Shame and the Freeze Response
As a therapist who specializes in both trauma and shame, one of the most common issues my clients present with is profound shame about their freeze response. Some may have frozen during traumatic experiences, others may be living with prolonged symptoms of being frozen (what we call functional freeze). The first step in overcoming this debilitating shame is to learn what a freeze response actually is and is not and what happens when it goes hand-in-hand with shame.
What is a Freeze Response?
Every wellness account on social media seems to talk about the Nervous System as if it’s one thing, but this is too reductive (yes, I’m also occasionally guilty of this!). The Nervous System is highly complex and comprised of multiple systems that perform different functions. For example, the Sympathetic Nervous System activates a fight or flight response by producing the stress hormone cortisol and increasing the heart rate to enable movement.
Contrarily, the Parasympathetic Nervous System slows the heart and metabolic rates down. At optimal levels, this engages the healthy rest and digest state that we aspire to be in. However, when the Parasympathetic Nervous System is responding to a perceived threat, it initiates a freeze response which suppresses cognitive brain functions like problem-solving and critical thinking to conserve energy for survival. In other words, we experience brain fog, low appetite, and delayed reactions when we’re frozen.
Signs You are in a Freeze Response
A freeze response can be difficult to self-identify, because sometimes we’re in a freeze response, other times we’re in shut-down, which is related but different. Shut-down is more closely related to dissociation. Whereas in a flight response we may feel anxious or the clear urge to get away and in a fight response we may notice our fists balling and pressure in our chest or arms as if we want to shove something, the freeze and shut-down responses often produce the inability to feel.
Symptoms of being in a freeze response include:
A feeling of immobility or rigid muscles
Not paying attention, spacing out, brain fog, or delayed responses
Feeling cold, numb, or stuck / paralyzed
Shallow breath
Mindless scrolling
The urge to sit in front of screens for hours on end
Why Shame Produces a Freeze Response
Shame itself is a freeze response; it triggers the Parasympathetic Nervous System to shut us down. When we’re shamed, or feel the emotion of ashamed, our body responds in the ways described above due to shame’s biological purpose which is to halt action. Shame was designed to keep us safe by stopping us from doing things that harm the tribe. This is why we freeze when we’re shamed.
SHAME VS. ASHAMED
We need to side-step for a moment and talk about the difference between shame as an emotion (ashamed) and Shame with a capital ‘S.’ The former is like any other emotion in that it’s temporary and provides important feedback. The latter - Shame - is far more than an emotion. Shame refers to internalized toxic shame. Whereas Healthy Shame teaches us boundaries and keeps society safe, Toxic
Shame is the core belief that we’re intrinsically flawed or unworthy. (Both Healthy and Toxic shame are taught to us, which is why it’s a parental responsibility to understand the difference) When Toxic Shame becomes internalized as a result of not processing and releasing it quickly, we lose the ability to discern between Shame and our Self. We perceive ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, as shameful. When we have internalized toxic shame, our body reflects this with a phenomenon called the physiology of shame, which looks like permanently hunched shoulders, avoiding eye contact, and concave chests.
WHEN SHAME IS TRIGGERED
Coming back to the freeze response, when we have internalized toxic shame, it frequently gets activated by triggers which remind us that we’re shameful. Having our internalized shame triggered is not the same as being shamed the first time, although the body feels like it is. In fact, because the brain still equates shame with being expelled from the tribe, it feels like we’re dying when we’re shamed.
When our existing shame is triggered, we don’t always experience a freeze response, sometimes we experience a flight response which looks like avoidance, deflection, or numbing, or a fight response in which we lash out with rage or defensiveness. Other times though, we freeze. In these moments we’re unable to think clearly, want to hide or disappear, blush, and look away. We may even start to dissociate.
Examples of Shame Responses
Below are some examples of each response and how others may respond to them:
FREEZE
Say our manager gives us feedback that a piece of work wasn’t to the standard they were expecting. If this criticism triggers our internalized shame and low self-esteem, we may experience a freeze response where we can’t think of a coherent response; in fact we can’t even process what they’re saying. They may become frustrated and suggest that we’re not listening to them. We also may blush and feel heat in our faces or look away instead of maintaining eye contact with our boss which can amplify their frustration.
FLIGHT
Perhaps we have internalized shame about our bodies and someone we’re sitting with starts telling us about the diet they’re on. This is likely to trigger our body shame and if it activates a flight response, we may find ourselves getting twitchy and pulling at our clothes and we may change the subject, get up to go to the bathroom, or we may even binge on food, substances, shopping, or some other activity that helps us avoid the feeling of shame. The other person may sense that we’re behaving awkwardly, feel dismissed, or think we’re being evasive or even passive aggressive and become short or frustrated.
