In this episode I talk about freeze, the response in men that hides in plain sight. Fight gets respect. Flight at least looks like movement. Freeze just looks like you vanished, and most of the time nobody even clocks it, including you. Plus on top of that a lot of men get praised for being steady when what's actually happening inside them is immobilization.
I've lived inside this one for most of my life, in the conversations that mattered, the choices I couldn't make, the moments I needed to show up and couldn't find my way there. In this one I get into what's actually happening in your body when you freeze up, why the pattern runs so deep, how to head it off at the pass when possible, and what happens when you do really freeze and can't get yourself out of it.
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All right, and welcome back. So, on today's episode, I want to talk about something that has absolutely impacted me and my journey as a man, and frankly, so many guys I've worked with. I'm going to start with just one scene. Let's say you're with your feminine partner, and she says something, and then suddenly, something inside of you just goes still. And it's not that you're thinking. You're not even really choosing to be quiet, and you're definitely not strategizing. Something has actually locked up inside you. And now you're standing there, and she's looking at you, waiting for some kind of response, and there's nothing. You're just gone. That's the freeze response, and that's just one version of it. But freeze shows up everywhere for men. It's the decision you can't make where you just keep spinning through the options because you're afraid to move. It's the thing you want to say, the boundary you need to set. And yet your throat just closes. And it's even wanting to share something vulnerable with someone you trust. And the words are right there, but your body won't let them out. It's seeing a woman you're attracted to and wanting to approach her, wanting to make a move, and your body literally won't go. It's procrastination. And I don't mean laziness. I mean, there's something, you know you need to deal with, and you just keep not dealing with it. For me, there was a period where I needed to look at my finances, and I was sitting alone in my apartment, unable to pay rent. And instead of getting out there, finding work, figuring out a solution, I froze in my room and I watched the American Office for five days straight. Now, the truth is, I know I knew I needed to, like, open a spreadsheet, look at my bank account, and face what was there, but I just couldn't do it. So I'd eat another slice, I'd check my phone. I'd do anything else. I was frozen. And that is freeze. Right? It doesn't always look like going totally still. Sometimes it looks like staying very busy with everything except the thing. And almost every man I've worked with knows at least one of these scenarios, but most of them have just never heard it named right. Freeze. I've touched on freeze in a number of prior episodes and really have talked about how our nervous systems work. Fight, Flight. Freeze. Fawn. But I've never made freeze the topic. And it really deserves to be because it's the one most men experience, and yet it's the one that's least talked about. So what is freeze really? Again, we've all heard fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn. But here's the thing about men. Fight gets rewarded, right? Oh, he's strong, he's tough, he's standing up for himself. Flight. It at least looks like some kind of action. He's doing something. He just blew his lid and he got out of there, even if it's leaving. But freeze, Freeze just looks like you disappeared. Nobody necessarily sees it, nobody necessarily names it. And that's why it really doesn't get talked about as much. But it actually can get much worse than that. Because not only does freeze not just go unnoticed, sometimes it gets rewarded, Right? Men, us men can get praised for being cool under pressure, for being even keeled, for not being emotional. And a lot of the time, what looks cool and collected on the outside is actually a man who's frozen on the inside. And this is something I really had to come to terms with in myself over the years of my men's work. A lot of times people would say to me, oh, my God, you're so present. You're so calm. And I'd get rewarded for that, in a sense. But the truth was, in a lot of those times, I was actually just in a frozen, numb state. And here's the thing. Freeze and calm are not the same thing. Being paralyzed inside is very different from I'm calm and able to respond. So what's actually happening in the body when we get totally overwhelmed? Our prefrontal cortex, our logical mind, our upstairs brain, it gets knocked offline. We get frozen into a parasympathetic state. This is one of the oldest parts of our nervous system. And it takes over, right? Don't move. Don't be noticed. Survive this. There are animals in the world that feign death for this reason. They freeze to try to escape danger. The animal thinks, I'm already dead. Maybe it's not going to pursue me. If I stay still enough, maybe it won't see me. So I'm just going to freeze. And freeze lives inside the body, right? Your jaw clenches, your chest tightens, and almost always your breath totally stops. Your throat might close, and you just might go still. In a lot of ways, it looks like we're immobilized, because we are. And that's what it really means to freeze. Something becomes immobile and really, you Know that analysis paralysis. I mentioned the spinning through the options. That's a kind of a freeze too. It's frozen energy circulating in your head because your body can't move. Like I've talked about, rumination is often the cognitive expression of a kind of freeze state. Fear based. And there's one more version a lot of men don't necessarily recognize off the bat. My mentor, Dr. Robert Glover, talks about dear defend, explain, excuse and rationalize. When a man feels