Womanly Learning on the World Wide Web

Two interesting things have come across my attention in the past couple of days.

First:

There is new research about the fight or flight reaction to stress (something that those of us with PTSD are well acquainted with!)

Some really thought-provoking new research has identified a different mechanism used when dealing with stress. It's being called "tend and befriend" and the research is showing that women are more likely to react this way to stress, while men are more likely to react with our old friend fight or flight.

Here's a couple of links.

Readable, thoughtful article about tend and befriend:

http://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/services/ucla_study_friendship.html

Wikipedia's article, which is more technical:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tend_and_befriend

This new information is really making me think.

Personally, one of my most difficult symptoms of PTSD is constant, tight, physical tension in my body, with an overly active startle reflex. At one point, I clenched my jaw tightly at night, and woke up in the mornings with my teeth and jaws very sore. I trained myself to fall asleep with my tongue poking between my teeth. That way, when I clamped down during the night, I would bite my tongue and wake myself up. This solved the problem pretty quickly.

Then I started clenching my fists so tightly while sleeping that my hands were aching the next morning. I trained myself to sleep with my hands pressed flat under my pillow to prevent this, and my hands got better. I don't know what, if any, habit I replaced this with while sleeping. Whatever it is doesn't cause me to wake up in physical pain.

Maybe the antidepressants help with this. My physical ability to relax (while awake) is much better now. There was a level of physical relaxation that I didn't even know about before. You know those exercises where you tense and then relax each part of your body one after the other? Pre-Prozac, there wasn't much difference in the two states for me.

I am always aware of my surroundings, and it's important to me to feel safe. I cannot wear my hair in any style that impedes my peripheral vision even the tiniest bit. It panics me. I tend to position myself in a room so as to be able to watch the whole space and keep an eye on the exits. I live high up in a secured condo building where my front door opens into an indoor hallway. I feel safer here than any other place I have ever lived.

In the past few years, I learned that my both my maternal grandmother and my mother's sister where sexually abused as children. (My mom seems to have escaped this.) Both my grandma and my aunt are long-time sufferers of fibromyalgia, an arthritis-like condition where the muscles are affected rather than the bones. Research shows that women who were sexually abused are much more likely to develop fibromyalgia as adults.

I could probably claim to have fibromyalgia, although my pain threshold has always been very high. Definitely I have more than a couple of symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome. I shy away from any diagnosis or labelling, though. I do believe that our thoughts affect our reality, and I do not want to identify myself with an illness. (This is not a criticism of anyone else, just my personal quirk.)

I don't know how to tend and befriend. There have been a couple of points in my life where I had an active social network that I interacted with almost compulsively. It never felt genuine to me, though, on my end. I always felt like I was playing a role, like I was just pretending to be a part of things. More lately I've given up most of my social network. I can't clearly articulate to myself why.

But I cannot be social when I'm stressed. When I'm stressed, there's nothing I would rather do than burrow at home, preferably under my bed covers, until I feel more able to handle the situation. I will avoid people as much as I possibly can until I feel more under control.

I can intellectually see how and why tend and befriend makes sense. I can't do it, though. I do "tend" in the sense of caring intensely for my children and their safety and well-being. But I do this by pulling them into my "burrow" with me, and by going with them when we are away from home. There have been a couple of times when there has been a true physical threat to my children, and my instinctive reaction is to dig a hole for the three of us and pull the earth in over, so nothing and no one can find us or hurt us. (I mean this figuratively, of course.)

Here's a theory: PTSD short-circuits tend and befriend. Or maybe PTSD kicks in when tend-and-befriend can't help us. A child being molested in her bedroom by her father, a little boy being beaten, a woman being raped or a soldier being shot at, cannot be helped in that moment by tend and befriend.

(There is another fascinating topic that begs to be discussed here. Jonathan Shay, author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, both of which I highly recommend, has an interesting take on this. In his work, he has identified factors that separate combat veterans who develop PTSD from those who don't. A major factor is something he calls a betrayal of "what is right." Something to post about another time, maybe.)

Is PTSD what we do when we learn on some visceral level that no one else can or will help us? Is it what happens when whatever intrinsic faith we have in the protection of our community is stripped away?

I don't know. But it's giving me something to think about. Lately, lots of information about the physical and emotional benefits of friendship and community is pinging my personal radar screen. On some level, this totally makes sense to me. On another level, it baffles me. My immediate interior reaction to a new group of people is wariness, at least until I feel like I have a handle on what's going on with them.

There was a point when I was younger was I was indiscriminately friendly and trusting, with predictably unpleasant results. This probably also contributed to why I am this way.

Another theory: the trauma that leads to PTSD short-circuits some of the wiring that allows us to use discernment in who we should and should not tend and befriend. If you tend everyone and befriend anyone in your path, it's not a great way to protect yourself from stress. And then, maybe, this leads to more fighting and flighting?

All I have today is questions, and some things to think about. No answers. But maybe sometime soon I'll start figuring all this out, and more importantly figure out how to overcome it.

I'll leave the second second interesting thing I found recently for my next post. This one is long enough.

Be well.

Quote for today: Yes, something happened to me. And I can’t talk about it. And yes, that’s probably how you let it go–sooner or later you have to face it. If you don’t, you become suspended between your yearning and your fear, and you’re doomed to repeat the same sad acts without end, without completion or satisfaction.

You become a ghost.
--Daniel Hecht