Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

In this opening chapter, Levine examines how wild animals naturally recover from life-threatening encounters. He illustrates this concept through a detailed scenario of an impala being hunted by a cheetah, demonstrating how the prey animal enters an instinctive “immobility response” when escape becomes impossible—a state that appears like death but serves crucial survival functions.

Levine argues that this freezing response represents one of three primary survival mechanisms (alongside fight and flight) available to all mammals when facing overwhelming threats. The immobility state serves two evolutionary purposes: It provides a final survival strategy if the predator abandons apparently dead prey, and it eliminates pain during what might be a fatal encounter. Crucially, healthy animals naturally “shake off” this frozen state once danger passes, returning to normal functioning without lasting effects.

This biological framework challenges modern cultural attitudes that view such surrender as weakness or cowardice. Levine contends that judgment about the “freeze” response stems from deep-seated fears about immobility’s resemblance to death. However, he positions the ability to move into and out of this natural response as essential for avoiding trauma’s debilitating effects, calling it “a gift to us from the wild” (17).

The author grounds his approach in neurophysiology, explaining that trauma responses originate in “primitive” brain regions humans share with other mammals.