Polyvagal Freeze State: Cognitions and Release

Hey, I'm Justin Sunseri. I'm a therapist, a coach, and the creator of the Polyvagal Trauma Relief System. This is a clip from one of the meetups with my private community. We're going to discuss the polyvagal free state, but in particular, how it relates to this thing that I created, a resource that I created called SSIEC. It stands for State Sensation. impulse emotion and cognition. It's how our sensations, impulses, emotions, and cognitions connect to our polyvagal state.

If you would like to download the resource, just sign up for my email list. I'll put a link in the description for you on how to do so. It's for free. And then you'll be able to use the SSIEC resource for yourself. or for your own client work. Enjoy. Some of the impulses and cognitions described in the SSIEC tool. When I read them, they do not make sense to me. I would like to better understand the impulse of release in the free state. Can you elaborate?

So freeze, imagine, um, let's put an image to this, maybe it'll help make more sense. Imagine there is a, uh, well, slinky comes to mind, you know, a slinky gets really tight. Well, it condenses and it could expand. So imagine someone's, or we'll do a spring. That's a slinky. If you push down on a spring, you can immobilize the spring, but it has all this tension inside of it. Like it wants to release. If you, once you release the immobilization, it releases.

So freeze I conceptualize similarly where someone or a mammal could go through something, they tense up, and to get out of that situation, that freeze energy is supposed to explode into aggression or evasion. So fighting back or running away, and it's one big release, one big burst of movement from, from that frozen situation. state.

So, uh, for traumatized individuals, if you're stuck in freeze, then that freeze activation can linger day to day, but it can also be triggered in a specific moment by some, a trigger, by a cue of that event, right? So day to day, it's still there because the immobilization, the squeeze is still on if we stick to that. image of the spring. So the, the immobilization of shutdown compresses the flight fight activation.

And it, so it's really the flight fight activation that's like ready to explode, but the, the immobilization of shutdown is what's keeping it pushed in. So you experience at the same time, the tension and immobilization. Yeah, it's felt as it could be felt as tension. You experience the flight fight activation, but it's just, It's stuck. It can't be used for what it's supposed to be used for, running away or aggression. So it, the flight fight is immobilized due to, uh, shutdown.

So freeze is a combination of flight fight plus shutdown. Sympathetic plus dorsal vagal. For people who are more of a freeze traumatized state, when the freeze gets triggered, it's, it's the flight fight being triggered with the shutdown. So it just stays like that. And what ends up happening is that it explodes into rage or panic, which is too much. It's, it's a dysregulated release. And what we want is a regulated release.

We want safety active along with, well, we want safety active to, to turn down the shutdown, basically. So as that immobilization eases up, we want the flight fight expansion to come gradually. We don't want it to, spring and to explode. We want that to expand gradually. So as more safety comes on, then shutdown can come off, hopefully little by little. As that happens, then we can release flight fight a little bit at a time. Make sense? Yeah, total sense. Really clear. Thank you.

And then you said, I would also like to better appreciate how the following cognitions are connected to a free state. So let's, let's, let's, let's ground ourselves back in this. So With freeze flight fight is active, but it's stuck. It is frozen in place by dorsal vagal immobilization. So imagine like you can stick with the spring. That's I'm imagining it like jittery, but we can imagine a car where you're slamming on the accelerator and the brake at the same time.

And the wheels just spin, uh, the engine gets loud. It's revving the car shaking. Right. So that's, if that's the state of the body, like what happens in our brain, what happens in our mind, what happens to our thoughts, really. So in that state where it's highly revved up and there's really no safety active, it's going to be kind of all or nothing. The thinking is going to be very black or white. It's extreme thinking is going to be pretty extreme.

So when we say all or nothing, that's what we mean is. There's no safety present, there's no empathy, there's no compassion and consideration. I mean, at the extreme. It's just, it's just I'm activated but I can't do anything with it. So thinking becomes very extreme. Because it matches the state of the body. The state of the body is in the state of, uh, danger and life threat.

