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Trauma Rewired
The Freeze and Flop Trauma Responses and What’s Really Happening in Your Nervous System
00:55:09
Functional freeze is not laziness. It is a learned survival strategy that lets you function on the outside while feeling numb or shut down on the inside. In this episode of Trauma Rewired, Elisabeth Kristof and Jennifer Wallace unpack freeze, tonic...
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- [00:00]
A
Functional freeze is a survival strategy. It's learned and it's reinforced by chronic stress. And it interferes with really our ability to feel and live a fully connected life.
- [00:11]
B
And this is not out of choice. This is a level of self abandonment. And it's all about capacity. People in this state might skip meals, they might avoid personal care, even like showering or brushing their teeth. It might also be about emotions and avoiding emotional conversations, or even just about avoiding your own emotional state, just to kind of get buy. Functional freeze doesn't always look dramatic. It's very quiet. It's in the moment. You open your laptop and you stare at it for two hours, or you keep it open and you zone out on your phone and start scrolling. And it could last for hours or days about just like kind of doing nothing. You might cancel plans, not because you don't want the connection, but because your system literally can't mobilize to go for the connection. It's just too much. And functional freeze is a chronic survival state state, externally functional, but internally numb or frozen, with disrupted cognition and emotional disconnect due to ongoing or unresolved stress or trauma. This is often lumped in with burnout, but they're very different because burnout is a state of emotional, physical and mental exhaustion caused by chronic unmanaged stress. The root cause is overuse into depletion, into collapse. Think about the phrase I've been running on fumes for too long. That is a clear identifier of a burnout state.
- [01:38]
A
Have you ever sat across from someone or intended to have a really important conversation, but you couldn't make the words come out? It was like your voice was gone. Or you sit down to work on a really important project and you know that it matters, but you can't get your body to move. And sometimes this paralysis can feel like failure. But what if it's not? What if it's an intelligent adaptive response of your nervous system doing the best that it can to protect you?
- [02:04]
B
For a long time I thought I was unmotivated. I thought I was lazy and even apathetic. The truth is I actually had a lot of emotions underlying that. But really I was living in functional freeze. I was unable to move my body. And it's not that I didn't care. I care a lot. But I couldn't access motion, I couldn't access motivation, and I couldn't access my emotions through the functional freeze. And understanding it was really changed everything for me. And today we're unpacking the freeze trauma response as not just a trauma state, but as a form of survival that can become chronic over time. And we'll explore how to thaw slowly and safely.
- [02:47]
A
The most important part.
- [02:48]
B
Yes. Welcome to Trauma Rewired, the podcast that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the body, and what you can do to heal. I'm your co host Jennifer Wallace. I'm a neurosomatic psychedelic preparation and integration guide and I bring your nervous system into peak somatic experiences so that you can create lasting, sustainable transformation in your daily life for what you are desiring to create. I'm also one of the educators at the Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification.
- [03:17]
A
And I'm your co host Elizabeth Kristof, founder of Brainbase.com, an online community where we use applied neurology and somatics for resilience, personal development, growth and behavior change. And I'm also the founder of the Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification. That's an ICF accredited course for therapists, coaches and practitioners to bring neurosomatic tools, practices and a framework into all of the good work that you do. Make sure to subscribe to this channel so that you never miss an episode and share it with someone that you think it might help.
- [03:47]
B
And if you're watching us on YouTube, click that little bell so that you're not missing an episode there either.
- [03:52]
A
So let's talk about how freeze gets patterned in before we dive too much deeper into the actual neurology of this trauma response. So freeze gets patterned in in chaotic or chronically stressful environments where it is not saf to move to express yourself. There's not an option to fight or to flee and that becomes the well worn path that your nervous system learns to go down. What this can look like is frequently occurring shutdown or dissociation or having that feeling of feeling really far away, an inability to make decisions. Maybe you avoid initiating or completing tasks that can also be like Jen was talking about, a real sense of emotional flatness or numbness, this lack of sensation. You can have very low energy even though you're resting a lot of the time. And we can find ourselves in behaviors like over consuming media or food or substance. When we're stuck in this state of chronic freeze.
- [04:57]
B
And we internalize these states of being as personal flaws, even as personality because they're so well worn as paths. We think that that's who we are and we begin to identify that way. But that's not true at all. In life, especially in infancy and childhood, we're completely dependent on our caregivers. If we experience emotional neglect or misattunement or threats without escape, be it parental rage, any kind of abuse, parentification, covert abuse, or even household chaos, that is going to create this freeze state. And it could also be that we get punished for expressing ourselves, for having emotions and emotional needs and even like looking for connection and feeling the sadness and feeling the loss of those connections. And these are really developed in environments where we lack that protection and we lack the safety of, of being ourselves and that real connection. Yeah, when we experience this kind of chaos in our homes, our nervous system learns that we, we can't look for help through running. Fighting isn't safe, crying is dangerous and it will still will go quiet and often go numb. And we learn that if our, if we learn that our emotions are unsafe and really stressful, that will also dysregulate our caregiver. That creates another layer of a lack of safety. And when our caregivers don't know how to attune to us and we can't co regulate with them, we end up shutting down. And this is a method, an activation as an effort response that really works because it reduces pain. We are able to disappear from the threat and we are, are able to survive in that moment. And then the path gets created and we continue to walk down with it.
