Managing the Freeze Response: Dissociation, Emotional Shutdown, and Creating Safety | Being Well

hello and welcome to being well I'm Forest Hansen if you're new to the podcast thanks for listening today and if you've listened before welcome back I'm joined today as usual by clinical psychologist Dr Rick Hansen uh Dad how are you doing today I'm really good and thoroughly psyched for the topic today yeah I've been really looking forward to this one today we're going to be focusing on working with dissociation avoidance and emotional shutdown which are all linked to the freeze response to stress every stress response has its challenges and the freeze response in particular has some features that make it pretty unique but to get to the freeze response and understand it a little bit better it's really helpful to have context on our stress responses in general and as I was going through the process of prepping for this episode I found some material and started thinking about things myself in a way that really interested me and I'm really curious what your take on all of this is as well here Dad so we're going to start with understanding what's going on here conceptually which will then give us some ideas of what we can do practically and then in the second half of the episode I'll be asking you for a lot of practical how-to so does that sound good yes great so in order to understand what's going on here it's helpful to have a basic understanding of the stress response so there are four big ways we have of responding to stress in life we can fight it we can run away from it we can try to appease the person who's hurting us that's called faing or we can freeze in response to it like animals do when they play that now most people are probably familiar with fighting freezing and running away uh the fwn response is a little bit newer in terms of our incorporation of it into this model I think that one of the first people to introduce it was actually former podcast guest Pete Walker that was from his work on childhood trauma and complex PTSD and this is an appeasement strategy fawning is you give the other person what they want in order to diffuse a stressful or potentially dangerous situation now we're all capable of ACC accessing all of these different responses but people tend to develop a habit of one of these responses they tend to be more freezers or Fighters or fleers we typically build these uh these habits early on in life although of course they can change over time and they're built based on things like our environment what are the situations that we find ourselves in or our experiences what happened to us or they might even be built based on our self-concept how do we view ourselves particularly in relationship to other people and as I was learning about this a little bit I started asking myself the question well why do people become a fighter or a Fleer or a freezer like what's the what's the logic in play here because stress responses are adaptive we do them to try to solve a problem so they're based on some view of either ourselves or the world around us why would somebody fight well they fight if they think they can win or they think that uh they can hurt their opponent badly enough that they give up we flee if we think that we can escape danger we might Fawn if we think we can diffuse the situation or get the other person to like us enough that they stop hurting us whatever it might be these are responses that are inherently based on some amount of self-efficacy right the person believes that they can be as strong or as fast or as interpersonally effective or whatever else as those around it that they can meet the challenges of the Moment by moving into that kind of action they can influence their environment so what are we doing when we're freezing well we freeze if we believe we cannot do any of those things if we appraise ourselves as unable to affect our environments in that kind of a way and as we get here I want to emphasize that freezing isn't passive some people misf frame freezing as this kind of passive response it's not it's active but one of the unique challenges associated with it is that the person who's going into that beh Behavior understands that they don't have a lot of other options it's based on a lack of self-efficacy there's the rational belief that they either can't change their environment or can't defeat their challenge in some other kind of way and this is part of why the freeze response and dissociation and particular which we'll talk about in a minute is particularly associated with things like complex PTSD relatively high levels of trauma uh childhood abuse domestic violence all of these incredibly challenging situations where the person couldn't fight or run away effectively and that lack of self-efficacy I think is just such a key challenge here for people who struggle with that family of responses it's such a big piece of the puzzle and so I'm wondering dad uh as a clinician how do you think about all of the kind of conceptual academic stuff that I just said and um how do you think that that comes up for people the way you described that was completely accurate and I want to go wide in a little bit of a contextual framework and then we'll come back in to the particular so you've described a way of dealing with challenges to safety and that way of dealing with challenges to safety uh which includes these four major approaches fight flight freeze appease or more recently keeping the fs here Fawn and those particular for strategies are are tend to be much more and what you and I talk about is the red zone reactive approaches to threats to safety uh people can deal with threats to safety without revving up uh sympathetic nervous system activation without a lot of uh stress hormones and such as cortisol and adrenaline and can you know deal with those challenges in maybe different kinds of ways and so we're going to talk about ways to deal with threats to safety uh without necessarily getting Frozen or immobilized ized or helpless or inert or dissociated in response to that and then also I want to add of course this context that you know that um we also get challenges to our needs for satisfaction similarly when people are addressing their needs for connection uh they can deal with challenges to Connection in ways that are very stressful or deal with challenges to connection more from what you and I have called the green zone so in my way I think of course about a 2x3 Matrix in which we have three needs right and there's a basic distinction between green zone and Red Zone responsive or reactive ways of managing them you and I are now in one of the cells inside that 2x3 sixfold Matrix you know one of the six cells which we're talking about reactive uh you know ways of dealing with challenges to safety hey it it wouldn't be a being well episode if we didn't have a something by something Matrix that sorted things into buckets of plausible responses right we're we're just unbelievably on brand here Dad but I do want to take what you're saying here which I think is a really really key point because it speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding that people have about the way that the stress response works so First Fundamental misund understanding is that these responses are bad these are bad behaviors of different kinds fawning that's bad you know we just did a whole episode on a self-abandonment which is essentially like a maladaptive version of the Fawn response you might think yeah that's interesting yeah but positioning stress responses in that way leads to a deep misunderstanding of them because these responses are not singular behaviors you can fight in a lot of ways that do not look like hitting another person these are families of behaviors that include more healthy or more adaptive and less healthy more maladaptive versions of them so self-abandonment might be a maladaptive version of the Fawn response right but you might be able to think in terms of more adaptive versions of it as well like when I was prepping for this episode I started thinking about these stress responses and this is becoming a little pop psychology here in my framework on it but I like this and I hope it helps people as almost kind of like personality types are you more of a fighter are you more of a Fleer are you more of a freezer are you more of a faer and I had a hard time sorting myself into one of those categories because I was trapped in that framework of all of the responses tied to these things are