FIGHT
I know this one will resonate with anyone who’s ever lived with someone! Think of a time when you expressed to the person you lived with, say a roommate or a partner, that you wanted them to contribute more to the home’s upkeep or reconsider certain behaviors. Maybe you asked them to clean better or more often, or maybe you suggested that they were hogging the TV with their long hours spent laying on the communal sofa. Assuming we approached the conversation in an open, mature, and compassionate way, how did they react? Did they respond with understanding and compromise? Or did they lash out and get defensive? If the latter, chances are their shame was triggered and a fight response activated. In turn, you probably went into your own stress response.
“When we are in shame, we freeze inside. We cannot see others. We cannot receive from them, or see how our actions are affecting them.”
-Sheila Rubin & Bret Lyon, Center for Healing Shame
The Shame of Freezing
The reason many people feel ashamed of their freeze response is because they don’t understand it. Many believe that we have a choice in how we respond to threat, but this isn’t strictly true. Survival responses are involuntary and automatic.
If we believe that we have a choice in how our body reacts to the perception of danger, then it’s likely we’ll be ashamed of our response if we don’t believe it worked. In other words, if we still feel the effects of trauma, we may feel ashamed of freezing and ‘allowing’ the event to happen instead of trying to escape or fight back. We may feel like the pain is our fault and that there is something wrong with us for not protecting ourselves. We may start to believe that we’re weak and feel contempt towards others who we perceive as weak.
In some cases people feel shame for freezing instead of defending or protecting another person. This is a common experience in people who survive abuse, exploitation, or violence in a group situation, or in the case of military/police personnel who find themselves unable to take action in certain situations. The shame of a freeze response adds further trauma to the survivor.
“While the freeze response is an important aid to survival…it is often accompanied by dissociation and a sense of shame for not having done more to ward off the threat.”
-Christiane Sanderson, Counselling Skills for Working with Shame
Reframing the Freeze Response
I listen to a podcast called Being Well, hosted by psychologist father/son duo Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson, and caught a particularly resonant episode in which the hosts evaluated the freeze response. They make a pointed observation which contradicts what most people believe about it, namely that it is not a passive response. The freeze response is as active as the flight and fight responses.
How can freezing be active? Because a survival response is simply a methodology that the brain uses to survive. It will assess what its best chances are for surviving a given situation and do that. If we had a traumatic experience as a child, however, our brains are likely to reenact the same response it did in that moment until the trauma is discharged from the body through a therapeutic process like EFT.
For example, if a large man is attacked by a smaller woman who jumps on his back, his brain may engage a fight response because it knows it’s likely to overpower the source of danger. If, though, that man has a history of trauma where as a child he was overpowered by larger offenders, his brain may be wired to react the same way he did as a child, perhaps by freezing (this may also cause him shame). However, if a small woman notices a larger person starting to approach her and she’s physically fit, her brain may deem flight the best option if she’s capable of running away quickly. If a child is threatened by an adult, the brain will usually engage a freeze response because the chances of fighting or escaping are low. In that situation, freezing and dissociating (when the mind literally leaves the body) is the safest option.
Sometimes the automatic response doesn’t make sense in a cognitive way. For instance, if someone freezes when they see a car barreling towards them, it may seem like the sensible option to dive out of the way but I invite you to consider that if the person were a mammal in the wild, a gazelle say, and the car were a much faster cheetah speeding towards them, nature tells us that the gazelle would neither try to outrun nor fight the cheetah. It would freeze and slow its heart rate down so substantially that the cheetah might believe it to be dead. The animal would be more likely to abandon its prey and once it had gone, the gazelle would escape.
Can you now see how freezing is an active response, not passive as most people believe? Once we reframe this false belief we can begin to take the shame out of freezing. When we freeze in the face of danger, we’re doing so because our brain believes it’s our best defense. When we freeze, we are protecting ourselves.
Next Steps
It’s important to remember that survival responses (or ‘stress responses’) are involuntary, we don’t choose them. To prevent our internal systems from hijacking our emotions and bodies, we need to rewire the brain so that it responds differently to triggers. EFT ‘tapping’ is one of the best tools to achieve this because of how it works neurologically. To learn more about how we can do this together, or how we can discharge toxic shame, feel free to book a 20-minute Discovery Session!