Why kidnapped girls, hostages, sex slaves, and battered partners don't leave for many years

It's true that when you can't run and you can't fight, you freeze. Humans and pets act that way. But there's more behavior within the freeze that kicks in for survival. There are four reasons why certain kidnapped children and some battered partners don't leave their kidnapper's homes.

It isn't always about Stockholm syndrome, where the hostages befriend and testify for the kidnapper thinking if you be a friend, the evil person will befriend you. And not all kidnap victims freeze in the face of not being able to split or fight. Other brain hormones might kick in, depending on hardwired personality traits set by genes.

When kidnap victims or battered wives meet, the project often created in a community setting usually is a collection of recipes and food talk, as in The Battered Wives Cookbook. Therapy and entering reality or counseling sometimes begins with talking about food because food is the bridge to seeking nuture and nourishment. It's a beginning path to healing by focusing at first on recipes as insight.

The Jaycee Dugard case or the Elizabeth Smart case could be two examples of seeking understanding of the perpetrator just as some people try to understand the power of nature. Other cases, especially with kidnapped boys, could be exemption from duty or making an impact on the perpetrator just as the perpetrator seeks to make an impact on the life of the child victim.

Victims may resort to the four payoffs to survive when he or she can't fight and can't flee becomes only part of the problem of immobility. What if the personality of the victim is hardwired so he or she can't freeze? Instead, the victim might resort to one of the four payoffs or rewards. In this case reward means being allowed to stay alive and fed for decades without constantly being kept in pain, tortured, or killed.

Pregnancy is one way a perpetrator uses the payoff of making an impact to keep the victim alive for more years. In turn, the victim's payoff could be exemption from duty or gaining some semblance of attention in the midst of isolation from anyone familiar. It all happens on the subconscious level, below the level of awareness.

The four payoffs are exemption from duty, understanding and gaining a little control over surroundings/nature, making an impact, or seeking enough attention to allow the victim to survive in the face of uncertainty.

The kidnap victim might remain in the four payoff stages of response for decades, even marrying the abuser. As long as the victim thinks the abuser will destroy his or her real family, or as long as the threat of harm is present, the kidnap victim will stay frozen. What four payoffs does staying frozen have?

The four payoffs or rewards give the quickest pipeline to survival by satisfying four needs, payoffs, or rewards, in the victim. These four consequences that allow the victim to live with less emotional and/or physical pain or fear include the following to which the victim may not be aware on the conscious level:

1. Power of understanding nature: such as why the perpetrator has kidnapped the victim.

2. The ability to carry out a duty, burden, or obligation (protecting one's real family against the perpretrator's threats).

3. the need for attention, to know that once kidnapped you're now part of a new family and not all alone in unfamiliar surroundings.

4. the need to make an impact--to make a difference in the world in some way, such as serving one man or his family and other children. You make an impact on someone else who needs you.

It's not always about being drugged all the time like some sex slaves are kept in bondage by traffickers. It's not all about being locked in a dungeon with no windows as some girls were. And it's not about being chained to a fireplace as some boy victims were.

In Stockholm syndrome, the hostages befriend the perpetrator out of empthy, sympathy, and most of all, in order to get kind treatment from the kidnapper in return for equal treatment. It's not always about treating others as you want to be treated yourself.

What it is about is responding by moving from being frozen to seeking one of the four payoffs or rewards in exchange for being allowed to survive without unbearable pain. For example, lesser pain might be substituted for the pain of torture. A victim may bear the prepetrator several of his children without the help of a doctor. The pain of labor is traded for avoidance of the pain of torture and being killed in the end so as not to identify the pepretrator.

Instead of the hostage's autonomic nervous system responding with the usual flee or fight response, the Big Freeze factor happens with you can't flee and you're too small to fight. So you freeze up. It's a knee-jerk, automatic response of your brain to shut down or freeze.

The shutting down of emotions starts with the brain releasing hormones such as dopamine and serotonin, among others, to protect against pain. It's similar hormones that kick in during childbirth so you don't feel the pain. The brain is wired to freeze up when there's no place to run and you're outnumber or outsized and can't fight.

It happens in wartime as well, as in being locked in a ghetto or gas chamber, gallows, or guillotine, or lined up against a wall facing a firing squad. There's no place to run. But the life preservation instinct kicks in. You'll freeze to preserve your life. You'll stand still and let the charging animal run around you instead of run and be jumped by the charging tiger.

Seeking release from duty or burden protects against pain and assault. But it may also prevent the attacker from harming you. In fact, it may elicit a response in the perpetrator to offer you food and release you from handcuffs or further drugging.

In seeking attention from the only family remaining in the victim's present world, the hostage doesn't think to run or fight, but thinks how to survive by standing still. Often the hostage goes numb or catatonic. With numbness comes less pain.

Children facing an adult aggressor may go into a seeking power response, since fighting or fleeing is impossible, seeking to understand the nature of the beast often gives the victim more time to calm the anger in someone who is bigger, stronger and faster. Submissive dogs may go numb when yelled at by the master.

By seeking to make an impact on the perpetrator, the environment becomes familiar. The strange room becomes the new home, and the four payoffs or rewards freeze the hostage in place for decades until an outside force acts upon the unlikely family or community and breaks the union.

That outside force could be the authorities, the victim's real family making contact, or the perpetrator getting caught. One other ice-breaker in the Big Freeze of brain neurotransmitters could be the perpetrator taking a new victim. The original kidnap victim is now displaced or asked to discipline the new victim.

At his point, the family bonds again are broken, and the freeze melts to the point where the victim is able to confess to authorities what has happened. But this only happens when authorities either arrest the perpetrator first or the kidnapper takes in a new victim.

Any one of the four payoffs or rewards the victim selects depends upon the victim's personality traits and brain wiring. Those payoffs may remain in place if the kidnap victim is addicted to brain-altering drugs such as cocaine or other addictive drugs, date rape drugs, certain volatile painkillers, or anesthetics, whereby the kidnap victim is numbed to the sufferings of the newest kidnap victim and may not seek to leave or contact authorities until the perpetrator is caught without the victim's aid.

Also see: North Korea's kidnap victims return home after 25 years | World news |.

View the uTube video above that discusses the Atlanta Citywide League of Battered Wives - The Battered Wives Cookbook, on the uTube video from Atlanta, Georgia.

Get an idea of the mindset of why these wives don't leave abusive husbands. Unbelievable of how the brain changes when someone is abused and is not able to leave because of brain changes that keep the woman standing by her man.

The video discusses easy recipes for battered wives to make for their husbands according to the injuries or wounds the battered wife might be enduring. From The American Music Show on public access Atlanta, GA. The topic is unbelievable, but unfortunately they're serious about the recipes about the Battered Wives Cookbooks. Or are they? The music and sound at the ending seem to bring down the credibility somewhat.

The clues mentioned in the video include The City Project in Atlanta (Georgia). Quotes: "When he ain't drinking, he's a fine man." Atlanta Citywide Group of Battered Wives, is the publisher, according to the uTube video.