Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined today as usual by clinical psychologist Dr. Rick Hansen. Dad, how are you doing today?
I'm really good and thoroughly psyched for the topic today. Yeah, I've been really looking forward to this one. Today, we're going to be focusing on working with dissociation, avoidance, and emotional shutdown, which are all linked to the freeze response distress.
Every stress response has its challenges, and the freeze response in particular has some features that make it pretty unique. But to get to the freeze response and understand it a little bit better, it's really helpful to have context on our stress responses in general.
And as I was going through the process of prepping for this episode, I found some material and started thinking about things myself in a way that really interested me. And I'm really curious what your take on all of this is as well here, Dad.
So we're going to start with understanding what's going on here conceptually, which will then give us some ideas of what we can do practically. And then in the second half of the episode, I'll be asking you for a lot of practical how-tos. So does that sound good? Yes. Great. So in order to understand what's going on here, it's helpful to have a basic understanding of the stress response. So there are four big ways we have of responding to stress in life. We can fight it.
We can run away from it. We can try to appease the person who's hurting us. That's called fawning. Or we can freeze in response to it, like animals do when they play dead. Now, most people are probably familiar with fighting, freezing, and running away. The Fawn response is a little bit newer in terms of our incorporation of it into this model. I think that one of the first people to introduce it was actually a former podcast guest.
Pete Walker. That was from his work on childhood trauma and complex PTSD. And this is an appeasement strategy, fawning is. You give the other person what they want in order to diffuse a stressful or potentially dangerous situation. Now, we're all capable of accessing all of these different responses, but people tend to develop a habit of one of these responses. They tend to be more freezers or fighters or fleers.
We typically build these habits early on in life, although of course they can change over time. And they're built based on things like our environment. What are the situations that we find ourselves in or our experiences? What happened to us? Or they might even be built based on our self-concept. How do we view ourselves, particularly in relationship to other people? And as I was learning about this a little bit…
I started asking myself the question, well, why do people become a fighter or a fleer or a freezer? What's the logic in play here? Because stress responses are adaptive. We do them to try to solve a problem. So they're based on some view of either ourselves or the world around us. Why would somebody fight?
Well, they fight if they think they can win or they think that they can hurt their opponent badly enough that they give up. We flee if we think that we can escape danger. We might fawn if we think we can defuse the situation. or get the other person to like us enough that they stop hurting us, whatever it might be. These are responses that are inherently based on some amount of self-efficacy, right?
The person believes that they can be as strong or as fast or as interpersonally effective or whatever else as those around it, that they can meet the challenges of the moment by moving into that kind of action. They can influence their environment. So what are we doing when we're freezing? Well, we freeze if we believe we cannot do any of those things. If we appraise ourselves as unable to affect our environments in that kind of a way.
And as we get here, I want to emphasize that freezing isn't passive. Some people misframe freezing as this kind of passive response. It's not. It's active. But one of the unique challenges associated with it is that... The person who's going into that behavior understands that they don't have a lot of other options. It's based on a lack of self-efficacy. There's the rational belief that they either can't change their environment or can't defeat their challenge in some other kind of way.
And this is part of why the freeze response and dissociation in particular, which we'll talk about in a minute, is particularly associated with things like complex PTSD. relatively high levels of trauma, childhood abuse, domestic violence, all of these incredibly challenging situations where the person couldn't fight or run away effectively. Lack of self-efficacy I think is just such a key challenge here.
for people who struggle with that family of responses. It's such a big piece of the puzzle. And so I'm wondering, Dad, as a clinician, how do you think about all of the kind of conceptual academic stuff that I just said? And how do you think that that comes up for people? The way you described that was completely accurate, and I want to go wide in a little bit of a contextual framework, and then we'll come back in to the particular. So you've described...
a way of dealing with challenges to safety. And that way of dealing with challenges to safety, which includes these four major approaches, fight, flight, freeze, appease, or more recently, keeping the Fs here, fawn. And those particular four strategies tend to be much more in what you and I talk about as the red zone reactive approaches to threats to safety. People can deal with threats to safety.
without revving up sympathetic nervous system activation without a lot of stress hormones and such as cortisol and adrenaline and can you know deal with those challenges in maybe different kinds of ways and so we're going to talk about ways to deal with threats to safety without necessarily getting frozen or immobilized or helpless or inert or dissociated in response to that.
And then also I want to add, of course, this context that you know, that we also get challenges to our needs for satisfaction. Similarly, when people are addressing their needs for connection, they can deal with... challenges to connection in ways that are very stressful or deal with challenges to connection more from what you and I have called. the green zone. So in my way, I think, of course, about a two-by-three matrix in which we have three needs, right? And there's a basic distinction.
between green zone and red zone, responsive or reactive ways of managing them. You and I are now in one of the cells inside that two by three six-fold matrix, you know, one of the six cells in which we're talking about reactive, you know. ways of dealing with challenges to safety. Hey, it wouldn't be a Being Well episode if we didn't have a something-by-something matrix that sorted things into different buckets of plausible responses, right? We're just unbelievably on brand here, Dad.
what you're saying here, which I think is a really, really key point because it speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding that people have about the way that the stress response works. So first fundamental misunderstanding is that these responses are bad. These are bad behaviors of different kinds. Fawning, that's bad. You know, we just did a whole episode on a self-abandonment, which is essentially like a maladaptive version of the fawn response, you might think.
That's interesting. But positioning stress responses in that way leads to a deep misunderstanding of them because these responses are not singular behaviors. You can fight in a lot of ways that do not look like hitting another person. These are families of behaviors that include more healthy or more adaptive and less healthy, more maladaptive versions of them.
So self-abandonment might be a maladaptive version of the fawn response, right? But you might be able to think in terms of more adaptive versions of it as well. Like when I was prepping for this episode, I started thinking about these stress responses, and this is becoming a little pop psychology here in my framework on it, but I like this and I hope it helps people, as almost kind of like personality types.
Are you more of a fighter? Are you more of a fleer? Are you more of a freezer? Are you more of a fawner? And I had a hard time sorting myself into one of those categories because I was trapped in that framework. of all of the responses tied to these things are bad. But when I started to open that up a little bit, it became immediately clear to me that I was totally a fawner. So what does that look like for me? It means being easygoing and adaptable.
