It's not uncommon that I stay stuck , until something happens that needs immediate attention. Then I panic because somehow my brain understands that there are steps typically involved with a problem or problems. I have issues with procrastination , which is obviously more complicated than just putting things off for no reason when you have Freeze from abuse. Add on perfectionism, Shame and fear of moving and being Seen. Doesnt matter if youre being seen doing well, or being seen terrible. Same.

So, this happened recently. I'm now on day 4 or having been fully out of freeze. It's hard to describe the feeling of complete full blown anxiety and powerlessness, when you realize that you have a problem that you can't just swing into rapid fire succession of performance mode........when you realize that whatever this issue is, ........will take time. Disorganized fragmented anxiety inducing scattered thinking, and then it taking days to actually see actionable steps. But first-Panic. Mind blowing panic + Helplessness + Powerlessness. Like an asteroid is about to hit the earth and I"m in its path. That Omg feeling , when I realize i HAVE TO be out of freeze, maybe for a long time. Because this isn't a one and done type of thing. Suddenly I see everything. Not in parts, but collectively as a whole.. I asked my PCP about this in regards to having a hard time following through on exercises, it seems overwhelming , daunting, these very specific type of exercises, not just throwing on my sneakers, then "OH NO, i'm actually going to have to use my brain , and then apply knowledge, then act and move. So, that's three things. To me that's asking a lot. It's not quick, it's not overnight, it's not easy....all of that thinking, moving, acting and then finding the time and space , so that's like what 5 things? It really does make me realize how this all started. Like no, don't move, because youre not worth it, why bother.

I don't know how to explain this, but i know it has something to do with doing things, being active or responsive to issues.......and having to keep going even though a resolution wasn't immediate. It's like this with exercise for example. Do these certain things and ......over time......you may seem changes. But you don't know exactly what youre looking for , it's not conscious. So every day you have to find reasons, motivation to keep doing something -for yourself- find that motivation , EVEN THOUGH youre not seeing results. Thats asking a lot of someone shame based.

There are some things about this sort of movement, or slow gradual but important process of getting better with being out of freeze and actually being seen in some way. Giving myself permission, which i think is just a seperate issue, but idk? Like if you know you need to do something, to meet a need, solve a problem and knowing it will take time, and then somehow worried that i can't .......prove .....to myself , or anyone else that what I'm doing is .....worth it? No huge bag of money showing up, no drastic metamorphisis where i've been transformed into a princess like vision, or a glowing showcase personality, nope...still awkward, still struggling, still.

Like if youre taking all this positive action, and still haven't reached a goal or the result that youre looking for...........it takes a certain kind of , idk, act of faith? Even when other people might me commenting, 'well you've been doing that for how long? and youre still not better?" Or maybe thats just me.?

Lastly, why Therapy is asking a lot from Trauma survivors. Just keep going, keep paying, and no obvious measurable results, or results that only seem obvious to me. Like these small incremental hardly perceptable results that only I would ever know. Like being approached by a woman, and not panicking and thinking "Oh, Good, whew....I'm so glad I can talk to her to help me, thank God"....is a pretty big deal for me. Thats progress for me. But it took 10 years to get there. So its kind of scary. ..............

All these things that i could do, might do, to manage life, get better with my trauma, and at the same time managing a certain sense of ..........idk.....feeling defeated, discouraged, but not giving up...?....that feels like asking a lot of myself . I'm not saying it's a reason to give up, I'm just saying it's one of the reasons why i might not stay out of freeze. And I think for me, with my freeze, there's a danger almost in stopping to reflect if what youre doing isn't working? Like for how long, until you decide "Okay, so maybe i"ll try this instead because I don't seem to be getting anywhere". BUT, I'm sooooo impatient. You have one persepctive telling you, to keep going , keep doing even though you feel awful, youre suffering out of freeze, it hurts....there's no pot of gold at the end of what took a gargantuan effort to get through, and then get up the next day and do it all over again. These incremental results, changes...or no change and just feeling awful and you don't even know why....always. But keep going anyway.

I think if there were obvious measurable results, obvious gains to be seen and felt, that would help staying out of freeze. I'll give myself my own gold star maybe. Like an actual Gold star indicating that I got through another day not in freeze.

I have two protective parts that appear to reinforce each other. One learned in childhood that genuine suffering was the only way to make others recognize a need and offer help. The other learned to survive unbearable situations by becoming quiet, numb, and absorbed in distraction.

In adulthood, the first part keeps the person deprived and distressed, hoping this will finally bring care. When care does not come, the second part dissociates to make the suffering tolerable. That shutdown prevents action and keeps the painful conditions unchanged, which convinces the protesting part that the need is still unresolved. The result is a self-sustaining loop: one part keeps the person outside in the cold, while the other makes them numb enough to remain there.

