Some demands that might be raised in a courtroom where one person is accused of harming another:

-Time

-Place

-Exact Sequence of Events

-The Ability to Tell the Story

-Facing the Threat

Unfortunately, after a traumatic event, our fight or flight response might not provide us with any of that.

Now, the fight or flight response is made to keep us safe, and part of how it does it is through setting off the alarm system (See: Moldy Cheese and Fire Alarm Systems: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn) when it encounters anything that reminds your sensory input systems of the abuse. It smells smoke, and it screams of fire.

So making a person face their abuser in court can actually flood them, causing them to be unable to speak, think, or communicate clearly.

Courts are based in the pre – frontal cortex. Fight or flight is sensory. 

In addition, when a damaging incident takes place, the brain may also suppress it because it is too much to handle, or because you had to keep surviving in that scenario. So an incident can be fully suppressed, and not even brought up.

When our bodies engage in fight or flight, here’s what can happen to our pre – frontal cortex. 

Now, just a little background: safety is the number one priority. If your safety is threatened, your body will do all it can to first restore you to that, including sweetening reality and disengaging your pre – frontal cortex. In addition, trauma has been shown to shrink it. (The fact that our brain puts rose colored glasses over reality in abusive situations is why the advice of ‘notice the good’ or ‘be grateful’ can be especially toxic in those. Often the problem is that the victim is seeing too much good, and is unaware of the extent of the destruction. We actually want to make it safe enough for her to see otherwise.)

Anyway, now that that’s understood: here’s what happens when you engage in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn: 

The brain moves from calm functioning to managing threat in order to restore safety. Generally, the amygdala hijacks control and the pre – frontal cortex – where we reason, think, and plan – goes offline. The degrees differ by the type of reaction you have: 

Fight: the amygdala takes over, and the danger becomes an obstacle to overcome. Depth of reason is sacrificed for speed;

Flight: the amygdala takes over, and cognitive focus is used to fight escape routes. Depth of reason is sacrificed for speed;

Freeze: the amygdala hijacks, and it’s not only the prefrontal cortex that shuts down. There’s a broader dissociative slowdown, and you might feel sluggish, foggy, slow, or stuck, like your thoughts won’t form or connect. Some trauma research finds fragmented, sensory-heavy, non-narrative memories from freeze episodes, so gaps and lack of recall of trauma is perfectly normal. Reasoning is sacrificed almost entirely;

Fawn: Fawning is reading the situation and adjusting behavior to appease the threat, not acting out of a place of your values independent of people’s reactions. Because you need social reasoning to appease the threat, the pre – frontal cortex is not entirely shut off. The amygdala uses it to manage the threat – objective reasoning is turned off, behavior does not come from a free, independent place of values, but is catered to appeasing the abuser.

Knowledge of the danger can be suppressed, and the brain can make it sweeter in order to continue surviving within it. 

(And the irony is that many people causing this state call themselves ‘the logical ones,’ who ‘just want to hear the truth,’ when their behavior makes it impossible for those around them to speak it.)

And for abusers, or people who simply do not understand how this system works, it’s golden: I can call into doubt the veracity of your claims, because I can question every last bit of it. And if I can intimate you with aggression, it can push you even farther away. And mix fragmented memory, the panic state, and self doubt – or take one of those – and it’s easy for a lawyer to paint doubt in a court room with a judge who was trained to only evaluate the cold, hard, provable facts.

The mind is easy to twist. The body is harder. It will have a reaction: and if I can train you to listen to the reactions of your body, I become a threat to everyone convincing you to ignore them. 

Now, as for seeing the alarm as a valuable information system – we’ve been taught to distrust the language of our bodies and to only trust the language of thoughts – especially in religious spaces.

(The irony is that thought is the most influenced when we’re in fight or flight, or suppressing feelings. It’s only through fully feeling them that we allow them to run through us, and not make the decision for us.) 

That’s why when big (and too often) political figures are accused of sexual assault, many times conservative (and not to make this political; it’s just usually them) figures come out and ask: ‘Where? When? Time? Place? Tell the story! In detail! Do you remember the exact time? What exactly did he tell you? A discrepancy in your story? You must be lying! Can’t remember exactly where it happened? What you were wearing? What he was wearing? The time of day?’

(Mind you, trauma can sometimes be activated by speaking about it, which is why many survivors don’t come out until years later, when they’ve healed enough to be able to talk about it. That’s why the statute of limitations law is so toxic.)

Fight or flight doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t function like a lawyer, collecting evidence of time, place, exact text messages, locations, and excel sheets to be entered into evidence. It’s a fragmented collection of smells, tastes, colors, and the slightest shifts in facial expressions.

So try using that all in a courtroom. It won’t make sense. It won’t be admissible in evidence. But we need to start believing survivors with different kinds of evidence, and at the very least, not writing them off when they don’t provide it to you lawyer style. Understand that that’s normal, understand that when they are providing you with evidence that doesn’t match a courtroom it doesn’t automatically add suspicion to their story, and understand that when we write off recounts that don’t match the courtroom but match the body’s alarm system, we appear wholly uneducated in neuroscience.

And the conservatives, those who love facts, the lawyers, the jury – they should know how neuroscience works. They should know that the facts are that after being a victim of destructive behavior, you may remember fragments, colors, smells: not hardcore time, place, and story. They should know that’s how the neuroscience works, and not discredit it. Because, after all, facts don’t care about their feelings.