What the…. freeze??
I have a confession to make! Even though I am a Nurse, I did not recognize the anxiety I had been carrying for years – which I just called stress. That is, until a few years ago, when I myself experienced a very heightened state of freeze.
It was a Naturopathic doctor who pointed it out to me. At the time, I knew I was super stressed, severely anxious and depressed, but in freeze?. I didn’t get panic attacks often associated with anxiety. So my anxiety, and freeze, had gone unchecked, as I continued to push through, until my nervous system just wore out.
“Even though we may not always be aware of danger on a cognitive level, on a neurophysiological level, our body has already started a sequence of neural processes that would facilitate adaptive defense behaviors such as fight, flight or freeze”.
- Stephen W. Porges, PhD, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation
Very simply, our body’s Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) is a built-in defense mechanism that protects us from danger. It serves us well when there are actual physical threats to our safety. The ANS prepares us to fight off the threat or flee from it.
But in our modern world we are most often not warding off physical threats, though our body still responds as if we are. So why are so many of us walking around in survival mode?
“We don’t have all the rituals of attachment and connection. So we’ve come undone. We’ve lost our way.”
- Dr. Gordon Neufeld, Developmental Psychologist
When we have lost a sense of attachment and connection, especially as children, (and being raised by parents who themselves are in survival mode at least to some degree) that loss causes a sense of separation and disconnection which threatens or obliterates our sense of safety and puts us into survival mode.
People get confused and think “well I didn’t experience any physical abuse or significant loss. My childhood was pretty good”. But any experience that shocks us, frightens us, and essentially disempowers us in some way, can be a trauma.
“When we are young and our minds are overwhelmed by trauma or separation that is too much for us, initially we create a foreground alarm energy of fight or flight (or pursuit). This puts our minds into survival brain and our bodies into high activation. If that boost of energy does not resolve the situation and because the sympathetic nervous system activation can only be maintained for so long, eventually part of us just gives up, like a cornered animal that stops fighting and freezes.”
– Dr. Russell Kennedy, MD, Anxiety Rx
When we are children we can’t respond in fight or flight. We are disempowered. We submit. Even as adults we can’t fight off a distressing email or flee from a family member that may be ill.
Have you ever heard of the expressions “I was walking around on eggshells”, “she was like a deer in headlights” or “I felt like a sitting duck”. These describe freeze mode. There is a sense of danger lurking but nothing actually happening. There is a hyper-alertness. There is muscle tension and tightness. Emotionally there is a numbing which is why we have no idea how afraid we really are. Over time we can develop an inwardly guarded stance and difficulty switching to relax mode.
“Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.”
- Susan Pease Banitt, LCSW, Psychotherapist
These protective mechanisms like fight, flight and freeze, and there are others, can be very subtle but their effects in and on the body do build over time and eventually get our attention, unfortunately often through some type of mental or physical illness.
“Animals do not view freezing as a sign of inadequacy or weakness, nor should we.”
— Peter A. Levine, PhD
Freezing is nothing to beat ourselves up about. Remember that freeze – along with fight or flight, is an automatic, survival-based response. It is not conscious. But we can bring awareness to it.
The discovery of freeze in myself informed the therapies and resources I used to heal the anxiety, depression and freeze. Working on “this part of me that doesn’t feel safe” became the focus of my healing journey. The more I worked on calming and regulating my nervous system, the safer and less overwhelmed I felt. And then, as it was a process and a journey, I was eventually able to allow awareness of emotions that I had been protecting myself from feeling. I was gradually able to take back my power and give a voice to the frozen parts of myself. Of course life is life and regulating the Nervous System is an ongoing practice. But we don’t have to be a slave to it. We’re not meant to be walking around in survival mode 24/7.
Written by Michele Venema BScN, RN, Psychotherapist, cEFT2 AEFTP
Nurse Psychotherapist/EFT Practitioner
From Shadows to SoulLight Counselling 2023
Stay tuned for my next blog where I will talk about how you can recognize the freeze response, and other protective responses, in your body and how to calm and regulate your Nervous System.