bad but when I started open that up a little bit it became immediately clear to me that I was totally a faer so what does that look like for me it means being easygoing and adaptable it means smoothing things over and avoiding conflict when I can being pro-social uh doing maybe more than my fair share of the work when we're committed to a group project so we avoid friction among the members of the group this is like a version of a fwn response if you want to kind of think about it that way but it's one that I experience is having a lot more benefits for me than costs and it is fundamentally coming from that pro-social connective relational orientation that you're talking about Dad in the green zone right yeah maybe a way to like separate out the more adaptive versus less adaptive or more healthy less healthy stress responses is just asking the question is this in service to relationship like is this in service to healthy forms of attaching with somebody else so what do you think about that I think there's so many things in we just said for us that are actually really brilliant and would be very useful uh for more people to understand and there aspects of them that I think are really original I find it kind of uncommon that I stumble on something where I'm just like o I haven't really heard that from somebody else so was pretty stoked about this yeah it's really good so how I translate is I say well yeah in fighting broadly are probably a handful of elements and uh some of those elements uh are more they're just like a tool they're like a hammer can you use that Hammer as it were of fighting that element in ways that are really adaptive and selective like sending up to power assertiveness totally you know Gandalf at the bridge and Bor slamming his staff down you shall not pass right boom it's a place for that and then in fleeing and fleeing healthy adaptive withdrawal stepping back disengaging just kind of quietly deciding for example I'm just not going to go on another date with that person that was kind of weird right so healthy withdrawal healthy freezing where you pause you reflect you figure out what you're going to do and appeasing in that you're describing that element which has to do with being cooperative I think sometimes we realize that we're outnumbered we're outgunned uh the best move is to be superficially compliant to kind of appease people you know and then get out of there as fast as we can if you're watching the TV show Shogun right now toranaga the main character is engaging in an appeasement strategy You could argue with his political opponents so there you go oh yeah in the second episode and then we've seen the third episode and more happens things go from there sure no spoilers here anyway uh very good uh joking by the way was the book that Forest read I don't know you were like N9 years old you know you I think I was a middle school something may earlier 600 Pages you get to the last page you kind of sighed Happily and then you went back to the first page and reread the book that book for sure that's pretty good okay yeah I'll tell you a paradoxical intervention I sometimes use with people let's say there's a person who's really good at uh quarreling fighting that's a form of fighting let's say or they're really good at withdrawal or they're really good at defending themselves or they're really good at kind of dissociating from their body and their feelings and we're trying to help them not do that so much the fact that they're really good at that particular strategy paradoxically can help them understand that they can afford small step by small step to shift into a new way of being because if they have to revert to that strategy they're really good at it and they can count on that strategy yes and so a piece of this I was fascinated by and as a clinician I'm really curious what your take is on this Dad when I see people just casually with their friends talk to their friend about their their tendency to dissociate or their tendency to get kind of blown out in an emotional conversation and uh two friends are sharing about an interaction that one of them had with their significant other let's say just as a example here and one of them is like wow I just got so I got so overwhelmed I just kind of shut down emotionally I I I just didn't know what to say I felt like I was so stuck in that moment so this is classic freeze response okay their friend says something to them like oh well weren't you mad you should get more mad you should get more pissed off or what so trying to move them into more of a fight response like what they said was so inappropriate to you weren't you mad about it so they're trying to shift them up essentially the chain of self-efficacy moving from a Freez response to a fight response they feel like they can push back for me I think that this is a total mess because the question isn't like trying to jump somebody from a stress response that they're very familiar with to a different one that they're less familiar with it's how can we move into a more adaptive version of the response that you are more naturally comfortable with so the question isn't like how do we get you to punch the other person in the face it's how do we get you to be able to take that pause and that moment and that space while still staying inside of your your Healthy window of Tolerance there um that just kind of occurred to me while I was doing the prep for this and I'm wondering what do you think about it as a clinician there's this beautiful phrase called harm reduction and it was originally applied to sobriety with people who they're just not ready to abstain entirely from their drug of choice but you know they're you could get them to binge one less time a week right or stop at six beers or later on four and then maybe two right and uh that approach is a little controversial in some quarters because for some people they really can't drink moderately and my rule is um as someone who's definitely enjoyed many different kinds of things uh if you can't uh do it moderately you shouldn't really do it at all right uh so there's that term so you can imagine the same thing so someone who for example is very bellicose shifting their fight strategy from literally punching people to just yelling at them all right and then moving from yelling at them to uh yelling them yelling at them for only 10 seconds and then settling back down again you know or further on you know that Continuum can we uh dial it down some so that it's less moving into really problematic territory right the key two criteria for a psychological disorder impairs functioning Andor creates uh distress you're trying to reduce those consequences and reduce distress and as as long as it's less and less and less you're moving in the right direction yeah you're shifting to that slightly more adaptive version of this thing so focusing on the freeze response in particular which is what we're going to spend most of our time on today again just when I was thinking about this it it seems to me as a non-clinician that this is a family of responses a family of behaviors that would be particularly difficult for people to work with and probably particularly difficult to work with clinically because people who freeze for starters are disproportionately likely to be higher trauma as I was saying earlier which just creates challenges in general yeah and second there's that lack of self-efficacy which I emphasized earlier which is generally what people need in order to move into different kinds of change there needs to be a belief in the self as something that can affect change on its environment or affect change internally and then third really interestingly there's not the same sense of um energy or movement or action that can be associated with the other three responses there's an action that's happening but it's the action of going offline and so people can get stuck really easily when working with this family of behaviors uh what do you think about that it's very insightful to appreciate it and I want to build on um your third option in that very often people understand when they're fighting so let's credit context here yeah go ahead this is animal behaviors grounded in biology uh you can see animals freezing in response to Predators the the mouse does not try to appease the hawk uh the mouse cannot fight back against the Haw so these are you know responses that you know to Predators for humans and other social um mammals and certainly us primates uh much of the fight flight