Why did Jaycee Lee Dugard, held captive for 18 years, not leave, or even use the phone, when she had the chance? Why do battered wives keep returning to the husbands who beat them?  Kidnapped by domestic terrorists, why did Patty Hearst help them rob a store?  Why did Stalin’s brutal dictatorship produce good Communists and the Inquisition produce good Catholics?  Why did so many people cooperate with the Nazi’s?  Why do people who are taken hostage by terrorists quickly identify with them, a phenomenon known as the Stockholm Syndrome?  All these events have a common denominator: our human nature.
 
We are primates, and like other animals we have survival instincts that tell us how to find food and shelter, reproduce and compete for survival of the fittest. They also tell us how to respond to dangerous situations: physically, we can flee or fight; psychologically, we can get control of the situation or seek the approval of those who have control.  If you are the one with a gun, then you control the situation and decide who lives and who dies. If you don’t have the gun, but get the approval of the man with the gun, he may shoot the person next to you, but maybe not you.  These powerful instincts are unconscious and are not moral or immoral, but amoral; our normal human nature allows us to do anything to survive. 

Physically weaker, confined, isolated, dependent and brutalized, Jaycee’s only survival option was to seek the approval of her captors and accept her life as “normal.”Just as Muslim women, who live in similar circumstances, accept their lives as “normal.” Just as, when Western Europe was a brutal theocracy, from the Pope on down, people came to accept the burning alive of people in the village square as “normal.” Just as, for centuries, we accepted slavery as “normal.” Just as the “bad cop” creates fear in a suspect, who then bonds with the “good cop” and cooperates. Just as today, politicians attract supporters by warning people of imminent terrorist attacks or losing their health insurance.

Our survival instincts are all-inclusive.  Not only do they help our bodies survive, they also help us survive mentally.  To prevent a mental collapse, when our experiences are too traumatic, last too long and we can’t make sense of them, the brain automatically separates out information associated with the experiences and stores it in our unconscious mind — out of sight, out of conscious mind.  We shut down emotionally, adapt – and survive.

And then the police find  the kidnap victim, the gates of the concentration camp are opened,  a prisoner is released  from jail, soldiers return home from the war and an abused child grows up and leaves home – with heads full of repressed memories, what quantum psychology calls unintegrated information.  Because this information concerns our survival, our brain has red flagged it as too important to forget. If phase one is managing to survive, and phase two is adapting to the situation and accepting it as “normal,” phase three, which completes the experience, is retrieving the information – and the body gives us a simple, efficient  way to accomplish this.
  
To remind us that we have unfinished business and to motivate us to take action, the body generates stress and causes us to repeat the past.  Then, rather than talking about our problems, we retrieve this information in the form of pictures, which is the preferred language of the unconscious mind.  When we do, the brain responds immediately, producing immediate results in freeing us from the past and stimulating normal personal growth, which includes enjoying life, accessing our individual power and achieving higher consciousness.
 
When a bone fracture heals, the new bone that is generated at the site of the break is stronger than undamaged bone. So also, we can emerge from traumatic experiences not only stronger but also wiser. Like psychiatrist Victor Frankl, who survived three years in Nazi concentration camps, at some point, as we progress, we also will conclude that we would never have chosen the experience, but we don’t regret it, because of what we learned.  Now that Jaycee’s “normal” has changed, and she is free to begin the healing, within her are the means to turn something horrendous into something magnificent.