A reflective essay in conversation with Jordan Peele’s vision and the bodymind’s survival intelligence
Content note: racism, horror, trauma, child abuse, movie spoilers
The Body Learns Silence
The house I grew up in was static before the storm. The scent of ozone, leaves turned soapy bellies up, green clouds gathering in the east. I measured each sound I made, studied the rhythm of his footsteps, the pace of his breathing. I didn’t dare look at him, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away for an instant, because that’s how long it took for murmured menace to shift murderous. There was no pattern I could trust. Sometimes laughter set him off. Sometimes a single misplaced question. Sometimes nothing at all.
I tried to be good. I was a tuning fork, crafted in the key of danger. The work was impossible, but I kept trying, because the cost of guessing wrong was high. All this daily labor was churning through bodywire, nerve endings touching air.
When I made him angry (and I frequently did) my heartbeat drowned my ears; the room contracted around me. There was nowhere safe to go. He had chased me before, kicked through the bathroom door when I locked it. So I waited.
My vision tunnelled, centering his grievance-distorted face. His voice echoed down my cold marble corridors. Static in my ears, waves of sound lapping on my shores. All light contracted to a single bright dot, the last wink of an old television set before it goes black. And then it went black. I was gone to some silent, dark place, and I was alone, and I was terrified.
Sometimes, my nervous system makes the decision for me. It knows: survival sometimes means leaving your body behind. When my father became angry with me, I survived the impossible expectations of a moment with no right choices by unexisting inside nothing.
It is the most frightening state I’ve ever been in. It was traumatic dissociation. It was a sunken place.
Familiar Darkness
Yesterday, I finally watched the 2017 horror film, Get Out. In an early scene, the main character, Chris Washington, is hypnotized and sent to the Sunken Place. His eyes went wide, his chair fell back, and he was falling, panicked, silent, the world shrinking to a distant square of light.
My body recognized that drop into darkness. My hands went cold. The image wasn’t imagined; it felt remembered. My body knew what I was seeing.
Peele captured it with eerie precision: the sensation of being pulled away from yourself, consciousness receding while the body stays pinned in place.
It was both hair-raising and validating to see someone else’s map of the terrain of disappearance.
Peele’s Original Meaning
On Twitter, Jordan Peele wrote, “The Sunken Place means we’re marginalized. No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us.” He was speaking about Blackness in America, about a history of being consumed and erased, about the body turned into property and then into spectacle, about the ongoing horror of having to perform safety inside danger.
The Sunken Place is a Black creation, carved from centuries of forced silence. It belongs to that lineage, to the lives that carried terror and genius and grief in the same breath. The power of Peele’s image lies in that inheritance: the way he made visible the machinery of white desire, the way he showed how politeness can conceal predation.
This essay isn’t a redefinition; it’s a conversation. Peele built a world where the silenced body speaks through image, where the unspeakable finds form. “There’s lots of different sunken places,” Peele said in a Los Angeles Times roundtable.
I can never know the Black experience. I enter that world as a listener. Still, from all the way over here in my lane, I recognize the dissociation of marginalization. I found my own sunken place. My nervous system knows the frozen language of marginalization that speaks across lots of different experiences and echoes through lots of different sunken places.
The Body’s Language of Survival
When my father gathered his anger, my body calculated: I couldn’t fight a grown man twice my size. Flight had already failed. That left stillness. I never knew the safe thing to do, so I’d do nothing.
My body pulled the plug, dimmed my sight, twisted sounds until they broke away. This wasn’t a metaphor or an act of imagination. The same ancient circuitry that tells a gazelle to drop limp when the fangs close around its neck was pulling my consciousness out of my trapped body.
The autonomic nervous system runs the show when danger closes in: fight, flight, fawn, freeze, and finally flop: the full-body surrender of dissociation. For me, the fear and stress threshold has always been set low. My autistic senses strip me to the bone. The smell of tension, the pitch of a voice, the flash of movement, too much information, too fast, too loud. When safety collapses, my nervous system swings from high alert straight into shutdown, into blackout.
Dissociation isn’t intentional disconnection. It’s the body’s last, best act of self-care. It’s the autonomic nervous system folding consciousness away from harm until it’s safe to return.
