REACT SERIES PART 4– FREEZE! Living with the Freeze Trauma Response

We've talked about fawning, flight, and fight. Now we're exploring the fourth response: freeze. The shutdown. The dissociation. The moment when your body goes numb and your mind goes somewhere else.

If you grew up in an abusive home, freeze might have been your only option. When you couldn't appease, couldn't run, and couldn't fight back—you disappeared. Today, we're breaking down what freeze looks like, why it happens, and how to come back to your body.

Transcript

Welcome And Why This Exists

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Terra to Triumph. I didn't know if we were live just now or not. I apologize about that. But uh welcome to Terror to Triumph. I am your host, Alfonso Pelt. I am the creator of this platform for survivors of childhood abuse and learning about what's going on with us. Yes, I am a fellow survivor. I've been going through my issues for 40 plus years. And up until recently, within the last year, I just started to receive some kind of understanding and help, which caused me and spurned me to create this platform to share information because there are a tremendous amount of childhood abuse survivors who have lived into adulthood who have not reported their.com.

Merch Support Without Direct Donations

SPEAKER_00 5:02

You can go there and buy merchandise that I've created as a survivor myself that you can buy, and those purchases will help support this podcast. I'm not asking for any direct money, no donations or anything like that. I'm trying to give to receive, and I'm giving twice, if you think about it that way. I'm giving you information and I'm giving you a platform. If you want to donate, you have something to show for it. It won't just be, well, I gave him some money, I got a receipt. No, you gave some money, now you got a nice outfit. You got a nice hat. You got a hoodie. You got a jacket. You know what I'm saying? You got shoes. Yes, I made shoes. So it's a lot more things. You got aprons, you got T-shirts, and I got other stuff on there too. I made some other stuff because I'm from the 313. So yeah, I got some Detroit City stuff on there. Okay, I had to do it.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

I had to do it. Okay. But anyway, yeah.

Upcoming Guests And Empowerment

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Go check that out.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

So got Dr. David Marcus coming up this Saturday. I want to remind you of that. And next Saturday after that, the 16th of this month, we have a second guest. Well, this actually would be our third guest, because Heather Ann was our first, actual first guest. But our third guest will be Tracy Smaldino. She'll be here. She's also a podcast host, and she has a tremendous story, y'all. I don't want you guys to miss either one of these stories. Namely because these stories are stories of empowerment. These are people who were suffering like us, but they became so much greater because the stories we have and the life we live, if we choose to step into our calling, I'm telling y'all, we are some strong people. I don't think they make people stronger than us. If you made it through your trauma and you made it through the portion where you were really contemplating suicide, because all of us go through that. If you made it through that, there's really nothing you can't face on this earth. I'm just saying. As a survivor, when it's personal and somebody close to you causes you trauma like that, there's no way you can't face anything. Once you step into your calling, once you step into your healing, once you go on the path of healing, there is no stopping you because you were forced to survive. You were forced to survive. You became a survivor. You didn't just survive birth. You didn't just survive childhood. You survived abuse. You survived verbal abuse. You survived sexual abuse. You survived mental abuse. Parentification. We talked about that. Excuse me. Survivor is one of the most powerful people there are. Because we're fighters. There's no greater fighter than a survivor. Okay. Now I said all that to say this, y'all. These are powerful stories that they're coming up. They're going to share with you. This Saturday, Saturday, May 9th. I want you guys to remember that 9.30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Dr. David Marcus will be with us. And then next Saturday, Tracy Smaldino, podcast host, will be with us. I don't want to get nothing away. I want to say, you know, I don't know if you know me that well, but if you followed the podcast, you will know I don't like holding stuff back from you guys. I want to give you all the information as soon as I get it, but not this time. I'm going to hold out because I want you guys to be there because this information. If you were there with Heather Ann when she was on the show, oh my God. She packed so much into that show. And I got two more people who got a lot of information just like that. A lot of empowering stories. Okay. Enough about that. Enough about that. Okay. I already talked about Pell Symporium. And if you want to check out the podcast, you can go to YouTube and check out our YouTube channel. That's Terra to Triumph Live. Okay. And outside of that, if you want to listen to the podcast, you can go to BuzzRout. That's B-U-Z-Z-S-P-R-O-U-T. Look up Terra to Triumph there. And you can check out our podcast. You can subscribe there. Excuse me, I'm burping a little bit. We have special episodes that we don't normally share. And I'm a big softie at heart. I know us as survivors. We need all the information we can get. And there are some episodes that I have put on hold for subscribers only. This series, this React series that I'm finalizing tonight was supposed to be one of those. This series was supposed to be on there. But I deemed it so important that I could not hold that back. Everybody needs it. And I'm starting to consider maybe I shouldn't even do the subscribe thing, like you have to pay a subscription because this information needs to be given freely. So I'm rethinking that. Maybe you guys just go over to Pell Symporium, support the podcast that way. You can also view Pell's uh you can also view Terra the Triumph, the podcast, on Pelsemporium.com. So just saying, once you become a member on Pell Symporium, you have access to the podcast over there. Just saying. Okay, now without that, with that out the way, now, here we go. We have a new platform I want to make you guys aware of. We're now on Riverside. That's R-I-V-E-R-S-I-D-E. So if you look up Terror to Triumph on Riverside, you will find us there, all our podcast information, the videos, and all that kind of stuff. So we've we've we've always been upgrading. We're always trying to learn to improve the podcast to give you the best experience we can. And Riverside was the next step for us. So now that you have all that information, that was all our announcements, except for one. I'm gonna say that to the end of the show.