freeze AAS or Fawn uh response or repertoire of behaviors is in Social settings in which there are threats when you're fighting you know you're fighting if you're running away you know you're running away right if you're engaged yeah in a pement behaviors uh knuckling under rolling over on your back as dogs would wild dogs exposing your belly things like that freezing you're doing the KN you're not moving you're not speaking sometimes you're not thinking and so it's uh harder to notice particularly with humans when people are moving into subtleties of freezing which include just going kind of inert or getting sort of sleepy or fuzzy or just sort of swerving away from a topic or sticking your neck out in some way or actually completing a project or or so that you might be recognized and then well if you're recognized you'd expose yourself to a shaming attack like you experienced in your family or your school so you just drift and I think a lot of freezing is in that category and it's also problematic for other people because when you're on the other when you're dealing with someone who's just they're looking at you and they're nodding but the truth is they're gone lights are on but nobody's home yeah totally yeah or they're nodding and it looks like they agree with you but they're going a nerd uh or it looks like that they've that they're going to make a promise with you they're they're going to do something different in the future and yet they don't these are these are problematic and they're harder to discern interpersonally you know when the other person is doing them so I think that's that's why the freezing is a is a particularly important and interesting topic to focus on and I'm really glad you're doing it just to maybe put like a a super fine point on the last thing you said about some of the challenges interpersonally that can come from these behaviors the person who is in a freeze response is not being uh deliberately deceitful in this Behavior to be clear nine times out of 10 if not 99 times out of 100 this is an automated response that's kicking in as a survival strategy if we think about it from like an ifs Parts frame framework a part has come forward that is engaging in a behavior the smile and nodding but the rest of the system is pretty much offline and it might be helpful here to talk about what uh what freezing looks like for people in practice cuz you've already started to do that a little bit here Dad I want to name dissociation in particular because it's a family of responses that if you think about it are actually like pretty wild uh we we've done full episodes on dissociation I'm just going to talk about it kind of quickly here and then maybe we'll talk about some of the other ones that you named already dissociation is a feeling of Disconnect or uh distance from your physical senses your thoughts your feelings your sense of self a common feature of it is that you kind of outside of time and space so a person might literally have a sort of outof body third person they're hovering above themselves perspective um there are everyday examples of dissociation which could include just zoning out during a conversation we've all had those moments where we kind of blink a couple of times and we realize that the other person said three sentences to us that we just don't track at all uh it could be feeling a little bit emotionally numb after a long day or a tough conversation uh it could include intense flashbacks of different kinds where you feel like you've really moved into a different moment in time um a memory that feels a little too Vivid you've become disconnected from right now in some kind of way at a clinically significant level and we're not really going to talk about this today but I just want to name it there are a number of disorders that are called dissociative disorders where a person really is losing touch with reality in some kind of way this includes did or dissoc identity disorder this was previously known as multiple personality disorder which is characterized by when a person has two or more persistent personalities uh states that they shift back and forth between another one is depersonalization derealization disorder and this is characterized by feeling more detached from one's uh own body or your thoughts and then there's also something that's called dissociative Amnesia which is characterized by forgetting personal information and memories of events so so that's kind of like way out at the tail end here Dad earlier you were mentioning when people shut down or they go aert which is a little bit more in what I would call the normal range end of the the dissociative Spectrum so could you describe what that might look like so one version of freezing uh really does include dialing down uh metabolic activity so a person might suddenly be kind of drowsy uh typically aren't moving they're sedentary uh there's a kind of inner slump and a an extreme version of this that Steve pores uh has called out in his wonderful work on poly vagel Theory isn't fish that in the face of predators will play dead and in lakes for example it would start to sink down to lower levels of the lake that have less oxygen in it and be so Frozen as it were in pling dead that it would die because it would no longer have enough oxygen to breathe through its gills that's like an extreme version of really dialing down metabolic activity a different version of it is seen in research on attachment theory classically in the strange situation it's a kind of a research protocol typically a parent will come in with a young child like an 18-month-old and then the parent will leave the room which is stressful for a child and then they're different steps in the standard strange situation avoidantly attached kids typically will look unbothered they'll be just fine they look just fine Mom leaves the room dad leaves the room they're just fine from the outside but if you watch them closely their heart rate is spiked their you know their their autonomic nervous system is revving up they're upset inside they're outwardly sedate they're just sitting there there maybe playing with the blocks but inside their heart is racing so that's a certain kind of a freeze response where you're outwardly immobilized but internally you're kind of panicked and that's by the way a common response for people who've been traumatized you know they're they feel Frozen they feel voiceless they can't speak and yet inside themselves uh they're they're panicking so that would be a different kind of freeze response so as a clinician somebody's walked into your office who either is deliberately interested in engaging with these issues because they're causing them a lot of distress or you appraise pretty early on that this is an issue for this person this sort of a funny question to ask but is there like a typical Arc to the therapy that you do with them are there things in particular that you're trying to build or help support them with early on like how do you how do you think about the framework of approaching this kind of an issue yeah so let's kind of locate it on the Spectrum including the spectrum of dissociation uh so for example I've had clients definitely who were very prone to dissociation it took very little and uh in my office they'd be gone or they would start to slump in the chair or literally slide out of the chair or the sofa onto the floor because they they had kind of left the room and their body had turned to jelly uh that's pretty extreme you know I've had people uh who you know after after an appointment um I you know went down to the parking lot an hour later after my next session and I found them in the back seat of their car with the door open and the engine running just clocked out on the back seat so that there're extreme versions of that that's not so common so let's now move more toward people who you know it can get dissociative they sort of space out go away they they they kind of feel Li headed maybe out a out a touch um IM like immobilized almost like in a dream you're trying to escape but you can't move or let's say subtler but quite pervasive examples of that where in certain situations you know rationally you have the right to assert yourself in some way right you you could speak up you could name what's happening you could disagree you could ask for something you could declare a need you could say Hey you know that's not okay right but you just can't get it out you know yeah you can't say it and that's a kind of freeze response that's