- [06:54]
A
Yeah, it's really an intelligent adaptation that can become that well worn path that then becomes maybe harmful as it continues on. And one of the ways that this can become harmful as it gets patterned into adulthood is the way that it starts to show up in our relationships. Because when we have this chronically occurring freeze response, it really has an impact impact on our ability to connect and to communicate with people. And so in a real physiological sense, what that can look like is losing your voice in difficult conversations, having a lot of trouble making eye contact, feeling like you are immobilized or maybe like repeating, I don't know, I don't know. When you're having a conversation with someone, you could have a really flat affect to your voice and your facial expression. Like you just look very disconnected when you're talking to someone. And then in the behavior of the relationship, maybe whenever there's a difficult conversation, you kind of shut down, you go numb, you check out of the situation. That can be difficult for a partner and to develop relationships with intimacy. And you can shut down mid conversation when you're trying to resolve something. And that impairs our ability to repair a rupture. And then with our emotional landscape too, that can lead to a lot of things that aren't great patterns for our emotional health. Right. We might find that we're avoiding emotional expression, authentically being able to express ourselves, or just generally feeling numb or emotionally unavailable. Even when you really want to connect, you're disconnecting from your own needs, your own boundaries, your desires. There's a real resistance to feeling vulnerable and having a certain level of connection. And that's not because you don't care. It's because your body predicts threat or danger in being seen. And so then you find yourself perhaps withdrawing or checking out, even during meaningful or intimate moments.
- [08:52]
B
What's interesting about the phrase I don't care that's coming up for me right now is that I learned that, that that was part of freeze. And to hide that I would change my language and be like, I, I'm not sure, or you know, instead of saying like, I don't care, I don't know or I don't care, I'd be like, I'm not bothered by that. Or, you know, because I got smart to how my language would identify one of my. And then to hide that I was in that response, I learned to change my language.
- [09:20]
A
That's amazing. Our brains will do that because we're still trying to perform and we do really want that connection. So then we're like trying to cover it up. But at a physiological level, we're losing all this prefrontal cortex activation. We don't have the ability to make decisions or to know what we're feeling, to feel our internal sensations. So we really don't know. So we can't say something else.
- [09:42]
B
And the hiding gets more pattern, the mask gets thicker, if you will. Because the withdrawal isn't about caring. It's really about what the body is saying. It's about the body saying like this, this is too much. Right. Without regulation, like you were saying, vulnerability becomes dangerous. So like, it's the idea of like, I can't say the truth in this moment because I will lose the connection based on the activation that my nervous system is saying. And those freeze patterns in relationships, they can be really subtle, they can be confusing, but they're often misinterpreted by our, by the people really that we're with. And both the person experiencing them is feeling misunderstood and confused. But also it creates confusion in partnership, whether that is intimate partnership, work, partnerships, like all of the relationships that we are moving in through into. And this can look like ghosting, disappearing after closeness as like a post connection collapse. It can look like behaviorally staying in relationships that feel unsafe, feel unfulfilling by feeling stuck, but unable to leave or to change things. And this, it's. It's performative connection. And that, wow, that is like hitting me. I'm actually starting to sweat even kind of thinking about it, how my nervous system is responding. Right. Because it's about that going through the motions without actually feeling it in your body. Right. It's, it's. Sometimes we can even know things, but it's not enough to know it. We really have to work in our bodies. There's an inner experience where there's like this feeling frozen, paralyzed, unable to initiate repair or reconnection. And this flooding of shame self blame for not being able to show up for. For really hiding our authenticity. And it's like watching yourself from the outside, unable to engage, knowing that we. Knowing what we should say and do, but feeling like our body is not cooperating. And this just creates so many layers of shame.
- [11:54]
A
Yes.
- [11:54]
B
If you would like to experience the tools that we talk about on every conversation of trauma rewired, please join us for two free weeks@rewired trial.com.
- [12:04]
A
We meet live and in community. There's also a huge on demand library of classes with practices and neuro tools. And it's a place to really integrate the neurosomatic work that we do daily. So you can join us@rewiretrial.com and this.
- [12:20]
B
Just creates so many layers of shame.
- [12:23]
A
Yes. So many times in my past, before I started really working with my nervous system, I would intend to have conversations and like, be honest with someone about something. Express like a need or a boundary or a vulnerable statement. And I would go into the conversation so prepared and I literally could not. Like, I lost my voice. My mind was blank. I was totally out of the situation. And then the shame that would come after that of like, why can't I do this? I think I'm a strong, motivated person. I don't have the bandwidth to be able to do this. I just didn't understand how deep that pattern ran.
- [13:03]
B
And we'll get into this, but it's not about freeze in a way of like full mobility. It's actually the internal states of how our body freezes and the internal organ. Organisms. Organs.
