Resource, Resilience, and Regulation, Part 4: Coming Out of Freeze
INTRODUCTION
In this fourth segment of the Resource, Resilience, and Regulation series, we’ll take a closer look at the freeze response—a distinct survival strategy that activates when fighting or fleeing doesn’t feel possible. We’ll explore how this physiological state becomes deeply patterned in the nervous system, how it often becomes entangled with experiences of shame and relational rupture, and how specific somatic and imaginal interventions can begin to gently unbind those patterns and restore a sense of agency, dignity, and embodied presence.
What is the Freeze Response?
Imagine you’re walking in the woods and suddenly come face-to-face with a wild animal. Your first instinct might be to run, but what if you can’t? What if you’re cornered or the animal is too close? This is when the freeze response might kick in. Your body plays dead—freezing might be your best chance of survival.
In essence, the freeze response is an ancient, automatic reaction that happens when the brain perceives extreme danger, especially when there’s no way to fight back or escape.
How Does the Freeze Response Work?
When we freeze, our bodies undergo several physiological changes:
Cognitive Impairment: During freeze, brain activity shifts as the frontal lobes—responsible for reasoning, decision-making, and executive functions—show decreased activation. This reduction impairs cognitive processing, making it difficult to think clearly, plan, or take deliberate action, further reinforcing the immobilization state.
Numbness and Detachment: Freeze often brings a sense of dissociation—a protective dulling of emotional and physical pain that helps you survive the trauma.
Slowing Down: Freezing activates the dorsal vagal branch of the parasympathetic system, slowing heart rate and breathing. Muscle tone varies—dorsal vagal activation lowers tone, causing flaccidity, but simultaneous sympathetic activation causes bracing and rigidity.
Endorphin Release: The body releases natural painkillers to numb physical pain during the event.
Why Do We Freeze?
Freeze is the body’s last line of defense when fight or flight isn’t possible. Some animals freeze to avoid detection by predators. In humans, extreme fear or trauma—like assault or life-threatening accidents—can trigger freeze. It may provide precious moments to assess or avoid escalating danger.
Freeze is often tied to double binds—no-win situations where conflicting demands trap a person. For example, a child encouraged to express emotions but punished for doing so learns that openness is both required and forbidden. The mind, overwhelmed, freezes to cope with the tension and avoid harm.
Double binds are common in manipulative or abusive relationships. If someone is criticized both for being distant and for being needy, they may feel paralyzed, unable to act safely. Over time, repeated freeze responses in these no-win situations can harm mental health and autonomy.
The path to healing involves memory reconsolidation—recalling the double bind situation and attending to each conflicting survival impulse separately. Somatic Experiencing® (SE) combined with Dynamic Attachment Repatterning (DARe) works well here.
For example, the child punished for emotional expression might imagine successfully defending themselves—fighting back or escaping. When abuse happened in childhood, therapy often involves imagining a competent protector acting on the child’s behalf—resolving the impossible double bind where the caregiver was both source of safety and threat.
The other half of the intervention involves imagining a scenario where free emotional expression is not only welcomed and celebrated, but where the underlying needs associated with that expression are also recognized and attended to—needs that were unmet during the original traumatic experiences.
Functional Shame and Freeze
Shame adds a uniquely complex dimension to trauma because it operates on both emotional and physiological levels. It is not just a feeling but a state of autonomic collapse and disconnection, often involving dorsal vagal shutdown. Because freeze physiology is accompanied by cognitive impairment, shame becomes difficult to process mentally and is instead experienced as a full-body reaction—often shown through slumped posture, downcast eyes, quiet or inhibited speech, and social withdrawal.
From an evolutionary standpoint, shame likely developed to help maintain group cohesion, alerting an individual when their behavior risks exclusion (Gilbert, 1998). But when chronic or linked to identity—especially in early relational trauma—shame becomes toxic, reinforcing self-loathing, isolation, and a tendency toward collapse or immobilization.
Neuroscientifically, shame tends to involve the insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and default mode network—regions implicated in self-referential thinking and internalized social comparison (Michl et al., 2014). When paired with freeze physiology, shame can become deeply encoded in implicit memory systems and remain resistant to change without somatic, relational, and experiential input.
Practices that activate the ventral vagal system—such as warm eye contact, gentle vocal tone, affectionate touch, or attuned physical containment—can shift this state. The message communicated is: You still belong. You are safe. You are welcome here.
Repeated exposure to these social safety cues—especially in the context of therapy or co-regulation—can rewire early attachment injuries and decouple shame from identity. Over time, clients learn to distinguish between “I did something wrong” and “I am something wrong,” and begin to reclaim the sense of dignity that trauma often obscures.
A Real-Life Example
Let’s say I’m out walking with my 4-year-old daughter and she suddenly runs into the street. I rush over and say sternly, “Never do that again, it’s dangerous!” She breaks into tears. Deep in her attachment system, the intensity of my response feels like a threat to her belonging and survival. Because fighting or fleeing her father isn’t safe, her nervous system automatically initiates a freeze response.