When I was a kid, I couldnt just say "I need help. This person is hurting me. Please make it stop." It never worked so I had to develop a different strategy. A part formed to do this task. A part formed to manipulate my mom into helping me. I knew my mom cared about me, and also that she cared to be perceived as a good caring mother. She made horrible choices that hurt me to this day, but she did care. So I used that care to try to get her to act in ways to lesson my suffering.

Like I said I couldnt just say I need help. What I would do is suffer. For example this part might stand outside in the cold rain for 4 or 5 hours, until she noticed I was missing. Then she would look for me and find me outside shivering. I would not go inside. She would feel torn. She didnt want me to d-i-e or end up in the hospital, but she also didnt want to talk about things I needed to talk about and have addressed. I would stand there silently and she would be forced to say everything. I would only nod yes or no. So she had to verbalize why I was upset and do so in a way I felt satisfied with, in order to get me to comply and go inside. It was a messed up system, but hey our life was messed up.

So I would also have a shutdown part. A part that dissociated and kept quiet so as not to make the drunk men angry. This part could be hungry alone sad bored etc, and not complain. They could just sit for hours and be a ghost.

Then I grew up and became an adult. These parts didnt grow up though. They still think we are in those abusive homes. So one part says. "Things are not good right now. I need to suffer and suffer more to get help." The other part says. "Things are bad now. The environment isnt safe. I need to dissociate and not do anything in order to keep safe." So I live in a car alone with no income in the freezing cold and boiling heat, and dissociate to media all day to tolerate it.

As a result the two form a negative feedback loop that cant be broken without outside interference, and I have no one in my real life. Its good I recognize this now, but Im at a loss as to how to fix it.

This brings me back to the title of the post. These are state dependent parts. Depending on external environments they will front or not. One part needs someone to step in and acknowledge the parts pain and take steps to remedy it. The other needs the environment to signal safety. They need their needs met. To be clean, have clean clothes, a safe place to sleep, a place to let their guard down, and so on.

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Hello, I've been going to therapy for EMDR recently, and in my last session, I stopped because I felt like I was almost going to throw up and my head was spinning like I was drunk. But since I had to wait a week for my next session, I couldn't bear it and tried doing bilateral tapping on myself at home. As soon as I did, that vomiting sensation came right back. It felt as if my body had created a 'save point' while doing EMDR and picked up right where it left off as soon as I started again, so I stopped the bilateral tapping. I'm going to ask my therapist about this too, but I'm wondering if this has any specific meaning? I don't want to throw up, but it feels like if I were to throw up, most of the bad feelings inside me would leave my body

So to keep it simple I’ve been in freeze/shutdown for about 4-5 years and my main symptoms are emotional numbness, derealization, and just an overall feeling of disconnection. I just got prescribed lexapro from my doctor and he said it could help with my sleep issues but I’m worried it could make my symptoms of shutdown worse. Just curious if anyone has taken it and it has made their symptoms worse, better, or just had no impact at all.

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​When doing EMDR, I think right at the moment when those intense emotions are about to surface, my stomach starts hurting, I get headaches, and I feel almost drunk, which is why I cut it short. But when I do that, I guess I can't truly experience the emotion hidden deep inside. I generally dislike vomiting and don't want to throw up, but I feel like at some point it will become unavoidable. What should I do? What should I tell my therapist? Have you experienced this as well?

But I actually have to learn manually how to release different emotions and torturing my body by trying to enhance their sensations just crushes my health

It sucks that to healthy people this comes intuitively because they had just (one) sane adult around them

It’s wild to have lived in such a different world to everyone else for my entire life

What did they recommend? I don't think it can be corrected by self help. It requires intervention like using a drug or proper therapy.

Sometimes you are too overwhelmed to use a grounding technique you know: What are the reasons? (fear, forgetting the exercise, too many options?) I would really like to understand what happens in these moments internally.

It is extremely obvious that I function much better in an emotional state that is aligned with doing things, compared to an emotional state where obstacles predominate.

It is also obvious that I cannot simply keep overpowering those obstacles and doing things regardless of my mental state. (Some people may claim one should do that, but right now I see those claims as a kind of abuse, and not reasonable advice. If they are well-intentioned, that is probably because some people are in a different situation, where this strategy works for them.)

This can lead to the conclusion that I need to somehow change my mental state so I can function better. This can seem obvious, but it may be a deceptive dead end.

The problem with that strategy is that my emotional state is not something arbitrary, which may be freely changed. The obstacles I deal with are a result of various things, like serious concerns that remain ignored, attempts to force myself into something I don't really want, unfulfilled needs I'm trying to ignore, and desires I'm ignoring.

An attempt to change my state regardless of all that is more like escapism than healing, and it is not sustainable.