confronted, he often defaults to one of those four. And all of them are attempts to make intensity stop rather than staying present with it. So dear looks like engagement. There's some verbal movement, looks like you're responding, but it's often the same shutdown, right? It's approval seeking disguised as communication. If you're deering, you're still flooded. You're just flooding things with words instead of silence. You're overloaded. So freeze can look like going still, but it can also look like spinning in your head. It can also look like staying busy with everything else and it can look like talking a lot without actually saying anything real. So where does it come from? For many of us, freeze is a pattern that developed when we were young. In whatever situations of volatility or strife we were in, Freeze became one of the best tools we had for navigating it. And for any of you guys that have any kind of background in emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, explosive fathers, unstable fathers, unstable mothers, explosive mothers, any kind of volatility can be very common. To freeze in those situations or to get really quiet because that's what saved you the most often when you were a kid, that was the best response, right? To not act out into in some capacity, immobilize. And as I've said many times on the podcast, what protects us when we're young becomes the barrier to what we want when we get older. So freeze was often a necessary survival move when we were, let's say, seven years old. But here's the thing, you're not seven anymore. And your nervous system doesn't necessarily know that. And so this learned pattern, intensity becomes danger, emotion means danger, conflict means danger, even though in the current moment they're not always that. And so the best move out of default habit becomes to shut down. So here you are, maybe you're 37 years old, your partner raises her voice and your body responds like your father just walked in the room and yelled at you, or your boss gives you critical feedback and your throat closes up just like you're a kid being Told you're in trouble. The moment isn't the same, the threat isn't the same, but the pattern fires anyway because it was wired so early in, reinforced so deeply that your body doesn't know the difference necessarily. That's what we're really dealing with. It's not necessarily always a present tense emergency. It's often a childhood pattern mapped onto our adult life. And the research really backs this up, right? The Gottman Institute's research shows that men have a lower threshold for emotional flooding, and it takes us longer to recover. 85% of stonewallers are men. So stonewall, right? I'm the wall. You guys have heard that before. And often, even though we're stonewalling, our heart rate spikes, stress hormones surge, peripheral vision narrows. We're not choosing always to check out. It's our nervous systems are pulling the emergency brake, sometimes too aggressively. And culture reinforces all this from day one, because really, whatever sensitivity a boy does show, it's treated as a problem. Toughen up, don't cry. Man up. So boys and men often learn early that what we feel is too much and the safest thing to do is shut it down. And that conditioning doesn't stop in childhood. Even men with avoidant attachment get that avoidance reinforced by the culture around them. Whereas at least women are socialized to express emotional needs even when they're avoidant. Men get it from both sides. It's two forces pulling a man away from engagement. So when I talk about Freeze, I'm not talking about a character flaw. It's biology and culture compounding in the same direction. And your nervous system learned a long time ago that this is what you do when it's too much, and it's been reinforced ever since. And we're often unconsciously fused with that survival strategy in our body mind, right? We're not even aware of it, and we're not even aware we're making a choice, because oftentimes we're not. And that's the whole problem with Freeze, right? Choice goes offline. But here's the lie that freeze is telling us. If I don't move, this will pass. But it doesn't. It never does. Whatever the intensity of the moment is asking from us, it's still going to be there, and it accumulates. Talked about this before on the podcast, right? Because when an animal normally escapes a predator, once it gets to safety, then and only then does its body process what happens, right? You see this in deer as they shake, their whole bodies vibrate as they're integrating and Metabolizing the intensity of that experience. As men, we rarely do that. We freeze. The moment passes and then we just carry it. That's why men who freeze often describe feeling so heavy or numb over time. Like me, right? They're holding years of unprocessed, unresolved charge and turmoil. And here's the cruel real. Here's the cruel part, right? The freeze response itself, the non responsiveness often creates more of the very thing we're trying to avoid. So you freeze in conflict, but the tension grows. You freeze on a decision, the paralysis deepens, the decision becomes more important. You freeze when you want to approach someone and you walk away carrying that. Next time, it's even harder to move. You freeze when you need to set a boundary and the resentment builds. In relationships, freeze tells you an even deeper lie. It tells you she's too much. Her intensity is the problem, right? But it's not. Sue Johnson, the founder of Emotionally focused Therapy, found that most fights between partners aren't about the content of the fight. They're protests over disconnection. So she's reaching out because she senses the bond weakening. And then he withdraws because his system is overwhelmed. Yet underneath of both, it's the same thing. Are you there for me? My wife and I call it the wall and the grenade, right? She reaches, I freeze. She reaches harder. I withdraw harder. And it escalates. And when I'm honest about