Introducing Freeze In Trauma Responses

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Okay. Anyway, so we're gonna get into the meat of our show. Now we talked about fawning, we talked about flight, we talked about fight, right? Now, tonight we're talking about the fourth response, which is freeze. Okay. So the shutdown, the dissociation, the moment when your body goes numb and your mind goes somewhere else. If you grew up in an abuse in an abusive home, freeze might have been your only option to experience the lapse stuff. So I know I raise my hand a lot because I'm telling y'all, you know, when I raise my hand, I'm saying, I've been there, I've done that. So when you see me do this or point to myself, I'm saying that's me. That's part of what I went through. So with that being said, if you if you understand what freeze is, when you couldn't appease or fawn, when you couldn't flight or run, when you couldn't fight back, you disappeared. Today we're breaking down what freeze looks like and why it happens and how to come back to your body.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Okay? Hang with me, y'all. It's a lot. It's a lot.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

So you might be asking yourself, okay, what what is freeze? I mean, when you you said kind of what it is, but let me break it down to you, right? So freeze is the response your body is in when it shuts down in the face of a threat, okay? According to Rain, R-A-I-N, of course you may not know what that is. That's the rate, abuse, incest, national network. Okay. Freeze is one of the four primary traumatic responses. It's automatic. It's not a choice. You can't choose to freeze. It's what just automatically happens when you are faced with something traumatic. It's your nervous system's way of protecting you when all other options are gone. When you can't focus on anything else. I mean, immediate danger is right there in your face. You your mind can't go to anything. You just lock up. Okay. That's freeze. So when you were a child, you can't fight, flee, and appease. Your body does the only thing it really has left to do, and it freezes. So you go numb, you dissociate, part of your mind leaves your body and goes somewhere safe while the abuse happens. Maybe you have experienced freeze. Just saying. So here's the neurobiologic part of it.

What Freeze Is And Why

SPEAKER_00 14:15

When your nervous system perceives an inescapable threat, you can't get away. It's inevitable, it's gonna happen. It activates the dorsal vogal system. The deepest, most primitive, I'm sorry, primitive, primitive part of your nervous system. Okay, like I say, I'm not a therapist, not a psychologist, I'm not a psychiatrist. I have no formal learning of any of this stuff. I just find the information and bring it to you guys. So forgive me if I mispronounce some stuff. You can all do your due diligence and look this stuff up. I'm not bringing you stuff that's not real. I I did some homework. I did my digging. So by all means, if you need to fact-check, fact-check. If you need to verify, verify. If you try to vet a source that I give you, vet it. It's there, it's out there. But I'm not giving you something that I haven't checked. I won't do that because what if I give somebody some information and they really need it themselves one day? And then they make a phone call on one of the numbers that I gave them, and then the number doesn't work, then they're really in a bad situation. I'm not trying to have that happen to anybody, especially a survivor or somebody who's going through trauma right now. You guys need that information. I'm going to give it to you. And I'll make sure it's going to be accurate. Okay? Okay. Now, according to CPTSD foundation, this response is mediated by the vagus nerve, which is the longest cranial nerve in your body. When activated in a certain way, certain way, I don't know what that means, but it creates a state of immobilization, what some call plain dead or tonic immobility. So I guess it's activated when you're faced with immediate danger, when the threat's right there upon you in your face. I guess when it's so sudden and you're not expecting it to come. Like you could see some danger coming, but some danger is instant, bam, right there in your face. You can't avoid it because it's on you right then. That could cause you to freeze because your mind's trying to process and you're overloaded.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

