How to stop freezing up and start speaking up with your partner
By Orit Krug | June 24th, 2019
Telling your mind to stop freezing up is not enough to physically change the response during conflict with your partner.
Learning how to stop freezing up is something that plagues a lot of people who’ve experienced trauma. The Freeze behavior a primal response that’s impulsively carried out by the nervous system to protect itself. It can be very difficult to break the pattern.
Do you freeze up when your partner uses a different tone of voice or looks at you a certain way, even if they’re not angry? Do you lose your ability to speak and stare out blankly as if you’ve just left your own body?
You may beat yourself up for reacting in such an extreme or “odd” way, but please know that this is not your fault or uncommon. It is a behavior that’s become hardwired due to past trauma. And right now, it is out of your mind’s control.
Freezing up is a primal response that becomes activated within your nervous system whenever your body is subtly reminded of past trauma. The non-verbal part of your brain essentially “tells” your body, “Remember when your father raised his voice? Your mom got seriously hurt. Let’s get out of here NOW!”
In this example, your partner’s tone of voice reminds you of how your father was abusive towards your mother. Then, within a split second, this sequence of events happens next:
- Your Amygdala (brain’s fear center) becomes activated and triggers the nervous system to react in Fight, Flight, Freeze or Shutdown
- Your Hippocampus (distinguishes past events from current reality) becomes essentially useless.
- Your Prefrontal Cortex (higher-brain that governs verbal language & logic) desperately tries & fails to convince yourself “This is your loving partner, NOT your father!”
… and BAM! You’re frozen.
A deeper explanation of how each part of the brain responds when activated by old trauma.
Nothing you tell yourself in this moment can stop your body from freezing up, even though you know in your mind that your partner is DIFFERENT– they love you and wouldn’t actually mean to hurt you.
All it takes is a subtle trauma trigger to go into freeze mode, which can make it feel impossible to change this old pattern. But I assure you – you can rewire your trauma reactions and become in command of your nervous system & body’s behaviors.
Learn how to stop freezing up by becoming aware of YOUR specific pattern
Some people freeze up and stand there without saying anything until they finally “come back.” They may not even remember what just happened in the moment of conflict with their partners.
Some isolate in bed for days feeling completely fatigued or sick after they freeze up. After all, the body needs to recover from the massive amount of energy it takes to carry through such an ancient survival response.
Others snap back into the moment quickly and proceed into a fight response, where they explode into a yelling rage, or a flight response to escape the situation as quickly as possible.
Everyone responds in their own unique way depending on the specific trauma they’re storing in their bodies. You have your own unique way too.
Let’s dig a little deeper and see what’s going on for you. Hopefully, this will help you understand how to stop freezing up.
Create a list of the events and triggers that usually make you freeze up.
Get. really. specific.
My client Zoe’s partner asked her to prepare dinner when he worked later nights. He communicated that this would be really helpful for him to get to sleep earlier.
Zoe was happy to do this for him when she was free, but one night recently, she didn’t follow through.
When he used a frustrated tone of voice to express his disappointment, she immediately froze up and didn’t say anything. He became more agitated as he tried to discuss this with her and she just stood there (note: she identified that his agitation was NOT abusive, and it never has been).
When we explored this in session, we pinpointed that Zoe froze up every time her partner’s face hardened and his tone was more assertive. Even if he practiced the kind words that they discussed in couples therapy, she was already frozen as soon as she noticed these changes in his expressions.
What specifically makes you freeze up? Is it a certain look on your partner’s face? Is it a moment of silence at dinner when it looks like they’re about to say something that’s difficult to hear?
It’s important to understand the VERY first signs that trigger you into a freeze response before you can change it.
Understand the root cause behind why you keep freezing up.
Many people try to understand their unhealthy patterns by talking about it, thinking it through, and other mind-based techniques. But they never FULLY understand what they need to know in order to stop freezing up.
That’s because the freeze response is a very PHYSICAL behavior that occurs in the body. You can only access the deepest root cause through techniques that connect you to the wisdom of your body.