- [13:15]
A
Yeah. Our breath, our vocal tone, all these deep intrinsic systems that are also being immobilized. So we have a couple different things that we want to start to parcel apart here because there's some nuances to the way that freeze shows up. So we have freeze, the acute Freeze response, the kind of classic freeze response. We have tonic immobility, which is longer duration. We have flop, and then we have functional freeze and burnout. So we're going to kind of look at all of those to start to find some differences here. They're all related, but they're a little bit different. So true freeze is short. It is like a very momentary immobility where your nervous system and your brain are taking in information from the environment, but they don't yet know what to do, Right? So it's like that deer in the headlights freeze really quick while you're assessing the situation, and then you go into another response. So you freeze to flight or you freeze to fight, or if fight or flight is not available, you might freeze to flop, to shut down. And we'll explore what more of that is. But the most important thing here is that it's very short. It is both a parasympathetic and a sympathetic activation. So you have this big charge inside, like your heart rate might increase, your respiration might increase, you feel a lot of tension in your muscles, but at the same time you are immobilized, you might lose your voice, you can't take action. But again, in a true freeze response, it's just very momentary. And then you move into another one of the F responses in a full blown F response. And that follows the same pattern of our F responses, right? We have our amygdala perceiving threat, then our periaqueductal gray is triggering the immobility, and that is communicating with the brainstem to change our autonomic system and those responses. And then fuel and resources are moving away from the prefrontal cortex, where we have higher order thinking systems, ability to make decision, to look at the situation, with altitude to inhibit our back brain and survival responses. All of that is going on in a freeze response. But there's just more, more immobility than a fight or flight.
- [15:26]
B
And let's talk about tonic immobility, because freeze and tonic immobility are often used interchangeably, but they do refer to really distinct neurobiological and physiological reactions in the body. So tonic immobility is more of a last resort survival response when escape or defense is impossible, often followed by shame and confusion. It's triggered by intense inescapable threat, often during a sexual assault of violence or when one is experiencing an extreme fear. And this is characterized by involuntary motor and vocal inhibition and rigid paralysis. Signs of tomic tonic signs of tonic immobility are frozen body often very stiff. Wide eyed, stillness, hypervigilance, high internal activation, but no movement is possible. And this can involve vocal suppression. But internal cognition may still be active. A slowed heart rate and breathing, altered time perception or dissociation. And this can last for minutes to hours. So where freeze is this pause in preparing for an action. Tonic immobility is freeze to survive. It's to avoid pain and to deter threat. And tonic immobility has been well documented in survivors of sexual trauma, childhood abuse and combat. And it's often accompanied by shame because the body did not fight back or could not flee from the situation, from the danger. And so freeze is earlier in the threat cascade and it may show up subtly in modern life. Like freezing in a meeting, like we were talking about being unable to speak or how I was experiencing it as I was talking about it earlier.
- [17:09]
A
Yeah, that tonic immobility is like further on the spectrum. Like this is a big life threatening event and I can't escape.
- [17:16]
B
And I think more people when we say are stuck in a chronic freeze response, it's more tonic immobility than it is like freeze moves on.
- [17:24]
A
Yes, freeze moves on. And then we'll parcel apart functional freeze too, which is a little bit different from that. Okay. Then we have flop, which is another one of the F responses that's really related to freeze. And this is a more passive like collapse of your system. You feel very limp, very heavy. And that often occurs after tonic immobility. So at first I'm very rigid and I have a really high state of activation inside internally. Still when I have gone on beyond that, it's a big parasympathetic activation and I lose energy. I might even collapse or faint. My body feels like limp, rubbery, heavy, feel very fatigued. And there's a high amount of dissociation that comes with flop because flop is really when we are, if we're thinking about it in terms of a trauma response that would happen in our animal body, it's like we've been caught by the predator, we're going to experience something really unpleasant. And so it is adaptive to not be able to feel that sensation, to disconnect from the body. Maybe if we play dead, the predator will pass on or if we go through the experience, we aren't having to experience it in our consciousness and the body, we lose sensation of pain and there's just a real disconnect from the body. So with tonic immobility it's like this rigid freeze. You're still aware and you're also still really activated inside. But Then when we go into flop, there's much more dissociation, much more disconnect, and the immobility is less rigid and more collapsed.
- [19:03]
B
And I think too, and you can really see how flop would be so intelligent for people who have experienced early childhood sexual trauma over time or even in that moment. But as it continues, that that would be the path that one would take.
- [19:21]
A
Or any kind of like long term abuse, physical abuse. And then again that can become the well worn pattern and it can show up in when the stressors aren't so high. Like I remember being in a tremendous amount of financial and work stress and we would have these meetings to talk about it and I would just be like flopped at my computer. So you also see this flop posture of like, you can't even hold your head up. The fatigue is so heavy. And it's really that high stress load in a situation that you can't escape at the time and your body's just kind of shutting down. I have an example of this that I actually experienced this morning that I want to share about because I think it really beautifully illustrates the progression of this. So I was walking my dog, Juni, and in our neighborhood there's a lot of wildlife. And so we were out in this area. And first she starts like smelling the air, right? And then I hear a rustle. So like my sensory systems are starting to pick up something. My amygdala is like, hey, there's something different here. Radar's going off. Little bit of activation. Then I start to see the outline, the silhouette of some really big pigs. And then I noticed that they have tusks. And I was like, oh, those are some wild boars. And there were four or five of them. And they started coming down the hill towards us. And there was a moment, it felt longer because time kind of expands in that freeze response. So there was a moment both Juni and I were frozen. And then she turned and started sprinting as fast as she could. And I was like, good idea. And so I started sprinting with her. And so that was that moment of acute freeze where we just had this split second immobility as our system was gathering information. What's going on? Is this dangerous? Can I run? Can I fight? Well, I don't want to fight the wild boar. I can escape because there's plenty of room around me. So we went into the adaptive next response, which was to flee. And then I was able to process that stress response because we were actually running. So that is an example of like a really healthy Stress response. If we hadn't had an escape, we might have gone into tonic immobility and gotten really rigid and hoped the boars didn't notice us. And, or if the boars attacked us, we might have flopped right. To not experience that sensation. And early childhood abuse, or living in a state of chronic stress or like a long term abusive relationship is like, I live in the house with the wild boars, you know, and so I'm constantly, I can't escape it because I need my house, I need food and shelter and my space. Maybe the door is locked and I can't get out. And so now I'm constantly facing that threat response of the wild, wild boar being the boar. And so I start to go more into freeze and flop because there's not an escape route.
