So how bout the results of those recent papers?
Psychopathy and Victim Selection: The Use of Gait as a Cue to Vulnerability
Angela Book, PhD, Kimberly Costello, PhD, and Joseph A. Camilleri, PhD
Journal of Interpersonal Violence
2013
and
Attracting Assault: Victims’ Nonverbal Cues
by Betty Grayson and Morris I. Stein
Journal of Communication
1981
I, for one, was shocked and shook by the findings.
Non-fluid, limb-led, awkward and physically uncomfortable walks are what stand out to psychopaths.
What wasn’t included?
Downward gaze, slumping shoulder, hypervigilant scanning, chronic fidgeting, hesitancy.
Things we’ve all been told make us appear unconfident and fearful. Things I would expect psychopaths to lock onto.
But instead, they look for much more subtle and nuanced – difficult to fake – features of a walk.
Which is unfortunately genius.
When it comes to the stereotypical signals of lacking self-assurance, they’re all gestures that can be easily coached and forced into practice. It’s not hard to pull your eyes upwards and focus straight ahead, to strain your shoulders, to keep your hands rooted in pockets or other “safe and casual” positions, or to chart your pathway and rocket through it like you own the place.
All of those learnable behaviors, actually, are quite cohesive with anxiety. It could be an effective motivating factor that keeps a person walking in these ways.
Which obviously does not mean the anxious individual has had a trauma-free life or is impervious to future abuse.
So those signals aren’t very accurate, precise, or effective for a predator to rely on.
But what can’t we fake so easily?
A centralized, secure, integrated relationship within the brain, to the body. Calm, collected, presence from the center-most point of the body, outwards.
The deep, long-spanning work that goes in to actually healing trauma. Not just learning some quick surface level masking tricks, but slowly relearning how to lead life from the guts, crosschecking the knowledge with the mind’s intellect, and bringing those determinations into material reality – rather than operating in reaction to the chaos material reality, streaming it through the trauma-affected head to edit and offset as many problems as possible, and hopefully remembering to shove some energy into the meat suit, as well.
The difference sounds tiny, but the experience of it is world-changing.
And that discrepancy between guiding oneself from the brain rather than from the center of the being is what predators are looking out for – consciously or unconsciously – as an extremely accurate predictor of past and future abuse acceptance.
Which had me screaming when I read these papers. Because I have written intermittently and extensively, from my own observations and figurings, about the greatest trauma recovery requirement for a few years now….
You have to have access to, and lead your life from, the stomach, upward and outward. Reprogramming your brain and changing your life? Literally takes guts.
Let’s talk about core-disassociation and trauma.
Where the core matters – trauma and bodily recovery
You may have heard before… Men tend to have emotional repression and physical trauma symptoms play out through their backs. Women, through their hips and digestive systems.
“Men are from mars,” “they carry trauma where they carry weight holding up the world for everyone,” “women hold trauma in their genitals and wombs, as the mark of the original sin and their servitude to mankind,” and whatever else people might flippantly say. It seems like the two sexes have completely different experiences and we can mentalize reasons why, based on societal trauma and overwrought expectations placed on their heads.
But the issue is the same.
What do both of these spaces – the back and the GI system - have in common?
They’re connected by the core.
A weak core will cause poor posture, leading to shoulder and back pains for the men when it’s “pushed through” and ignored to keep functioning.
A detachment from the stomach, guts, and pelvis will cause poor tone, poor flexibility, poor bodily responsiveness, and perhaps ignorance of a diet that doesn’t agree with the constitution of the holder – eventually causing disease and disorder for the women when those issues are “pushed through” and numbed out to keep fulfilling duties.
So we can see, quickly, how disassociation from – ignoring and weaking - the stomach – both muscularly and functionally - could be the root problem leading to psychosomatic ailments that western medicine can’t (won’t?) address in both sexes.
Again, a theory I’ve spoken on for a few years now that, as suggested, isn’t going to be confirmed by research due to western medicine and grant funding. We can prescribe pain meds and generally gaslight women about having any health issues, so why bother?
But this research suggests that maybe that proposition is reality.
And why IS it so common for us to adopt this gut-detaching behavior post-trauma?