So for a child being abused, freeze is actually a brilliant survival mechanism. It reduces pain, it prevents further escalation, it allows you to psychologically escape while your body endures. But as an adult, that same freeze response keeps you stuck in your body, in your relationships, and in your life. Okay, I'm just saying. Me, right? Okay, so now currently, as we are in the present time, we're not in childhood anymore. We're moving forward to adulthood, fast forward. Freeze doesn't always look like it's being physically immobilized. Sorry. It doesn't look like physically being immobilized. In fact, for many survivors, it's more internal. But just as limiting. Let me walk you through this. Okay, so dissociation is when you feel disconnected from your body. You're watching yourself from outside of yourself. Anybody, if you play games, you know what a third-person shooter. Like you're not that character. First person view, you just see the gun and the hands on the gun. Sometimes depends on the game. So you might just see the gun, but not the hands. Some games you'll see the gun too. But you can't see the rest of your body. You might look down and be able to see your feet. Maybe not, depends on the game. But you can't see yourself in the game. You see everything else. So that's like you living in yourself. But imagine you pulling back to third-person view where you see just over the character's head, or from behind the character, you could see the whole character's body, but you're just seeing behind them, from behind them, like you're a drone and you're just following the character, if you will. You're there, but you're not present. You're not inside your body, you're just outside of your body. You're watching it happen. You might not remember conversations or events because your mind literally leaves to protect you. Okay, now emotional numbness, right? You can't feel. You're flat emotionally. You go through the motions of life, but there's no emotions underneath. You might cry at sad movies, but you feel nothing about your own pain. We're not talking about physical pain. I just want to say that right quick. We're talking about emotional pain. You guys might understand this when I say this. I've been to many funerals. Funerals. And my grandma, my great aunts, my great uncles, even a couple cousins. So aunts, uncles. I've been through these funerals, but there wasn't a sadness in me. I love these people, but they were just, I don't know, I just didn't have that connection to where I felt sadness. Now, those are people outside of my immediate family. I'm talking about my siblings and my parents, right? So imagine when my parents died and I felt like the worst person ever. Because when I was at my father's funeral, I couldn't feel myself having any kind of tear. I was trying to force myself to cry, but I was so numb. And I wanted to feel like I'm hurting too.

The Nervous System And Vagus Nerve

SPEAKER_00 20:56

But it didn't, it didn't feel right. I saw my family in pain because they had lost their father. And I I couldn't I couldn't reach that emotionally. That was out of my scope. That's emotional numbness. So we're going on to another topic or another part of the topic. Paralysis, paralysis, rather. So when you're triggered, you literally can't move. You're frozen. You can't speak, you can't act, you can't defend yourself. Your body is locked down. I've been there. That is not a good feeling. That's like fear personified. If anybody listening has felt this, then you guys know there is no worse feeling than ultimate fear. Okay. Brain fog is another one. You have difficulty thinking when I was talking about that earlier. You mind, your mind can't process. What's going on? Remembering or focusing?

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Again, that's me. That's me. I'm bad.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