So scattered, yeah, in that state, you can't really focus on one thing, or I guess you could overly focus and to the point of obsession on the next word is obsessive. So as a way to, I consider this with OCD as a way to contain that out of control flight fight activation, the person's behavioral adaptation might be to overly focus on something in particular, uh, to, or create a ritual, you know, like Locking something six times.

That ritual doesn't solve the problem, but it might contain that flight fight activation, that's just spinning its wheels. It might help to lower it enough to move on to the next step of like going to bed. That's obsession. And then the compulsion is the you're acting on it, uh, scattered for someone who's in freeze. It could be flight fight also, but freeze it's thoughts could be all replaced. This is probably more with a panicky kind of freeze because freeze can be rageful or panicky.

Or overwhelmed or stress, stress, but freeze in the more panicky flavor of it. I could see as scattered, like just all over the place, not able to identify the issue or where the danger is from. I'm just focusing on this and then this and then this and that flashbacks would be. Well, it's flashbacks. You're specifically the memory, uh, an image or a re experiencing of the thing that put someone into freeze the, the event.

Grandiose that I would see that as another one of those cognitive adaptations where it doesn't solve anything, but if I can, if someone in freeze can focus on how incredible they are, it's like. Now that that might contain what's happening within me that might help reduce my own freeze activation. If I can, if my, it's not, it's not a conscious thought, no one's choosing to do this really.

But if, if, if one can overly think about a thing or, or themselves as being so much better than maybe, or so much more capable than they really are, I don't know that might help too. If I could focus on that, maybe that gives me a sense of containment of like my activation inside. It's a, I would call that a cognitive adaptation versus a behavioral one.

And then shaming, uh, that's more probably due to the nature of where freeze comes from. Oftentimes is freeze comes from acute traumatic incidents, like a, a thing that somebody went through and those things are a lot of times can be, uh, assaults of various kinds. So those can leave somebody feeling disgusting, shameful, ashamed, but it's really more about what was done to them. The person's inflicting their shame onto another.

So the thoughts in a stuck free state may probably depending on how you got there in the first place. But the thoughts might be about, I'm a bad person that I did a bad thing. You know, shame and guilt are, are different. Guilt is I did something wrong and I feel bad about, bad about it. And shame is there's something wrong with me in my core as a, as a, as a person. No one's born like that. I don't think so.

That probably comes from, I would assume repeated incidents that left someone in more of a free state versus like it could come from one as well. Can we have the shame because of this free state, let's say we were assaulted and we couldn't move, we couldn't defend ourselves, we were frozen and we feel ashamed, is it all linked together? Uh, yeah, it could be. Yeah. That's usually with the people I work with. Plus, you know, messages that we get from.

caretakers from trusted individuals in our lives. Shame can come from a lot of places, but it could be connected with freeze. The feeling of disgust, I think, can go along with shame. Uh, the feeling of revulsion can, I think, come along with shame and be connected to the free state in particular.

I wondered if you work the conditions to have an impact on the rest. On the stage or on the sensation or emotion. So is that a way you can work, start with the cognition and then make your way up?

Yeah. Yeah. That's usually where, I mean, not usually, but many times where we start, uh, but yeah, you totally can just by learning something like polyvagal theory or attachment theory, or learning for some people, they like, um, different modalities like internal family systems, learning a top down piece of knowledge can help someone to, you know, Make sense of or contain what's happening within them. So, yeah.

Yeah. Uh, a common thing I do with that's top down is the validate, normalize, and give permission, uh, process. Where can you validate what you feel? Just name it. Can you normalize it, make sense of it, and can, and can, can you then give permission for it to be there? And all, that's pretty much top down stuff. And then once you do that, then the bottom up, more bottom up felt experience stuff can, can occur.

So yeah, it's totally, it can totally be a way to calm, to contain, to make sense of, or even to eventually allow, uh, what's happening bottom up.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope this was helpful for you in learning more about freeze, the cognitions, and also the underlying experiences of it. Again, if you want to download the SSIEC sheets, it's for free. Just sign up for my email list. There's a link in the description for you. Otherwise, I hope this was a helpful resource for you. Bye. This podcast is not therapy, not intended to be therapy, or be a replacement for therapy.

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