What I do next matters. If I scowl, shake my head, and drag her away without comfort, she might conclude “I am bad,” fusing shame with her sense of self—and with freeze physiology.
But if I kneel and say, “I got loud because I was scared. I love you so much and never want you to get hurt. Come here and give me a hug,” she receives the message that her behavior was unsafe—not she was bad. The eye contact and embrace also support ventral vagal engagement, helping her shift out of freeze and avoid internalizing shame.
The Aftermath of Freezing: What Happens Next?
While freeze helps survival in the moment, it can leave lingering effects. Survivors may feel helpless, confused, or ashamed afterward, wondering why they didn’t run or fight.
Freeze can contribute to anxiety, depression, or PTSD, making it hard to return to calm and causing feelings of being stuck.
PRACTICE: The Swaddling Technique
When everything feels “too much, too fast, too early,” we brace our muscles to hold it together—but this comes at a cost. It’s like having the gas and the brakes on at the same time—burning fuel without moving.
If the feeling is overwhelming, we may dissociate and not even notice our bracing.
An antidote to the overwhelm of freeze is often containment—the feeling of being held and supported from the outside instead of bracing from within.
Containment can come from reassurance or attuned connection with others. Here, I offer a simple physical containment practice I call the “swaddling practice” that you can do alone or with support:
Find a firm blanket or towel (bath towel or Mexican blanket works well).
Instead of wrapping it around your neck, scoot the top down to wrap snugly around your upper arms, just above the armpit crease and below the shoulder tip.
Hold the blanket ends crossing your shoulders with opposite hands.
Shrug your shoulders up toward your ears, walk your hands up the blanket a bit, then release shoulders down to create snug compression.
Adjust until you feel a spontaneous sigh or deep breath.
Stay wrapped as long as you like, focusing attention on your gut, pelvis, legs, and feet to notice grounding or settling.
It’s beyond the scope of this article to provide a full range of therapeutic tools to address the freeze response. The swaddling practice is just one example among many, and will not be applicable in all cases. If freeze is a persistent pattern in your life, I recommend working with a skilled somatic practitioner who can tailor interventions to your individual physiology and history.
DISCUSSION
The swaddling practice provides deep pressure stimulation, a proprioceptive input shown to calm the nervous system. Pressure activates skin and fascia receptors that signal through the vagus nerve to the brainstem, shifting us from sympathetic or dorsal vagal shutdown into ventral vagal social engagement (Porges, 2011).
This fits within Polyvagal Theory, which describes a hierarchy of nervous system states: mobilization (fight/flight), immobilization (freeze/collapse), and social engagement. The ventral vagus helps us feel safe and connected, and practices supporting it—like facial expression, tone, and physical containment—can pull us out of freeze (Porges, 2017).
Deep pressure therapy has shown benefits in sensory integration disorders, PTSD, and anxiety, improving heart rate, skin conductance, and calmness (McIntosh et al., 1999; Champagne & Stromberg, 2004). Swaddling adults mimics this by offering a nonverbal container cueing safety and easing dissociation or hypoarousal.
When paired with relational attunement—whether with a therapist, loved one, or imagined protector—this intervention’s effects grow stronger. Co-regulation refers to one regulated nervous system helping another return to balance (Schore, 2003; Siegel, 2010). Repeated safe co-regulation builds self-regulation, often impaired by trauma.
Research on infant temperament reveals that babies often labeled as “easy” or “quiet” may actually be exhibiting a chronic freeze state. Their apparent calmness can mask an underlying immobilization response—an adaptive nervous system shutdown in response to early stress or threat (Tronick & Beeghly, 2011; Porges, 2011; Schore, 2001). This insight highlights how freeze physiology can manifest early in life, shaping patterns of emotional regulation and social connection that persist into adulthood.
Memory reconsolidation research shows that traumatic memories are not fixed in the brain but can be fundamentally altered under the right conditions. This possibility hinges on a specific form of brain plasticity—experience-dependent synaptic change—that becomes accessible when a memory is reactivated and accompanied by a mismatched, emotionally salient experience (Nader & Hardt, 2009; Ecker et al., 2012). In this “limbo” window—usually lasting several hours—the neural circuits encoding the original memory become labile, meaning they can be updated or even erased at the synaptic level. The result is not merely cognitive insight, but a durable shift in autonomic, emotional, and behavioral patterns, especially when the intervention occurs in a regulated, relationally attuned state (Alberini & LeDoux, 2013).
In clinical work, SE, DARe, and other somatic modalities work not by talking about trauma, but by completing thwarted survival responses and restoring nervous system coherence. Techniques like titration (breaking experiences into manageable parts), pendulation (shifting between distress and resource), and imaginal work (e.g., protectors or safe places) allow the nervous system to finally resolve what was once overwhelming.
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