- [22:06]
B
It's a beautiful example. Yeah, illustrates freeze perfectly.
- [22:11]
A
So these are all the different types of like in the moment stress responses, how freeze presents. But like all other F responses, freeze can become a well worn survival strategy. Something that gets patterned into our nervous system and becomes our go to adaptive strategy in stressful moments. And, and we hear a lot about functional freeze. This is a term that's used a lot. It's not a clinical term, but it's used a lot to describe that chronic stress trauma related state where we have limits in our daily functioning, where we are able though to show up and do the things that we need to do. We can go through the motions, but inside we're not feeling a lot. There's emotional numbness, there's dissociation, there might be some mental paralysis or brain fog, inability to think clearly and we start to avoid a lot of tasks. And so it's a chronic internally frozen state where someone might appear outwardly to be getting by, but internally they remain numb or stuck or dissociated. So functional freeze is also a survival strategy. It's learned and it's reinforced by chronic stress. And it interferes with really our ability to feel and live a fully connected life.
- [23:28]
B
And this is not out of choice. This is a level of self abandonment and it's all about capacity. People in this state might skip meals, they might avoid personal care, even like showering or brushing their teeth. And it might also be about emotions and avoiding emotional conversations or even just about avoiding your own emotional state just to kind of get by. And functional freeze doesn't always look dramatic. It's very quiet. It's in the moment. You open your laptop and you stare at it for two hours or you keep it open and you zone out on your phone and start scrolling, rolling. And it could last for hours or days about just like kind of doing nothing. You might cancel plans not because you don't want the connection, but because your system literally can't mobilize to go for the connection. It's just too much. And functional freeze is a chronic survival state. Externally functional, but internally numb or frozen, with disrupted cognition and emotional disconnect due to ongoing or unresolved stress or trauma. This is often lumped in with burnout, but they're very, very different because burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by chronic unmanaged stress, especially in work and in caregiving roles. The root cause is overuse into depletion, into collapse. And think about the phrase, I've been running on fumes for too long. That is a clear identifier of. Of a burnout state. And functional freeze is a nervous system state where you continue to perform the basics of life. You're maintaining your own status quo, but you feel internally disconnected. You feel numb, indecisive, and immobilized. And it's not about depletion. It's about shutdown as a protection. If you think about the thread for this overwhelm into perceived threat, into a freeze state, and thinking that it's safer to numb out or to do the bare minimum than it is to feel or to act or to follow through.
- [25:40]
A
I really think of, like, burnout as about, like, capacity and that idea of, like, burning the candle at both ends. You are doing a lot. And freeze is more that ongoing threat response, that interpretation of your brain of threat that's continuing to create that immobilization. And it's about the nervous system pattern of perceived threat and moving into a trauma response, rather than just overall system depletion by overworking, over giving, overdependence.
- [26:06]
B
Yeah. I remember when we recorded with burnout before, and it was talking about that internal flame. Right.
- [26:11]
A
The.
- [26:11]
B
The energy, the batteries that we have for each thing that we're involved in. And kind of looking at our system as these different fuel tanks. And it's like, okay, I can, I can do this, but I might need to be pulling from this other resource. And then, like, I want to go outside and take walks, but it's like, if I do that, I'm burning from something else and, like, don't have the capacity.
- [26:30]
A
Yeah.
- [26:31]
B
To maintain all. All of what I really want to engage in with life.
- [26:36]
A
Yeah. I think with burnout, there has to be, like, some lifestyle changes to reduce stress. There have to Be some ways to increase capacity and to process stress. And then with functional freeze, there really has to be this element of neural reprogramming and threat reduction to reduce the amount of threat that's coming in all the time and to stop making that the well worn pathway.
- [26:56]
B
Yes, yeah. And it's for the person who's experiencing burnout, it's really threatening to make these lifestyle changes. Which also comes back down to the the neuro work. Right. And creating and extending that capacity and really understanding where do I get my fuel from, how do I resource in my life as like a human.
- [27:15]
A
Yeah. And they can overlap of course too. You know, they can both overlap because being in that freeze, high stress state is causing depletion of resources that can lead to more burnout. You can have both, but you kind of tackle them a little differently.