It means smoothing things over and avoiding conflict when I can, being pro-social. doing maybe more than my fair share of the work when we're committed to a group project so we avoid friction among the members of the group. This is like a version of a fun response if you want to kind of think about it that way.
But it's one that I experience as having a lot more benefits for me than costs, and it is fundamentally coming from that pro-social connective relational orientation that you're talking about, Dad, in the green zone, right? Yeah. Maybe a way to separate out the more adaptive versus less adaptive or more healthy, less healthy stress responses is just asking the question, is this in service to relationship?
Like, is this in service to healthy forms of attaching with somebody else? So what do you think about that? I think there's so many things in what you just said, Forrest, that are actually really brilliant and would be very useful. for more people to understand, and there are aspects of them that I think are really original.
I find it kind of uncommon that I stumble on something where I'm just like, ooh, I haven't really heard that from somebody else. No. I was pretty stoked about this one. Yeah, it's really good. So how I translate is I say, well, in fighting broadly. are probably a handful of elements. And some of those elements are more, they're just like a tool. They're like a hammer. Can you use that hammer, as it were, of fighting?
that element in ways that are really adaptive and selective, like standing up to power. Assertiveness, totally. You know, Gandalf at the bridge and Bardur slamming his staff down. You shall not pass, right? Boom. There's a place for that. And then in fleeing and fleeing, healthy, adaptive withdrawal. Stepping back, disengaging.
Just kind of quietly deciding, for example, I'm just not going to go on another date with that person. That was kind of weird, right? So healthy withdrawal, healthy freezing, where you pause, you reflect, you figure out what you're going to do. appeasing in that, you're describing that element which has to do with being cooperative. I think sometimes we realize that we're outnumbered, we're outgunned. The best move is to be superficially compliant.
to kind of appease people and then get out of there as fast as we can. If you're watching the TV show Shogun right now, Torunaga, the main character, is engaging in an appeasement strategy, you could argue, with his political opponents. So there you go. Oh, yeah, in the second episode. And then we've seen the third episode and more happens. Things go from there. No spoilers here. Anyway, very good.
Shogun, by the way, was the book that Forrest read. I don't know. You were like nine years old. I think I was in middle school or something. Yeah, 600 pages. You get to the last page. You kind of sighed happily. And then you went back to the first page and reread the book. Love that book, for sure. That's pretty good. Okay. Yeah. I'll tell you a paradoxical intervention I sometimes use with people. Let's say there's a person who's really good at quarreling.
Fighting, that's a form of fighting, let's say. Or they're really good at withdrawal, or they're really good at defending themselves, or they're really good at kind of dissociating from their body and their feelings. And we're trying to help them not do that so much. The fact that they're really good at that particular strategy, paradoxically, can help them understand that they can afford small step by small step to shift into a new way of being.
Because if they have to revert to that strategy, they're really good at it and they can count on that strategy. Yes. And so a piece of this that I was fascinated by, and as a clinician, I'm really curious what your take is on this stat. When I see people just casually with their friends, talk to their friend about their tendency to dissociate or their tendency to get kind of blown out in an emotional conversation.
And two friends are sharing about an interaction that one of them had with their significant other, let's say, just as an example here. And one of them is like, wow, I just got so overwhelmed. I just kind of shut down emotionally. I just didn't know what to say. I felt like I was so stuck in that moment. So this is classic freeze response, okay?
Their friend says something to them like, oh, well, weren't you mad? You should get more mad. You should get more pissed off or whatever. So trying to move them into more of a fight response. Like what they said was so inappropriate to you. Weren't you mad about it? So they're trying to shift them up essentially the chain of self-efficacy, moving from a freeze response to a fight response. They feel like they can push back. For me, I think that this is a total mess.
Because the question isn't like trying to jump somebody from a stress response that they're very familiar with to a different one that they're less familiar with. It's how can we move into a more adaptive version? of the response that you are more naturally comfortable with. So the question isn't like, how do we get you to punch the other person in the face?
It's how do we get you to be able to take that pause and that moment and that space while still staying inside of your healthy window of tolerance there. That just kind of occurred to me while I was doing the prep for this, and I'm wondering what you think about it as a clinician. There's this beautiful phrase called harm reduction. And it was originally applied to sobriety with people who they're just not ready to abstain entirely from their drug of choice. But, you know, they're...
You could get them to binge one less time a week, right? Or stop at six beers or later on four and then maybe two. right? And that approach is a little controversial in some quarters because for some people, they really can't drink moderately. And my rule is, as someone who's definitely enjoyed many different kinds of things, if you can't...
do it moderately, you shouldn't really do it at all, right? So there's that term. So you can imagine the same thing. So someone who, for example, is very bellicose, shifting their fight strategy from literally punching people. to just yelling at them, all right? And then moving from yelling at them to yelling at them for only 10 seconds and then settling back down again, or further on that continuum.
Can we dial it down some so that it's less moving into really problematic territory, right? The key two criteria for a psychological disorder impairs functioning and or creates distress. You're trying to reduce those consequences and reduce distress. And as long as it's less and less and less, you're moving in the right direction. Yeah, you're shifting to that slightly more adaptive version of this thing.
So focusing on the freeze response in particular, which is what we're going to spend most of our time on today. Again, just when I was thinking about this, it seems to me as a non-clinician that this is a family of responses, a family of behaviors.
that would be particularly difficult for people to work with, and probably particularly difficult to work with clinically. Because people who freeze, for starters, are disproportionately likely to be higher trauma, as I was saying earlier, which just creates challenges in general. And second, there's that lack of self-efficacy, which I emphasized earlier, which is generally what people need in order to move into different kinds of change. There needs to be a belief in the self.
as something that can affect change on its environment or affect change internally. And then third, really interestingly, there's not the same sense of energy or movement or action that can be associated with the other three responses. There's an action that's happening, but it's the action of going offline. And so people can get stuck really easily when working with this family of behaviors. What do you think about that?
It's very insightful to appreciate it. And I want to build on your third option in that very often people understand when they're fighting. So let's create a context here. Yeah, go ahead. This is animal behavior. It's grounded in biology. You can see animals freezing in response to predators. The mouse does not try to appease the hawk. The mouse cannot fight back against the hawk.