I'm bad with remembering stuff. Your mind feels cloudy and you can't access information even when you know it. Your brain is offline. Avoidance through shutdown. What does that mean? That sounds intriguing, right? But instead of running away like flight or fighting back, flight, I mean fight response, you shut down. You isolate, you go to bed, you disappear into your phone or to a show or on a show or watching a show. You're not engaging with life. You're just engaging to yourself, this guy here. And I just, every time I said something just then, it was like a flashback. Yeah. I forced myself as a child to go to bed. Sometimes at a certain part of my life, I was trying to stay up because I was being very curious and nosy. Curiosity killed the cat. That's another story. But most times I didn't care to stay up. Especially after the abuse, I didn't want to be around anybody. I stayed in my room. We didn't have cell phones back then like that, where you could look at a screen. Wasn't like that back then. So I isolated heavily. That lasted all the way into adulthood. And still I isolate a little bit. I'm trying to be more sociable, but it's still there. A part of that is still there. You have chronic fatigue, you're always tired, exhausted all the time. You wake up tired. Even when you slept eight, nine hours, you still wake up feeling like you ain't slept at all. Your nervous system is working over time to keep you in a frozen state. And it's draining. I know a lot of you survivors felt that, or you felt like you just could not get enough sleep. I ain't talking about those of us that sleep three, four hours, five hours a day. Sometimes I do that. That's because I'm doing a lot, though. I'm talking about those of us who work a nine to five, come home, relax, do whatever we do. We isolate, so we don't go nowhere. And then we go to bed. We sleep a good eight hours sleep. Wake up, it feels like we just touched the bed. It don't feel like I slept no eight hours. It felt like I closed my eyes and I opened them again next day. It's like the sleep just disappeared. And I like the Adam Sandler movie with the remote, you just fast forward through your sleep and you woke up the next day. Don't remember sleeping. Sometimes some of us don't even remember laying down to go to sleep. Or you sit down somewhere, you talking, and you're in a conversation. Next thing you're waking up like, what just happened? Body's exhausted. You've been getting sleep, but you ain't getting sleep.

SPEAKER_01 25:14

Exhausted.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

Just want to say that for a friend. Hope somebody's listening out there. Anyway, so you're not engaging with life. When you're doing avoidance, you're not engaging with life. You're not engaging hardly at all. If you're not engaging at work, you're just keeping to yourself, doing your job, keeping your head down, as people say. You come home or you go to a grocery store, you don't really socialize with anybody. You get your stuff, you get out, you go home. You're not engaging with life. You're not trying to engage with life. You you're just isolating yourself. That's your protection mode. That's avoidance through shutdown. So difficulty with intimacy. And uh there's one I'm sure all of y'all might have perked your ears up on. Freeze often shows up as difficulty being present during sex or an emotional connection, cuddling or anything like that. Your body is there, but mentally, you're you checked out. You're somewhere else, you're somewhere safe. Probably go through the motions because physical contact might remind you or trigger you. And or you just might be scared of performance anxiety because the trauma was just that triggering.

Dissociation And Emotional Numbness

SPEAKER_00 26:39

You know you want to pleasure your partner, or be close to your partner because you know that's what your partner wants, but you're emotional detached. So the intimacy has problems because intimacy is the opposite of dissociation.

SPEAKER_01 26:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

So according to research from the National Trial Traumatic Stress Network, children who survive through freeze responses may continue to struggle with emotional regulation and presence as adults. I concur.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

That's absolutely 100% correct. I'm telling you that from experience.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

Personal experience. A lot of fucking personal experience. I'm not even gonna sugarcoat that. So the nervous system learns staying present is dangerous. Leaving is safe. That was my mantra. That still is my mantra. If I feel like something is going south, I'll walk. People on my job right now, I tell you, if I feel things going south, I'm not staying around. If I feel like a situation about to get volatile, like it's about to get violent, it's about to be words, it's about to be fists, I'm walking. I'll leave before I fight somebody. I'm not, I'm not about to subject myself to that. Staying present is dangerous. It's dangerous. And I look at it as danger to my well-being, but more so my danger to my livelihood. If I fight right now, I might lose my job. That's my job is sustaining me. I don't want to lose that. You know, then I got way more problems than just you and me fighting. There's a lot of repercussions behind that. My mind is constantly thinking about the repercussions of any situation. That's a survivor thing. So, anyway, so staying present is dangering, leaving it safe, right? Now we're going to talk about the cost.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

What is the cost when you chronically freeze? So it costs you your presence, like you living in the moment.

