Freezing can make us feel powerless, unable to act, as though stuck in a nightmare.
Just this morning I saw the freeze response.
I looked out my window and saw a squirrel moving steadily along the top of the fence. As I opened the window, it heard me – a potential predator as far as it was concerned – and froze like a furry participant in the childhood game of statues.
Eventually, when it had, presumably, deemed me not much of a threat, it ‘reanimated’ and scurried off into some trees. But what if it had felt as though it couldn’t go from freeze to action?
“I just couldn’t move!”
One client, Kathy, came to see me with a terrible height phobia. I asked her when it had begun. She’d been in China and had been taken up to the top of a towering building, maybe 150 metres high, where a glass ‘sky bridge’ connected to another part of the building. The transparent floor, she told me, made it feel “like there was nothing between me and the streets below!”
Kathy had previously been fine with heights, but halfway across this precipitous transparent bridge she’d frozen as though glued to the spot. In effect, her limbic system was screaming, “Don’t move or you’ll die!”
“I couldn’t move back and I couldn’t move forward,” she told me. “I just froze!”
And when we’ve frozen once, we may fear we’ll freeze again.
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“What if I freeze and he does it again?!”
I worked with another client, June (described here), who had been raped hundreds of times by an uncle decades before. Now she was to see him again at a family gathering. Although he was now old and infirm, she dreaded seeing him after so long, fearing she might freeze and “it all might happen again!”
Freezing can make us feel powerless, unable to act, as though stuck in a nightmare. So what even is the freeze response? When is it useful and when is it maladaptive?
What is the freeze response?
We are used to thinking of panic as the rapid switching on of the fight-or-flight response. And certainly when we perceive a threat, a great height (even if we know on a cognitive level that we’re safe), any sudden shock, or even just surprise, we will tend to react by either going into flight or fight, or maybe a combination of the two. Our breathing quickens or we may forget to breathe, our pulse rate shoots up, and our heart beats faster.
But just before this happens, we freeze. Why?
Attention refocused
Imagine you’re at home, say in your apartment. You get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. You believe you’re home alone but suddenly you hear what sounds like movement from another room. Who’s that?! You freeze. Perhaps only your eyes move.
In that initial moment at which we become aware of a potential threat, our attention becomes totally oriented toward that threat, just like a mesmerized squirrel! This is sometimes known as the ‘orientation response’. We do this for a couple of reasons.
First, to give us time to assess the situation: What’s going on here? What do I need to do? This freezing may be extremely brief and happen just before we spring into action.
Second, freezing can make us ‘invisible’ to potential predators. Many larger predators detect their prey mainly through their movement. So if we stop moving, we become invisible to them.1
Once when I was describing the freeze response to some trainee therapists, one of them told me how he’d come across a tiger in the forest in India. “I froze,” he told me, “and eventually the tiger moved on without attacking me!”
So clearly the freeze response has survival value. It helps us assess the situation, if only for a few milliseconds, and it may even help us blend into the landscape so we’re not detected by some nasty predator.
But what about when maladaptive freezing happens?
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Stuck in deep freeze
When a threat is detected, it can feel as if we go straight into fight or flight: we run away, or defend ourselves. But as blindingly brief as it may be, that freeze part of the process is always there. The problem arises when we get stuck in the freeze response.
Kathy had to be rescued from the high bridge. She felt she literally couldn’t move. Freeze had turned into something else.
Kathy had sunk into a state of ‘tonic immobility‘: a trance-like state in which she was effectively paralyzed. In this state, people may even be unable to speak or insensitive to outside stimuli.
Tonic immobility is different from the freeze state, in which the heart rate slows for a moment.2 In tonic immobility, heart rate speeds up. Tonic immobility has long been observed in animals, but has also been documented in humans.3 The person appears to be inactive, but on the inside is extremely aroused.
This is more likely to happen when a person is or feels trapped, perhaps in a situation in which there really is no use trying to fight or flee. Survivors of childhood abuse often really were trapped and powerless during that abuse by a much larger adult. Freezing, with its analgesic properties and capacity to help us feel detached through dissociation, may have been a kind of defence mechanism.
But there may be another important but often overlooked adaptive quality to the prolonged freeze response.
Playing dead
Picture someone suddenly trapped underground after an earthquake or literally trapped in the jaws of a predator. There is no option to fight or flee.
The natural adaptive purpose of tonic immobility, that third route from freeze, may be that an animal captured but not yet badly injured by a bigger animal may appear to be dead. The predator may then release its prey by putting it down for a moment, giving it a chance to ‘come back to life’ and escape.
It might also be that there are some analgesic benefits to tonic immobility so that if the creature is killed it may, at least, not suffer so much pain.4 However, if the creature does survive, something strange may happen.
A shaking off of stored energy
Once the immobility is past, the animal (or human) may exhibit vast amounts of emotion, a kind of ‘shaking off’ of the energy that was stored during the ‘zombie state’ of tonic immobility.5
One client, Brian, told me how during the Ladbroke Grove rail crash he had been trapped beneath bodies and unable to flee the wreck. He “fully believed [he] was going to die.” Even after rescue, he’d felt unable to move, “frozen”, but then…
“I started shaking uncontrollably. Like I was having some kind of fit! Eventually it passed.”
Brian had, in effect, been ‘caught in the jaws’ of a situation. The situation was the predator, so to speak, and his freeze response turned into tonic immobility. Even in the absence of serious physical injury, he had felt paralyzed – unable to move or react, even for a little while after rescue.
From maladaptive to adaptive
So we don’t seek to ‘cure’ the freeze response, or its prolonged cousin tonic immobility, any more than we cure any natural reflex. But we can help align it so that it only happens when it really needs to happen.