So these are, you know, responses that, you know, to predators. For humans and other social mammals, and certainly us primates, much of the fight-flight-freeze appease or fawn response or repertoire. of behaviors is in social settings in which there are threats. When you're fighting, if you're running away, you know you're running away, right? I see where you're going here, dad. Yeah. Yeah.
If you're actively engaged in appeasement behaviors, knuckling under, rolling over on your back as dogs would, wild dogs exposing your belly, things like that, freezing, you're doing the not. You're not moving, you're not speaking, sometimes you're not thinking.
And so it's harder to notice, particularly with humans, when people are moving into subtleties of freezing, which include just going kind of inert or... getting sort of sleepy or fuzzy or just sort of swerving away from a topic or sticking your neck out in some way or actually... completing a project or so that you might be recognized. And then, well, if you're recognized, you'd expose yourself to a shaming attack like you experienced in your family or your school. So you just...
drift. And I think a lot of phrasing is in that category. And it's also problematic for other people because when you're dealing with someone who's just... They're looking at you and they're nodding, but the truth is they're gone. Lights are on, but nobody's home. Yeah, totally. Yeah, or they're nodding and it looks like they agree with you, but they're going inert.
Or it looks like they're going to make a promise with you. They're going to do something different in the future, and yet they don't. These are problematic, and they're harder to discern interpersonally. you know, when the other person is doing them. So I think that's why freezing is a particularly important and interesting topic to focus on, and I'm really glad you're doing it. Just to maybe put like a super fine point on the last thing you said about
some of the challenges interpersonally that can come from these behaviors. The person who is in a freeze response is not being deliberately deceitful in this behavior, to be clear, 9 times out of 10, if not 99 times out of 100. This is an automated response that's kicking in as a survival strategy. If we think about it from like an IFS parts framework, a part has come forward that is engaging in a behavior, the smile and nodding.
But the rest of the system is pretty much offline. And it might be helpful here to talk about what freezing looks like for people in practice, because you've already started to do that a little bit here, Dad. I want to name dissociation in particular, because it's a family of responses that...
if you think about it, are actually pretty wild. We've done full episodes on dissociation. I'm just going to talk about it kind of quickly here. And then maybe we'll talk about some of the other ones that you named already. Dissociation is a feeling of disconnect or distance from your physical senses, your thoughts, your feelings, your sense of self. A common feature of it
is that you feel kind of outside of time and space. So a person might literally have a sort of out-of-body, third-person, they're hovering above themselves perspective. There are everyday examples of dissociation, which could include just zoning out during a conversation. We've all had those moments where we kind of blink a couple of times and we realize that the other person said three sentences to us that we just don't track at all.
It could be feeling a little bit emotionally numb after a long day or a tough conversation. It could include intense flashbacks of different kinds where you feel like you've really moved into a different moment in time. a memory that feels a little too vivid. You've become disconnected from right now in some kind of way. At a clinically significant level, and we're not really going to talk about this today, but I just want to name it.
There are a number of disorders that are called dissociative disorders where a person really is losing touch with reality in some kind of way. This includes DID or dissociative identity disorder. This was previously known as multiple personality disorder. which is characterized by when a person has two or more persistent personality states that they shift back and forth between. Another one is depersonalization-derealization disorder, and this is characterized by feeling more detached.
from one's own body or your thoughts. And then there's also something that's called dissociative amnesia, which is characterized by forgetting personal information and memories of events. So that's kind of like way out at the tail end here, Dad. Earlier, you were mentioning when people shut down or they go inert, which is a little bit more in what I would call the normal range and of the dissociative spectrum. So could you describe what that might look like? So one version.
of freezing really does include dialing down metabolic activity. So a person might suddenly be kind of drowsy. Typically, they're not moving. They're sedentary. There's a kind of inner slump. And an extreme version of this that Steve Porges has called out in his wonderful work on polyvagal theory is in fish that in the face of predators will play dead and in lakes, for example.
it would start to sink down to lower levels of the lake that have less oxygen in it and be so frozen, as it were, in playing dead that it would die because it would... no longer have enough oxygen to breathe through its gills. That's like an extreme version of really dialing down metabolic activity. A different version of it is seen in research on attachment theory. Classically in the strange situation, it's kind of a research protocol. Typically, a parent will come in with a...
young child, like an 18-month-old, and then the parent will leave the room, which is stressful for a child, and then there are different steps in the standard strange situation. Avoidantly attached kids typically will look unbothered. They'll be just fine. They look just fine. Mom leaves the room, dad leaves the room. They're just fine from the outside. But if you watch them closely, their heart rate is spiked.
Their autonomic nervous system is revving up. They're upset inside. They're outwardly sedate. They're just sitting there, maybe playing with the blocks. but inside their heart is racing. So that's a certain kind of a freeze response where you're outwardly immobilized, but internally you're kind of panicked. And that's, by the way,
common response for people who've been traumatized. They feel frozen, they feel voiceless, they can't speak, and yet inside themselves, they're panicking. So that would be a different kind of freeze response. As a clinician, somebody's walked into your office who either is deliberately interested in engaging with these issues because they're causing them a lot of distress.
Or you appraise pretty early on that this is an issue for this person. It's sort of a funny question to ask, but is there like a typical arc to the therapy that you do with them? Are there things in particular? that you're trying to build or help support them with early on? How do you think about the framework of approaching this kind of an issue? Yeah. So let's kind of locate it on the spectrum, including the spectrum of dissociation.
So for example, I've had clients definitely who were very prone to dissociation. It took very little. In my office, they'd be gone or they would start to slump in the chair or literally slide out of the chair or the sofa onto the floor because they'd kind of left the room and their body had turned to jelly.
Pretty extreme. You know, I've had people who, after an appointment, I went down to the parking lot an hour later after my next session, and I found them in the backseat of their car with the door open and the engine running just...
clocked out on the backseat. So there are extreme versions of that. That's not so common. So let's now move more toward people who can get... dissociative they sort of space out go away they kind of feel lightheaded maybe out of touch like immobilized almost like in a dream you're trying to escape but you can't move or let's say subtler, but quite pervasive examples of that where in certain situations, you know rationally you have the right to assert yourself in some way.