what's underneath my freeze, it's this. I don't know if I can be what she needs right now. And that terrifies me. And I'd rather feel nothing than feel that. But here's the deal. That same pattern plays out everywhere. You want to share something vulnerable with a friend, and you freeze because you don't know if it'll be received. You want to make a move and you freeze because you're afraid of rejection. You want to set a boundary, and you freeze because you're afraid of the fallout. The content changes, but the freeze is often the same. So what do we do with this? For me, a lot of times, freeze shows up when I don't know what to do. Right. Like I just said. And what that really maps to is I feel scared, I don't feel safe. And I'm afraid whatever action I take is actually going to make things worse or harm me or the other person I'm with. Even more so, learning to work with freeze is frankly one of the biggest skills we can develop as men. And the path out has three parts. First, you build your own capacity, right? You Train your awareness so you can catch freeze before it immobilizes you and takes over. Second, you get men around you because there will be times when your nervous system goes fully offline and and you cannot bring yourself back. You need people around you who can bring you back. And third, you work with the fear at the root. The original stuff that taught your nervous system to freeze in the first place. So let me work through all three. Part one, right? Building your capacity. Now here's the thing. Once you're in a full freeze, the tools I'm talking about and I'm going to share about are mostly offline. That's the nature of freeze. The choosing part of you is gone. So the real work in this part one is building awareness and sensitivity to catch it before you're fully offline. It's interoception learning what's happening inside your body so you can feel the first tremors before the earthquake hits. The opposite of freeze is not necessarily safety. It's often just movement. Literally it's getting moving again. If you're standing there frozen, right? Shift your weight from one foot to the other. That's it. Move your body. That one physical act sends a signal to your nervous system that you are choosing to move. Deepen one breath on purpose. You don't need a fancy technique, just a conscious inhale, right? Freeze almost always stops the breath. So one breath is a pattern. Interrupt and then name it out loud, I'm flooded. I'm freezing right now. I'm at capacity. Something just locked up in me. I don't know what to do. The act of naming it is so key. Cause the moment you do that, you are reactivating your upper brain, your prefrontal cortex, that capacity that can consciously respond. Language is an upstairs brain function. Using it pulls you back online. And this works everywhere. Freeze shows up, right? As long as you catch it earlier enough. If you're frozen on a decision, say out loud, I'm stuck. I'm afraid to pick the wrong decision thing. That alone starts to break the spell. I'm avoiding this because I'm scared of what I'll see. The moment you say that, you're already closer to opening it and dealing with the financial problem. And if you're across the room from a woman you want to talk to and your body won't go, shift your weight. Take one step, right? I teach guys some activation tools. You don't have to walk all the way over just initially. Break the stillness. Get moving. For me, I discovered in somatic therapy with my partner in front of our couples therapist, where freeze starts in my body. It's right around my face, kind of where the smile creases are, right? For those of you guys listening, those muscles totally freeze up and go numb. It's like a deadening in my face that I'm now very sensitive to. And as I feel those muscles starting to do their thing, I can now head it off at the pass, take a deep breath, make a little noise, move my face. And in relationships specifically, the honest truth is most partners will feel way better if you can just say it. I'm flooded right now. I need a moment. And when I come back, I'll come back. That's so much better than the half assed withdrawn freeze where we pretend we can still be there when we actually can't. That's going to drive your partner even crazier than just naming it and stepping away with intention. So the same Gottman Institute says 20 minutes is the minimum for your nervous system to come back from full flooding. And they're serious. That's not a suggestion. That's a physiological time sequence. So take the break when you need it, but be the one who comes back. And so that's the kind of in the moment work where you try to build capacity to head things off at the pass. But the longer game, right, really is still building that interoceptive capacity so you can keep catching that freeze earlier and earlier. It's really like learning to drive a manual stick shift car, right? First, the transitions are really choppy. You stall, you lurch, you grind your gears. With practice, you shift and things get smoother. Embodiment work, mindfulness, intensity practices. These are the gym for building sensitivity to what's happening in your body. And the more you build that awareness, the more, the more your window of tolerance expands. And what used to be a full freeze becomes a little shift in my nervous system. I can notice and then surf in real time. So the truth is you're not getting rid of freeze. You're getting better at feeling it and adjusting before it takes over. Okay, part two, get men around you. That's the solo work and it matters. But I want to be really honest. Sometimes you can't catch it, sometimes I can't catch it. Sometimes you're in a full freeze and the part of you that can choose to react is just gone. It's knocked offline. There is no choice. I had one of the most intense freeze experiences of my life when I was traveling out of the country and I found out my wife was going through A medical crisis. As soon as I landed, I literally