Let’s spit out two low-hangers first.
Firstly; fight and flight – not rest and digest. If we’re chronically or recently stressed, we’re going to be sympathetically activated. The get up and go nervous system response. This pushes blood into the limbs for mobilization and fighting, not into the stomach for digestion. So our attention is also going to be drawn to those areas, not to our abdominals.
Secondly; sexual and physical trauma -> pelvic numbing pipeline. When we have body trauma, we can cut off the area that has been marked as “dangerous.” If we’re sexually assaulted or have an appropriately localized health challenge, we might not trust our lower pelvis anymore. It might become foreign to us. It might disappear from our mental map of ourself.
We detach from our tums because that’s where the trauma tends to live, via our emotions, our shaken confidence in our instincts, and our damaged sense of self in two ways.
Now let’s talk through them all.
The emotions
Where do feelings live? In the body, centralized for most in the chest and guts.
What does trauma leave us with? Enormous painful and overwhelming emotions that we accidentally abandoned ourselves for during and shortly after the trauma, so now they live like artifacts inside those areas.
Don’t want to feel them?
Don’t. Just cut consciousness off at the clavicle or the bottom of the ribcage and you’re golden!
And so, it starts as an acute way to get through a difficult day without feelings gumming everything up or creating an embarrassment. But one day tends to roll into the next and the next – pretty soon it’s a chronic way of existing to simply pretend a section or half of the body doesn’t exist.
We can live on a surface level out of the brain, reacting to life’s requirements and managing ourselves the ways we’ve been taught to be socially safe. And it does create a false sense of security – of everything being okay because you’re going to work, showering, eating, going through the motions.
And no one – not even you – must be privy to the emotional corruption going on inside. You can get through the day, every day, indefinitely, as long as nothing stops you. Like the negative repercussions of this coping behavior, eventually catching up when the body can’t compensate for the new problems that disassociation is causing.
Again, western medicine will call those psychosomatic illnesses, or “disorders and diseases that don’t appear to have an established cause.” And good luck getting any help with them.
So the negative emotions caused by trauma contribute to a delayed, physical trauma generally in the form of unfixable and chronic bodily disordering, through our propensity to ignore our feelings in order to keep surviving.
We have bigger fish to fry. As suggested, outward life goes on. And we have faces to save.
The damaged self
Post-trauma, often, we don’t know who we are anymore. At least in some ways – some areas of life - our idea of self is dismantled or corrupted.
We didn’t previously incorporate this event or its downstream consequences into our self-assessment or identity before, obviously, and now we must. There’s often a distinct before and after available in memory, so we can ruminate endlessly on the beforetimes – who we were then - and the devasting and unfair traumatic consequences as they’ve impacted our lifetime.
It’s a time when we have to reappraise ourselves as we were AND try to guide ourselves into a new personhood. Like hitting “restart,” post-trauma periods draw a line in our story that we can take advantage of.
Something that can put us into overdrive mode, operating from the urgent brain, which is trying with great panic to “do everything right” to course-correct and even post-traumatically grow.
Or, to hide the trauma from others and possibly ourselves by appearing “fine” regardless of the true condition.
Either way, it requires us to get out of our feelings and our more innate self-guidance source (the stomach) so we can perform according to external standards, so we can feel safe, so we can eventually be safe again.
Alternatively, if none of that happens – we don’t shoot for the stars post-trauma, but sink into ourselves to rest and rehabilitate – we DEFINITELY don’t want to feel our guttural centers, because that’s where our wants and needs live. And we’re probably neglecting those or estimate ourselves unable to meet them anyways or feel as though we don’t deserve to – and therefore, just like our feelings… why bother observing them at all?
When we wallow, we also tend to disconnect from our core, even though we are awash in our emotions. Because we’re being tossed around by the wild waves at the surface (the trauma’s emotional aftermath) and never get down below to the calmer, deeper, waters (your guiding feelings).
This has some interplay with our next point:
The shaken confidence in instinct
Post-trauma, what do we feel? Generally not very assured by our own wiles.
A negative thing happened. In the search for meaning and understanding, the human mind likes to turn to the lowest hanging fruit – we can’t possibly comprehend or compile a story out of random, unseeable events that led us to the event we experienced - so we tend to blame ourselves. We did A, it led to B, we stupidly allowed C to transpire… everything is on us.
