usually do not surrender in time or at all. What effect this has on those in combat who are not allowed to follow their own natural instinct is known as Battle Fatigue, PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), or “Shell Shock”.
Some of the most easily observed traits of someone with PTSD are distrubed sleep patterns, malaise, neurotic behavior, loss of appetite, psychotic episodes, self destructive behavior, catatonia, and a host of other horrible things.
There are some really excellent articles on this subject on the AMAJ (American Medical Association Journal) and the NEJM (New England Journal of Medecine).
Do a search for PTSD and you will get a lot of info.
p.s. As a somewhat hopefull afterthought, our military is learning about this and they are enacting policies that are intended to circumvent such atrocious loss of not only life, but loss of desire for life in the survivors of combat.
Can I speak about the stupidity of fear?
It’s a mental paridgm where you loose all sense of control, and boy, it’s not fun.
It happened to me during an airline flight, serious turbulence and thunder and lightening, my first natural instinct was to grasp someones hand, but i couldn’t do that…
Every time the cabin dipped, i wanted to grab someones hand, i wanted to grab something…
so i started to tap a beat on my leg
anything to release myself from an absolute GRIP of fear
it was so overpowering, there was no mental tricks to get me out of the knowledge that i was going to die on this flight
I’ve been on many flights, some of them have been hairy, but i was so convinced this was going to be a fatal flight
Next time I travel, I’m taking the greyhound
I was trying to add a few more things to my post.
I haven’t felt right since, to me, it was a major blow to my sense of strength. It’s as if i feel like i’ve gone through a war, full knowledge that death was on me.
I still haven’t recovered, I 've become shy, and fearful of any endevour.
I’ve never been so scared, so aware of my own mortality
The thing is is, i want the antetote to how it made me the afraid, i want somebody to sit down and tell me that it’s going to be okay, and hold my hand
I will apppreciate any help on this subject.
From an evolutionary perspective, “freezing in terror” does serve a purpose. Most predators who hunt by sight are tremendously sensitive to motion, not only mammalian and avian predators but insects and arachnids, too. Freezing would have the effect of causing the predator’s eye to move over you.
Just because the Marine’s forebrain didn’t detect a specific predator didn’t prevent his hindbrain (the “reptile brain”) from responding as though it did.
Seraphin, FWIW, here is some help. You were in the grip of an automatic, instinctive reaction, the fear of falling. Everybody in the whole wide world is afraid of falling. It’s such a normal response that it doesn’t even merit the label of a “phobia”. Your brain is hard-wired to be afraid of falling. When you were a 5-minute-old infant, lying there all wet in the obstetrician’s hands, you were afraid of falling. It’s normal.
Nobody is expected to control ALL their fear ALL of the time. You’re not expected never to feel fear–a normal thinking human being frequently has cause to feel fear, and sometimes great, paralyzing fear. All that Society expects of you is that you control enough of your fear so that you don’t make a scene and frighten the children. Since you DIDN’T go ballistic on the plane and freak out and give the airline personnel a hard time and frighten the children, this means that you DID control your fear. WTG! 
And I’ll bet you a nickel that you weren’t the only one of 150 or so other people there who was sweatin’ bullets. 
If this doesn’t help, try a Google search on “post traumatic stress disorder” and see what comes up. Just because you weren’t in an actual war doesn’t mean that the information isn’t applicable to you. Good luck!
Seraphin - I suffered from PTSD after the death of my friend (see “Have you ever seen someone die?” in MPSIMS). I walked around, waiting for “the other shoe to drop”. I felt out of control and panicked, all the time. My emotions were on edge and my nightmares were twisted, violent and horribly disturbing. I finally went for help when I stopped eating and was afraid to sleep (the dreams). I was diagnosed as having PTSD and a deep depression. It was a pretty tough road back, but it’s well worth it. I hope this is not what’s happeining to you, but if it is, go and get help. You will not get over it on your own, it will keep coming back. It’s kind of like your brain is a record and it’s been handed something that it can’t deal with or get rid of, so it skips.
Good luck. If you need more help, feel free to email me.