- [27:29]
B
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [27:30]
A
Also, people often talk about functional freeze as being a dorsal vagal shutdown. Like a too much parasympathetic where the dorsal branch of your vagus nerve is creating that immobility. And that is true, but it's also a little bit more complex than that. It is more whole system than that. Because our vagus nerve doesn't act alone. The dorsal vagal response is part of a whole brain system wide protective strategy, not just the vagus nerve. So the brain detects danger. Right. That's where our amygdala is our threat response. And it evaluates your options. And if needed, it's going to send out a global inhibitory signal through different subcortical and autonomic pathways. And the dorsal vagal complex is just a component of the full body orchestration of shutdown. Right. So our prefrontal cortex and our language centers get less fuel inactivation, they get a little quieter. Our, our sympathetic arousal, if we're in that flop state starts to drop and that leads to low energy. And we also have shifts in our neurotransmitters. We get less dopamine production for less motivation, less norepinephrine so that we have less alertness, less acetylcholine, which leads to lower attention and less focus. Our HPA axis downregulates and then over time that can lead to more blunt, blunted cortisol and not an appropriate stress response, not enough activation to situations at hand. And then our proprioception and our interoceptive abilities start to fade. Right. We have less awareness of where our body is in space. We have less ability to feel the internal signals inside. And also we're running more in a default mode network. Which leads to more rumination, more looping thoughts of shame or dissociative thought patterns. And then the dorsal motor nucleus of our veins, vagus, is actually located in our brain stem, and that controls our visceral parasympathetic output. So that actually slows down our heart rate, our digestion, our blood pressure. And so the signals are traveling down the vagus nerve to the organs, but they're not necessarily the cause. They're the messenger.
- [29:48]
B
And the emotional toll is heavy. In freeze, we don't just lose energy. We lose our emotions and our emotional connection. We lose the ability to feel excitement, to feel joy, to feel purpose, and to feel. It just all begins to feel like a dullness, and we can't feel the good or the bad. In these states, emotional processing becomes nearly impossible. And we begin left. We are left feeling numb. We are left feeling shut down and often deeply ashamed of what we can't do. And I've experienced this firsthand functional freeze and burnout like we were talking about. They really begin to overlap, and it's hard to separate them, especially with thought loops of shame and having the focus, that survival focus of, like, what I'm lacking. And I really believe, too, that numbness is. It's like all of the emotions are happening at one time, and I can't identify them. I can't move into processing the anger or the grief or the. The. The disconnect. To be able to feel the. Just to be able to tap into purpose, because it just all goes very flat.
- [31:03]
A
Yep, a hundred percent. There's no, like, nuance to the emotional experience. And since this season is all about emotions and emotional processing and nervous system health, I think let's talk a little bit about emotional processing and freeze and how that interplays. And then also we're looking at some emotions as we dive into these different F responses. And so today I was thinking we would talk about almost like that void of emotions and look at numbness and apathy and the emotional experience of that, or really the lack of an emotional experience that comes with that. So when it comes to emotional processing and feeling, anything freeze can create a huge barrier to that. Like Jen was talking about the numbness, because we have those interoceptive deficits. Like, the dial is actually being turned down on the signals from inside of our body that are our felt sense of the emotional experience. So we start to lose some interoceptive clarity. And we also then might start to attribute too much threat to those internal signals. Right. And so then that leads to even more freeze with the sensations from inside of our body. And so even if there's a desire to feel present, if we're in that chronic freeze state or when we start to freeze, when we feel those internal sensations of our emotions, we can't get out of that just by thinking our way out of it. It's a protective shuttle shutdown of our sensory and emotional systems, and that is driven by our trauma or overwhelm of the. Of the sensation. And so you'll start to feel cut off from your emotions or your body. You want to feel something, but you can't access it. Like people who come into the site to work with us. A lot of times in the beginning, it's like just very difficult to even feel any kind of signal and then make a sound or a movement with that. And so we really have to approach it gently with minimum effective dose. And so overall, there's this emotional blunting, physical disconnection and a dullness to our sensory systems, which then can come with a lot of confusion or shame about that disconnection. And all of that is impairing our ability to be able to express and emote.
- [33:17]
B
And there's a difference between numbness and apathy. Numbness often gets labeled as apathy, but it isn't quite the same. Apathy is more in the burnout spectrum and has more to do with a lack of resources. Apathy is the absence of interest, motivation, or concern. And it's a cognitive emotional state where things don't matter or you believe that they don't. Right? And this is rooted in neurological exhaustion, burnout and depression. There's this dopaminergic dysfunction which translate as a lack of reward, anticipation. Right? A dopamine dysfunction. And that creates a learned helplessness or a chronic disillusionment. Right? And the key features of this are lack of care, motivation, or engagement. And you don't want to feel, you don't want to act, you don't want to connect. Right? And this is then often tied to hopelessness or resignation or disconnection from purpose.
- [34:15]
A
Yeah, you're burnt out.
- [34:17]
B
Yeah, you must burnt out. You just can't do it.
- [34:18]
A
You don't have the capacity to care anymore. So you move into that apathy state.
