“Potentially traumatic situations are ones that induce states of high physiological arousal but without the freedom for the affected person to express and get past these states: danger without the possibility of fight or flight and, afterward without the opportunity to “shake it off,” as a wild animal would following a frightful encounter with a predator. What ethologists call >tonic immobility— the paralysis and physical / emotional shutdown that characterizes the universal experience of helplessness in the face of mortal danger — comes to dominate the person’s life and functioning. We are “scared stiff.” In human beings, unlike animals, the state of temporary freezing becomes a long-term >trait. The survivor, Peter Levine points out, may remain “stuck in a kind of limbo, not fully reengaging in life.” In circumstances where others sense no more than a mild threat or even a challenge to be faced, the traumatized person experiences threat, dread and mental/physical listlessness, a kind of paralysis of the body and will. Shame, depression and self-loathing follow in the wake of such imposed helplessness.

The American Psychiatric Association’s >Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) “deals in categories, not in pain,” in the incisive words of psychiatrist and researcher Daniel Siegel. Central to Peter Levine’s teaching is that trauma cannot be reduced to the diagnostic traits compiled by the DSM under the rubric of PTSD, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Trauma is not a disease, he points out, but rather a human experience rooted in survival instincts. Inviting the full, if carefully graded, expression of our instinctive responses will allow the traumatic state to loosen its hold on the sufferer. Goodness, the restoration of vitality, follows. It springs from within. “Trauma is a fact of life,” Levine writes. “It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.” In our suffering also lies our salvation. As he shows, the same psychological systems that govern the traumatic state also mediate core feelings of goodness and belonging.”

— Gabor Mate, in his forward to Peter Levine’s In an Unspoken Voice