You could speak up. You could name what's happening. You could disagree. You could ask for something. You could declare a need. You could say, hey, that's not okay. But you just, ugh. Can't get it out. You know, yeah, you can't say it. And that's a kind of freeze response that's not uncommon at all. And very often people will come to a therapist for help in kind of claiming their power or getting in touch with her.
their feelings, and becoming more able to assert themselves in appropriate ways. So that kind of territory. So first off, I'm trying to get a sense of what's what. So now that I've kind of set the context and the degree of intensity. My first step is to keep them out of a freeze response so that they can stay in the room and they can stay in relationship with me and can begin to...
move into topics that in other settings would trigger a freeze response. But with me, they're learning a new way of being with relationship to that material. And to do that, of course, just like you said, I need to really do what I can to promote a sense of safety and also encourage... Just highlight where they do have agency, they do have efficacy, where they do have power. Like they always have the power to change the subject with me.
What do you do for a living? You meet somebody at a party. I ask annoying questions. you know, for example. And they have the option not to answer my questions. You know, so I'm creating safety, creating safety and promoting their sense of efficacy. So that's very foundational. Yeah. A second, as you've described, and it makes me always so happy when you implicitly endorse psychoanalytic terminology. Join with a defense. Yeah, totally.
Yeah, and just really affirm the functional benefits, the payoffs, the usefulness of what they're doing. And in that context of appreciating how good they are at freezing. we can then also explore, oh, where'd this come from? How did you learn to be so good at freezing, right? So then there's kind of an understanding of it and they appreciate that I'm not trying to, you know, rip that defense away from them. And then I think the third step...
classically, of course, is to just explore different ways of being. And then in the therapy room, which is so important, help people actually install those other ways of being. We might use other words like establish or internalize. And those three steps, establish a container. Second, become aware of what's problematic.
typically beginning with appreciating its functions for you. And then third, exploring alternative ways of being and increasingly installing those alternative ways of being so that They're with you when you leave my office. I think that's a great place to start with this. This might seem surprising, but I have always struggled to eat enough vegetables.
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I'm really curious about that third step, explore other ways of being, because of course we would kind of all love to be able to just explore other ways of being, but that could be quite challenging for people. So I do want to loop back to that in one second.
But to do a little bit of really quick commentary on some of the other things that you've said here, at the very beginning of what you were saying, you said that the first thing you try to do is to try to help them not freeze, which sounds maybe obvious or trite to people.
But it's an acknowledgement of actually a really, really important idea from habit loops, which is that it's very difficult to disrupt a habit when we are in the routine of it. Habits have three stages. They have a trigger, a routine, and a reward. In routine, it is very hard to stop the routine. So most of the good advice about building new habits gets to triggers. It's not about routines. It's about how do we either create triggers for good habits or...
take away the triggers for more problematic habits. And so that's kind of implicit in what you were saying right there. And so I thought that that was just like a really important shout out at the top of this. For people listening again, I'm a big believer in do-it-yourself DIY therapy. Yeah, totally. If you can do it. Yeah. And I've done a lot of DIY therapy and I bet you have too. And so people listening can think for themselves, okay, how could I help myself? How could I be my own therapist?
in ways that are appropriate. You know, always know when it's helpful to reach out, get that clinical input from a licensed professional. But as long as you can do this sort of stuff productively on your own, go for it. Yeah. I was talking with Elizabeth a little bit while I was prepping for this because she's a trauma therapist and she's somatically informed. She works with a lot of people who struggle with dissociation or struggle with the freeze response broadly.
And one of the things that she really emphasized was similar to what you said, but I just really liked the way that she put it, so I'll share it here, which is that a huge piece of this process is self-awareness. Because what happens when you're working with somebody is you go through these cycles.
where they have a cycle where they freeze, and then, okay, you try to kind of resource them up out of it, and then they come back into your office the next week, and they probably freeze again, and okay, you try to resource them up out of it. And then the third week, they're able to say something like, oh, that was a freeze response. That's what happened. So the awareness happens after the event itself. They're able to recognize, okay, I was going through this response.
And then over time, you develop earlier and earlier awareness of what's going on. So you're eventually able to catch it. before the switch totally flips and you're just completely blown out of your body and you can resource yourself in various ways by say
getting up and walking around a little bit or asking for some space from the other person being like, hey, I'm about to get blown out with this. I need a little bit of room. Sometimes you can ask for that space. Sometimes you can't, but hopefully you can. whatever it is that's kind of helping you before the wire gets trapped. Does that check out with your experience, Dad? Well, very much so. And I think I would say that complicates things. I was just reflecting here on people I've known.
is that they walk in the door frozen. Sure, yeah. Or in terms of a general quality of vitality, they come in the door constricted. armored, and they don't even know it because that's just the new normal that they acquired 30 years ago when they were a kid, let's say.
It's a little bit like the classic conditioning. There's what's called the unconditioned stimulus. There's the bell that rings, and then there's the conditioned stimulus, the minor but mild but unpleasant electric shock, let's say, that occurs. the animal starts to associate that as soon as that bell starts to ring, there's going to be a bad event, even after the bad event has stopped happening, but they've just acquired a learned response. For some people, living...
is the unconditioned stimulus with which they associate the electric shock, even though they're not actually being shocked in the moment. It's quite poignant and profound, actually. Just entering into a relationship, just... Talking to a new person is the unconditioned stimulus that they actually associate with things that happened to them typically when they were young. And that's kind of global, right? How do you help people?
come out of that. And one of the things I have found really useful for people, and probably rings true to you as a dancer, and also to Elizabeth, who's a super dancer, is physical activity of one kind or another. where you're moving, you're doing something, you're making something happen, you're active in some way. I find that that's really helpful. And also it's helpful to rock climbing.
or similar kinds of things where people are put into stressful situations, martial arts training, rock climbing, something where you need to function. and under threat. You're under threat. You know, there you are, you're 60 feet up and the rope's on you, but whoa, you're standing on holes, you know, the size of a pencil, the width of a pencil. And you're like, wow. And so, but you got to keep it together.
right? That's actually really useful. And people, they might find other versions of that. I've referred a lot of people to Toastmasters. What a great graduated stressful environment. for social anxiety. Toastmaster. Forced public speaking. Super structured, highly supportive, graduated context, and yeah, things like that. So that's about the global, right? And then-
The particular things where people are inhibited around self-expression, they freeze around full self-expression. Step by step, so much of the therapeutic process is just to, ah, Carl Rogers was right. You just rest in an unconditional positive regard. And you gradually create a space in which people can, small step by small step.
communicate in a more open and vulnerable, tender, authentic, less controlled kind of way. You know, the ultimate being in a way being out of control about being out of control. For example, sometimes people will regulate their crying or they will regulate their intensity. And you have to be careful about being out of control, about being out of control, but there's a certain thing that happens when you can't stop crying or you just let it go. You say all of it.
There's no attempt to censor or edit or guide or soften or pull the punches of whatever your truth is. That's kind of an ultimate step that I actually just kind of wanted to name here. I think this is all great, and I want to loop back to what you were saying earlier about exploring new ways of being. Those examples that you gave of push-the-envelope situations that a person could start experimenting in and start
learning to trust themselves that they can meet challenges in a way other than entering the freeze response. That's really the lesson. In the Toastmasters example that you gave or in the rock climbing example, you can make choices that are not just climbing up and you start to increasingly experience yourself.
as effective in that way. You're building up that stronger sense of self so you think that you have other options. You have an option of being assertive. You have an option of leaving. You have an option of being socially skillful, whatever it is for you, right? But I just think that there was something you were getting to in that Explore New Ways of Being that I want to focus on here for a second because I'm curious about it. Yeah. Well, let's use an example. Maybe people you know?
perhaps, disguising the identities or any situation that might come to mind, even one or two. How about I give you a general structure that I've seen in a lot of different people? in life. And so this is a hypothetical situation with a family of challenges that a person might have. So let's say that this person is comfortable interacting with their emotions generally.
They feel pretty okay most of the time. But when they're faced with situations that feel more stressful or threatening, they have a very difficult time feeling inside for how they feel about it. Maybe they feel a little panicked. They feel that kind of disconnection from their emotions. They have an interaction with somebody, a friend, a significant other, a boss, where...
They feel like they're being pushed on by that other person in some way. There's an implicit criticism being directed at them. The other person is looking for something from them, whatever it is. And by essentially round two. of the interaction where there's been a back and forth, now we're on the second back and forth, they feel themselves kind of losing the ability to articulate what they think or how they feel. Things get kind of fuzzy for them.
when this is happening, kind of soupy. And when this happens, the person that they're with, based on what you were describing way earlier in the episode, Dad, is kind of understandably going, wait, did you hear me? Did you understand what I was saying? I'm not getting a response from you. And so that pushes them to freeze harder, essentially. which pushes the other person to get more frustrated, which then exacerbates that freeze, and so on and so on. So there's this pattern of relationship.
that tends to describe a lot of their interactions, and particularly their more challenging interactions. So for somebody who describes that as the way that a lot of their stressful interactions go, How would you talk to that person? How would you start thinking about that problem? And is there anything you would say to them? Just anything you might think would be helpful here. Well, first off, that was an acutely described, almost like a novelist.
clinical case study and which is really helpful and very perceptive as a therapist i would be trying to draw the person into that kind of interaction with me So that the issue that they've been talking about outside the room is brought into the room. That's a classic step. And people informally, if they have a certain amount of...
agreement to do this can do this with each other. They can bring it into the present. Like in a perfect world, the person, let's say a partner who is getting frustrated. exasperated at this response, especially the 10th time it happens, instead could just slow it down and bring it into the room. Like, what's happening for you right now?
Is there anything I can do? So as a therapist, I'm trying to, I'm really watching very acutely this process. And as soon as the person goes into overload, that's a good way to put it. Once they're in overload, forget it. You've got to get out of overload.
So you come back out of overload. This is very much the work of people who do trauma work. Steve Levine talks about it, Peter Levine rather, in terms of pendulation. You move in, you swing into the content, then you move back out. So if they're overload, you want to... back out, reestablish, as you said, safety and efficacy, and then one molecule at a time, one millimeter at a time, go back into the material again and again. So you start...
in window of tolerance, you start expanding that window of tolerance in terms of being able to stay present. Mindfulness is the opposite of dissociation. If we disassociate... We go away if we're present, we're associated, we're connected with ourselves. And then another thing is to try to really identify what is the threat because People freeze in the face of threat. What is the threat? What is threatening here? It's interesting. What is threatening here? Is the threat an internal threat?
This is classic psychoanalysis, thank you segment, in which he's talking about people being potentially, you know, they suppress, they repress material. And so the threat of that material resurfacing. is where the threat is. Now, the threat could be external as well. So let's say this person is, you know, let's say there's an interaction that's a little feisty or a little
It's about a conflict or, you know, the other person's being kind of assertive in some way. Is the threat the other person? Even a notion that, oh, that other person might. abandon me if I'm forthright or that other person might hit me because that's what happened when I was little. If I speak up, you know, that's an externalized threat. Okay. What if the threat...
is some kind of memory that they're keeping at bay deep down inside, unconscious? Or what if the threat of certain feelings that they want to keep at bay? Maybe there's a deep sorrow or a rage. They don't want to stay connected because if they stayed connected, that might... pop the top on a whole bunch of bottled up rage. Whoa. So this is a way of thinking about it. Where is the threat, right?
I love this, Dad. I'm not trying to cut you off here, but I just want to emphasize something that you're really saying here. The specificity about what really is the threat is the important part of this process. Because a lot of the time when you explore this idea with somebody, they kind of look at you like you're an idiot, to be frank. And they're kind of like, well, what do you mean? Of course this is threatening.
The threats are obvious, don't you see the threats? But then you dig one layer down and you realize that the person actually is not specific inside of themself about what the real threat is. They just know that they're scared and therefore things are threatening. But if you go through this process, sometimes you find at the bottom of the barrel, there's a threat that you did not expect. But the real threat, in fact, was not the other person. The real threat was some feeling inside of yourself.
Or maybe you thought that the real threat was you didn't want a shaming attack. But really the real threat was you didn't want to be yelled at by the other person. Like whichever direction it goes here, people are often surprised by what it is that they are actually concerned about. Exactly right. I really appreciate you saying specificity because it can really help. And it also gets at the ways in which people dissociate about dissociation. In other words...
