^{A's to your Q's}

This depends on each person. When one is living with freeze (the brake), that automatically means there is also a big sympathetic activation in the system (the gas), because remember — the freeze response only comes on after fight/flight has been unsuccessful, so where there is freeze, there is also fire, though one may not feel that.

The most common thing we see when someone has been living with both unresolved freeze and fight/flight in their system for a long time is what we call Syndromes (fibromyalgia, chronic pain, Crohn’s, IBS, PCOS, endometriosis, etc.). This is because the nervous system is so darn exhausted and confused! We have these big survival energies always running in the background, and over time that wreaks havoc with all the functions the autonomic system is supposed to support: immune function, heart rate variability, breath, digestion, reproduction, endocrine hormone production, cell and tissue repair, etc.

The gas on/brake on experience can also show up behaviourally or emotionally; manic depressive episodes and borderline personality disorders, etc. Always being ON or OFF is essentially flip-flopping between the high Sympathetic arousal and the high Parasympathetic arousal. This may also show up more mildly as episodes of both anxiety and depression.

The trembling response you describe is a deactivation of the fight/flight energy, which only occurs once the animal is safe. The impala was still in imminent danger, so it went from freeze right back into fight/flight so it could get outta there! Once it reached safety it would then come down from the fight/flight, which often produces that tremor response.

The freeze response is high activation of the Parasympathetic Nervous System, specifically the Dorsal Vagal branch. This can be confusing, because with the freeze response everything feels numb, like there is very little happening in the system, but in fact, there’s a lot happening. It takes a huge amount of energy to numb the body, draw the blood to the core, slow down the heart rate and breathe (the breath may be so shallow that it feels like it has stopped, and this is also to help the system feel less), and stop all non-essential biological functions. So it really is a state of peak activation.

Along with freeze often comes dissociation, though not always. The dissociation serves as a function to help mammals not feel the pain of being eaten by a predator — that’s how it evolved. As humans, our higher brain enables us to manage these survival energies, often unconsciously, so the freeze response may manifest simply as feeling lethargic, hopeless, or numb in parts of the body, without the dissociation. Or it may be experienced primarily as dissociation: being completely checked out.

When the freeze response has become an embedded, go-to option as a response to stress, people will often end up living in what we call a functional freeze. This means it has become normalised and doesn’t necessarily show up in dramatic ways.

Functional freeze can actually show up as the ability to accomplish TONS of work and achieve a lot, especially in Type A personalities. There are many successful business people and incredible athletes who are living with functional freeze. They are only able to be such high performers by not feeling into their bodies and what is happening inside.

Generally, they don’t know they are doing this, they just know they prefer to always be on the go. Always doing, producing, moving is often the only way they feel anything at all. In first responders, for instance, this is very common. The ‘rush’ of constantly being in a crisis is the only way for them to feel into their bodies.

Functional freeze can also show up as limitations; fear of speaking up, not having boundaries, always giving in to others, lethargy, a feeling of no purpose in life, or no drive to accomplish anything. These are all manifestations of trying to stay as small and quiet as possible. In other words, to remain frozen.

There are often big events that are traumatic, even though they have been normalised and may not seem big by society’s standards. Things like circumcision, early surgeries or severe illness, choking on food – these are all pretty big events to a young system. 

But more often in our society it is the things that don’t seem ‘big’ at all, that have a serious impact on the nervous system – parents who are chronically stressed (that’s just ‘normal’, right?), parents with unresolved trauma, or who don’t like each other, who fight a lot in the presence of their kids, who are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol, or who are separated and uncommunicative – all of these things are quite common and not usually considered traumatic, but they almost always are.

Yes, totally normal and a good thing. It may not feel like a good thing, because of the discomfort, but there is simply no way to heal this stuff if we are numb. As we say – if you can feel it, then you can heal it!

This is also why it is SO important to go slow and really titrate this work. When we do that, our system will generally not offer up more than we have the capacity to deal with. If we’ve been living in freeze, functional or otherwise, as we connect and attune to our system, and the freeze starts to lift, we can have periods of actually feeling MORE stressed than before we started this work, as the underlying Sympathetic energy starts to move. We may feel angry, afraid, and new, uncomfortable sensations.

Being afraid of this is understandable, but there simply is no other way out but through, so we really need to work on accepting this, knowing that it is our life energy returning to us, and that the discomfort wont last forever.

