How trauma and the freeze response might be stopping you from changing your life and achieving your dreams

July 1, 2023 Kym Wilson

I’ve been contemplating the question of “Are you for you or against you?” for a few days now. Idea and words effortlessly streamed into my mind in the safe contained space of my shower, which is always a magical portal for ideas, inspiration and insight.

As I sat down to write about how our inner critics work against us, the words have frozen inside me and it feels like a drawer-bridge crashed down in front of me so I can’t move forward and write. My stomach is constricted. Feelings of dread, horror and shame arise. My arms feel jittery and weak. I want to go and do something else that doesn’t feel as hard or scary.

Have you ever experienced something like this?

Maybe it wasn’t as result of writing. Perhaps you wanted to reach out to someone to take the next step in a friendship or relationship, make contact with someone you haven’t spoken to for a long time, apply for your dream job, go somewhere new on holiday or take a creative class alone, speak in public or bring up a conflict or issue in a relationship or something else entirely.

You may have concluded that you’re on the wrong track, that what you’re feeling is an indication that you shouldn’t proceed. If it feels bad, maybe you’re just not meant to do it? Or maybe what you long for just isn’t for you? Why would doing something you love or really want to do feel so bad? But this often isn’t what it signifies at all.

Instead of writing about inner critics in this article or even a more soulful poetic piece as I often love to do, I’m sharing an important piece about navigating the freeze response on your growing edge – where you want to step towards something you long to experience but freeze and get stuck and can’t go towards it. It can be very painful, lonely and upsetting.

Without a map – a clear understanding– of what is happening you can stay stuck for too long or give up and never get to where you long to be.

In the past my freeze response has kept me stuck for extended periods of time. I’ve had so many stuck places that I think I deserve a gold medal or the title of the Queen of Stuckness. I also know from my own experience and feedback from my audience that it is really helpful to be able to understand your own internal process and behaviours by seeing them modelled and explained in others.

Writing and sharing this article is also my way of directly working and moving over the edge I hit sitting down to write, as well as unshaming my own freeze response.

Symptoms of your growing edge

The place I arrived at, frozen and wanting to avoid writing was my growing edge. An edge occurs where you’re about to do something new, step into the unknown, make a change big or small, let go of an old identity or step into your life in a new or powerful way. You usually have no map of what lies over the edge because you’re going into new territory.

It is normal that fear arises on your growing edge. Here you can experience all sorts of feelings and behaviour such as procrastination, confusion, doubt, numbing through bingeing on Netflix, food or substances, and avoiding the very thing you want or need to do.

This is also a place where our unhealed trauma wounds can arise. Sometimes on our way to creating the new or entering the unknown, the trauma or scary experiences of our past get triggered and reactivated in our current experience.

The presence of fear doesn’t mean that you’re on the wrong track.

It usually means the opposite. You’re in exactly the right place with an opportunity to grow, heal, evolve and create the dreams you long to bring to life. To create something new you must leave the safe container of the old. Nothing new exists in the old.

While we often think that we need to take a flying leap or push ourselves over our edges, there are kinder, gentler ways that we can help ourselves over them and prevent ourselves from getting stuck. Sometimes there’s even ways we can burrow under or around instead of having to dive into the fears and trauma.

What is most helpful is to slow down here, recognise and name that you are on an edge and explore what is happening on the edge and over it because mastering your edges and edge behaviours will help you to move more easefully and gracefully over the many edges you will face in your lifetime without getting stuck for too long.

What causes the freeze response

This experience of freeze and feelings of fear, horror and dread aren’t new to me. Recently, it has occurred frequently when I sit down to write a new article or newsletter that shares my personal ideas or inside world with others or when I put myself out there visibly in the world – to take a risk, be seen and be vulnerable with others.

Thanks to my training and personal therapy, I can see and understand exactly what is happening inside me and over time as I have worked with and healed, the response has lessened in severity and I get stuck here less and less.

Inside me, in my stomach area live all my young parts. You’ve probably heard of the term inner child? I tend to refer to my inner child as young parts because there’s not just one inner child but many younger parts that split off and froze during my childhood when faced with overwhelming experiences.

So today, when I sat down to write, a young part of me was triggered. She was terrified that if I share my ideas or inner experience that she’s going to get really hurt again, ridiculed and shamed, repeating what she experienced many, many times with her mother and she wants to avoid this at all costs.

Based on my past experience and the way my nervous system is assessing sensory information primarily from my internal environment (because I can tell you there’s nothing scary here in my current external environment just me, my sleeping cat and my laptop), my primitive brain assessed that if I write the article as intended that I would be putting myself in a dangerous situation. So my nervous system responded quicker than you can click your fingers and sent me into a freeze to stop me, as well as a flight activation to get away from the trigger i.e. writing.

Unshaming the freeze response

All of this happened in an instant outside of my conscious awareness and without anything I could do to stop it. But I can respond to it and lovingly support myself out of freeze and into what I want to do.

If you’ve ever gone into a freeze in any situation and not been able to move, act or speak, you may have felt a lot of shame or embarrassment because you believed that you should have been able to respond and that there is something wrong with you because you couldn’t. I want to lovingly let you know and reassure you that there’s nothing wrong with you.

