Freeze in Your System
What is the freeze response and how does it show up in my life and work?
The freeze response is so common and so misunderstood. It is your body’s way of shutting down, disconnecting when things feel overwhelming or too much. And, most of the time this coping pattern developed in childhood, especially for sensitive and empathic children.
When you are a child, you depend on your caregivers for survival. You are dependent and your nervous system, your body, knows that in order to stay alive, you need to be in connection with your caregivers. So, your body prioritizes the programming that will allow you to stay in connection. (As we become teenagers, we start to push back and play with this, but for now we will stick with the child programming.)
What does this mean? If you experience feeling angry and you express it and your caregiver does not hold space for your anger, your body learns it is not safe to be angry. Now, your caregiver can do this unintentionally. Most of the people in this world have not learned how to hold space for anger, especially children’s anger. So it can be as simple as asking a child to not yell without trying to really validate the anger that can trigger the feeling of being unsafe.
So, your body as a child learns it is not safe to be angry because, “I risk my connection to my caregiver, thus risking my survival.” In order to try and protect and keep you alive, your body learns to automatically shut down the anger response. So, anger triggers the shut down response before you as a child and even now are even aware that you were feeling anger. (I am using anger as the example but it could be anything that was not fully validated and accepted and held space for: sadness, excitement, fear.)
Fast forward to being an adult, your system prioritizes staying in connection vs being authentic, vs having your own needs and desires. This shows up in work life as taking on the responsibility and well being of your clients, having a hard time setting and maintaining the boundaries that truly work for you. Shows up as having a hard time actually resting and nurturing yourself without thinking about your endless to do’s. In intimate relationships, it can look like having a hard time owning and expressing your needs without guilt, taking on over responsibility for your partner’s well being. In parenting, it can look like martrying yourself for your children.
All of this is because your system, thinks that in order to stay safe, it needs to prioritize connection. Your system sees prioritizing the wellness of the one you are in connection to. So, even really before you are consciously aware of it, your system is shutting down, numbing out YOUR desires, YOUR needs and YOUR pleasure. This is why just telling yourself to “put yourself first” and “put your oxygen mask on” and just do more self care is not actually going to shift anything in your system. It is not addressing what actually needs healing to create lasting change.
Your system, your body needs to learn that it is safe even in disconnection. Your system, your body needs to learn that it is safe when you are authentic to yourself. That takes time and healing and it has to take place within your nervous system before it gets to the thoughts. Then, your thought patterns and beliefs and actions, behaviors will shift.
When you heal the shut down response within your nervous system, you experience the ability to be authentic, to feel your power, to have boundaries and to have your desires and needs take up space and matter and it does not take effort. It just becomes your natural state.
I am teaching you how to work with this freeze response inside the workshop From Stuck to Unstoppable. I would love for you to join so you can truly shift and experience the freedom, expansion and possibility on the other side of the Freeze response.
