AoH Learning Lab: Calling Out for Help

“Calling Out for Help” is a little-known and rarely talked about survival response. In my opinion, within a regulated nervous system, it reflexively precedes the well-known survival responses, fight, flight and freeze. It is a mammalian behavior, and most distinctly, human, as we have the most sophisticated form of verbal communication. 

“Calling Out for Help” typically shows up in infancy. When our cries for help (feed me, change my diaper, soothe me), are met with attunement, our nervous system will establish a secure relationship style with the Self, with others and with the world. 

If our cries for help are met with dismissal - especially chronically - the nervous system will interpret it as rejection, neglect and abandonment. If this rupture is not repaired, we will often stop using this pathway, i.e., co-regulation, but we may also spend the majority of our life attempting to get the necessary repair. 

As we are creatures of patterns, this “repair” may play itself out by getting into intimate relationships with those who lack attunement and empathy. As well as those who dismiss, neglect and abandon us, over and over and over again. This is also where co-dependency features may show up: trying to change others to meet our early need for compassionate and empathetic love.

In my clinical work, I’ve noted that clients will speak not of the traumatic event(s) per se, but rather, how no one showed up in their time of need, distress or crisis. Whether someone came to our aid or not, is often the determining factor of whether an event(s) becomes trauma or not.

Becoming aware of our relationship patterns and allowing compassion and forgiveness are first steps in repairing this rupture. Limbic revision and resonance is the second step. This second step entails establishing a safe, therapeutic and platonic relationship with another over an extended period of time.