A Father And Son Discuss Ways To Confront PTSD'S Freeze Response

Make Yourself A Source Of Safety

I think this is one of the better conversations about how to come out of “freeze” or “shutdown.”

I think it is actually the true, living, authentic self, shutting down the conflict averse, people-pleasing (which should be called people appeasing) false self, so I am kind of pro-freeze, in some ways.

When I go into “freeze” or its darker cousin “fossilize,’ it can be because I “over-extended” and lost control of “agency.”

Sometimes the “news-cycle” paralyzes me, because I have no genuine idea what is “happening,” and feel I must know what is “happening,” and since I don’t, I lose all words.

Hence: Freeze.

The freeze reflex is not “bad,” it’s what happens when the “traumatized” (ie all of us) mind gets overwhelmed.

America is unique in that it is a nation that believes deeply in perpetual activity, action, and “getting things done.” “Meeting goals,” and all that.

I believe the enemy of life is stress. The belief in speed, output, productivity, and the habit of stressing other people out (by talking about how stressed we are.)

Milan Kundera wrote a small novel called Slowness and some people hated it. It makes the case from slowness, as the great enabler of memory.

But before I romanticize all this too much, I must admit it’s not really “ok,” and it must be confronted, by movement, and the re-awakening of limbic courage. Fish, when facing predators, will sink to the bottom of the lake (play dead) but can sink so low they find no oxygen and they die.

PTSD “freeze” happens when some kind of situation moves too fast from something expected to something unexpected, and the brain can’t keep up.

Maybe this is why Finnish people barely speak, at all.

When you freeze, you’re trying to stop time, find more time, by stopping everything. These periods can be very frightening—and very fruitful.

Less is more, and emotional shutdown is one way to limit harm.

It took me so many days to get a post up. I was “frozen” and everything I wrote froze, died, seemed worthless, and scared me.

Scared of what?

Scared of everything out there that is somehow my unmet responsibility. All the things I could know, find, say and do, that I need more time with. All the things we might have done, might have helped with, but didn’t. All the petitions, campaigns, letters, expressions, protests— all the things.

Step off the train of the epoch itself?

“Silence, you’re the best

of all I’ve ever heard.”

—Boris Pasternak

These two—who are new to me— are very avuncular, very friendly; I think this conversation has many highlights, for those among us who tend to freeze.