Often around this sort of stuff, there's this fog. Yeah, the fuzz, totally. One way you can kind of tell you're in the presence of dissociation. When you're the therapist or the other person, you start feeling sleepy and fuzzy and foggy and bored yourself. Bored. That's really interesting. You're using your own countertransference. You're using your own reactions to the client as information. Oh, this is interesting. I'm just kind of bored here. Like, whoa, that's interesting. So, yeah.
Yeah, exactly right. Specificity, I think, is really important. And then people, if they can tolerate anything that takes them down a path of Removing this defense, dissociation is a defense. It's one of the primal defenses. One version of freezing is to deny reality. We have to be able to help people face the real threat. And sometimes they're too scared to even name it. I want to ask you, as we get to the end here,
And this is one of those things we could do, eight episodes on this. So I think we're quickly discovering. I could say more about what this person could do for themselves. Yeah, that would be great, actually. Yeah, yeah, let's do that. Let's do a little bit more, and then I want to ask you a question about one piece of it. But go ahead.
So this person, first of all, it helps that they know that this is true about them. Let's say that's the case. They kind of get it. Self-awareness. They get it. Yep. Okay. What to do about it. Several things I think can be really helpful. One is to be aware that other people can be in similar situations and be more active and vital and nimble.
free and assertive and do just fine. Yeah, this isn't a forced response. Yeah. Yes, that's right. That's right. It's not God-given. It's not a rule. Other people... can go down a different road. Like, oh, it's a possibility for me to go down a different road and not have the bad things happen that I'm afraid, because this is a threat response, that I'm afraid will happen.
Just that. Oh, possibility. That's helpful. People like me, dealing with similar situations, can act in a way that's not so frozen. Then to help yourself, as you've noted, it helps to build up. foundational capabilities, vitality in the body. Often the freeze response is understandably the result of medical issues, a history of injury, disability.
illness. And so building up resources that they give you a more sense of energy, efficacy, looking for other domains in your life where you're more like a hammer and less like a nail, general capabilities, all that good stuff. Great. You've done that. Three, when it starts to happen and you can have an attitude, weirdly, counterintuitively, that wrangles with others are so wonderful.
Because what an opportunity to remove the conditioning, the shackles that bind you to those old habits. Wonderful. You're changing the frame here, Dad. I like it. Yeah, wonderful. I'm getting upset again. Fantastic. It's so useful. There you go, being an asshole. Thank you. Thank you. It's so good because it gives me opportunities to learn new ways of dealing with people like you. You know, right? So he frames it. It's good. So you start to look for the scripts.
You understand the scripts and you start to look for ways to intervene early before you go away, right? When you're gone, you can't intervene. So you're trying to intervene early when you're in that zone where the dissociation, the slump, the swerve, the sleepy is starting to sink in, but you still have some mobility.
In relationship to it. Okay. Yeah. And at that point, you can do little things like take a break to pop out of the habit loop, as you said, take a little break, step back, disengage. to be engaged, distance in the service of attachment in a way. So you can step back so that you can step in. You could do that. You could tell the person, buy yourself some time. Could you say that again? Sorry.
I didn't quite catch it. Or what did you mean by this part? Just did it by yourself some time. So you can mobilize, right? The essence of freezing is immobilization. So the more mobilized you are. in thought, word, and deed, the more that you can break out of, you know, anything that helps you break out, thought, word, and deed. You want to mobilize. So you're intervening early in the script.
And then you're basically building up step-by-step your capacities to be able to maintain some mobility, some nimbleness, some options in interactions with others so you're not so frozen. It can help too. To write things out in advance, literally, and have a card. I've known people who have written stuff out and they're like, ah, they don't know how to say anything, but they just hand the card. Hand the card. You might say something like...
I'm really scared. It's not you. It's hard for me to talk. I know you love me, but this is really hard for me. Yeah. But, you know, write the card when you're not immobilized, right? That's the thing. moving your body, stand up, walk around a little, move around a little bit. You're breaking the script. You're breaking the frame. You're reclaiming your potency. And these are little things that could seem so small, but they're...
They really work. And then to complete the learning cycle, right? So you're identifying the issue. You're having new experiences and new behaviors. And then to install them. you want to really appreciate that it went okay. It went well with this new way of being. I was louder. I was freer. I wasn't trapped in that old role. I was able to say no. I was able to say yes.
And, oh, it went okay. Maybe it wasn't perfect. Maybe the other person was sort of miffed. But you know what? I have the right to say this. It's okay. And I'm going to let it really sink in the sense of what I did that had a good result. And I'm going to take a few beats, a few breaths to really let it sink in. So then that becomes increasingly my new habit loop. And last, be proud of yourself.
Yeah. Yeah. Like we love it when Bambi stands up to Godzilla, right? We love it. We love it when Brock Purdy wins the Super Bowl. Oh, well, next year. Anyway. Yeah, yeah. Next year. Next year, buddy. Right. We love that stuff. We love the, I don't know, the mouse turning on the line. You know, we love that. And there's so much credit to somebody who's breaking out of old strictures, old frozenness. Credit yourself, honor yourself.
feel good about yourself i love that yeah that's great and as we get to the end here I'm going to ask you a question that we could probably spend a whole episode on. So maybe this is bad podcasting right now that I'm saving this for the end. But I'm wondering what your thoughts are on it. So we've talked over and over again throughout this episode.
about the nature of the stress response as a hello response to the experience of a lack of safety, some kind of threat, right? And we try to create a lot of safety in our environments if we can. But life is chaotic and weird, and we do not always get to control those environments. So what this means is that we have to increasingly build up our sense of ourselves.
as the source of safety. And we are the source of safety because we can affect those environments. We're at choice rather than being at effect from them, right? And that's the big question mark a lot of the time, particularly for people who freeze because they don't have that sense of self-efficacy by and large.
