#18 - Wandering Around Vagus (WAV) - July 2024

Deep Dive into the Freeze state, Part 1

Welcome to Month 18 of Wandering Around Vagus, a paid monthly subscription series exploring the Vagus Nerve + Polyvagal Theory.

I’m Tina Foster of Foster & Flourish, the creator and guide of Wandering Around Vagus.

A few quick notes to help you orient within our pages:

• If you’re new, or need a review, here’s the link to the START page.

• You can find last month’s post (our 17th) on the hybrid state of Intimacy here.

• Monthly & Supplementary Posts + Recordings can be accessed by topic from the navigation bar atop the Wandering Around Vagus Homepage.

• All past posts live on the archive page.​

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THIS MONTH’S WORK

We continue our exploration of the three hybrid states in polyvagal theory: Play, Intimacy and Freeze. Each hybrid state is a combination of two of the primary states: ventral, sympathetic and dorsal.

Here, again, are the three hybrid states and the two primary states that combine each hybrid state:

1. Play - combining ventral and sympathetic states

2. Intimacy (or Stillness) - combining ventral and dorsal states

3. Freeze - combining sympathetic and dorsal states

This month, we focus on the hybrid state of FREEZE, a blend of the sympathetic and dorsal states. We'll define the freeze state, its evolution, the role it plays in our lives and learn ways to work with it. In practice, we'll explore our own experience of freeze to get a sense of how it works in our own unique nervous system and lives and how we might more effectively recognize and work with it.

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By the end of this 18 minute audio you’ll have a better sense of:

• what the freeze state is + how it operates + why it exists

• the evolution of the freeze state

• recognizing various versions of the freeze state + what they look like

• distinguishing the freeze state from shutdown/collapse

• how to navigate the freeze state

• one technique to slowly, safely come out of freeze

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Introduction to the Freeze State

Polyvagal Theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, has greatly enhanced our understanding of how the nervous system responds to stress and trauma. A key concept of Polyvagal Theory that gets talked about a lot is the freeze response, a hybrid state blending elements of both the fight-or-flight response (aka survival sympathetic) and the collapse or shutdown response (aka survival dorsal).

What is the Freeze State?

I daresay most, if not all of us have heard of the freeze state and likely even have stories of our experience of it. We might remember being intensely shocked or overwhelmed by threat-based fear, going mentally blank and/or feeling highly charged with energy, unable to act quickly or even focus.

We’ve all also likely experienced freeze more often than we realize. Freeze can often be hard to recognize even by the person experiencing it. The source of the confusion in recognition is largely due to the freeze state’s intermingling of two states that are in many ways oppositional—survival sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and survival dorsal (collapse or shutdown).

When/how the body tends to shift into the freeze state: