This week was the lecture on the biology of emotion. This is two hours devoted to attachment, the stress response, and the basic emotions.
I do a thing where at the end of each class students write down one important thing they learned. And a LOT of students said the bit about the stress response was really important, and then I also got an email this week from someone asking why no one ever told her about tonic immobility, which is a characteristic of the stress response that folks don’t learn about. So I think it’s a good idea to write a blog post about it.
What DO people learn about? Generally I find that people learn about “fight or flight,” the body’s response to a perceived threat in the environment, preparing the organism to beat the shit out of that threat or else run like hell. Generally I find people are surprised to hear about “freeze,” where your body responds to a perceived threat by shutting down or locking up. (In some places, it gets called the “fright” response, and sometimes “freeze” is used to describe the alerting and vigilance the precedes flight/fight/etc.)
Basically it goes like this:
You notice a potential threat in the environment and your body floods with adrenaline and cortisol and things, which prepares your various organ systems to cope with that threat.
And your body does a fast assessment of that threat.
If it determines that this is a threat that it can cope with best by trying to escape, you get FLIGHT, which we experience as fear… and anxiety and worry and concern and all the emotions we cluster generally as different intensities of fear.
If your body determines that this is a threat it can cope with best by trying to conquer it, you get FIGHT, which we experience as anger. And rage. And irritation or annoyance… all the diverse intensities of anger.
If – and this is the one you don’t hear about – your body assess the threat decides its best option is to shut down, wait for the threat to pass or wait for a solution to come from outside the situation, then you get freeze. We might experience freeze as numbness or as feeling “stunned” or overwhelmed, and in the long term we can experience it as depression.
For the central nervous system nerds out there, fight and flight are sympathetic nervous system and freeze is parasympathetic. For the non-CNS nerds, fight and flight are like slamming your foot on the gas pedal. Freeze is slamming on the brakes.
One of the stressors that actives fight/flight/freeze is sexual assault (though not just sexual assault) and may survivors wonder what went wrong with their bodies; why didn’t they fight back? why couldn’t they run or kick or even scream? Answer: nothing went wrong with your body, everything went right. Your body decided that its best hope for survival was to shut down, freeze. And it worked. You did survive. How do I know you survived? Because here you are, reading this.
A difficulty with freeze, apart from the cultural non-recognition or devaluing of it as a survival mechanism, is that it leaves all this adrenaline-mediated stress to go stale in your CNS. Animals in the wild, as discussed by Peter Levine and Robert Sopolsky, freeze as a last ditch effort to convince a predator they’re already dead; the predator loses interest or goes to get its cubs to feed, and the animal does an extraordinary thing:
It shakes. Trembles. Sighs. And gets up to trot away. It’s finishing the activation process, purging the residue.
Now, freeze in humans is more complex than in gazelles and gorillas, but one of the issues we have is that very often we don’t get the opportunity to complete that process. Our powerful prefrontal cortices are really good at inhibition, keeping the brakes on.
So. Freeze. It’s a thing. If you’ve experienced freeze, your job is to gently ease your foot off the brakes, let the stress response finish (this will feel weird and if you have an emotion dismissing background it might take some practice to get used to the idea that it’s okay to allow this stuff to happen). It takes time. You’ve got time. Okay.
emily nagoski
14 Responses to “Freeze.”
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Must say I feel strange forwarding posts with the new name…I liked the old name better.
Wow. That’s odd that people don’t know about that one. It seems to me far the most familiar of the responses to stress — I couldn’t begin to count the number of times it’s happened to me (in a more minor way, that is).
I experienced a similar today, when the neighbor’s 80 lb boxer and 70 lb pit bull attacked a contractor’s elderly schnauzer. While one lady contractor cried and the other swore, I just froze for 5 or 10 seconds. Then I saw that I could reach in and grab the boxer’s collar and drag her off. Our 10 lb Maltese was in the mix but not actually involved.
This fight was a huge surprise as the boxer and pit bull are frequent visitors and playmates of our baby dog.
I can see how this kind of freeze is evolutionarily adaptive, forcing my brain to take time to evaluate and decide before I jumped in to rescue our pup. It might be related to the “play dead” sort of freeze.
It took a stiff drink and a long walk to start calming me down. 2 hours later my heart rate is still up.
I got linked to this by the “Private Practice” blog entry (see pingback), and just wanted to say thank you. So many people don’t understand the freeze response. And that’s exactly what happened to me. I’ve tried to describe it as “rabbit noticing wolf” but folks still get tied up in that “but WHY didn’t you run away if he was too big/whatever to fight??” Argh. Natural body response, yo.
Additionally, thanks for the emotion dismissing link. Yeah, I grew up in that sort of family, too. Fun, eh? (For varying definitions of fun equaling not so much.)
The first time I learned about “Freeze” as the third option was from my flight instructor. He detailed for me how various students reacted to high-stress situations in the plane, and he described “flight”, “fight”, and “freeze” (he called it “paralysis”). It was incredibly useful for understanding my own behavior and now I’m able to apply it to my interactions with other people as well when I recognize their “Freeze” reaction.
Thank you for bringing this to the attention of your students, I’m so glad it made an impression on them. It’s good to hear it reinforced as a normal reaction – makes it easier to understand and work with/around!
Very useful, thank you. I had security training for my high-risk-travel job recently. The guy advised us that if we were in a situation where we couldn’t successfully run away or overpower our assailant, we shouldn’t try – this would enrage the attacker/kidnapper and we would end up dead. Guess the body’s survival mechanisms know this better than our conscious minds. It’s very helpful to have the freeze response described as appropriate, rather than as a weakness; for many women, this is going to be the most appropriate mechanism to survive. It would have been good if this had been explained to me by the police who dealt with my sexual assault case.
missypiggy – I wonder if any of them knew either? Not excusing the individuals, just saying that this seems a much bigger issue.
Thanks Emily, this was a really illuminating article for me. Another thing that I desperately wish I had been taught at school. In terms of sexual assault, I think there’s a really important lesson here for attackers too. Our culture dismisses the freeze response, and assumes consent unless told otherwise. It could be very useful to teach teenagers that if the person you are with is non-responsive, not only is that *not* consent, but they may actually be in a physiological shut-down. Hence it is critical to get explicit consent, every time.
I’ve experienced the freeze response a couple of times, including the going away and then shaking and breaking down in tears part once it was over. It scared the hell out of me because I had no idea why I was responding so strongly to something that logically wasn’t a big deal. That I froze and that the incidents seemed so minor (or would’ve done to an outsider) that I never reported because who would’ve believed me? I spent a long time berating myself for not getting out of those situations but now it makes sense. Thanks Emily, I’ll be sharing this as and when.
You’ve mentioned “completing the stress response” or something like that a number of times, and I’m not at all clear on what that means, what it looks like, or how to do it. Can you explain that a little more, either here or in a new post?
Yes – I’ve been meaning to write a post about that. Lots of people ask. I’ll get on it!
Heh. I freeze almost exclusively to the point where I don’t think I could “fight” or “flight” for anything.
To solve any problem, here are three questions to ask yourself: First, what could I do? Second, what could I read? And third, who could I ask? Jim Rohn