We also may need to work more proactively with engaging the Sympathetic system in healthy ways, like with increased movement, and/or things like the Healthy Aggression work in module 4 such as the 'Be The Animal You "AHH"’ practice. 

Contrarily, we may also need to support our Parasympathetic down-regulation with some of the slower practices (bearing in mind that everyone is unique, and that exercises that are soothing for some people may be stimulating for others). Example 'Finding The Safety' & 'Feeling the Now'

On the bright side, being able to feel more uncomfortable things means we also will get to feel more wonderful things, like joy and pleasure, though that may not be apparent right away.

Parts of the body may be numb and have little sensation, or when someone tunes in to feel what’s happening on the inside, there may just be a sense of void, nothing going on. Or it may show up as poor digestion, a poor reproductive flow/cycle and low immune function, and an inability to get a restful night’s sleep, because when we sleep or are deeply resting we are supposed to be in a more nuanced and healthy zone for the Dorsal Vagal branch — which is the low-scale state. This low-scale Dorsal Vagal state supports digestion, reproduction, barrier-keeping in the guts, cell repair, physical growth, and immune function. So, if we are living with functional freeze, there may be a tendency when we sleep to dip fully into that freeze response such that we don’t have access to a healthier, low-scale state.

There are many ways freeze becomes a normal part of how we react to stress.

Usually it is rooted in early/developmental trauma, where the little one could not fight or flee a hostile, neglectful, chronically stressful, or misattuned environment, and so the system perceived freeze as the only option left, and then eventually just starts to default to freeze when stress enters the picture.

It can also happen because of traumatic births or surgical procedures early on, but it’s not a guarantee; if the caregivers are healthy and attuned then the little one’s system will be able to bounce back from pretty much anything. It can also happen later in life through physical abuse that can’t be escaped or defended against; an older child’s system may still learn to numb out as a way to defend.

There is no one timeline or sequence to coming out of freeze, it will be different for everybody. One thing is the same though, in that it does take time. This isn’t something that happens in a session, or a week, or a month.

Generally we are looking at months or years, with improvements and gradual changes in physiological function that happen slowly. Some may start to notice they simply feel more alive or feel more sensation, or have more energy or better boundaries. They may start to speak up for themselves. Sleep may improve and start to be more restful, or immune problems may start to clear up. Digestion, reproduction may get better. Basically, physiological function will slowly improve over time, and we see this in improvements in the systems that have been compromised, and in the behaviours that have their roots in the unresolved freeze response.

The Vagus nerve plays a huge part in Parasympathetic function, which is to down-regulate the Sympathetic Nervous System. In other words, it helps to calm us down. The Ventral Vagus is the part we really want to do this. It is the part that governs safety and connection, and lets us, by engaging with safe people, or by making sound, or hearing soothing sounds, gently take the foot off of the ‘gas,’ which is the Sympathetic.

The Dorsal Vagus, on the other hand, is more like the emergency brake. When a lot of energy goes into it (we call this High Scale Dorsal), it activates the Freeze, or shutdown response. This will also bring us out of Sympathetic, but it is a survival response and not very good for us when it has become the go-to option.

On the other hand, ‘Low Scale Dorsal,’ when a lesser amount of energy is in this system, is VERY good for us. The Low Scale Dorsal state lets us rest, digest, reproduce and repair our cells. It supports immune function and barrier-keeping in the gut. When we have more access to the Ventral Vagal part of this system, we will also have more access to this healthy ‘Low Scale’ state. This is optimal.

With unresolved trauma in the picture though, it is much more common to flip between high Sympathetic activation (Fight/Flight), and High Scale Dorsal (Freeze). When this is the case our gut is impacted because we don’t have nearly as much access to healthy digestion, healthy reproductive flow/cycles and barrier keeping in the gut.

When I say ‘scale’ we simply mean the amount of energy of the dorsal state in the system. The technical word is 'tone' but I like the word 'scale' as I feel it can be understood better. High scale is a lot of energy, low scale is a little bit of energy.

In the context of the dorsal vagus, this is the difference between getting ready to die, and successfully living!

The high scale dorsal vagal response is the Freeze response, the last ditch effort of the organism to survive, or at least to be more numb to the experience of dying. The low scale dorsal vagal response is what governs digestion, reproduction, immune function, cell repair, barrier-keeping in the gut, proper sleep, and growth. In other words, all the good stuff.