froze. I didn't know what to do. Should I get on another plane and go home? Is that going to support her? Should I continue with my weekend? I was totally paralyzed. I couldn't weight shift my way out of that one. I couldn't breathe my way out of that one. I was fully offline. Luckily, I was headed into a weekend with men I was in a men's group with. And one of them literally handled me, helped shuffle me home and got me from the airport to the place we were staying. And then all the men helped ground me, regulate me, and helped me figure out what was really going on for me. And their nervous systems, their holding of me, started to thaw me. And they helped me make an action plan that I would not have been able to make without them. Right? Again, they loaned me their nervous systems, their capacity to move, helped thaw me and allowed me to move. The truth is, that's co regulation, right? The eye contact, the breath, the voice, the touch. Another human being's regulated nervous system helping yours come back online. And that's really what I want to drive home here. If you don't have a men's group, get one, right? I talk about it all the time. I would not be the man I am today without the men who have held me, challenged me, called me on my stuff, and been there when my nervous system got knocked offline and I froze in my life. The guy who just tries to think his way out of freeze, read his way out of freeze journal, his way out of freeze. ChatGPT is way out of freeze sits there alone in his room. He's going to stay stuck. Because information alone isn't transformation, right? You can understand freeze perfectly and still be frozen. You need another nervous system. And your nervous system doesn't learn safety from concepts, right? It learns safety from other nervous systems, from people. You need men, in our case, around you who can see you freeze in real time and say, hey, what's happening right now? Who will hold the intensity? Your system can't hold yet until you build the capacity yourself. That's a great question for you. And it's not going to be a beer and sports group, not a networking group. It's going to be a group of men committed to doing real work together. One of my earliest episodes is some things are aren't meant to be felt alone. And freeze is at the top of that list. Okay? And then there's the deeper layer I also want to get to because freeze has a root and the root is usually fear, right? Fear that what you feel is too much, fear that you'll be rejected or abandoned, fear that you can't handle what's on the other side of moving. And, and that fear, right, it doesn't get resolved by breathing techniques or even by men holding you. That fear gets resolved by going into it directly. And that's a major thing that therapy does, right? A good somatic therapist or a trauma informed, informed therapist can help you work with what's underneath the freeze. The original experiences that taught your nervous system to shut down in the first place. That's also what shadow work does, and that's what deep coaching can do. You're not just managing the freeze anymore. You're working with the very fear and patterning that created it. The origin stories. When you combine all three of these things, right? Building your own capacity, getting more sensitive, getting surrounded by community and men, and the willingness then to go into the root and address the original patterns, you become something powerful, you become responsible, right? That's it. Responsible, able to respond fluidity with what's happening rather than locking up. So if you're the man who freezes, I want you to know there's nothing wrong with you, right? It's totally normal. I still freeze in my life. That freeze likely saved you before, just like it did me. And it did. And sometimes it's still doing its job. But the truth is you're not just in that place. You were where that freeze was born anymore. And the person standing in front of you is not the person you necessarily needed protection from back in the day. The work is learning to stay, to feel the charge move through you instead of locking it down, to feel the fear get moving. And you probably can't do that alone. It's not a weakness, it's just our biology. The man who can stay present even just 10 seconds longer than his nervous system wants to from these habits is the man who breaks the cycle. This is you. If you recognize yourself and what I'm describing, there are absolutely ways to go deeper. If you don't have a men's group yet, my men's group experience will teach you how to find and build one. It's the foundation. Everything else works better when you have men around you. And in my program, pillars of presence, two of the first pillars are really landing in your body and learning to name what you notice to get out of freeze states, right? And that program is built exactly for this kind of work. It's 16 weeks, it's virtual, and you can enroll at any time. Right. It's evergreen in that sense. And then there's the heart of shadow. Right. Which is the place to go. If that freeze is connected to old wounds, things you've been carrying in your body for years, that's the deepest work. And we do that in person. And then there's always private coaching with me. If you want to go into the freeze. If you. And practice moving in and out of it and actually start to build this capacity for getting sensitive to it and learning some different strategies to keep moving, you can head over to Evolutionary Min to book a call with me. Learn more about all these programs and just frankly, talk about where you're at. Freeze is a real thing. It's probably been the biggest one I've lived with my entire life. And. And the good news is it can change. You can learn to become more aware, more connected to yourself. Catch these tremors before they come, These. These big earthquakes that really immobilize you, and you can start to make different choices in your life. Okay, well, thanks for sticking around, and until next time.
