You know how people always analyse behaviour after a tragedy to determine guilt

[ImFinkinn]

I was thinking about this the ither day after watching a crime video and the comments were all about the behaviour of the person who made the 911 call and how suspicious they were / how they didnt behave how an 'innocent' person would. Turns out they were innocent.

But it really got me thinking back to when my DD was about 3 years old and I went to get her out of bed and she was gone.
Her older brothers had woken me up and I'd made them some breakfast. DD still hadn't come downstairs so i went into my room to give DH a cup of tea (so knew she wasnt in there) then went to wake her up and she was gone.

For a little bit of context I do suffer from anxiety/OCD and had a traumatic event when my eldest son was a toddler where we thought for a solid 20 mins he had disappeared at my mums house with neighbour searching for him in the avenue etc. He was playing hide and seek 😒

So I saw she wasn't in her bed and checked her brothers room and the bathroom. Nothing.

I remember going into a trance like state. I could feel my heartbeat throughout my whole body and I went into autopilot.

I went downstairs and continued to make her breakfast. I buttered toast with my hands shaking and poured out juiced. Talked to her brothers and washed a few plates

All my brain kept telling me was that I couldnt acknowledge she was gone because then it would be reality and if I told her Dad then he would see she was gone and we would need to call the police.
Its like I couldnt bring myself to allow that chain of events to become real so my brain just shut down into denial??

So I stayed downstairs in this nauseating mode of autopilot/shock for a good 15/20 mins and decided I needed to go back upstairs.

So i did and i remember my legs barely being able to carry me up the stairs physically.

I went in her room and her bed was still empty and I just was about to lose it when i saw a sock poking out from down the side of her mattress.

She had somehow rolled down the side of the mattress and was fast alseep out of eyeline (it was a midsleeper)

I know this isnt comparable to the crime documentary situation but I can totally see how people dont do what you would expect in situations like that.

Imagine my daughter really was missing and I admitted to the police that after realising that, I went and carried on as normal for 20 mins and didn't tell anyone. People would think that was suspicious as hell.

It's a load of crap as people react very differently when in shock & many are still processing the event.

Unless you are washing blood off your clothes, burning evidence & packing a bag to flee the country then one's behaviour doesn't really shout to innocence or not.

* It's* like I couldnt bring myself to allow that chain of events to become real so my brain just shut down into denial??

I've had similar, dd also somehow went between her mattress & sheet & I couldn't see her. And friends ds hid in a supervised playgroup & we couldn't find them. You almost don't want to acknowledge it's happened but also it's confusing as how can they disappear.

I always think this as people react so differently when in shock and you don’t even know how you’d react until you’re in that situation as shown in your example

I think thats a little different! I'm talking about the immediate moments after. Not days. Weeks and months. Of course all ofnot should be taken into a ccount but I'm just saying there is no set way a brain reacts to a devastating situation.

I get it. My then 3.5 year old went missing (turned out he had escaped the house) and in the moments after running around the house searching for him and screaming - my house phone rang. On some weird trance kind of autopilot - I answered! Why the fuck, I've no idea. What the hell was I going say to someone? As it was, it was the hospital (I am close by) who recognised my child and called me immediately. So it was a blessing I answered, but had it been someone else? God knows what I'd have said.

OP, are you ND in any way? I react the same way and I’m ADHD and potentially autistic too. It’s like my brain shuts down and doesn’t know how to respond to shock. I need extra time to process the situation before I can respond fully. Processing delay is one of the key symptoms of ND disorders - this is how it manifests.

A lot of Amanda Knox’s alleged “guilt” was based on how she behaved after Meredith’s death: not seeming upset enough, acting impulsively and saying inappropriate things, as opposed to actual evidence of guilt. I’ve always thought she was definitely ND and these symptoms played into her behaviour following the murder. It terrifies me how easily it would be to pin something like that on an innocent person with no evidence other than they are “odd” and “an innocent person wouldn’t behave like that”.

People do the same with victims. "Oh she didn't cry so I don't believe she was raped." "She cried too much so she must have been putting it on, I don't believe her."

Most people fancy themselves as an expert psychologist and imagine that they would act like the perfect innocent person/victim if an unimaginable tragedy befell them.

So true!