SPEAKER_00 29:04

It costs you your relationships, your family, your friends, your loved ones, significant other. And it can cost you your life. I've I've witnessed that twice, at least twice in my life. Okay. I'm starting to get a headache. I might have to take some headache medicine. So, okay. I'm trying to stay with y'all on this, okay? No, it's triggering for me to talk about some of this stuff too. So I apologize. Apologize in advance for me having to take a moment on a show. But we got a power through this, and the show must go on, and I'm gonna give it to you, Raw. Emotions and everything. That is everything in this show. I don't know. It's not a part of me that doesn't want to share all of me with you. Because me being this transparent with you lets you know that I'm serious about this. My heart is really beating fast right now. Excuse me. Okay, where was I? Okay. Okay. When you're in a constant state of freeze, you're not actually living, you're surviving. You're going through the emotions, but you're not engaged in the emotions. You're just going over the surface of the emotions. So it looks like you're engaging in emotions on the outside, but on the inside, you're dissociated. You're not connected, you're not feeling, you're just enduring. According to the CPTSD Foundation, freeze responses are often accompanied by depression, dissociation, and a sense of hopelessness. Because all of this, you feel like you can't come out of this. You want to come out of it, but if it's spiraling backwards and you feel like you can't gain any traction, am I reaching somebody out there? Because I'm talking about personal experience. I know. Because when you're frozen, you can't take action, you can't change your circumstances, you can't advocate for yourself. You're stuck. You're staying stuck. Trying to get unstuck, but you'll get stuck more because you're freezing. Can't move. It's debilitating, literally. Shrug it off. Okay. There's also a rational cost. People feel your absence. Have you ever done something and you felt like you were going through the motions of expressing yourself emotionally? And the person looks at you and is like, that ain't real. Have you been there? I have. And I really thought, or I might have really felt that I cared and I loved this person. But the dissociation clearly made them feel otherwise. It might have been in my heart, but I didn't know how to engage and connect. So they felt like I didn't care. They felt like I was just there. I was told in one relationship that they felt my significant other felt more like they were just my best friend. We were just live-in buddies. And I think about that. And even right now, I kind of laughed to myself and said, what's wrong with that? Don't you want to stay with your best friend? Don't you want to live with your best friend? You want to share with your best friend, laugh with your best friend, kick it with your best friend? Yeah, but being in a relationship with your significant other is supposed to be more than just kicking it with your best friend. Supposed to be more than shooting the shit with your buddies. Supposed to be more than just laying around playing games. Supposed to be more intimacy, more cuddling, more conversation, more engagement, more

Shutdown Signs In Adult Life

SPEAKER_00 33:08

connection, more being present. I didn't have those things.

SPEAKER_01 33:12

I was ill-equipped because I was emotionally not present. And I didn't know it.