A freeze response is a biological protective response that happens outside of your conscious awareness. Like me, it’s possible that something in the present is reminding you of a past trauma where the original fear or panic hasn’t been fully discharged so your original reaction of freezing repeats again. With therapeutic help, you can be supported to heal the original wound and learn how to care for and help yourself out of a freeze response.

Here’s some suggestions to start.

How to work through the trigger and freeze response

1. Acknowledge and name what is happening for you

As I sat frozen at my laptop with feelings of fear and dread arising, I became curious and interested in my experience and simply asked myself kindly, “What’s happening here?” To start with I simply named my experience:

I feel frozen
I feel like there’s a barrier in front of me stopping me moving forward
My stomach is constricted and has feelings of fear, dread and horror
Ah, there’s a young part of me in there
My arms are feeling tingly, jittery, weak and tense

Naming and acknowledging what I was experiencing helped to breakdown my experience into smaller digestible components so it wasn’t one big fearful experience.

Dr. Daniel Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry, developed a strategy called ‘name it to tame it’ which addresses the idea that naming emotions can help you to identify and regulate them.

This can be extended to naming anything that has been influencing or controlling our behaviours internally or externally. Naming and knowing means you can find effective ways to work with it. Naming alone can be a very empowering and relieving act.

Note that if you haven’t worked with your young parts before or have a very traumatised young part, you might not be able to identify that you have a young part that is triggered, this is because the young part can pull you into it so you and the young part are one in a process called blending. This is where counseling/therapeutic support can be helpful.

2. Belly Breathing

As I wrote down my experience, I breathed long and slow into my belly.

Breathing long, deep and slow into your belly with equal exhale will stimulate your vagus nerve and help bring you back into a state of rest and digest where you can access deeper states of wellbeing. It sends a message straight to your primitive brain that you are safe. It’s such an effective technique and you will notice that I write about it, recommend it and use it often.

You might like to try my Heart & Belly breathing exercise, which you can do anywhere and only needs 1 to 3 minutes to receive benefits.

3. Ground yourself in the present moment

I paused and looked around my room and named objects I could see – the curtains, the picture of me smiling in front of a Lake Garda sunset in Italy, my cat whistle breathing into her bedding – of course I patted her too, which is very regulating and calming for the nervous system.

Looking around you and taking in what you can see will help to ground you back in the present moment. When you are triggered, you can be pulled into the past implicit memory and live it like it’s happening again, so belly breathing, looking around and reminding yourself where you are now, how old you are and that you’ve grown up will help bring you back into the present moment and re-establish safety.

4. Caring for your young parts

Part of becoming a mature adult is learning to care for your young, inner child parts – it’s just that most of us have never been taught to do it.

I used to think that growing up was about becoming an adult and leaving childhood behind, but we don’t leave our childhood behind. It comes with us, as well as the many young child parts that live inside us. When you become an adult it becomes your role to parent them and care for them when they become upset or triggered or have needs for closeness, connection, fun and joy.

You parent your inner child through your own loving presence, being willing to be with those parts as they feel their feelings to completion, and offering them the loving words they’ve needed and perhaps never heard.

I lovingly witnessed my scared, horrified little one inside. I reassured her. “It’s okay. I’m here (meaning big Kym is here.) Nothing bad is going to happen. No one is going to attack or hurt you. I won’t let them. “

And I reminder her, “It’s not your job to write this article. It’s mine. This is part of my work and calling in the world, and you little one, get to go and play and paint and read and whatever else you would love to do.”

As I did this, the feelings in my stomach subsided. I felt more peaceful, calm and relieved.

5. Explore your growing edge

For me, the above steps were enough to be able to keep going and write this article for you. I have done a lot of healing and work with my inner child parts, am a trained counselor and healer and I know this edge of mine well.

Some edges are bigger and more complicated than others. Sometimes you need to hang out and explore what is on and over your personal growing edge from the safety of this side of the edge before you can go over it. You may need to reclaim powers and gifts or build skills. You may need to call in allies. You may need to cultivate new and more helpful beliefs.

There can be difficult energies through ancestors and past lives or past experiences that can stop you and keep you stuck here. You may need the help of a practitioner to help you name what is happening in your process and find your way over.

My sincerest wish for you…

So dear Soul, if you have been trying to move towards your dream or make a change in your life and have found yourself stuck, it is my sincerest wish that this article helps to give you a picture of what could be happening inside you –in your body, nervous system and psyche- that might be keeping you stuck and offer a map of how you can begin to work with your freeze/stuck response.

Supporting people on their growing edges is one of my gifts and greatest joys. I have an incredible ability to name, discover and hold down your growing edge so you can work it, go over it successfully and evolve. If you are in need of support, discover how you can work with me here or reach out if you have questions.

With love and courage,

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge that unshaming is a term that I learned from psychological activist, David Bedrick whose work is all about unshaming the unheard and marginalized voices inside individuals and culture.

I would also like to acknowledge and offer gratitude to my teacher Myree Morsi for all she has taught me about working and healing our growing edges.

Kym Wilson Holistic Counselling & Healing