Sharing – When Your Body Won’t Let You Act

Hayley describes one reason why parents who suspect their child is being abused may do nothing, and it has everything to do with feeling like it’s safe to act:

The parent who doesn’t act is often a person who has never, neurologically, felt safe enough to stand.

https://hayleyjoneswriter.substack.com/p/when-your-body-wont-let-you-act

I read this with interest, not as a parent, because I’m not a parent, but as a survivor who has seen too many of us asked about why we didn’t fight back, or run, or fill-in-the-blank action. Because when we don’t know what it is like to feel safe, our nervous system gets overwhelmed, and we don’t respond at all. Our body is waiting for our brain to instruct it, but the brain is processing too much shock, and freezes.

This is why that quote above rang true for me. You can’t act rationally if acting doesn’t feel safe, and many of us grew up never feeling safe. To our mind, staying silent and still was the rational choice. Doing something different could have been more dangerous. It was also the natural reaction because we were simply overwhelmed.

So the next time you want to ask someone why they didn’t act, stop and consider how overwhelmed they were in the moment, and what having the safety to act would look like instead.