SPEAKER_00 33:20

I thought I was. I was going through the motion, but emotionally I wasn't there. And for those who I'm talking to who knew me in that capacity, I'm very sorry. I did not know I was doing these things to such a degree. And now I understand your reaction to So I do apologize for my actions. Those were trauma responses, literally and physically and emotionally. No, I didn't beat anybody. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't abusive in any of my relationships. But emotionally, I wasn't present. That you can consider that abuse, emotional abuse. If I don't show you emotions like you need to receive emotions, I'm depriving you. It wasn't intentional because I didn't know I was doing it. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to do, but the trauma had me stuck. And I'm sorry, 100% disclosure. I'm not playing on this platform. Okay, so we're moving on. Okay, so there's also a rational cost. People feel your absence, partners feel like they're alone in relationships because you're not emotionally present. I'm not, I didn't even need to say that part because I just talked about that. If you have kids, they feel like they can't reach you. Your friends feel the distance between you and them, and their isolation deepens the freeze. Okay? There's a professional cost as well. Freeze shows up as difficulty making decisions, difficulty speaking up, difficulty taking the initiative. Your nervous system is so focused on staying safe that it can't engage with growth or change. So imagine yourself, you're working a job, and oftentimes pressing situations arise in the workplace. So while you're in the workplace and you're being pressured to do a job, to produce more, to get something done in a short amount of time, you can have difficulty speaking up or taking the initiative. And your nervous system is so focused on staying safe that it can't engage with growth or change. So you might shrug away opportunities for advancement because you feel it's not safe. Okay, and then there's the physical cost, obviously. According to research on the polyvagal theory, chronic freeze can lead to chronic pain, autoimmune disorders, and digestive issues. Your body literally is shutting down. How about that? When it comes to freezing emotionally, your body feels it and joins in, really? So it's not just emotional, but if you think about it, since your nervous system is connected to the rest of your body, what do you think is going to happen if you shut down up here? You're gonna shut down everywhere else eventually. If you don't handle that, that's why I always tell y'all to look into getting a therapist, a trauma-informed therapist is so important. It's very important. Your life is at stake. Okay, I digress. But it is serious. So here's the truth. Trees kept you alive, they protected you when you had no other options, right? It allowed you to survive the unsurvivable, the unfathomable, fathomable. I don't know why I'm getting tugged with it tonight. But I do mess up words, so that's not that's not uh something that's rare, you know. But it's not weakness that you did the freeze response, it's survival. And the work now that you're about to embark on is learning to come back to your body, to be present, to engage with life. That's what I want you guys to have. A life. Life, a life, a life life. I want y'all to have life, man. In abundance, like the Bible said. So what's wrong with having life? You're supposed to live. God wants you to live, and he wants you not just to live, but he wants you to live with life abundantly. Okay. When you isolate, you can't have that. And all these responses we talked about is counterproductive to living life with abundance because you're isolating and you're keeping yourself away from success, from love, from relationships that actually are good for you because it keeps you self-sabotaging and all the other counterproductive things that we do as survivors. But the show gives you information to learn more about yourself, to know: hey, that's something he's talking about that I do. Maybe I do have that issue. Maybe I do need to talk to somebody. And that's not bad. And that's okay if you do recognize some of the things I talk about with yourself. It's okay if you do, as long as you do and take the steps afterwards to seek help, to go further than the show. So you can receive the healing that you were supposed to have. Ma'am, sir. Okay. So how do you heal from this chronic freeze, right? I'm about to hit y'all up. We got like seven, seven steps. Okay, so I'm about to hit y'all up real quick. This is how you start healing. Okay, first, you gotta recognize. Always with anything, you have to recognize what it is. So you got to recognize that you're frozen. It's harder than it sounds because freeze feels normal to you. You've been numb for so long, you don't know what feeling feels like. Didn't think about that one, did you? How do you start feeling? Well, you got to start with noticing. Am I present right now? Am I feeling right now? Am I engaged right now? Second, gently move your body. Freeze is stored in your nervous system, okay? Movement helps discharge it. Discharge it. I'm sorry. I was moving. So I was moving and I got away from the microphone. You probably couldn't hear me all that well. But let me say it again. Movement helps discharge freeze that's stored in your nervous system, sir.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

Ma'am, I'm telling you, it does work. So you discharge it with movement.

SPEAKER_00 40:30

Movement, moving. Okay. I don't know. I'm I'm mixing two words at the same time. Start with gentle movement. Start with stretching, walking, yoga,

The Hidden Costs Of Chronic Freeze

SPEAKER_00 40:41

dancing, nothing intense. Just enough to wake your body up. Okay. So, third, practice grounding. Bring awareness back to your body. Feel your feet on the ground. Take your shoes off. Take your socks off. Feel the carpet. Feel the texture of the wooden floor underneath you. Feel the coldness of the ceramic tile on your floor in the bathroom. Feel the slipperiness of the linoleum in your kitchen if you still have linoleum. I don't know if you guys have linoleum, if you got ceramic tile, or if you got a wooden floor in your kitchen. I don't know. I'm just saying. Maybe go to the basement, the basement. If you don't have a finished basement, you got that cement floor, take your socks and your shoes off and step on the floor. Feel the coldness. Ground yourself. That makes you realize, hey, I'm here. I'm right here. I'm not outside of myself. I can feel this. Okay? So once you ground yourself, do the five things you can see, the four things you can touch, the three things you can hear, the two things you can smell, and the one thing you can taste. All this anchors you into the present moment. Five things you can see: laptop, webcam, water bottle, mouse, microphone, glasses. See my glasses. What can you touch?

SPEAKER_01 42:08

Hmm. I could touch my fingers. I could touch the mic stand. I could touch my mouse. I could touch the water bottle. I can touch the keyboard. See when you do that, you can actually feel yourself do things.