Back to Zoe– what she really wanted to say to her partner was, “The kids were so difficult this evening. It took all my energy to get them to listen and calm down. I felt so drained and time slipped away. I’m really sorry, I should’ve been more aware and communicated that I wasn’t going to be able to do it. Maybe offer to order take-out instead.”
The mere THOUGHT of speaking up to her partner triggered so much anxiety when she was telling me about it in our session.
This signaled to me that her brain and body were not able to distinguish the imagined scenario, where she could speak up to him, from the reality of the present moment, where she was safe in session with me.
When she talked about asserting her needs, her body seemed to get pulled back into the trauma of her father being abusive whenever her mom tried to speak up.
Instead of letting her body get warped into an old memory, I guided her to explore her anxiety through a gentle and safe process.
By exploring this in her body, we opened up the opportunity for her to become more in command of her body’s response rather than dissociate, numb, or escape.
We tried a movement “experiment” together:
“You’re going to come up with different movements and I’m going to purposely not follow you.” I explained.
She nodded.
I added, “Your role is to tell me how to change what I’m doing in order to mirror your movements accurately. Then we’ll switch roles and try it the other way around.”
When it my was turn to lead, I had to speak up and tell Zoe how to change her movements to match mine. She did the same when it was her turn to lead.
Essentially, we had a conversion through our bodies AND words that said, “This is how I’m expressing myself and here’s how you can listen to me and understand me better.”
Here’s what happened:
Zoe gave me directions with no hesitation AT ALL. She appeared to be very calm and confident while being assertive with me.
From the outside, she seemed to be completely in her comfort zone.
The twist? She confessed afterwards that she was freaking out on the inside… the entire time!
This was her norm. She appeared calm & cool on the outside, but on the inside, her anxiety escalated so much and she became highly stressed. This often flung her nervous system into a freeze response because it was all too much to handle.
You have the power to change your response once you discover how it gets triggered in your body.
Once you pinpoint how your Freeze response begins–whether it’s small bits of stress that add up over time, or huge bursts of fear that happen all at once–you have the information you need in order to change it.
In our session, Zoe’s movement experience revealed how often she ignored her own body’s stress signals to avoid “negative” feelings and conflict with her partner.
This was GOLD because we were finally in a position to rewire this pattern together in session before it could happen again in her real-life relationship.
“Let’s go back and do it again,” I prompted, guiding us back into our movement experiment.
“Except, this time, I’d like for you to tell me the instant you start to feel anxious inside your body, even if it’s not obvious from the outside.” I added.
She agreed.
We initially did this in short spurts to avoid overwhelming her nervous system. Pushing her too far, too fast would be counterproductive, as the point of the intervention was to strengthen her nervous system and expand her window of tolerance to stop reacting in a freeze response.
By the end of the session, Zoe told me exactly how to mirror her movements, exactly the way she wanted, WITHOUT feeling any fear. It was an amazing shift! It primed her body to be ready and be assertive with her partner the next time they got into conflict.
This was already SO much more effective than years of couples therapy, where she constantly talked about how she wanted to stop freezing up, but could never physically change it.
You deserve to find peace in your body & let love in without fear.
The latest trauma research shows that cognitive-based therapies cannot fully access trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body. Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain-Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal trauma from the physical body or nervous system.
This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for many people. They end up feeling stuck, even after spending decades of therapy and gaining so much self-awareness.
If you relate, you might’ve considered giving up on your healing. You might wonder if a fully integrated healing is not possible for you.
Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing deeply & wholly, because we all have neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection to love, joy, and openness.
But even with an effective neuroscience-backed Somatic approach, going to weekly sessions could still require many more months or years until you feel that “click” in your body that finally makes you feel WHOLE.
That’s why I run Somatic Trauma Healing Retreats where many people experience accelerated, integrated, and lasting healing in just a few days.
(Disclaimer: each attendee must go through an application process that ensures this accelerated healing is possible for them).
If this sounds like something you might be interested in, I’d love to invite you to check out my retreats! There are several options from women’s healing, plant-assisted, 1:1, and more.
