Chronic Helplessness
Chronic Helplessness
With hyper vigilance there are no normal orienting responses. This has serious ramifications for traumatized people. It will impair their overall ability to function effectively in any situation, not just those that require active defense.
A function of the orienting response is to identify new info as we become aware of it. When this function is impaired, any amount of new information leads to confusion and overload.
Chronic helplessness occurs as the freezing, orienting, and defending responses become so weakened that they move primarily along predetermined and dysfunctional pathways.
Chronic helplessness joins hyper vigilance and the inability to learn new things as another fact of a traumatized lifestyle.
As helplessness becomes an inextricable part of some people’s lives, they will have a difficult time behaving in any way that is not helpless. Instead, they move directly from arousal into immobility and hopelessness, bypassing the other emotions as well as the normal sequence of responses. They are just waiting to be victimized again and again.
Any time they are aroused, they feel immobilized and helpless; and they are. They may be fortified by adrenaline and physically able to run, but the sense of helplessness is so strong that they are unable to find the exit and leave.
Instead of normal orienting and defending responses, they experience anxiety, profound helplessness, shame, numbness, depression and depersonalization.