Lauren Taylor

      This weeks readings were especially interesting to me, and actually really helpful in learning something new about my reactions, and my personhood as well. I currently suffer from severe anxiety when it comes to making simple decisions ("Hey, Lauren, what do you want to watch on Netflix?"), and often find myself giving up in the middle of any planning process. There have been two instances in my life, once when I was very young (around seven), and another upon my first arrival to Memphis, in which I've nearly been kidnapped. In both occurrences  my surrender to the situation was instantaneous, as was described in the reading. “When a person is completely powerless, and any form of resistance is futile, she may go into a state of surrender. The system of self-defense shuts down entirely.”(Herman, 42). The "constriction" symptom described is something I now know that I can relate to personally. Though my social skills are pretty in tact (I'd like to think), my response to any moderately unnerving event is a complete shut down of the thinking that would allow me to arrive at a decision, if that makes sense. Consciously I can acknowledge the need for planning and decision-making, but there is always a subconscious effort within me to avoid these at all costs. This is vaguely relative to the study Terr did on kidnapped schoolchildren. “…Years after the event, the children retained a foreshortened sense of the future; when asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, many replied that they never fantasized or made plans for the future…”(Herman, 47). This reaction to trauma is something I’m actually pretty thankful for sometimes; I think aspects of it allow me to live life more authentically, doing things based more on a present primal instinct than my concern the future.