Freeze Response (part 1) : Living with Overwhelm

We have all heard of our nervous system’s freeze response.

And yet, feeling and recognizing this response in our internal and relational systems is quite complex. In part because its stealth power is creating a sense of absence - a bit like an invisibility cloak.

You might just, however, be interested in learning to recognize this response in your system as chronic freeze/overwhelm is a known driver of chronic conditions and chronic pain also known as neuroplastic symptoms/conditions. 

A good friend of mine recently had a shoulder replacement after years of shoulder pain following a complex fracture. 

She was telling me about her post-op experience:

“It was great. I had a nerve block, and for 2 days I had no pain! I couldn’t even feel my arm so nothing bothered it. 

I did also notice that I was bumping it into things which I know could be dangerous too and I couldn’t move it at all. But it was great to have that relief! ” 

 

My friend's experience is a perfect analogy for our body's innate freeze response.

 

‘Freeze response is the disconnection that manages overwhelming experiences.’ [June’s blog on Coming Home to the Body] 

As a reminder, our nervous system states change in response to our external and internal experiences.

Ideally mobilizing us through emotion [fear, sadness, care, love] to bring us closer to experiences and people that give us a sense of connection to ourselves and others. 

And ideally mobilizing us to move us away through emotion [disgust, anger, fear] from experiences, people, situations, places that bring more threat to our sense of internal connection and well being.

  

If these mobilizing responses are not able to create a sufficient experience of proximity (connection) or distance (safety), our body begins to shift into immobilizing these responses and some part of our felt experience. 

We are then moved into a different strategy for survival - disconnection, not feeling, freeze, numbness - loss of consciousness around this particular situation, emotional experience, body area… 

Think of this as ‘merciful anesthesia’, a mini specific nerve-block.

When connection doesn’t come through, disconnection from the pain, the fear, the anger, the sadness, our own experience of ourselves and even our awareness of the threat is our body’s alternative.

This disconnection allows us to keep on keeping on because we lose our capacity to feel what was too much to digest and integrate into a more dynamic experience of ourselves. 

Disconnection is however a stopgap measure in which we lose access to part of our experience. [see June’s blog]

Just like my friend said, this can feel good in the moment, and it can also be dangerous. 

One of the dangers is that disconnection numbs us to our personal experiences through which we might have accessed meaningful support with others; it creates a sense of isolation.

Disconnection and freeze also mean that these painful experiences get put on hold (ideally for a later time when more support is available that will help us digest and integrate the experience). These ‘whited out’ or frozen feelings, also known as “undigested emotional experience,” as you may remember when we explored chronic stress in a previous post, is the primary driver of inflammation in our bodies. 

So if you are eating an anti-inflammatory diet, and are not orienting to relationships that can support digestion of the backlog of undigested emotions you are carrying, you might be paddling upstream.

You may have an experience you can reflect on from hindsight where you stayed in a situation or place that was not resourcing for you or even downright not okay for you. 

Maybe you lost a sense of motivation, or agency to overcome or change it (fight response)  or get yourself out of that into something more supportive (flight response). 

Maybe you sensed that you could not overcome or get out of that situation or that doing so would put you in the double-bind of overwhelming emotion…

 

This is the territory of freeze.

It’s nature: immobilization, collapse, disorientation, aimlessness, isolation, disconnection, flatness. 

The movement is from conscious struggle to the fuzzy shadowy realms of unconscious management where the impact is fed into our deeper physiology, the body.

From inside these experiences,  we often can not recognize what is happening (anesthesia - loss of conscious awareness).  And, we definitely don’t have traction because the challenges outweighing our resources gives us nowhere to move from. 

When we are not held by a caring social mirror [Thomas Hubl] (aka: intentional healing relationships) that sees our dilemma and can offer us the resource of compassionate mirroring and resourcing, we are adrift without a sense of orientation. 

There is something that feels better in our system in the initial freeze usually - we lose conscious awareness of something that was too much, overwhelming.

We may feel ‘okay’, ‘fine.’ Though if asked to feel the sensations of that experience we may come up with nothing, the absence of feeling discomfort. 

This is the numbing quality of freeze, the free internal dosing of anesthesia that is our physiological inheritance. The thing is we don’t have conscious access to the dosing. We can feel lethargic, bored, apathetic and tired because it takes a lot of energy to immobilize these energies that are meant to move in us. 

My teacher, Thomas Hubl, says “These parts of us go into the deep freezer and guess who pays the power bill.”