Clients may report a freeze when someone unexpectedly asks them to speak publicly, or when talking to someone they are attracted to. Or a more severe freeze may happen during a flashback or ‘faulty pattern match‘ in a traumatized client.
A client may feel trapped again (a kind of natural and spontaneous hypnotic regression) not only when a faulty pattern match occurs – when a firework reminds a traumatized war veteran of warfare, for example – but sometimes even when they talk about what happened. This is one reason why, for some people, trauma therapy needs to be non-voyeuristic – in other words, we may need to work without having our client recount in too much detail what happened to them.
So how do we help our clients overcome maladaptive freezing?
Step one: Normalize the freeze response
Kathy, who was frozen high on the glass ‘sky bridge’ in China, felt she must have been ‘crazy’ to freeze like that. I described how and why freezing happens not just in us humans, but in animals too. She actually laughed when I described how a squirrel might freeze when it becomes aware of us, and she recognized that.
I described why freezing happens and even a little about tonic immobility and the ‘playing dead’ response, which can have huge survival value. It made sense to her and therefore reassured her that “I’m not mad after all!” as she put it.
Next is perhaps the most important step in curing a faulty freeze response.
Step two: Decondition the trauma (of course!)
If the freeze response has become an ongoing problem for your client (Kathy had started to freeze just thinking about going up a high building), it simply means the limbic system, the emotional mind, is overgeneralizing – seeing threat not just where it does exist, but where it doesn’t. It’s also an indication that the mind needs to process trauma, so the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder can drop away.
When we use a safe and comfortable method like the Rewind Technique to decondition trauma, it seems that difficult memories are released from the grip of the amygdala (the fight-or-flight part of the brain) and moved into the neocortex, where memories reside. The memories are then said to be de-traumatized; they feel more distant and much less threatening.
Unfrozen
Brian, the client who had been trapped in the Ladbroke Grove rail crash, had subsequently found himself freezing whenever he saw a train. But after we’d processed the trauma using Rewind, he found this no longer happened. In fact, the police officer who had arranged for me to visit him told me he was able to get back on a train the next day!
When I spoke to Brian a few weeks later, he told me that not only had the freeze response stopped, but so had the flashbacks and nightmares.
When freezing occurs as a facet of PTSD, we can expect it to lift once the trauma is successfully treated.
Lastly, I want to address the general sense of paralysis that may be preventing your client from moving forward in their life.
Step three: Helping stuck clients
Some clients can almost feel frozen in life. This may be a symptom of learned helplessness from a time they were genuinely trapped, either physically (as Brian had been) or by general life circumstances, as in the case of Sally, who told me that since her acrimonious divorce five years earlier she had felt “rooted to the spot” and “unable to move on” – which are, curiously enough, both good descriptions of the freeze response and tonic immobility.
It’s almost as though the paralysis of the freeze response can exert a kind of continuum of influence, where at one end we have a sense of being literally frozen to the spot and at the other we have a feeling of being unable to move on in life.
Being stuck, unable to get on with life, full of procrastination, indecision, and hesitancy, can also become a habit of being.
Sally starts to move again
With Sally I did find that once I had helped her overcome some of the horrible memories of her divorce, she started to feel freed up to move on with her life. The kind of freezing she had been experiencing was partly due to a general loss of confidence but also what’s known as subthreshold traumas from that time.
What I’m talking about here isn’t the freeze response proper, but it does have echoes of it in the way the person lives. We can help such ‘stuck’ clients visualize more ‘movement’ in their lives – both literally, in the form of exercise, and in the sense of forming and achieving goals. As well, we can deal with any difficult past experiences which may have contributed to the stalling in their progress in life. We can help such clients ‘get moving‘.
One study found that people feeling emotionally unstable (for whatever reason) have less positive attitudes towards action and more positive attitudes toward inaction.6 The researchers argued that helping people feel more positive about action and be more proactive could help them feel more emotionally stable.
Anyway, Sally started jogging every morning, literally moving more. She applied for degree placement at the Open University; she planned a vacation; she socialized more; and she started dating again. She was moving, no longer paralyzed by “crap from the past”.
That wee squirrel on the fence this morning was only doing what was natural for it. Sometimes, in a confusing and threatening world, we do the same – until such time as we can fight or flee (change) the situation, however that happens. And it may be that this unfreezing happens for your clients because of you.
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About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
Find out more about my trauma treatment course hereYou can also get my articles on YouTube, find me on Instagram, Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook.
Notes:
- Dixon, A. K. (1998). Ethological strategies for defence in animals and humans: their role in some psychiatric disorders. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 71(4), 417-445. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8341.1998.tb01001.x
- Roelofs, K. (2017). Freeze for action: Neurobiological mechanisms in animal and human freezing. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 372(1718): 20160206. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0206
- Volchan, E., Souza, G. G., Franklin, C. M., Norte, C. E., Rocha-Rego, V., Oliviera, J. M., David, I. A., Mendlowicz, M. V., Coutinho, E. S. F., Fiszman, A., Berger, W., Marques-Portella, C., & Figuiera, I. (2011) Is there tonic immobility in humans? Biological evidence from victims of traumatic stress. Biological Psychology, 88(1), 13-19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2011.06.002
- See: Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.
- See Griffin, J., & Tyrrell, I. (2015). Human Givens: The new approach to emotional health and clear thinking (pp. 324-325). HG Publishing.
- Ireland, M. E., Hepler, J., Li, H., & Albarracín, D. (2014). Neuroticism and attitudes toward action in 19 countries. Journal of Personality, 83(3), 243-250. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12099