The Architecture of Silence
What Jordan Peele built is a house of silence. Its walls are history; its foundation is the long echo of stolen breath. I don’t mistake my story for that house, but I recognize the architecture of generational trauma. The structure of being seen and not heard or believed, of existing at someone else’s mercy, of finding safety only in stillness? It’s familiar.
Black thinkers and activists mapped this terrain long before I had language for it. They drew the blueprints for how power shapes the body, how silence is manufactured and enforced. The Disability and Autistic movements learned from that cartography. Every framework we have for access and autonomy traces back to Black activists who fought to be viewed as fully human in systems built to deny their humanity.
There are many doors into silent houses. Peele’s door is race and history. Mine is neurology and trauma. The corridors are different, but the walls are built of the same materials: power, fear, and forced stillness.
The Nervous System’s Capacity
Dissociation begins long before the blackout. The body doesn’t leap straight to absence. It falls through stages of overwhelm. First comes sympathetic arousal, the fight-or-flight surge: heart hammering, blood flooding to the limbs, pupils widening, breath turning sharp and shallow. The body is shouting move! even when movement would mean greater danger.
When escape proves impossible, the system has nowhere left to send that energy. Adrenaline keeps firing, cortisol keeps rising, but there’s no outlet. The heart can’t keep sprinting forever, so the ventral vagal brake (the part of the parasympathetic system that normally restores calm after threat) tries to step in. It fails when safety never arrives. The body, still flooded, has to find another way to protect itself.
That’s when the dorsal vagal system seizes control. Blood pressure drops, digestion halts, temperature falls, perception narrows. The body drags itself down into metabolic silence. It’s a physiological form of invisibility. From the outside, it looks like stillness; on the inside, consciousness has pulled back to a distant point of dim awareness.
This is autonomic dysregulation in motion: the pendulum swinging violently from sympathetic overdrive to parasympathetic collapse. When it happens often enough, the thresholds shift. The body learns the shortcut from stress to shutdown. It begins to treat everyday tension as danger. For autistic people, the sensitivity is already heightened. With senses turned on high, noise, scent, light, emotion are each another demand on an already over-aroused system. It doesn’t take much for the switch to flip.
Across identities, the pattern repeats. A child bracing for a parent’s rage. A queer person gauging safety before speaking. A Black driver stopped by police. A disabled worker masking pain to keep a job. The nervous system recognizes threat in different languages, but the choreography is the same: surge, overwhelm, collapse. Awareness slides to the back of the mind while the body performs whatever will keep it alive.
The Sunken Place is more than psychological horror. It’s a mirror of autonomic biology, the moment when survival requires disappearance. Peele’s image gives form to the body’s ancient reflex: the will to live by going still.
Peele showed that experience through the lens of race and history; I recognize it through trauma and neurology. The spaces are not the same, but they rhyme.
Shared Darkness, Divergent Light
I keep trying to understand it: the blackout, the quiet, the way my body could vanish itself. I can diagram the sequence now. The sympathetic surge, the dorsal collapse, the whole autonomic ballet. I can trace the neural circuitry that pulled me under. But when I try to feel it from the inside, language falls away.
The bodymind remembers what language can only circle. Every time I get close, something inside me still flinches away, the same old reflex keeping its secret. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe dissociation was never meant to be understood, only witnessed, mapped from the edges, a coastline you can’t walk without sinking in.
Peele gave that darkness cinematic shape; science gave it names. I stand between them, translating what little I can. The rest remains unspeakable, and maybe that’s where it belongs. Understanding isn’t the opposite of silence. Sometimes understanding is a night-blooming realization that can only grow inside the silence.
Works Cited
Get Out. Directed by Jordan Peele, performances by Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, and Catherine Keener, Blumhouse Productions, 2017. IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5052448/.
Peele, Jordan. “The Sunken Place means we’re marginalized. No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us.” Twitter, 17 Mar. 2017, https://twitter.com/JordanPeele/status/842589407521595393.
Peele, Jordan. Interview by Glenn Whipp. “Directors Roundtable: Greta Gerwig, Guillermo del Toro, Jordan Peele and More on Harassment, Race, and Why Film Schools Need Change.” Los Angeles Times, 29 Nov. 2017, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-en-mn-directors-roundtable-20171129-story.html.
Recent Comments