not uncommon at all uh and very often people will come to a therapist for help in kind of claiming their power getting in touch with their their feelings uh and becoming more able to assert themselves in in appropriate way so mhm that kind of territory so first off I'm trying to get a sense of what's what so now that I've kind of set the context and the the degree of intensity my first step is to keep them out of a freeze response so that they can stay in the room and they can stay in relationship with me and can begin to move into topics that in other settings would trigger freeze response but with me they're learning a new way of being with relationship to uh to that material so and to do that of course just like you said um I need to really do what I can to promote a sense of safety and also encourage just highlight where they do have agency they do have efficacy where they do have power like they always have the power to change the subject with me or what do you do for a living you know you meet somebody at a party like I ask annoying questions you know for example and they have the option not to answer my questions you know so I'm creating safety creating safety and promoting uh their sense of efficacy so that's very foundational um a second as you've described uh and it makes me always so happy when you you know implicitly Endor psychoanalytic terminology join with the defense yeah yeah and just really affirm the functional benefits the the payoffs the the usefulness of what they're doing and and in that context of appreciating how good they are at freezing uh we can then also explore oh where' this come from how did you learn to be so good at freezing right so then there's kind of an understanding of it and they appreciate that I'm not trying to you know rip that defense away from them and then I think the third step classically of course is to just explore different ways of being and then in the in the therapy room uh which is so important help people actually install those other ways of being and we might use other words like establish or internalize and those three steps you know establish a container second you know become aware of what's problematic typically beginning with appreciate uh its functions for you and then third exploring alternative ways of being and increasingly installing those Al alternative ways of being so that they're with you when you leave my office I I think that's a a great place to start with this and I'm really curious about that third step explore other ways of being because of course we would we would kind of all love to be able to just explore other ways of being but that could be quite challenging for people so I do want to loop back to that in one second but to to do a little bit of really quick commentary on some of the other things that you've said here at the very beginning of what you were saying you said that the first thing you try to do is to try to help them not freeze which sounds maybe obvious or trite to people but it's an acknowledgement of actually a really really important idea from habit Loops which is that it's very difficult to disrupt a habit when we are in the routine of it habits have three stages they have a trigger a routine and a rule W in routine it is very hard to stop the routine yeah so most of the good advice about building new habits gets to triggers it doesn't it's not about routines it's about how do we either create triggers for good habits or take away the triggers for more problematic habits and so that's kind of implicit in what you were saying right there um and so I thought that that was just like a really important shout out at the top of this for people listening again I'm a big believer in do-it-yourself DIY therapist yeah if you can do it yeah and I've done a lot of DIY therapy and I bet you have two and so people listening can think for themselves okay how could I help myself how could I be my own therapist you in ways that are appropriate you know always know when it's helpful to reach out get that clinical uh input from a licensed professional but as much as long as you can do this sort of stuff productively on your own go for it yeah and I was talking with Elizabeth a little bit before uh while I was prepping for this because she's a trauma therapist and she's somatically informed she works with a lot of people who struggle with dissociation or struggle with the freeze response broadly and one of the things that she really emphasized was similar to what you said but I just really liked the way that you put it so I'll share it here which is that a huge piece of this process is self-awareness because what happens when you're working with somebody is you go through these Cycles where they have a cycle where they freeze and then okay you try to kind of resource them up out of it and then they go uh come back into your office the next week and they probably freeze again and okay you try to Resource them up out of it and then the third week they're able to say something like oh that was a freeze response that's what happened so the awareness happens after the event itself they're able to recognize okay I was going through this response and then over time you develop earlier and earlier awareness of what's going on so you're eventually able to catch it before the switch totally flips and you're just completely blown out of your body and you can resource yourself in various Ways by say getting up and walking around a little bit or asking for some space from the other person being like hey I'm about to get blown out with this I need a little bit of room sometimes you can ask for that space sometimes you can't but hopefully you can whatever it is that's kind of helping you before the wire gets tripped does that check out with your experience dad well very much so and I think I would say that's comp that complicates things I was just reflecting here on people I've known is that they walk in the door frozen sure yeah or you know and in terms of a general quality of Vitality they come in the door constricted armored uh and they don't even know it because that's just the new normal that they acquired 30 years ago when they were a kid let's say and it's it's a little bit um like the classic conditioning there's What's called the unconditioned stimulus you know there's the Bell that rings and then there's the conditioned stimulus the minor but mild but unpleasant electric Shar let's say that occurs and then the animal starts to associate that as soon as that Bell starts to ring there's there's going to be a bad event even after the bad event has stopped happening but they've just acquired a learn response first some people living is the unconditioned stimulus with which they associate the electric shock even though they're not actually being shocked in the moment it's quite it's quite poignant and profound actually just entering into a relationship just talking to a new person is the unconditioned stimulus that they actually associate with you know uh things that happened to them typically when they were young and that's kind of global right how do you help people to come out of that and one of the things I have found really useful for people uh and probably Rings true to you as a dancer and also to Elizabeth who's a super dancer uh is a physical activity of one kind or another where you're you're moving you're doing something you're making something happen you're you're active in some way I find that that's really helpful and also it's helpful to rock climbing or similar kinds of things where people are put into um stressful situations martial arts training rock climbing something where you you need to function and uh under threat you're you're you're under threat you know there you are you're 60 feet up and the rope's on you but whoa you're standing on holes you know the size of a pencil the width of a pencil and you're like w and so um you got to but you got to keep it together right that's actually really useful and people they might find other versions of that uh I've referred a lot of people to Toast Masters what a great graduated stressful environment for social anxiety Toast Master forced public speaking super structured highly supportive graduated context uh and yeah things like that so that's about the global right and then in the particular things where people are inhibited around self-expression they freeze around full self-expression step by step so much of the therapeutic process is just to Carl Rogers was right you know you just rest in a