SPEAKER_00 42:25

Three things you can hear. I can hear myself. I can hear the little hum of the microphone. I can hear stuff going on in the background. What can you smell? I smell electricity from all the lights, the electricity from the soundboard, the electricity from the keyboard of the computer itself, the laptop. I can smell the electricity from all the cords and everything for all the background, the lighting and all that stuff. So I smell I smell the electricity. Then I smell a little datness in the air, too. Studio. Okay. So what else? What else is there? So that's the three things, right? So, I mean, the two things I can smell. What can I taste? I don't know. I can't really taste anything right now. Water doesn't have too much of a taste to it. But my finger does. It tastes a little salty. So I had to think of something. I just ain't putting anything in my mouth. So my finger tastes a little salty. Okay. So that's one thing I can taste, though. This anchored me into the present moment. Okay. It brought me here. I'm grounded. Now I'm connected to my body. And I'm realizing I'm here in the present. Okay. Fourth, breathe intentionally. Okay. You might not understand. I know how to breathe. I've been breathing all my life. Okay. Be funny about it, but it's a science to this too. Your breath is the bridge between your consciousness and your unconsciousness nervous system. According to polyvagal theory, slow breathing, deep breathing activate your vagus nerves in a way that creates safety up there. So try box breathing, you know, four seconds. Inhale, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds, then inhale, repeat. Okay? That's box breathing. So when you box breathe, that activates your vagus nerve and helps you feel safe. Creates the feeling of safety. Now, fifth, ooh, I'm almost out of time. Fifth, seek somatic therapy, okay? Somatic experiencing and sensory motor psychotherapy specifically address how trauma is stored in your body, right? These therapies help you process the freeze at a nervous system level, not just the cognitive level. Okay, so I told y'all to seek a therapist, trauma-informed therapist. I mean, that's why. That's why. That's why. I'm trying to tell y'all, is there's some stuff that's really gonna help you. I know I laugh, I get silly, I get goofy sometimes, but hey, the information is solid. It's real, y'all. Okay, so six, practice presence. Start small. Be present for one conversation. Be present for one meal. Be present for one moment. I realized I didn't have my watch on. I pointed to my watch and didn't even have it on. Okay, anyway, so be present for one moment. Your nervous system needs evidence that being present is safe, okay? And lastly, practice self-compassion. This is very important. It sounds like something, but we we can skip that step. No, no, you cannot skip this step, okay? Because this helps you overcome that stuff that you have when you feel guilty

Seven Steps To Start Thawing

SPEAKER_00 46:18

about things. You practice self-love. You're easy on yourself when you make mistakes. This is self-compassion because you're growing, right? And healing is nonlinear. You have good days, you have bad days. So you have to have compassion on yourself. If you don't achieve a goal, it's okay. Because you can keep striving for it. It's not the end of the world. You're not gonna die. You're gonna be right here. We're gonna be right here with you, and we're gonna keep giving you this information. You keep keep trying, keep trying. But it put one foot in front of the other. Okay? Yeah. Keep stepping. Don't stop stepping. It seemed like something so far away. But if you keep taking them little steps, eventually you're gonna get there for real. Okay. And the people in the military didn't know it when they were first going to the military, but I bet you once they went through basic training, they learned. Wow, I can walk 20 miles in one day. I never thought it. I could jog for about a good five, 10 miles with all my gear on. And as a human or civilian, I never thought that was possible until you got into that military and they showed you, or they told you you had to do it, so you did it. Unless you washed out.

SPEAKER_01 47:43

So, but people who stayed in it, they got physically fit. Really physically fit. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 47:52

Okay, so practice the self-compassion. You froze because you had to survive. That was brilliant, but now you have to come back to your body to feel to be present. And that takes courage. You've been present, I mean, frozen, not present. You've been frozen for a long time. And it's time to thaw, okay? It's time to come back to your

React Series Wrap And Closing

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body. It's time to feel again. So, this, my friends, completes our React series: fawning, flight, fight, and freeze. These four responses kept you alive. They were brilliant survival tactics. I mean, you didn't even have to think these things to get them to activate. Your mind and your nervous system automatically just made them happen for you to keep you alive. And now you're learning new ways to respond, new ways to protect yourself, and new ways to live. You're not broken, not by a long shot. You're a survivor. You're very strong. You're tempered, okay? And now you're on the road to healing. Self-care isn't selfish, it's the ongoing practice of honoring yourself. And that's what sustains self-trust. Now, I love y'all. I thank you for being here with me and for being an integral part of the 3T Survivor community. We'll see you back here Saturday, 9 p.m. Eastern Standard, well, 9 30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, as we host our special guest this Saturday, Dr. David Marcus. I want y'all to stay safe and know that help is closer than you think. Y'all have a blessed night.