When a Trauma response is triggered, the more primitive part of the nervous system dominates. This is geared towards shutting down, protection and survival. Because it is a passive defensive response we may feel helpless or hopeless.
Trauma, prolonged stress, anxiety, depression and grief all contribute to feeling emotionally shut down. Nemmers says medication, while lifesaving for many, can also trigger a side effect of emotional numbness.
The 4 Trauma Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn: Examining The Four Trauma Reactions. According to a research on the neurobiological consequences of psychological trauma, our bodies are designed to respond to perceived threats with a set of near-instantaneous, reflexive survival behaviors.
There are actually 5 of these common responses, including 'freeze', 'flop' and 'friend', as well as 'fight' or 'flight'. The freeze, flop, friend, fight or flight reactions are immediate, automatic and instinctive responses to fear. Understanding them a little might help you make sense of your experiences and feelings.
That's what PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is—our body's overreaction to a small response, and either stuck in fight and flight or shut down. People who experience trauma and the shutdown response usually feel shame around their inability to act, when their body did not move.
Courage, Self-Love and Complex Trauma (CPTSD)
We shut down to reduce anxiety
In the midst of this cyclical anxiety, our bodies have learned that shutting down completely is an effective way to disrupt the overwhelming stress we're experiencing (which, predictably, only makes the situation worse in the long-term).
For some people, shutting down emotionally is a response to feeling overstimulated. It doesn't have anything to do with you or how they feel about you. If your husband or partner shuts down when you cry, for example, it may be because they don't know the best way to handle that display of emotions.
Your mind and body are under such intense stress with panic attacks that your brain decides to simply shut everything down for a while. It's not dangerous nor does it mean anything about your mental health. It's just a coping mechanism your brain thinks it needs when faced with that level of anxiety.
You may have more emotional troubles such as: Feeling nervous, helpless, fearful, sad. Feeling shocked, numb, or not able to feel love or joy. Being irritable or having angry outbursts.
Intrusive memories
Recurrent, unwanted distressing memories of the traumatic event. Reliving the traumatic event as if it were happening again (flashbacks) Upsetting dreams or nightmares about the traumatic event. Severe emotional distress or physical reactions to something that reminds you of the traumatic event.
If you live with complex trauma or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), trauma dumping or oversharing could be a natural trauma response and coping mechanism.
Shutting down emotions can be a normal part of human experience, as a coping strategy in stressful situations. Under high stress, it allows your body and brain to protect itself from perceived threats or harm.
Shutdown dissociation simulates central nervous system neuropathy. Peripheral neuropathy describes the damage to the peripheral nervous system. Peripheral damage affects one or more dermatomes and thus produces symptoms for specific areas of the body.
The Duration of a Nervous Breakdown Varies by Individual. A nervous breakdown is not a diagnosable mental health condition, and that means there are no official criteria to describe it, including duration. These mental health crises are highly variable, lasting a few hours for one person or weeks for another.
A nervous breakdown (also called a mental breakdown) is a term that describes a period of extreme mental or emotional stress. The stress is so great that the person is unable to perform normal day-to-day activities.
Stonewalling, one of the Four Horsemen, is Dr. John Gottman's term for one or both partners shutting down when feeling overwhelmed during conflict. Rather than confronting the issue, someone who is stonewalling will be unresponsive, making evasive maneuvers such as tuning out, turning away, or acting busy.
Differences in emotions in people with ADHD can lead to 'shutdowns', where someone is so overwhelmed with emotions that they space out, may find it hard to speak or move and may struggle to articulate what they are feeling until they can process their emotions.
For many adults living with ADHD, overwhelm can shut them down and keep them from moving forward. If you live with adult ADHD, as I do, feelings of overwhelm can engulf you and make you feel stuck. For adults with ADHD, it's challenging to get things accomplished when these feelings occur.
Selective mutism (SM) is an anxiety disorder in which a person who is otherwise capable of speech becomes unable to speak when exposed to specific situations, specific places, or to specific people, one or multiple of which serving as triggers. This is caused by the freeze response.
Type 1 trauma is single traumatic events that are usually life threatening (e.g. motor vehicle accident), whereas type 2 trauma occurs over an extended period of time (e.g. domestic violence).
Maria Root, who coined the term insidious trauma described the concepts as follows:"Traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or threatening to bodily well-being at the given moment but that do violence to the soul and spirit. " ( Root 1992; Brown & Ballou, 1992)