unconditional positive regard and you gradually create a space in which people can um small step by small step uh communicate in a more open and vulnerable tender authentic less controlled kind of way [Music] um you know the ultimate being in a way being out of control about being out of control for example sometimes people will uh be um in know they will regulate their crying or they will regulate their um intensity and you have to be careful about being out of control about being out of control but there's a certain thing that happens when you're you just you can't stop crying or you just let it you just let it go you you say all of it and there's no attempt to censor or edit or guide or soften or pull the punches of whatever your truth is that's that's a kind of an ultimate step that I actually just kind of wanted to name here I think this is all great and I'm I want to loop back to what you were saying earlier about exploring new ways of being those uh those examples that you gave of of push the envelope situations that a person could start experimenting in and and start learning to trust themselves that they can meet challenges in a way other than entering the freeze response that's really the lesson in the Toast Masters example that you gave or in the rock climbing example you can make choices that are not just clamming up and you start to increasingly experience yourself as effective in that way you're building up that stronger sense of self so you think that you have other options you have an option of being assertive you have an option of leaving you have an option of being socially skillful whatever it is for you right but I I just think that there was something you were getting to in that explore new ways of being that I want to focus on here for a second because I'm curious about it yeah well let's use an example yeah maybe people you know perhaps you know disguising the ities or any situation that might come to mind even one or two how about I give you a uh General structure that I've seen in a lot of different people in life um so this is a hypothetical situation where with a family of challenges that a person might have so let's say that this person uh is comfortable interacting with their emotions generally they they feel pretty okay most of the time time but when they're faced with situations that feel more stressful or threatening they have a very difficult time feeling inside for how they feel about it maybe they feel a little panicked they feel that kind of disconnection from their emotions um they have a interaction with somebody a friend a significant other a boss where they feel like they're being pushed on by that other person in some way there's an implicit criticism being directed at them the other person is looking for something from them whatever it is and uh by essentially round two of the interaction where there's been a back and forth now we're on the second back and forth they feel themselves kind of losing the ability to articulate what they think or how they feel things get kind of fuzzy for them when this is happening kind of soupy and when this happens the person that they're with based on what you were describing way earlier in the episode dad is kind of understandably going wait did you did you hear me did you understand what I was saying I I'm not getting a response from you and so that pushes them to freeze harder essentially which pushes the other person to get more frustrated which then exacerbates that freeze and so on and so on so there's this pattern of relationship that tends to describe a lot of their interactions and particularly their more challenging interactions so for somebody who um describes that as like the way that a lot of their their stressful interactions go how would you talk to that person how would you start thinking about that problem and um is there anything you would say to them just anything you might think would be helpful here well first off that was a an acutely described almost like a novelist uh clinical case case study and which is really helpful and very perceptive uh as a therapist I would be trying to draw the person into that kind of interaction with me so that the issue that they've been talking about outside the room is brought into the room great That's a classic step uh and uh people informally if they have a certain amount of um agreement to do this can do this with each other they can bring it into the present like in a perfect world the person let's say a partner who is getting frustrated a little you know exas exasperated at this response especially the 10th time it happens uh instead could just slow it down and bring it into the room like what's happening for you right now right is there anything I can do so as a therapist IST I'm trying to I'm really watching very acutely um this process and as soon as the person goes into overload that's a good way to put it once there an overload forget it you've got to get out of overload so you come back out of overload it's very much the work of people who do trauma work Steve LaVine talks about it Peter LaVine rather in terms of pendulation you need pend you move in you swing into the content then you move back out so if they're overload you want to back out really reestablish as you said safety and efficacy and then one molecule at a time one millimeter at a time go back into the material again and again so you start in window of Tolerance you start expanding that window of Tolerance in terms of being able to stay present mindfulness is the opposite of dissociation if we disassociate we go away if we're present we're Associated we're connected with ourselves and then another thing is to try to really identify what is the threat because people freeze in the face of threat what is the threat what is threatening here and it's it's interesting what is threatening here is the threat an internal threat this is classic psycho analysis uh than you segment in which he's talking about people being being um potentially you know they suppress they repress material and so the threat of that material resurfacing is where the threat is now the threat could be external as well so let's say this person is you you know let's say there's an interaction that's a little feisty or a little it's about a conflict or you know the other person's being kind of you know assertive in some way is is the threat the other person even a notion that oh that other person might um abandon me if I'm forthright or that other person might hit me because that's what happened when I was little if I speak up you know that's an externalized threat okay what if the threat is some kind of memory that they're keeping at Bay deep down inside unconscious or what if the threat a certain feelings that they want to keep it Bay you know maybe there's a deep sorrow or um a rage they don't want to stay connected because if they stayed connected that might pop the top on a whole bunch of bottled up rage whoa so this is a way of thinking about where is the threat right I love this Dad I'm not trying to cut you off here but I just want to emphas something that you're really saying here the the specificity about what really is the threat is the important part of this process because a lot of the time when you explore this idea with somebody they they kind of look at you like you're an idiot um to be frank and they're kind of like well what do you mean of course this is threatening there the threats are obvious don't you see the threats but then you dig one layer down and you realize that the person actually is not specific inside of thems about what the threat is they just know that they're scared and therefore things are threatening but if you go through this process sometimes you find at the bottom of the uh the bottom of the barrel there's a threat that you did not expect yeah but the real threat in fact was not the other person the real threat was some feeling inside of yourself or maybe you thought that the real threat was you didn't want a shaming attack but really the real threat was you didn't want to be yelled at by the other person like whichever direction it goes here people are often surprised by what is that they are actually concerned about exactly right and I really appreciate you saying specificity because it can really help and it also um gets at the ways in which people dissociate about dissociation in other words uh often around this sort of stuff there's this fog you know and one way you can kind of tell you're in the presence of dissociation totally