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Traumatic Civilization

David Price
4 min readSep 8, 2021

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Franz Dvorak

Dr. Peter A. Levine discovered 35 years ago that wild animals recover from trauma by tremoring spasms of their body core and flailing of limbs, to complete the fight-flight they were in before they froze.

Levine shows a video of a polar bear chased by biologists (just to tag him) and then shot with a tranquilizer dart.

As the bear wakes from freeze, its body trembles intensely, its legs thrash, and it makes biting motions over its shoulder — replicating and completing all the fight-flight actions it was making during the chase.

Finally, it undergoes deep gasping.

This discharges tons of stress chemicals which otherwise get frozen in the body.

Our human thinking brain usually refuses to do this trauma reset, aka “discharge.” We’re too fearful of the fierce shaking and the scary flood of our own natural aggression we might have to feel — without acting it out…

That’s why humans have trauma and wild animals usually don’t: old fight-flight stress chemicals stay frozen in our bodies. Wild animals only do when they have been in long contact with humans…

All our bodies are connected. Science is now discovering and proving what was long known by ancient cultures. Through an incredible nervous system that can sense threats in the environment way before it is

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David Price
David Price

Written by David Price

I write about creativity, loving, language learning and psycho/spirituality. I’m a longtime painter and reader.

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