(This is an AI generated image that I will explain at the end of this post.)

I had a breakthrough this week about being able to see what the freeze state is and how to get out of it. I have written about how I am stuck in a state of immobility. This is a link to the Polyvagal chart we have talked about: Polyvagal Chart. Immobility is in the red. I get confused about how you are going to have to experience a mobilizing energy (yellow) to get out of it…and how you are going to have to go through the yellow to get back to the green. I have been getting stuck when I am coming out of freeze and bump into some of that yellow energy. It’s too much, so I go back into a freeze like this:

I had been thinking of freeze in terms of the example of a person running from an animal that was chasing them. And then when they realized the animal could catch up to them, they stopped and hid. I was thinking that they would be in distress while they were hiding – so that was correct. But it hadn’t clicked with me yet that it is an involuntary and sudden freeze when it happens to a person, too – and that’s why it’s difficult to regulate. I saw some YouTube videos of the moment when an animal actually goes into freeze, and you can see that it’s not just that they stop moving. There is a process that takes place. They freeze. The animal had been going through its day and then it saw a threat. A large amount of SNS mobilizing energy was cued up. It was ready to fight or flee. But its mind realized that any more movement would endanger it. So the option that would give the animal the best chance of surviving would be to immediately freeze and become undetectable to the predator. Part of that process involves reducing the heart rate and breathing rate so that the predator either will not be able to detect the hiding animal, or it will think the animal it has caught is dead. It also involves making the animal unresponsive to pain so that it won’t cry out or move if it is bitten. 

So instead of just stopping and trying not to move, the animal experiences an involuntary reaction that takes over and floods their body with immobilizing neurochemicals and opiates and the animal suddenly stops/freezes. This slows their heart rate. We don’t have conscious control of our heart rate. Our autonomic nervous system controls it. We cannot change our heart rate by thinking about it. We might be able to change it indirectly by thinking about something stressful or something relaxing, but we cannot say or think, “I would like my heartbeat to rapidly reduce immediately” and make that happen like you could say to yourself “I would like to move my arm” and think about it and make your arm move. I think this is why that involuntary reaction takes over. Our mind/body is protecting us. So that’s what clicked with me…that’s what the breakthrough was. I hope I am thinking of it correctly. I see now that the surge of energy that puts me into a freeze is intended to help…it’s an involuntary reaction intended to protect me.

This is what Google AI said about this process when I asked what happens when the freeze state happens:

When the body enters a freeze state, the brain’s fear center triggers a massive surge of chemicals. This flood shuts down movement and action to protect you from harm. [1, 2]

The Brain and Nerve Signals

• The Amygdala senses extreme danger and signals the brain.
• The Sympathetic System starts with a burst of high energy.
• The Parasympathetic System then takes over very fast.
• The Vagus Nerve slows your heart rate and drops your blood pressure. [1, 2]

Key Chemicals and Hormones

• Endorphins flood the body to numb pain.
• Adrenaline stays high or shifts into a heavy, frozen block.
• Acetylcholine changes how your muscles respond.
• Cortisol stays in the blood to manage the severe stress.

Physical Effects on the Body

• Muscles lock up or go totally limp.
• Heart rate drops very low instead of racing.
• Blood flow moves away from your arms and legs.
• Voice and movement stop working as normal. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

So freeze floods the body with immobilizing chemicals. I had already been thinking of fight/flight as a surge of mobilizing energy. That had clicked with me. I wrote before about being stuck on the Squiggle of Trauma, the SNS/DV loop. If you are stuck on that, too, then you are used to those mobilizing and immobilizing surges of energy. When I was thinking about how fight/flight gives a surge of mobilizing energy, I remembered a tv show I watched where there was a woman who was in a room and then she realized the door was locked…she had been locked in the bathroom and couldn’t get out. She felt the stress of it…felt the threat to her safety…and she experienced a surge of mobilizing energy. She then had the strength to either break the door open or climb out the window…I can’t remember…I think she went out the window. The surge of energy she had  helped her to escape. I think she might have had to go out the window and climb onto a neighboring balcony. She was several floors off the ground. Usually, a person would have a lot of nerves about that. But she was in flight/fight…she had that surge of energy…she didn’t think about what she would normally think about…she just said, “Well, I’ve got to get out of here…” and climbed over to the other balcony. If someone had asked her when she was in the lobby if she would go upstairs and climb on the balconies, she probably would have said no…she would have thought she couldn’t do it. But when she was locked in the bathroom and needed to escape and experienced that mobilizing energy, she went out onto the balcony without the normal hesitation. That’s what these energies do…they put you in an altered state…where you’re not thinking about things the way you normally would. The SNS mobilizing energy gives you that extra surge of strength and narrowed focus (just on making it safely to the other balcony) that helps you just get through it and get to safety. 