when when you're the therapist or the other person you start feeling sleepy and fuzzy and foggy and bored yourself bored that's really interesting uh you're using your own counter transference you're using your own reactions to the to the client as information oh this is interesting I'm just kind of bored here like whoa that's interesting so yeah yeah exactly right specificity I think is really important and then people uh if they can tolerate anything that takes them down a path of removing this defense dissociation is a defense it's one of the Primal defenses one inversion of freezing is to deny reality we we have to be able to help people face the real threat right and sometimes they're too scared to even name it I want to ask you about as we get to the end here and this is one of those things we could do eight episodes on this as I think we're quickly discovering I could say more about what this person could do for themselves yeah that be great actually yeah yeah let's do that let's do a little bit more and then I want to ask you a question about one piece of it but go ahead so this person first of all it helps that they know that this is true about them let's say that's the case they they kind of get it they get it y okay um what to do about it several things I think are can be really helpful one is to be aware that other people can be in similar situations and uh be more active and vital and Nimble and free and assertive and do just fine yeah this isn't a forced response yeah yes that's right that's right it's it's not uh god-given it's not a rule you know other people can go down a different Road like oh it's a possibility for me to go down a different Road and uh not uh have the bad things happen that I'm afraid because this is a threat response that I'm afraid will happen just that oh possibility that's helpful people like me uh you know dealing with similar situations can can act in a way that's not so Frozen then to help yourself um as you've noted it helps to build up foundational capabilities Vitality in the body uh often the freeze response um is understandably uh the result of medical issues a history of injury disability illness and so you know building up resources that they give you more sense of of energy efficacy looking for other domains in your life where you're more like a hammer and less like a nail General capabilities all that good stuff great you've done that three when it starts to happen and you can have an attitude weirdly counterintuitively that wrangles with others are so wonderful because what an opportunity to uh remove the conditioning that the shackles that bind you to those old habits wonderful changing the frame here Dad I like it yeah wonderful I'm getting upset again fantastic it's so useful or there you go being an thank you thank you it's so good because it gives me opportunities to learn new ways of dealing with people like you you know right so brains it it's good so you start to look for the scripts you understand the scripts and you start to look for ways to intervene early before you go away right when you're gone you can't intervene so you're trying to intervene early when you're in that zone where the dissociation the slump the swerve the Sleepy is starting to sink in but you still have some mobility in relationship to it okay yeah and and at that point you can do little things like take a break to pop out of the Habit loop as you said take a little break step back disengage to be engaged it's distance in the surface of attachment in a way so you can step back so that you can step in uh you could do that uh you could tell the person um by yourself some time could you say that again sorry I didn't quite cat it catch it or what did you mean by this part just do it buy yourself some time so you can mobilize right the essence of freezing is immobilization so the more mobilized you are in thought word and deed the more that you can break out of you know anything that helps you break out thought word and deed you want to mobilize so you're you're intervening early in the in the script and then you're basically building up step by step your capacities uh to be able to maintain some some Mobility some nimbleness some options in interactions with others so you're not so Frozen it can help too to uh write things out in advance literally have a card I've known people have written stuff out and they're like ah they don't know how to say anything but they just hand the card and the card it might say something like I'm really scared it's not you it's hard for me to talk I know you love me but this is really hard for me yeah but you know write the card when you're not immobilized right that's the thing moving your body stand up walk around a little move around a little bit you're breaking the script you're breaking the frame you're reclaiming your potency and these are little things that could seem so small all but they're they really work and then to complete the Learning Cycle right so you're identifying the issue you're you're having new experiences and new behaviors and then to install them you want to really appreciate that it went okay it went well with this new way of being uh I was louder I was Freer I wasn't trapped in that old role I was able to say no I was able to say yes and oh it went okay maybe it wasn't perfect maybe the other person was sort of miffed but you know what I have the right to say this it's okay and I'm going to let it really sink in the sense of what I did that result that had a good result and I'm going to take a few beats a few breaths to really let it sink in so then that becomes increasingly my new habit Loop and last be proud of yourself yeah yeah like we love it when Bambi stands up to Godzilla right we love it uh we love it when Brock pie wins the Super Bowl oh well well next year anyway yeah yeah next year next year buddy right we we love that stuff we love we love uh the the I don't know what the mouse turning on the line you know we love that and there's so much credit to somebody who's breaking out of old structures old frozenness credit yourself honor yourself so feel good about yourself I love that yeah that's great great and as we get to the end here I'm going to ask you a question that we could probably spend a whole episode on so maybe this is bad podcasting right now that I'm that I'm saving this for the end but I I'm wondering what your thoughts are on it so we've talked over and over again throughout this episode about the nature of the stress response as a hello response to the experience of a lack of safety some kind of threat right and we try to create a lot of safety in our environments if we can but life is chaotic and weird and we do not always get to control those environments so what this means is that we have to increasingly build up our sense of ourselves as the source of safety wow and we are the source of safety because we can affect those environments we're at Choice rather than being at effect from them right and that's the big question mark a lot of time particularly for people who freeze because they don't have that sense of self-efficacy by and large and they've developed that habit of behavior because they've had repeated experiences of not being able to affect their environment those ways their safety was derived essentially from piecing out mentally from what is going on as a option of Last Resort for somebody with that pattern how do you how do you think about out or what would you encourage as even just a first step here for developing that view of the self of myself as something from which I can derive safety something that I can feel like is a sturdy safe place to be well this is an episode because you're getting at something that is actually really profound uh and a challenge for people including in a world that's full of threats it's also full of opportunities and uh the kind of threats we were mainly talking about here we're in a social context so we can have in our model of the three major needs safety satisfaction connection you can have a safety threat that is happening in the context of connection for example there could be a threat to connection that makes you feel unsafe and so this [Music] oneself as a source of safety that's a huge huge topic and there are certain key inner strengths and inner resources that have been Central for me and I share them with others and they've become major touchstones in my work if people are familiar with it and if they're not no wories at all so just a quick name a couple one is