And where were our instincts – our intuitions and deep knowings – when all of this was taking place? Why didn’t we realize that he was a bad guy, the place wasn’t safe, the idea was a scam?
Why the fuck didn’t our brains and bodies and spirit guides keep us out of trouble? Or, perhaps, even felt like they led us further in?
We don’t know!
And so, we begin to doubt or damn our instincts. Disregarding them as “n/a” or “the problem.”
And those instincts live, where?
In the guts. Perhaps as a spontaneous, convergent, emission of the microbiome living there. Perhaps because we have so many nerve endings there. Or maybe because of something we haven’t scientifically sorted out yet.
But when we say we have a “gut feeling,” we mean it quite literally and yet ineffably.
Trauma robs us of our capacity to trust those gut instincts. And from it, in part, we stop accessing our core.
Which is also where… surprise entry… the OTHER Self lives.
The damaged Self
It’s been a while since we talked about it and we can never say enough.
Have you heard about the big S Self?
It’s the mandatory force necessary for real, long-term, trauma recovery, “aligned living” as they say, and personal transformation.
And it lives in the guts.
The capital S Self is not the earthly, mental-identity, small s self that we previously spoke about. AKA the feeling of our personhood among other humans; the idea of who we are, by looking at ourselves from other perspectives.
The education and job we have. The community we’re a part of. The success we’ve achieved, as measured by popular human standards.
The big S Self is sortof the opposite.
It’s always been there. For as long as you’ve been alive, you’ve been able to reach down at some points and make contact with it. It’s the energy of who you are. Your “vibe,” but from your pelvis, upward and outward. It’s what you feel when you’re in a flow state or leading your day with no particular to-dos, just following where your body and best intentions take you. It’s the feeling of “your best days and your best self.” It’s how you know what’s important to you, authentically. What you care about, innately. Who you are, if all this meat, metal, and plastic didn’t define you.
And in the periods shortly after traumas? We tend to lose contact with this Self.
It requires calm, safety, stability, and vulnerability to experience. A curiosity about what lives in your body. A willingness to feel deeply and meditatively.
Things that do not describe peri or post-traumatic times.
And, when faith in “the universe” or whatever you personally call it is at an all-time ambivalence – I mean, you survived, so something had your back? But it allowed or caused all this to happen, so what in the fuck?” – it can be impossible to grasp that inner, somehow spiritual-thing, known as the Self with a capital S.
If you WERE to reach down into your stomach for it, you’d be angry to find it or discomforted by its absence. Logically, then, you don’t.
You only feel betrayed by your Self with a large S - or convinced it never existed.
And life often gets so loud – or the emotional reactions do – that it’s impossible to feel or hear anyways.
Which… actually… when it comes to our bodies functioning… might be part of the point.
Let’s also touch quickly on THIS promoter of stomach-ignoring.
The bodily disconnection that allows for maladaptive coping behaviors
I hate to throw out the somewhat shamey point, but here we go. And please don’t spiral. Look how normal it is that you’re hearing about it on some podcast.
Thing is…
If we’re not in our bodies – especially in our organs – then we don’t have to be aware of what we’re doing to ourselves to cope with the post-traumatic pains and life disturbances.
Be that drinking, stalling out, running ourself into the ground, eating for several, getting into messy relationships to avoid being alone, etc…
When we can’t fix what’s ailing us – and I just described about 20 things that regularly git us good after a traumatic event – we do what we can just to comfort ourselves so we don’t off ourselves.
It makes sense.
Unfortunately, many of the things we do are terrible for us. For a while we can use them to stay alive, but in some number of years they will be the things killing us.
But we can’t acknowledge that. Because then we would feel guilty – an emotion we’re trying to avoid.
So we can’t feel the truth of the consequences of our coping actions.
Drinking? Nah, it’s fine, doesn’t even bother us anymore. We’re used to feeling like shit. Because we just don’t feel.
Stagnating? No problem, we don’t have to notice the ongoing energy imbalance in our guts. The “get up and go” feeling that’s being repressed or the desire to go DO SOMETHING or to meet any of our needs.
