Freeze Response: How the Nervous System Shuts Down Under Trauma

Written by Roland Bal

Trauma and its effects are bound by the story of what happened to us, core emotions of fear, anger or sadness and a loss of control, and a sense of overwhelm and helplessness. In terms of the nervous system, trauma is a breach in the boundaries of its capacity to hold, contain and process. A break of the normal flow of resilience between activation and relaxation.

When that breach happens and the usual options are no longer available, the freeze response is what the nervous system defaults to. A full-on freeze response is when you go numb and play dead until the danger has passed. It is an extreme form of dissociation that is biologically hardwired in your system for the sake of survival.

There are many degrees of dissociation below the full-fledged freeze response. When you have too much emotional input all at once and you are not able to process what is going on and respond at the moment, your mind "zooms" out and waits until your energy is more available or until you are in a safer place. When this happens frequently, you might feel that you have gaps in your memory, which is a typical dissociative symptom.

Trauma is the uncompleted biological process of hyperactivation. When you do not have the possibility to escape or to fight, the freeze response kicks in as an ultimate survival strategy.

Protection Through Disconnection

What is often missed about the freeze response is that it is doing something important for you. It is not a malfunction.

When you disconnect, your energy becomes more present in the upper body and more disconnected from the lower body. It is usually the diaphragm that keeps a lid on the unresolved emotions that remain in the belly area.

Alongside this disconnection, you will likely default to some form of substance or behavioural addiction to cope with your excessive stress.

How Freeze Leads to Fragmentation

This is a good thing in the sense that you do not feel constantly overwhelmed. It is a not-so-good thing because this fragmentation causes secondary problems of addiction, short attention span, inability to focus and get things done, not being sensitive to the needs of your body, and often feeling somewhat depressed or numb.

It is a bit of a "damned if you do (reconnect = getting overwhelmed), damned if you don't (stay disconnected = not feeling alive)." It is a real dilemma.

The Low-to-High Freeze Cycle

The fragmentation does not sit still. The nervous system keeps trying to resolve what it cannot resolve, and this shows up as a cycle.

One of the most common patterns in complex trauma is moving from a low to a high freeze response. Your low will be marked by depression, lethargy, thoughts of suicide, unworthiness. Your high will be marked by anxiety, hypervigilance, digestive issues, mistrust, and anger. Basically, this is where your nervous system still remains in the upsetting event or periods that have set off the condition in the first place.

You go from a sympathetic nervous system freeze — the kind where you are activated but stuck, unable to move or act — to a fight-flight response, and from there you collapse into a parasympathetic nervous system freeze, the deeper shutdown. When the high goes into overdrive at some point, dissociation or a freeze response will likely kick in again, making you feel numb, disconnected, and indifferent.

From the nervous system, symptoms will start to trickle down and start impacting the digestive system and immune system. Additionally, what keeps the wheel of trauma ongoing is that our thoughts start to interfere as blame, guilt, and self-reproach. These thought patterns, as judgment towards self or towards others, keep the underlying emotion activated.

Shutdown, Depression, and Self-Defeat

Being in a state of depression and shutdown represents the outer layer of dissociation. Closely tied to this are the thought patterns of self-defeat, which may manifest as "nothing is going to help" or "I am never going to get out of this."

Unfortunately, these shutdown states and self-defeating thoughts are all too common with complex trauma. They trap you in a cycle of identification, making it difficult to break free. Your emotional state generates these thoughts, and the thoughts, in turn, reinforce the emotional state. Recognising this process in your own mind is the first step toward breaking free from it. Awareness can place you at a crossroads, enabling you to break these reinforcement patterns and begin moving away from a self-defeating or victim mindset.

Why the Freeze Response Gets Stuck

Underneath the self-defeating thought loops is a simpler reason the freeze response persists: it is still doing its job. You will have to observe the shutdown, depression, and freeze response, and realise that dissociation is a "safe" place when you feel emotionally too overwhelmed.

When you dissociate as a survival mechanism, you create coping structures on top of your emotional wounds. You will, in effect, choose survival patterns that will best fit your situation in order to maintain some sense of integrity and sense of self. Over time, you will likely also develop issues around trust and relationships, and get entangled in reenactment patterns that can further retraumatise.

You can either reinforce the cycle of hurt by repeating similar experiences in different circumstances, or, by bringing awareness to these processes, create a variable and allow the energy that is invested in these reactionary dissociative survival patterns of fight, flight, please-appease, and freeze-shutdown to flow back into awareness.

Thawing the Freeze Response Somatically

A major part of successful trauma work is to address the body and the nervous system in a way which brings these processes to a natural completion. With a chronic freeze state, that means going at the pace the nervous system can actually tolerate.

To unwind and unfold trauma, you need to go carefully in and out of the emotional residue that is stored in the body.

A trauma-informed therapist can be a great help, but it is just really hard to find them. And, working with a therapist who is not attuned to your needs and individual process can add insult to injury.

To help you gradually reconnect with the body and process emotional residue, the work needs to put the emphasis on building containment and resilience, without getting overwhelmed, so that you can safely process your emotional residue.