The thing to note is that she might not have felt the stress of climbing on the balcony in the moment when she was doing it, but she will feel it the next time things get quiet. Everything she would have felt if she had just gone up from the lobby knowing that she was going to climb on the balconies…and everything she would have felt if she had been more aware of what she was doing in the moment…wanting to scream, for example…she will feel all of that later. Or it will start to bubble up. If she can’t process it, it will stay locked away in her system.

I’m wondering if this is where I am getting stuck. Fight/flight/freeze can be triggered by emotional stressors also. And what is clicking with me better now is that the amped up (SNS) energy that got cued up when you sensed a threat gets compressed and frozen rather than discharging if you go into a freeze. It compresses it and waits for a later, safer time to discharge it. But if when you start to relax and things start to get quiet, if what bubbles up (or what starts to unfreeze) is too much for you…too dysregulated…or you don’t have the tools to process it…you go right back into freeze. I’m wondering if that’s what is happening when I start to get out of the red and bump into the yellow.

What I’m starting to see more clearly is that your body is going to want to go through and complete the movements it wasn’t able to act out when you come out of freeze. I posted a video on here before of an impala that was waking up out of immobility and started shaking out that energy. If it was a physical threat, you might have a locked in desire to punch or kick. If it was an emotional threat, you might have the locked in desire to say what you didn’t say or to cry or scream.

If this energy of uncompleted actions has been locked away for a long time, it is important to remember that you are trying to unfreeze a moment that has been frozen in time. It’s so completely frozen and preserved in your mind that it feels like it is still happening. The woman on the balcony did not go into immobility…but if her feelings about it were hitting her later, she might feel like she was on the balcony again because it feels like it is still happening. Or the animal that went into immobility when the predator got too close and is now waking up would be trying to shake off the feelings it had when the predator was standing right there…and the feelings would be so strong that it might seem like the animal is still there. So I think what’s clicking with my mind is that the first step to coming out of a freeze and being able to release the energy would be to realize that the moment you are remembering and trying to process is no longer happening. You are remembering what you felt while you were on the balcony…but you are not on the balcony now. The grounding exercises are supposed to help with that, I think, but I struggle with those. 

While I was thinking about this, I was looking at the Polyvagal chart and I realized that when you are coming out of the red (freeze, immobility/shutdown/collapse) you will go into the yellow next…but you are going into the yellow on the downward slope of the arc. You are mobilizing to escape. The animal that had frozen would be mobilizing to run away from the predator to safety. That would feel good. That would not have the same stress with it as it did when the animal was activating in the first place when he saw the predator approaching. So the animal would become aware that the predator was not there anymore, it would feel some relief and then start shaking off that compressed energy and then feel that mobilizing (yellow) energy that would enable it to run to safety. Then it would be able to slow down, rest and recover, and return to ventral vagal (normal heart rate and breathing rate). 

It’s helping me to write all of this out. It’s hard for me to keep the information straight in my head. I’m seeing more clearly now that Fight/Flight and Freeze are helpful survival states that you need to have available to you because they give you surges of energy that help you regulate things that you do not have conscious control over – such as how fast your heart is beating or how much blood is going to your muscles. These surges of energy enable you to do things that you could not do in daily living mode (VV). In daily living mode your autonomic nervous system is regulating your heart rate and breathing rate at a normal pace. When your mind senses a threat, your SNS increases your heart rate and breathing rate and makes adjustments to how much blood is being sent to your muscles and what resources are available for digestion so that the resources necessary for escape will be sent to the right areas. Then, if your mind senses that you cannot escape and any more movement would endanger you, your parasympathetic nervous system floods your body with immobilizing neurochemicals that suddenly reduce your heart rate and breathing rate lower than they would be in VV. It also makes adjustments in your muscles and organs that will enable you to not be noticed by the predator.

So these are good functions in and of themselves. They are necessary for your survival…they are defensive, survival states that enable your body to mobilize or immobilize suddenly and intensely in response to a threat. The problem is if these defensive states get triggered when they are not necessary, or if they do not fully complete when they are triggered…if that compressed energy never gets properly discharged.

