7. Learning to Be

Trauma, or triggers of earlier trauma, brings profound and unexpected immobilization. When in trauma, we revert to ‘older’ circuitry – we faint, we immobilize, or disassociate.

Dr Stephen Porges

Usually we learn to integrate our social engagement system very slowly and subtly as babies and this learning takes place almost unconsciously. Babies slowly learn to use their body. They learn to drive their body like we learn to drive a car. You start off slowly, with fierce concentration on the most minute detail until you have mastered it, then you move on to the next thing and the next until all of a sudden you can use your feet on the pedals while steering, while looking out of the window and working out where you are going. But you have to start slowly: it takes a while before your mind can manage all that and drive at 100km an hour!

Autists haven’t learnt how to use their body so well. For them, going out in public is like driving at 100km an hour without a licence. It is too fast, they can’t process it. It is information overload, as their brains are not wired up for the experience.

Like learning to drive a car, babies spend their time wiring up their brain and their body. It is what they do. They will stare at their fingers for hours. They will look at their feet, their toes, your eyes. They will smile and get a response. They will bend and flex, bringing feet to head. Slowly but surely they are learning to be in their body, and learning how to use it to engage with the world. They have to learn that this leg, this foot, belongs to them, how to make eye good contact, to smile on cue; they have to learn how to think, and how to be. It is not all completely automatic.

Babies are pretty smart because their brains and autonomic nervous system are generally working nicely when they are born. They know they are in there, but they do need a lot of time to work out that they have a body and how to use it.

It is all rather haphazard at first, but it slowly comes together. Slowly they begin to direct their arms and legs; slowly they begin to delight in making their brain and body talk to each other, so they can move, so they can communicate, so they can be in the world.

Babies gently embark on the extraordinary journey of self-awareness. Their job for the first few years is to get the body and brain talking. They are learning to feel and also to make sense of feeling; they are creating awareness. Babies begin to construct a world of images in their minds and begin relating them to positive and negative feelings, moving, associating and belonging. Awareness starts off simply, in the body. Gradually it becomes an increasingly complex association between the body and the mind.

But what happens if it starts off a bit complex? What happens if, for whatever reason, the baby is in prolonged FFI? What happens if at some point the baby has become Immobilized? Being a baby, they have little or no way of making sense of this. They do not know who they are; they just know that they are. In many ways, who babies think they are is their body.

So, having experienced it, babies can associate themselves with Immobilization; it becomes part of what they are, what they do. They have not learnt to separate and control this response, as it happens very early and so becomes integrated with their sense of self. Immobilization becomes a default position and certain triggers will make the child revert back to it easily.

This default becomes a learnt response, and an identity, and both get reinforced over time. It becomes part of the child, part of who they think they are. The mechanism to their sympathetic-adrenal response is strong; they associate with fear and shut down as a normal response and they associate with being inwardly focused. It is not a matter of choice or control. It just happens and it slowly becomes a hardwired, physical response.