- [34:22]
B
It calls for too much energy. And like, where are you pulling that from if you don't know how to resource through your nervous system? It's when you can't resource through your own nervous system, it's hard to resource from other people. It's hard to resource from love and from connection and from this is why I think animals are so important for people who have chronic trauma. Right. To be able to really still access being loved when they can't engage with like human connection.
- [34:52]
A
100%. Yeah.
- [34:54]
B
And I think some examples of this is that like you stop pursuing your goals because it feels pointless. You don't care anymore that you're isolating. You stop trying not because you, you can't feel, but just because it starts to feel meaningless. So it, to sum it up, when we're thinking about the desire to feel and numbness, it would be in present of I want to feel something, but apathy would be lacking. I don't care either way. Oh man, I feel it. I can really feel the connection, the connection to this right now. Especially when I think about those functional freeze moments. Right. How apathy really does start to turn it like to, to, to come into.
- [35:38]
A
Play because you don't have the resources. Yeah, yeah. And then there's like the capacity that you have to experience emotions. And those are a little bit different too. Right. With numbness it's like blocked. You cannot feel it. Your system is shut down. And with apathy it's more flattened or you're like uninterested in the emotional experience. And again, it's because we don't have the bandwidth.
- [36:02]
B
Yeah, I mean, you just, you just can't. And it's really protective. With numbness, it's a protective response like dissociation. Whereas apathy, it's a loss of motivation, meaning or energy.
- [36:13]
A
Yes. And then the kind of tone to these different experiences is that numbness is more like the connection is painful, the system is protecting against that. And with apathy there's more withdrawal or indifference there again, because we are under resourced and lacking the motivation to connect and feel.
- [36:41]
B
And both of these can coexist at the same time. Someone may feel numb and also begin to develop apathy as a second emotion, as a secondary emotional response. Like, why try if I can't feel anything anyway? But understanding these differences, it really helps guide the nervous system work and the emotional reintegration that one would need to the path that one would need to take.
- [37:04]
A
Yeah, totally. Do I need to create safety with emotional sensations to kind of come out of that numbness and work on my interoceptive system, my ability to feel and hear those signals, my ability to mobilize, or do I need to really start by resourcing the nervous system and doing tools that increase my capacity, working on my metabolic health and my respiration and my sleep so that I now have the bandwidth to start to move out of these states of apathy, overwhelmed burnout.
- [37:34]
B
And really, because of their overlap, it's all of it, right? I mean, the truth of it, it's all of it. And it all comes down to safety one way or another. And working with the system as a whole.
- [37:45]
A
Yeah, I don't think you can really parcel them apart that distinctly.
- [37:50]
B
They're part of the same thread.
- [37:53]
A
And I want to dive a little deeper into the interoceptive system and freeze. Because I think that's really important as we're talking about emotional processing and emotional experience. So when we are part of what is happening with freeze is when our internal sensations become threatening, right? We have internal sensations of these big emotions that have maybe been repressed or suppressed for a long time. And those pathways of repression and suppression are well worn. And so there's a lot of pain or shame or panic or grief that feels overwhelming to feel. And so our nervous system has learned to blunt those signals. And over time, we develop deficits in our interoceptive system. And so interoception, again, that's like our internal perception, our ability to feel ourselves. And that includes, like, am I hungry? Am I thirsty? Am I tired? But it also includes our emotional states. Because emotions are physiological events that are happening in our body. And this can be really distorted with trauma. And in freeze, even those subtle signals like I'm hungry or I need to use the bathroom can start to feel unsafe. Because we're so chronically disconnected from our body. So it can start to look like this inward threat response, this. This internal threat that is creating the freeze. And then you start to see it in your behavior. Like zoning out at meals or skipping them altogether, or not noticing your thirst or your fatigue. Or not noticing you need to go to the bathroom until it's really early, urgent. You can definitely find this showing up in moments of intimacy where you're having intimate relations. But you don't feel full or fully present. Or you don't feel a lot of sensation. And you're kind of frozen and dissociated through that experience. And all of that is happening because in freeze, the nervous system often shuts down our interoceptive awareness. So you stop feeling these signals. And it feels. Feels better at that level of survival and protection to not feel at all. But then again, this has a huge impact on our ability to process emotions. And how can we process emotions that we can't feel or respond to?
- [40:09]
B
And mobility is key to emotion. We need to be able to move physically Vocally and relationally. And freeze constricts that movement. Even your. Your face, your breath, your voice, all start to shut down. And these are ESS tools for emotional expression. They get shut down so you can't cry, you can't speak, you can't use your voice or. Or shake the energy out. It all just becomes stuck. And I think this is why so many people in functional freeze start to experience that numbness. Because it's this internal state, this apathetic and emotionally flat state. It starts to experience from the inside of the body first. And it's not that that we don't experience these emotions. It's that the system is too shut down to feel them or to express them. And you can't process what you can't access. And so this mask of stillness when freeze looks like calm. It's a fawn freeze loop. Also, where people may seem chill or easygoing, but they're actually immobilized, Especially in neurodivergent or trauma impacted flu folks. Freeze can be mistaken for going with the flow. Right. But it's often. It hits so hard, but it's often masking internal overwhelm and shutdown. I mean, I've always just identified as like, me too. I'm just like the chillest person I. I can. I can do it. I'm just going with the flow. Like, you don't even have to worry about me.
