by Daisy Luther, The Organic Prepper:

There’s something incredibly important for your survival that a lot of folks aren’t doing. I’ve written before about overriding your body’s natural urge to freeze in panic when something terrible happens, but there’s an additional step you must take. You need to know the horrible truth about the SHTF. The ugly, brutal truth.

Because as much as we stockpile, go to the shooting range and shoot stationary objects, can vegetables from our gardens, and raise chickens in our backyards, it only prepares us partially.

From my many interviews with guys like Selco and Jose, I know for a fact that an all-out collapse is a dirty, terrifying, and brutal matter of life and death every single day.

As much as we wish it was, the SHTF is not about you being in a bubble, peacefully working in your vegetable garden while the world goes to hell around you outside the bubble. The darkness can reach you wherever you are.

Why is it so important to know about the bad stuff?

Many of us try to insulate ourselves from the dark things going on in the world. I know that I stay away from social media beyond what is required for work because I’m sick of the arguing and the hatred. There are certain articles in the news I hesitate to read because I know they will haunt me. This is human nature – we avoid things that scare us, sicken us, and make us unhappy.

But there are some exceptions to this rule that you should make.

It’s incredibly important to know about the horrible things that could occur when the SHTF well before it happens. I asked Selco about this in a conversation we were having about his new book, The Dirty Truth About SHTF Survival. I asked him why people needed to know about the horrors he faced. He replied,

So you won’t be shocked and so you can shorten adapting period while you are shocked.

Generally speaking, there are lot of sick and bad and dangerous people. We just do not see them because the layer of civilization and the system covers it. And of course, if I had known, I would prep more but in the way that I would invest more in skills. Much more than in equipment.

Everything is much more mobile and fluid then people expect, but if you understand this, you will be able to move with it faster and sooner.

And that makes sense. I write a lot about the importance of adaptation. I constantly remind people that the three steps of survival are to Accept, Plan, and Act. But trust me when I tell you, if something truly horrifying happens right before your eyes, it’s going to be a heck of a lot harder to “accept” that if you never even dreamed that such an awful thing could happen in real life. But if you’ve contemplated it, if you’re aware of the possibility, it will still be horrible but you’ll be able to keep moving. You won’t be frozen in shock.

You need to train yourself not to freeze.

Many people freeze in a disaster situation.   It’s human nature, but the ability to break this paralysis is paramount to your survival. You can train yourself not to freeze by exposing yourself to the things you may experience while in a safe environment.

“Freezing” is called “tonic immobility” in behavioral science and it is a biological impulse.  A study exploring the “freeze response” to stressors, describes the reaction:

Part of Barlow’s (2002) description of an adaptive alarm model suggests that a freeze response may occur in some threatening situations. Specifically, freezing — or tonic immobility — may overwhelm other competing action tendencies. For example, when fleeing or aggressive responses are likely to be ineffective, a freeze response may take place.

Similar to the flight/fight response, a freeze response is believed to have adaptive value. In the context of predatory attack, some animals will freeze or “play dead.” This response, often referred to as tonic immobility (Gallup, 1977), includes motor and vocal inhibition with an abrupt initiation and cessation… Freezing in the context of an attack seems counterintuitive. However, tonic immobility may be the best option when the animal perceives little immediate chance of escaping or winning a fight (Arduino & Gould, 1984; Korte, Koolhaas, Wingfield, & McEwen, 2005). For example, tonic immobility may be useful when additional attacks are provoked by movement or when immobility may increase the chance of escaping, such as when a predator believes its prey to be dead and releases it.

Some of our data suggested that reports of freeze were more highly associated with certain cognitive symptoms of anxiety (e.g., confusion, unreality, detached, concentration, inner shakiness). This leads to some very interesting speculation regarding whether freeze responses are also manifested cognitively (i.e., the cognitive system, together with the behavioral system, being shut down). There has been some speculation that a form of cognitive paralysis occurs due to immense cognitive demands that occur in the context of life-threatening situations or stressors (Leach, 2005).

So, in the context of this particular study, the freeze response could be related to an overload of stimuli because of the demands of creating your plan.  By having thought through various situations and getting into the habit of quickly developing plans, you can override your body’s natural desire to “freeze” and you can take definitive, potentially life-saving, action.

By exposing yourself to the darkness, you don’t inoculate yourself against the horror – that’s impossible to do through simply reading a book. But you do take away a little bit of the shock that can cause you to be paralyzed.

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