the capacity to recognize when you are basically all right right now in the present uh even though uh the future you know might be different but to to recognize actually I don't feel safe but I am safe so then that recognition right there is a source of safety because you're no longer living with paper tiger paranoia so that's one a second is uh much as you keep emphasizing agency and for me agency uh is in thought word indeed they all work together sometimes it's not safe to be agentic with what we say or what we do uh we have to be very cautious uh but inside our minds we can retain a fundamental freedom to uh have agency in our clear discernments what do we see what seems to be true here and to to rest in the knowing of what's true to know that you have the capacity to recognize what's actually true is really useful for safety so that would be a second big headline and I think a third big headline uh for the oneself as a source of safety in the face of threats is to ground in the sense of oneself as strong and that's a umbrella term I use for cluster of qualities such as determination the sense of oneself as being able to endure discomfort which is a really under uh appreciated aspect of fortitude of strength you know yourself is very strong yourself is strong yourself is a coper yourself as someone who can function another one is that you can be the source of uh a receiving support from others very often when we're threaten what do you mean by that that's great yeah yeah very often when we're threatened uh by something uh we we we need help uh to be to be safe we need to get a second opinion from a different doctor or we need uh emotional support from friends or we need Ways to Think Through wow my boyfriend you know he hasn't hit me but he's gotten pretty intense o what should I do here you know to be able to reach out and get support to get allies to get resources that's another way to feel that you yourself can be a major factor in your own safety I think that's totally great and as I was doing some of the prep for this episode what I kept on coming back coming back to was this this self- advocacy question and this question of where do we actually derive safety from and what I realized is that I have a fundamental model of myself as a thing from which I derive safety I have a belief in myself as somebody who can solve problems overcome challenges uh experien stress without being overwhelmed with it these are all models I have of myself and when I think of people I think of my friends uh who struggle with the free response I I wonder if the if they have those models or not and I suspect that by and large they don't and I wonder about that yeah as just a key inter ition here and we've done episodes and episodes and episodes on self-concept which is why we're not really diving into it here today and I would strongly encourage uh checking out those episodes to anybody who wants to learn more about it I do think that we could spend an episode maybe even sometime soon on this particular topic this version of this topic which I do think is really interesting but I I love the initial treatment that you just gave to it there dad you know this for me is this is this a lot of compassion I guess and empathy for people who understandably feel totally unsafe beleaguered and there there are real threats there are real threats in their life you know there's a there's a lot of real suffering there that can be addressed by people building up recognizing the capabilities they already have and building them up further so that more and more they can be the the the origin point the Locust internal Locust of control the origin Point moving out into the world of um being as safe as they possibly can be as safe and feel as safe as you realistically can if I could I'd like to just drop in two quick points here the first is that sometimes unwittingly and this K this has happened for me a lot as a therapist it can happen for others that our well-meaning efforts to help another person feel safe or to kind of draw them out are actually for them triggers of freezing for example a kind of simple bid for greater emotional closeness or self-disclosure uh with another person uh could be experienced by them as very threatening and then suddenly they're withdrawing so being aware of that can really be helpful you know it's like I said earlier sometimes just being alive you know just living is the unconditioned stimulus it's the bell ringing that's not inherently problematic um just that alone can be you know the unconditioned stimulus in life just living right similarly others who are you know being friendly or kind or drawing you out that is what gets really really scary the second thing I would just say to finish here is that when you notice that another person is going in nerd or sort of going away or even sort of freezing or seeing sort becoming a little numb if you possibly can and it's appropriate be kind to them this is one of my one of my favorite ones that we've done recently I'm so glad that we did this episode I really hope that it benefits a lot of people and I feel like I just learned so much um both for the prep process for this episode I learned a lot from and also I really appreciate all the input that you had on it as a clinician here Dad I thought it was super helpful today's conversation with Rick focused on the freeze response to stress we all respond to stress in different kinds of ways the four big families of responses are fighting flying freezing and fawning the four FS fawning if you're not familiar with it is more of an appeasement strategy it's where you try to be nice to the person who is uh causing you problems or to the stressful situation in order to fly under the radar of more powerful individuals all of these stress responses have their challenges that are associated with them but the freeze response has some particular qualities that can make it really challenging for people to deal with these stress responses are adaptive in nature if you look at the behavior of animals they're making choices about how to respond to a situation based on their assessment of it a mouse does not try to fight a hawk because it understands that it cannot beat the hawk it just has to run away from it a lizard that's caught by a cat makes the rational assessment that it's not able to fight it's not able to flee and it's certainly not going to make the cat its best friend so what does it do it plays dead there is some rationality to these responses so why do we pick each one well we do it based on the assessment of our capabilities we fight somebody if we think we can beat them we run if we think we can get away we Fawn if we think that we can play the uh the social game really effectively with somebody else and maybe convince them to be our friend so why do we freeze well we freeze if we don't think we can do any of those things so baked into the freeze response is an assessment of the self as being vulnerable an assessment of the self as being unable to affect change in the world around it and because self-efficacy the belief that we can change our circumstances change ourselves uh behave in powerful way ways in the world is so fundamental so fundamental to our ability to change for the better the freeze response can be particularly hard for people to work with and as Rick emphasized freezing can be tough for people to identify sometimes because we know when we're when we're fighting somebody or we know when we're running away from them like it's very clear what's going on but freezing is kind of the action of an action so it can be harder for people to identify when they're doing it it also can be a little tough for people relation CU you can get into these cycles of behavior where it's not obvious to everyone that a freeze response is taking place it's not obvious to your boss or your partner or your friend that you have emotionally shut down and removed yourself from the interaction and so they keep on bidding for a certain kind of response from you that you are not capable in that moment of giving them and they get frustrated because it looks like you should be giving them a certain kind of response but you just aren't and that can create this uh this negative cycle that just exacerbates the problems because the person who's stuck in the freeze response just feels understandably more and more and more unsafe we then talked about some of the different presentations of the freeze response one of the most common symptoms of it is dissociation