- [41:41]
A
Totally.
- [41:42]
B
Because I'm too frozen to make a decision.
- [41:44]
A
Yes, totally.
- [41:45]
B
I'm actually not that chill.
- [41:46]
A
I'm thinking of, like. No, me neither. I'm thinking of thinking about so many times in my past life, like in work environments and stuff where people are like, you're so easy. Like, it would be in a kind of a high stress work environment where there were a lot of big personalities. And it was like, I was the one that people always wanted to work with because I was easy and I didn't care what decisions we made. I would just go with the flow. I was really agreeable. I probably had needs, desires, opinions, but I was just kind of checked out.
- [42:16]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Because it's not safe to vocalize all that. And it's too energy costly to have an idea that might actually be very supportive to the project or the idea at hand. But it's like, no, I'll just be. I'm just back here going with it.
- [42:32]
A
And I think that kind of leads into how freeze can be hidden for high performers a lot. Because I think a lot of times freeze is viewed as kind of the weaker trauma Response, which is not true. Right. They're all intelligent, reflexive, adaptive survival responses. But people especially who are high performing tend to associate more with like flight and that sense of urgency and perfectionism and getting things done. Or like fight being aggressive, being vocal, standing up for their needs, having a big presence. But I think it's there in a lot of high performers and I think it's under recognized because it doesn't always look like laying in bed and doing nothing. It can often be masked by over functioning and perfectionism and people pleasing. You're getting things done, it's more of that functional freeze because you're getting everything done. But inside you're still feeling really disconnected or joyless. You know we talked about this with Margie in our episode about high performers and emotional numbness. Emotional numbness. And it's like making these big decisions and you feel nothing or you reach your level of success and, and you, you don't feel anything and there's no capacity there to experience everything. You're created because you are a little bit frozen inside. And I think this often has really big health consequences because we don't see it and we keep pushing through and that's. You can find yourself in a bad spot.
- [44:00]
B
And I mean people in frieze, they still hit their numbers, they still are team leaders, they still run very successful businesses. But inside you're numb. And it's this unmotivatedness, just like showing up and going through the motions because you know what to do. Just like that conversation with Margie, it was like anyone can really build a, a large business, a successful business and you can do that from a freeze state. And it's that functional freeze. Like you're in high gear, you're moving, but it's in, it's from a survival mode energy, not in an alignment energy. And I truly believe some of what I've experienced in my metabolic, metabolic health is 100% down to freeze, tonic immobility and flop and functional freeze. Yeah, right. That's why we had that conversation with Matt about metabolic function. Like you've got to use this whole body perspective through the nervous system and resourcing and capacity because you've got to get your metabolism back online.
- [44:57]
A
Yeah. Because if you're under resourced again, you're going to be in that state of burnout and depletion. And then if we're really activated by the stress all the time, we're also going to be in high stress states like freeze. The emotional cost to that or the cost to that in General is huge because we have emotional burnout. We're living in a state of chronic stress. There's relationship disconnection. Like we talked about. The relational patterns that happen with freeze. And eventually there's gonna be a breakdown, right? And thawing out a freeze isn't necessarily a bad about doing less. It's about feeling more. Being able to feel into those internal signals, to be able to process the emotions, to hear our intuition, to have a full lived experience. Sometimes that requires slowing down and creating a different space in life. But sometimes it is just a matter of also making time to be with your body, to start to train your interoception and to move from that space.
- [46:01]
B
And let's talk about how we do begin to work out of a freeze response. Because this is really a time when we, I mean we always stress minimum effective dose. But this is definitely one of those times as we are building our capacity to feel, to reconnect and to, to our work, to our purpose, to, to people. And it's not about pushing or forcing or trying to snap ourselves out of it, which I think is a huge dialogue internally for people is that just need to snap out of this. And it is simply not that simple to do. And it's about building little by little the regulation practices and this capacity. And it's really a step by step action, right? The, the first goal isn't action, it's about safety. And we start by teaching the body that it's okay to feel again. To start to identify these emotions and to connect to them through the body. And in this realm, multidimensional physiological way. And that begins with nervous system regulation. We use tools like respiration, gentle movement, sensory input to shift from shutdown to presence. These inputs tell your brain that you are safe. Now it's about mobilization, as we were talking about in the internal place from our vocals, from our diaphragm. It's about rocking and swaying, maybe laying on the floor to get some movement. So you feel very supported by the floor or by the bed. And these little tiny movements really connect, reconnect our brain and our body. Movement is really the key because you can't feel or express when the system is immobilized.
- [47:44]
A
Yes. And I think it's so important. Just like you were saying, when we're talking about movement, we don't mean like you have to get out there and run or go do a big workout. We're talking about little gentle, intentional, precise movements or maybe some gentle somatic movements or even just using your vocals. That's a form of movement. You know, you're moving energy through your body by just an audible exhale.
- [48:07]
B
Yes. All through the vagus nerve. Like you are. You are toning and activating this huge nerve running in through your body. And it, it's, it's so simple and it can be really scary for people.
