DeepSummary
The episode discusses the 'freeze' response to stress, which is characterized by dissociation, avoidance, and emotional shutdown. Forrest and Dr. Rick explain the different stress responses (fight, flight, freeze, and fawn) and why people develop habits favoring one response over others based on their self-assessment of capability. They highlight the unique challenges of the freeze response, as it stems from a belief in one's inability to affect change.
Dissociation is explored in depth, with descriptions of mild cases like zoning out as well as more severe cases. Dr. Rick outlines his approach to working with clients who struggle with the freeze response, emphasizing establishing safety, avoiding triggers, joining the defense, and gradually exploring new ways of being. Specific strategies like writing thoughts down, moving one's body, and recognizing small victories are suggested.
The episode concludes by discussing how to develop a sense of the self as a source of safety, cultivating inner strengths like determination and the ability to cope with discomfort. Building this self-efficacy is seen as key to breaking patterns of freezing and dissociation.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- The freeze response is a coping mechanism characterized by dissociation, avoidance, and emotional shutdown in response to perceived threats.
- It stems from a belief that one cannot effectively fight, flee, or fawn to address the stressful situation.
- Recognizing and working through the freeze response can be challenging due to its subtle nature and the lack of self-efficacy underlying it.
- Building a sense of inner strength, determination, and self-efficacy is key to overcoming freezing patterns.
- Specific strategies include establishing safety, avoiding triggers, exploring new responses gradually, recognizing small wins, and developing the self as a source of safety.
- Self-awareness around one's personal triggers and threats is important for interrupting freeze response patterns.
- Developing qualities like agency in thought and action can counter the immobilization of freezing.
- Trauma and lack of control in past experiences often underlie severe freezing tendencies.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “If they're overload, you want to back out, reestablish, as you said, safety and efficacy. And then one molecule at a time, 1 time, go back into the material again and again.“ by Rick Hansen
- “Sometimes unwittingly, and this has happened for me a lot as a therapist, it can happen for others that our well meaning efforts to help another person feel safe or to kind of draw them out are actually, for them, triggers of freezing, for example, a kind of simple bid for greater emotional closeness or self disclosure with another person could be experienced by them as very threatening, and then suddenly they're withdrawing.“ by Rick Hansen
- “There's the rational belief that they either can't change their environment or cant defeat their challenge in some other kind of way. And this is part of why the freeze response and dissociation in particular, which well talk about in a minute, is particularly associated with things like complex PTSD, relatively high levels of trauma, childhood abuse, domestic violence, all of these incredibly challenging situations where the person couldnt fight or run away effectively.“ by Forrest Hanson
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Episode Information
Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson
Rick Hanson, Ph.D., Forrest Hanson
4/1/24