here at the end I do want to say dissociation can take place during any kind of a stress response it is not limited to the freeze response dissociation is when we disconnect from our senses or our thoughts thoughts or feelings we move ourselves out of space and time we are no longer here right now we are somewhere else relatively mild versions of this could be zoning out during a conversation or feeling a little emotionally numb at the end of a long day happens to a lot of people all the time very normal and then there are more serious examples of this Rick gave a few of clients being totally checked out during a session or him even walking outside of his office and seeing in the parking lot that somebody was just kind of camped out in their car and had been in their car for an hour after their session had ended just because they weren't able to move more mild versions of it could also look like somebody shutting down internally or becoming a little inert having some difficulty taking any kind of an action um having a hard time moving or speaking or maybe even just struggles with concentrating or feeling or expressing their emotions Rick emphasized three things that he tended to do when working with people who struggled with the freeze response and dissociation broadly first establishing safety these are all responses to threat clinically you cannot have a functional therapeutic relationship with somebody else unless there is the presence of safety then he talked about uh doing everything that he could to not trip the wire of the freeze response because once you're in the response it is really difficult to do anything about it so it's up to him as a clinician to pay attention to the person for them a little bit to make maybe uh take them away from topics that might activate a full freeze response if you started to notice that they were beginning to Edge into it and there's a lesson there for people who want to work on this outside of the therapeutic office right like that's most of what we focus on in the podcast what can you do on your own and it emphasizes self-awareness as a key tool in this process the first step of cultivating self-awareness is just understanding that you're a person who has this family of issues the second step is the ability to reflect on something after it's happened so you can look back on a situation and go oh yeah I froze there that's the freeze response happening to me then maybe the third step is you start to notice it while you're in it there's this part of you that's going oh I am Frozen right now and maybe you can't do anything about it but you just notice that it's happening then the fourth step the really really important one is you start to get some awareness of when you're beginning to fall into that response you see yourself tumbling and maybe you're not able to catch yourself yet but you can see the fall as it starts to happen and then over time you develop more and more and more space you're able to step further and further back from it and notice the train coming to hit you earlier and earlier and this then empowers you to be really at choice about it to um make the decision to stay in the interaction if that's what you want to do or to make the decision to step out of the interaction if that's something that you're capable of doing if you can't fully step out of the interaction maybe you can do little things you can do little things to try to rev your body up little motions with your hands little bouncing with your core something that can support this that Rick talked about is practicing different ways of being he talked about uh taking on public speaking or doing some doing some theater improv or going rock climbing situations where people often feel really really really stressed stressed out so you're deliberately putting yourself into an environment that you recognize could be triggering for you and you're practicing with that so you can expand your window of Tolerance around whatever the stressful behavior is and try on a different way of being and in that trying on of this new way of being you are increasingly experiencing yourself as strong vital and effective as somebody who can make choices who can make the choice to step out of an interaction or who can make the choice to speak up for themselves or make the choice to smooth things over with the other person so they stop being so annoying about whatever it is that they're they're talking about and as you are doing that you are implicitly developing something that I think is really the Crux of this whole thing which is the feeling of the self as the source of safety you are safe because you have a view of yourself as capable as being able to solve problems as being able to encounter C unfamiliar situations and handle them skillfully and that view itself is something that people who have a freeze response often have not been able to develop in life because they were exposed to a lot of situations that convinced them that the opposite was true that they did not have any optionality that they did not have any individual power that they couldn't do anything about what was happening to them and man you know both Rick and I go to go to such a place of uh of sympathy and compassion inside of this whole thing for people who have had those experiences like wow you developed that belief for reasons and today circumstances hopefully for you are different so you really can develop a new view of yourself you really can step into a different way of seeing what might be possible for you in addition to all of that which can be a big and very challenging process Rick did emphasize some specific ideas and interventions that I want to highlight here at the end one of the things that he talked about was developing a lot of specificity about what exactly is the threat that is causing you to freeze is it because you're worried about something being done to you is it because the person that you're in a situation with feels unsafe to you or is it because you're afraid of some response that's coming up inside of you and so you're free to sty that response are you worried about what will happen if you blow up at the other person what is it actually and by the way these are all quite possibly like very rational things to be concerned about I I totally get it but what is it really that is inspiring that fear that concern and getting really specific and granular about it can give you a ton of insight into what's going on here and then classic Rick he talked about developing inner strengths that could make you feel like you don't don't have to freeze uh these could be qualities like determination or a sense of your own Vitality or the feeling that you can make choices about the world around you even in very very small ways maybe you start to develop a sense of yourself as being good at different kinds of things that you can lean on in challenging interactions with other people whatever it is as you build up these qualities you will naturally feel at threat less which will make the number of times that you have to freeze in response to threat go down this was a big episode today with a lot of ideas in it and part of the reason that it was a big episode is because these are Big challenges for people this is not easy stuff and I really want to emphasize that here at the end so if you made it this far I hope you found the material today really useful and supportive of you if you have any questions about the content feel free to leave a comment down below if you're watching it on YouTube if you're listening to it you can send me an email that's contact beingwell podcast.com or hey you can reach out through social media I've got all the pages that you would expect if you'd like to support the podcast you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com beingwell podcast and for just a couple of dollars a month you can support the show and get a bunch of bonuses in return until next time thanks for listening and I'll talk to you [Music] soon sh

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 66,852

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient, Self-Care, Anxiety, Psychology Facts, Self-Development, freeze response, Managing the Freeze Response, coping strategies, dissociation, self-awareness, self confidence, sense of safety, stress response, fight or flight, freeze response to stress, stop dissociating, stop dissociation, emotional shutdown

Id: QHUoSrCOBGE

Length: 74min 58sec (4498 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2024