- [48:21]
A
Which is why we have to resource ourselves with other tools as well. And then also, as we're starting to begin this process of being able to feel and respond to our emotions, we really need to begin that in a minimum effective dose, which we talk about so much on here. But not diving into this huge experience, expecting our body and our nervous system to be able to process massive emotions that have been repressed for maybe our entire life. Right. And so we want to spend some time building that skill of even just taking 30 seconds to drop into the body, noticing any sensitivity, sensations, having a little. Do I. Does my body want to make a movement? Do I want to make a sound? Okay, that's enough for today. And then maybe doing some tools to regulate around that so that you're really teaching the system and continuing to recreate safety around that experience rather than pushing yourself into a place of more depletion or more dysregulation by trying to move into that emotional processing. So we don't want to dive into the deep end. We want to allow the emotion to surface enough to teach the system this is safe and I can start to feel this and move it without drowning and without reinforcing patterns of dissociation, shutdown, or any other outputs that we don't want to recreate. Like pain. Yeah.
- [49:39]
B
I think it can be really hard for people who desire deep change and want to come out of these responses to hear that we're not diving into the deep end, that we're not going to go fast into this, that it's not just going to like, happen. Like, it is not literally a snap out of it. And I think that's really hard for people who really have that desire for something different and to be a different way. It is all about going slow and, and, and meeting yourself really where you are. And oftentimes I remember when I started this journey many years ago, meeting myself where I was was not where I thought I was. I really realized that, oh, I'm. I'm actually down the spectrum a little bit more. I'm not as far as ahead as I think I am because of the mask and the performance and the, the having to keep up with so many things. It was like, oh, I really have to dial this way, way, way, way back. And that was uncomfortable to even. That was uncomfortable. I mean I'm just. That's the sentence. I was very uncomfortable.
- [50:38]
A
Yeah. I think for me, same. And it felt boring to me. Like I was like this, this feels boring because I didn't feel. I didn't feel anything, you know, like I didn't have any sensation. I couldn't really make movement. I didn't know what I was doing. It was confusing and it was boring. And I was talking with someone about the neuro resets that we do on the site. Because we, we talk about. We do emotional processing on there. And they were like, it's not what I thought emotional processing would be like. Like I imagined it like always being like screaming into the pillow or like doing a page purge. And like yeah, sometimes we do do anger at expression. But it's really more like self attunement. It's like attuning to your internal sensations and gradually expressing that through sound, through movement. It's not always going to be this big thing. That's not always what I feel.
- [51:28]
B
And we don't always have the energy to beat something or hit or jump around. Like it's really about moving as we're saying, in these really small intrinsic places. Not this huge expression.
- [51:40]
A
Yes. And just developing that practice of self attunement. Being with different parts of ourselves or being with ourselves in different emotional states. And then that's where you really start to learn the nuances of the emotional experience and all the different flavors and expressions. And it actually becomes really fun and interesting to yourself.
- [51:59]
B
Right. Like you really start to understand and develop a language with yourself and with your body and that. That's what we're after.
- [52:07]
A
Yeah, it feels good. Like you start to look forward to it. And then all of life becomes more interesting. Like emotional processing was boring or somatic work was boring because I didn't feel anything. But all of life was kind of more numbed out because of that. And so as I can start to attune to myself, mobilize, express. All of life becomes more interesting because I'm feeling all of the time I'm like alive to this human experience.
- [52:33]
B
And it has a huge impact on dissociation. Because like dissociation you start to. You start to re pattern dissociation into a embodiment. Right. And then it's like okay, you're in and then you're out. You're in and then you're out. And then you're in a little bit more for a little bit longer, and you start to experience life so differently. The fullness and the richness and. And then you get to have more agency in what you participate in instead of just like, going with the flow and rolling with it all the time. It's like, I don't want to do that. Yeah, you have agency and authenticity.
- [53:04]
A
And you know yourself.
- [53:05]
B
Yeah. And you know yourself. And there's. There's nothing. There is nothing like that in the world.
- [53:09]
A
Yeah. So if you've been living in freeze or emotional numbness, if this conversation resonates with you, or this is a reminder that you're not lazy or broken, you're not too much or not enough, you are running on your survival patterns, and your body made the smartest choice that it could. In an overwhelming moment, it paused to protect you.
- [53:30]
B
And it starts with one moment, moment, one breath, one movement, one sound. And then you can start to build on that. And just like your capacity will expand and your safety will expand and you will start to experience your life in a much richer sense, it's not about.
- [53:51]
A
Forcing your nervous system to do more. It's about gradually creating that safety and moving at the pace of your own unique nervous system. So if this episode resonated with you, be sure to share it with someone that you think it could also help. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss another episode because we have lots of great ones coming up. Continuing through the F responses and all about emotions and emotional processing.
- [54:17]
B
And if you're ready to join us for one of those neuro resets, if you're ready to begin this path and walk it with us, then you can get two free weeks on site at Brain Based at Rewire Trial. We would love to see you there and support you and you can be part of a really wonderful community.
- [54:33]
C
This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered medical or psychological advice. We often discuss lived experiences through traumatic events and sensitive topics that deal with complex developmental and systemic trauma that may be unsettling for some listeners. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice. If you are in the United States and you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health and is in immediate danger, please call 911. For specific services relating to mental health, please see the full disclaimer in the show notes.