They've developed that habit of behavior because they've had repeated experiences of not being able to affect their environment in those ways. Their safety was derived essentially from peacing out mentally. from what is going on as an option of last resort. For somebody with that pattern, how do you think about or what would you encourage as even just a first step here?
for developing that view of the self, of myself as something from which I can derive safety, something that I can feel like is a sturdy, safe place to be. Well, this is an episode. Because you're getting at something that is actually really profound and a challenge for people, including in a world that's... Full of threats. It's also full of opportunities. And the kind of threats we were mainly talking about here, we're in a social context. So we can have in our...
model of the three major needs, safety, satisfaction, connection, you can have a safety threat that is happening in the context of connection. For example, there could be a threat to connection that makes you feel unsafe. And so this... oneself as a source of safety. That's a huge, huge topic. And there are certain...
key inner strengths and inner resources that have been central for me. And I share them with others and they've become major touchstones in my work and people are familiar with it. And if they're not, no worries at all. So just a quick name, a couple. One is the capacity to recognize when you are basically all right right now in the present, even though the future might be different.
But to recognize, actually, I don't feel safe, but I am safe. So then that recognition right there is a source of safety because you're no longer living with paper tiger paranoia. So that's one. A second is, much as you keep emphasizing, agency. And for me, agency is in thought, word, and deed. They all work together. Sometimes it's not safe.
to be agentic with what we say or what we do. We have to be very cautious, but inside our minds, we can retain a fundamental freedom to have agency in our clear discernments. What do we see? What seems to be true here? And to rest in the knowing of what's true, to know that you have the capacity to recognize what's actually true is really useful for safety. That would be a second big headline.
I think a third big headline for oneself as a source of safety in the face of threats is to ground in the sense of oneself as strong. And that's a... Umbrella term I use for cluster of qualities, such as determination, the sense of oneself as being able to endure discomfort, which is a really underappreciated aspect of... fortitude, of strength. Yourself is very strong. Yourself is strong. Yourself is a coper. Yourself is someone who can function. Another one is that you can be the source of
receiving support from others. Ooh, what do you mean by that? That's great, yeah. Yeah, very often when we're threatened by something, we need help. To be safe, we need to get a second opinion. from a different doctor. Yeah. Or we need emotional support from friends, or we need ways to think through, wow, my boyfriend, you know, he hasn't hit me, but he's gotten pretty intense.
What should I do here? You know, to be able to reach out and get support, to get allies, to get resources, that's another way to feel that you yourself can be a major factor in your own safety. I think that's totally great. And as I was doing some of the prep for this episode, what I kept on coming back to was this self-efficacy question.
this question of where do we actually derive safety from. And what I realized is that I have a fundamental model of myself as a thing from which I derive safety. I have a belief in myself as somebody who can solve problems, overcome challenges. experience stress without being overwhelmed with it. These are all models I have of myself. And when I think of people, I think of my friends who struggle with the freeze response.
I wonder if they have those models or not. And I suspect that by and large they don't. I think you're right. And I wonder about that. Yeah, as just a key intervention here. And we've done episodes and episodes and episodes on self-concept, which is why we're not.
really diving into it here today, and I would strongly encourage checking out those episodes to anybody who wants to learn more about it. I do think that we could spend an episode maybe even sometime soon on this particular topic, this version of this topic. which I do think is really interesting. But I love the initial treatment that you just gave to it there, Dad. You know, this for me is a lot of compassion, I guess, and empathy for people who understandably feel totally unsafe, beleaguered.
And there are real threats. There are real threats in their life. There's a lot of real suffering there that can be addressed by people building up. recognizing the capabilities they already have and building them up further so that more and more they can be the origin point, the locus. internal locus of control, the origin point moving out into the world of being as safe as they possibly can. Be as safe and feel as safe as you realistically can.
If I could, I'd like to just drop in two quick points here. The first is that sometimes unwittingly, and this has happened for me a lot as a therapist, it can happen for others, that our well-meaning efforts... to help another person feel safe or to kind of draw them out are actually for them triggers of freezing.
For example, a kind of simple bid for greater emotional closeness or self-disclosure with another person could be experienced by them as very threatening. And then suddenly they're withdrawing. So being aware of that can really be helpful. You know, it's like I said earlier, sometimes just being alive, you know, just living is the unconditioned stimulus. It's the bell ringing. It's not inherently problematic.
Just that alone can be the unconditioned stimulus in life, just living, right? Similarly, others who are being friendly or kind or drawing you out, that is what gets really, really scary. The second thing I would just say to finish here is that when you notice that another person is going inert or sort of going away, or even sort of freezing or becoming a little numb, if you possibly can, and it's appropriate, be kind to them.
This is one of my favorite ones that we've done recently. I'm so glad that we did this episode. I really hope that it benefits a lot of people. And I feel like I just learned so much. both for the prep process for this episode i learned a lot from that and also i really appreciate all the input that you had on it as a clinician here dad i thought it was super helpful
Today's conversation with Rick focused on the freeze response to stress. We all respond to stress in different kinds of ways. The four big families of responses are fighting, flying, freezing, and fawning. The four F's. Fawning, if you're not familiar with it, is more of an appeasement strategy. It's where you try to be nice to the person who is causing you problems or to the stressful situation in order to fly under the radar of more powerful individuals.
All of these stress responses have their challenges that are associated with them. But the freeze response has some particular qualities that can make it really challenging for people to deal with. These stress responses are adaptive in nature. If you look at the behavior of animals, they're making choices about how to respond to a situation based on their assessment of it.
A mouse does not try to fight a hawk because it understands that it cannot beat the hawk. It just has to run away from it. A lizard that's caught by a cat makes the rational assessment that it's not able to fight. It's not able to flee, and it's certainly not going to make the cat its best friend. So what does it do? It plays dead. There is some rationality to these responses. So why do we pick each one? Well, we do it based on the assessment of our capabilities.
We fight somebody if we think we can beat them. We run if we think we can get away. We fawn if we think that we can play the social game really effectively with somebody else and maybe convince them to be our friend. So why do we freeze? Well, we freeze if we don't think we can do any of those things. So baked into the freeze response is an assessment of the self as being vulnerable, an assessment of the self as being unable to affect change.
and the world around it. And because self-efficacy, the belief that we can change our circumstances, change ourselves, behave in powerful ways in the world, is so fundamental, so fundamental to our ability to change for the better. the freeze response can be particularly hard for people to work with.