Running oneself into the ground – no issue whatsoever. Don’t feel the hunger, don’t have to respond to the hunger. Don’t feel the exhaustion or consequential caffeine digestion disruption, great we can keep pushing today.
Eating for comfort – obviously, if you never notice that you’re full, you never have to stop consuming. And eating is emotionally comforting because it feels like filling a void that you otherwise can’t. If you’re disassociating from your stomach, you can give yourself an endless task by never being satiated AND you can almost feel half of your body existing when it’s stuffed to the brim, painful AND you don’t have to notice the longer-term outcomes like perhaps consuming foods that don’t sit right with your system. Just ignore it all and keep packing it in. I speak from personal experience. I keep it tight, but I also eat for several men in my post-traumatic days.
And lastly – we can get ourselves into toxic relationships when we’re disconnected from our guts, which then serve as projection factories so we can pretend to feel again, through them. Without the warning signal “something is wrong here” coming from the stomach, we can leap into terrible partnerships. And in those terrible partnerships we can always have some emotional trojan horse or strategic upsetting distraction or emotional event in THEIR world to generate feelings (historical emotional reactions, really). So, again, we don’t have to notice the ways we’re avoiding our own. We don’t have to reconnect with our core. And we don’t want to, or we would notice how unbearable the relationship is.
Which, to bring this point back to the papers we’ve been covering…
Is a great reason for a predator on the hunt for someone to do exactly that, to notice that you’re disconnected from your guts, via the subtle signs of an awkward walk.
Which probably says a lot more about your inner world and current vulnerability to malleability than eye, shoulder, or hand position ever could.
THE CPTSD CONNECT
Now, imagine that these post-traumatic happenings are chronic, over a lifetime, and I think you’ll understand how a victim walk can become an unchangeable movement pattern.
Wrap
So why is core engagement the central indicator, from which all other green flags fly, when psychopaths are assessing potential victims?
Because our relationship and willingness to speak to our guts is impacted negatively through trauma by means of overwhelming emotions, disruption or loss of the small s self, distrust in one’s instincts or intuition, disconnection from the large S spiritual Self, and strategic but unconscious ignoring of the negative consequences of our coping behaviors to reduce discomfort caused by all the of the above.
This leads to numbing or disengagement from the stomach. This causes those central muscles to weaken and become underutilized during regular movements, such as walking. This sets us up to be identified by the most dangerous and violent of predators as viable victims, as they read our unsynchronous, peripherally-driven, walks. Because at some – probably instinctual – level, they realize that disassociation from the core goes hand in hand with reduced capacity for self-awareness and self-defense.
On a purely practical level, if we aren’t in the body, we aren’t fully in our environments to observe risks OR in our muscles to be in the best condition for reacting to danger.
And on a psychological level, if we aren’t in our selves, we aren’t able to best care for ourselves and probably haven’t been. We’re mentally and emotionally diminished without access to our guts.
Altogether, meaning we’re in danger several layers deep –
The recent trauma, which is probably predated by cyclical historic traumas
The loss of identity in the aftermath
The physical weakening
The inability to detect instinctive danger
The disconnection from higher spiritual wisdom
The gnawing search for comfort
The inability to detect growing parasitism accidentally obtained THROUGH that search for comfort
And all of this can be read, fluently, by the people most likely to cause our next trauma.
Making one motherfucking podcaster over here scream aloud…. As usual, it turns out that trauma recovery and prevention… is all about feeling, healing, and cohesively moving from… your guts.
If you’d like to hear my personal story on this topic, stay tuned for the bonus material.
Otherwise, as always, I thank you for being here and supporting this project. Feel into your stomach today, especially as you move. Let it guide you.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this “lets dive deeper” episode on recent research findings.
For the personal story about how this has presented in my (daily hiker, trail runner, and professional campground maintainer) life – leaving me semi-disabled over the course of emotionally abusive years where the predation just wouldn’t stop coming… check that patreon. I’ll tell you all about forgetting how to walk, western medicine trying to give me an opioid addiction instead, and my journey to re-figure out how my body is supposed to work which has been greatly clarified by this research.
And I’ll talk to you again next time.