So what I will be working on is learning how to safely discharge the compressed energy that is already stored and also how to prevent energy from getting locked away like that in the first place. What I have been writing about on here is that we are trying to find what actions we could take to get out of that SNS/DV loop…to get out of the Squiggle of Trauma and get into the Squiggle of Life. 

Some of the hymns I have been posting help us learn about how to stop and pray when we start to feel the activation process taking place. Praying is an action…you are crying out to God for help. You are crying out in distress. That helps discharge some of that cued up energy…and when you do pray, you will feel a response from God that can help calm your nervous system because you will sense that your cry for help has been heard. I’ve also been looking up hymns about how we are the clay and God is the potter. I hope to write about that sometime soon because the imagery is helpful. You have gotten into a bracing stance while you were in freeze…and hymns that are prayers for God to mold and shape us into who He wants us to be can help us get out of that bracing. I’ve also been looking up hymns about how Jesus is the sure foundation. There is really helpful imagery with those, too, because if we feel that solid foundation beneath our feet, it can help us to regulate when we are triggered because it gives us a sense of safety. When I was writing this post, God reminded me of 1 Peter 5:7 which says, “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” I found a really pretty hymn about casting all your cares on God and I found a lot of very helpful information in the study notes about this verse that I hope to post about soon. One thing I can share quickly is the imagery of your cares represented by a load of weight an animal, like a donkey or llama, is carrying. The act of “casting” is an intentional act of removing the load from the animal and placing it somewhere else. So instead of the donkey, envision your cares as a load of weight on your shoulders. Envision yourself intentionally removing it and then lifting it up…and casting it onto Jesus’s shoulders for Him to carry for you. There is more to this imagery, but it will help to start thinking about it like that. Even if you can’t physically move around when you are feeling triggered, envisioning a movement of casting that anxiety onto God can help prevent activation from increasing.

So, again, what we are trying to learn about is what we can do to prevent activation from increasing all the way through yellow to red when it doesn’t need to. When we start feeling triggered, we can stop to pray, cry out to God for help, learn how to be still before Him and wait, learn how to let Him mold and shape us. And we can learn to cast our cares on Him. Envisioning moving the weight that you are carrying off your shoulders and casting it up for Jesus to carry can really help.

I wanted to write a little bit about the picture at the top of this post. It is the image that the WordPress AI generated based on my post. I thought it was interesting and could be helpful to use as imagery. It is a close-up of relaxed hands slowly unclenching above a calm lake. The scattered ripples fading into still water suggest releasing the compressed, stored energy and completing unfinished actions. So, the hands are slowly releasing the compressed energy, which creates gentle ripples in the water. As the ripples fade away, the energy dissipates. This reminds me of exercises you can do where you are supposed to envision releasing the charged energy out of your feet into the ground to dissipate like what happens with lightning. I know that’s what happens in nature…lightning going through the ground like that where it dissipates without hurting anyone. But I struggle with thinking of the stored energy as lightning because I already have trouble thinking of the energy as something that could be released safely. It is so dysregulated and so harmful…how could it ever be released without causing harm? And I think of lightning as harmful. So maybe we could try thinking of releasing the energy…just a little bit of it…in waves into the water like in the picture. The key is to just release a little bit of it. That will take the pressure off of the rest of the energy that is stored…like a steam release valve. I tried using the imagery of the picture and it seemed to work. There are 2 hands in the picture. I thought of one of them as being mine and one of them as being Jesus’ hand. He was directing me…showing me how to release the energy into the water so it could dissipate. Then I started thinking of releasing the energy from my hand into His hand…and then He would carry that energy for me. That would go along with the idea of casting our cares upon Him. So sometimes when you work with one image, it can help some and then you might think of another image that helps, too. 

This is another AI image that was generated based on the content in this post:

It is a forest that is supposed to represent the freeze state. I thought it really effectively captured what it feels like to have been in immobility for a really long time. This is what you are trying to unfreeze from. This is what it feels like when you start to wake up. New life has not really been able to grow while you have been frozen. So you must wait and try to let things thaw out…wait for rays of sunlight to shine in. They bring a gentle warmth that wakes everything up…revives everything…brings renewal. New little flowers start to spring up. New life energy flows through everything. You start hearing nature sounds again…you see vibrant colors returning all around you. This is what we are hoping will happen. See if you can use this picture to help you envision it.

I will stop here for today and write more about this soon.