And as Rick emphasized, freezing can be tough for people to identify sometimes because we know when we're fighting somebody or we know when we're running away from them. It's very clear what's going on. But freezing is kind of the action of inaction. So it can be harder for people to identify when they're doing it. It also can be a little tough for people relationally because you can get into these cycles of behavior where it's not obvious to everyone that a freeze response is taking place.
It's not obvious to your boss or your partner or your friend that you have emotionally shut down and removed yourself from the interaction. And so they keep on bidding.
for a certain kind of response from you that you are not capable in that moment of giving them and they get frustrated because it looks like you should be giving them a certain kind of response but you just aren't and that can create this negative cycle that just exacerbates the problems because the person who's stuck in the freeze response just feels, understandably, more and more and more unsafe.
We then talked about some of the different presentations of the freeze response. One of the most common symptoms of it is dissociation. Here at the end, I do want to say dissociation can take place during any kind of a stress response. It is not limited to the freeze response. Dissociation is when we disconnect from our senses or our thoughts or our feelings. We move ourselves out of space and time. We are no longer here right now. We are somewhere else.
Relatively mild versions of this could be zoning out during a conversation or feeling a little emotionally numb at the end of a long day. Happens to a lot of people all the time. Very normal. And then there are more serious examples of this. Rick gave a few of clients being totally checked out during a session or him even walking outside of his office.
seeing in the parking lot that somebody was just kind of camped out in their car and had been in their car for an hour after their session had ended just because they weren't able to move. More mild versions of it could also look like somebody shutting down internally or becoming a little inert, having some difficulty taking any kind of an action, having a hard time moving or speaking.
or maybe even just struggles with concentrating or feeling or expressing their emotions. Rick emphasized three things that he tended to do when working with people who struggled with the freeze response and dissociation broadly. First, establishing safety. These are all responses to threat. Clinically, you cannot have a functional therapeutic relationship with somebody else unless there is the presence of safety.
Then he talked about doing everything that he could to not trip the wire of the freeze response because once you're in the response, it is really difficult to do anything about it. So it's up to him as a clinician to pay attention to the person. for them a little bit, to maybe take them away from topics that might activate a full freeze response if you started to notice that they were beginning to edge into it.
And there's a lesson there for people who want to work on this outside of the therapeutic office, right? Like that's most of what we focus on in the podcast. What can you do on your own? And it emphasizes self-awareness as a key tool in this process. The first step of cultivating self-awareness is just understanding that you're a person who has this family of issues. The second step is the ability to reflect on something after it's happened. So you can look back on a situation and go,
Yeah, I froze there. That's the freeze response happening to me. Then maybe the third step is you start to notice it while you're in it. There's this part of you that's going, oh, I am frozen right now.
and maybe you can't do anything about it but you just notice that it's happening then the fourth step the really really important one is you start to get some awareness of when you're beginning to fall into that response You see yourself tumbling, and maybe you're not able to catch yourself yet, but you can see the fall as it starts to happen.
And then over time, you develop more and more and more space. You're able to step further and further back from it and notice the train coming to hit you earlier and earlier. And this then empowers you to be really at choice about it, to make the decision to stay in the interaction if that's what you want to do, or to make the decision to step out of the interaction if that's something that you're capable of doing.
If you can't fully step out of the interaction, maybe you can do little things. You can do little things to try to rev your body up. Little motions with your hands, little bouncing with your core. Something that can support this that Rick talked about is practicing different ways of being. He talked about taking on public speaking or doing some theater improv or going rock climbing, situations where people often...
feel really, really, really stressed out. So you're deliberately putting yourself into an environment that you recognize could be triggering for you. And you're practicing with that so you can expand your window of tolerance around whatever the stressful behavior is and try on a different way of being. And in that trying on of this new way of being, you are increasingly experiencing yourself.
as strong, vital, and effective. As somebody who can make choices, who can make the choice to step out of an interaction, or who can make the choice to speak up for themselves. or make the choice to smooth things over with the other person so they stop being so annoying about whatever it is that they're talking about. And as you are doing that, you are implicitly developing something that I think is really the crux of this whole thing.
which is the feeling of the self as the source of safety. You are safe because you have a view of yourself as capable, as being able to solve problems, as being able to...
encounter unfamiliar situations and handle them skillfully. And that view itself is something that people who have a freeze response often have not been able to develop in life because they were exposed to a lot of situations that convinced them that the opposite was true, that they did not have any optionality, that they did not have any individual power, that they couldn't do anything.
about what was happening to them. And man, both Rick and I go to such a place of sympathy and compassion inside of this whole thing for people who have had those experiences. Like, wow, you developed that belief for reasons. And today, circumstances hopefully for you are different. So you really can develop a new view of yourself. You really can step into.
different way of seeing what might be possible for you. In addition to all of that which can be a big and very challenging process, Rick did emphasize some specific ideas and interventions that I want to highlight here at the end. One of the things that he talked about was developing a lot of specificity about what exactly is the threat that is causing you to freeze. Is it because you're worried about something being done to you?
Is it because the person that you're in a situation with feels unsafe to you? Or is it because you're afraid of some response that's coming up inside of you? And so you're freezing to stymie that response. Are you worried about what will happen if you blow up at the other person? What is it actually? And by the way, these are all quite possibly like very rational things to be concerned about. I totally get it. But what is it really?
that is inspiring that fear that concern and getting really specific and granular about it can give you a ton of insight into what's going on here and then classic rick he talked about developing inner strengths that could make you feel like you don't have to freeze. These could be qualities like determination, or a sense of your own vitality, or the feeling that you can make choices about the world around you, even in very, very small ways.
Maybe you start to develop a sense of yourself as being good at different kinds of things that you can lean on in challenging interactions with other people. Whatever it is, as you build up these qualities, you will naturally feel at threat less, which will make the number of times that you have to freeze in response to threat go down.
This was a big episode today with a lot of ideas in it. And part of the reason that it was a big episode is because these are big challenges for people. This is not easy stuff. And I really want to emphasize that here at the end.
So if you made it this far, I hope you found the material today really useful and supportive of you. If you have any questions about the content, feel free to leave a comment down below if you're watching it on YouTube. If you're listening to it, you can send me an email that's contact at at beingwellpodcast.com or hey, you can reach out through social media. I've got all the pages that you would expect.
If you'd like to support the podcast, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And for just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and get a bunch of bonuses in return. Until next time, thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.