Overwhelm = challenges > resources.

The challenges may not only be the perceived threat - an interpersonal challenge, a complex task, the unknowns in our relational, community, political, natural environment, significant changes we have not chosen in our lives especially when that has resulted in a loss of our sense of who we are.  Ultimately it is to the physiological and emotional experience these challenges bring up in us that our body responds.

If our early conditioning included insufficient resources to stay in connection with ourselves while feeling the impact of the threat in our system, we will hit the internal threshold that lands us in freeze more quickly than someone who experienced threat in that early environment in the context of a consistent responsive connection. This is called conditioning.

One of my favorite examples of positive conditioning of fear in early childhood is of a child being swung in a parent’s arms lovingly but to the edge of excitement and then feeling nuzzled and loved.

Peals of laughter, giggling and perhaps the refrain “again, again” ensue.

The good news is that the more responsive we learn to become to the mobilization responses we sense internally (proximity or distance seeking), the more our current day selves can become a powerful reconditioning agent to our freeze response’s reflex to take us offline.   

What helps you stay in connection with yourself through challenges? Time in the natural world, spiritual practice, prayer, movement, creative expression, feeling held and received by close others…?

How intentional are you in cultivating these resources that bring you back home to yourself and more essential aspects of yourself? 

The cultivation of practices that build our capacity to internal connection is nervous system gold! Front loading resources is a form of nervous system insurance, ours for the commitment to the daily personal practice, self care routines, intentional community, ritual space… 

One of the trickiest things about this natural pain relief response in our bodies is, as alluded to earlier, the danger involved in the disconnection from sensing parts of ourselves. 

If feeling and expressing our fear when we were young resulted in ruptured connections with those in our environment, our system may have helped us by disconnecting us from (or anesthetizing) our sensing of fear.  

We may then put ourselves in unsupportive life or relational situations without being able to perceive either our unmet needs (which would allow us to advocate for them) or that we are not having our needs met until we get into the downstream mess that can include deterioration of our health or of our felt sense of well being.

 

In our relational lives the impact of freeze may feel more like my friend noticing that she couldn’t feel a part of herself she cognitively knew was there. 

Like, “I just don’t cry” or “I never feel angry.”

It can also be that we don’t notice patterns of relational disturbance or that we do but can’t navigate those in the context of the relationship. We just feel disconnected and like the situation or the other person was the problem because we can’t feel the hurt relational part of ourselves.

In freeze we also may notice that judgement or some other mental activity arises in the place where there is not a feeling experience.

Here we can bring the light of consciousness and healing in by self reflecting, 

“I am in judgement. I can’t feel my own experience here. I need support to come back into connection with myself.”

When we can sense our emotional experiences, we have the opportunity to be in deeper relationship with ourselves. This means feeling more alive. 

Isn’t that what we all want? 

It’s just that somehow we have collectively oriented ourselves to the idea that we can feel fully alive without intentionally turning toward the discomfort. 

And then there is this confusion that feeling uncomfortable = not being safe.

Feeling uncomfortable in fact is part of feeling alive and is perfectly safe and even a good idea especially if we build the capacity to bring ourselves toward supportive connection to digest the discomfort.

This can be confusing when the cultural messages around us invite us, in myriad ways, to take any possible off ramp to avoid our uncomfortable emotional experiences. We live in a society that turns us away from intimacy with our own experience pretty consistently and also in which the structures and fabric of collective processing have disintegrated.  

Recognizing that our habits of disconnecting are not personal flaws but aspects of our collective conditioning \ can empower us and help shift us into a healing orientation. 

An Adverse Childhood Experiences psychiatrist who was leading a training I was in years ago said something that made a very strong impression on me:: 

“We are interested in our patients’ ACE scores because it tells us about how resourced or under resourced their parents and their early relational environments were. And that will help us offer them the support they need in building the capacities they didn’t get to develop early in life.”

This lens puts us squarely in a position of compassion which is the foothold for healing relationship!

So the next time you feel blank, absent, numb, offline, locked out of of your inner experience, a beautiful initial response might be to begin responding internally (and maybe to the person we are with):

“I’m feeling overwhelmed.”

“I’m not able to feel myself very well here.” 

“I could use some time, support/care so I can digest some of what feels like too much right now.”
“I’m not able to move forward in a meaningful way right now.” 

This is the trance-breaking magic of speaking the truth that you aren’t able to feel.