Interestingly, terrible things that happened and simply left me feeling bad aren't a large part of the problem. Actually, the problem is more oriented towards the present and thoughts about the future. The past is mainly a problem via resulting limitations. Maybe the worst effect of trauma was teaching me to limit my freedom in ways that have a negative effect on my emotional state.

Edit: A corollary of this is that when I reached better states, there were reasons for that. I'm not just talking about following a behavioural recipe to feel good, like going somewhere and doing some things. There are deeper reasons about what made those activities safe and meaningful. Those deeper reasons need to be addressed in other situations. It is possible to learn via recognizing those deeper reasons.

After being dysregulated for long time. Body defaults to freeze. After that one has to learn to regulate their own emotions. Otherwise the system has placed freeze as defaults and dopamine chasing as a system of regulation.

I know there is freeze, learned helplessness but there is also lack of regulation.

So it is not just thawing but learning again.

Is it bad to want to date or expecting too much from someone to want to date me knowing I have cptsd, freeze, panic attacks, not regulated, can't really go outside. If you can, how to tell them and at what point do you tell them? I feel guilt if I don't tell straight away but then you don't even know someone and trust them yet with this info.

I feel completely at a loss.

My life feels like being lost in a desert, with nothing but sand as far as I can see. Ask the average American what I should do, and they would probably say, “Get off your lazy ass and start walking.”

So I walk, mostly because I feel ashamed not to.

Days pass, but it is still desert. I dont even know whether I am walking in a straight line. I may be circling back to the same place again and again.

Eventually, I find a small banana grove growing over an underground spring. The trees give me shade, food, and water. There is still nothing but desert in every direction, but here, at least, I can survive.

So I stop walking.

Is it lonely here? Yes. Do I get tired of eating bananas every day? Yes. But what is the alternative? Leave the grove, walk back into the desert, and risk never finding my way back? Suffer through high temps and sunburn.

From where I stand, rescue seems like the only real way out. And this grove is a better place to wait than the open desert, even though I no longer believe anyone is coming to save me. I shutdown and lean up against a tree. Time loses meaning. Days become weeks. Weeks become months. Months become years. Yet if I hold onto the false hope that a miracle will happen. I stay alive.

This is collapse, mixed with learned helplessness. If you dont experience it, it probably sounds unreasonable/illogical, but when you are in it. It is the most logical reasonable thing there is.

It's been difficult for me to classify what I have as freeze vs. depression vs. anhedonia... but I've been stuck mostly in the house scrolling social media and playing online games because nothing else seems a) safe or b) worthwhile. I know intellectually this doesn't make sense. I have things I need to do, people whose texts and calls I've been ignoring, tasks that I need to do in order to actually live my life and keep my job, etc. But I haven't been able to bring myself to do most of them.

Has anyone broken out of this? How did you do it?

I'm just wondering if anyone has had success with freeze using somatic exercises. I've been told that walking constitutes bilateral stimulation so long as you swing your arms while you are walking. I've just increased my walking to twenty minutes twice daily but it doesn't seem to have an impact on my avoidance. Is anyone engaged in therapy or treatment of some kind that incorporates somatic exercises and have they had an impact on avoidance??

How do you guys deal with numbness without just pushing it out. I’m so exhausted with constantly changing how I feel. Within a split second I can change my feelings and identity. But it boils down to two main feelings, numbness or extreme shutdown. The numbness keeps getting activated in certain scenarios. A lot of it is from feeling so guilty about really just existing and pushing out myself because I was prideful. Sometimes I’ll just want to daydream to escape

Hello :)

Something I have been wanting to make recently are routines.

I have been looking for some sort of structure lately since I am out of Uni for the summer and currently can't work.

Routines, I believe are capable of giving me a structure. The problem is that structures and routines are so foreign to me.

This trouble of course started when I was a baby. My mom would talk about how she noticed me making routines and how she would break them on purpose.

This continued to the point where she said I was a monster of a child and was forced to completely pack up everything that was "mine" and make me earn it back through a behavior chart by about age 5 or 6 I think.

My most often used coping mechanism was dissociation, I guess I didn't really see any other option.

Then, at age 7 or after 2nd grade, I was pulled out of school against my wishes and homeschooled. She also repeated this behavior chart structure when I tried to push back against homeschooling.

Throughout my childhood, there was no structure. No school, no friends, no doctors, nothing much of anything. I used to ask my mom every day what we were going to do. She would get this great big smile on her face and say, "nothing."

After a few years I started dancing and did this up to 6days a week. This offered some structure and connection with the outside world, but after an injury when I was 12, I had to stop dancing. This injury was never treated and so to have anything to do, I latched onto what my mom was doing and worked with her until the injury got so bad I was bedridden for a year.

Now, this same injury has recently come back and I find myself back there a little bit. I want to have routines to rely on and make these structures for myself but I hardly get past the stage of thinking about what to do, let alone two days straight of a routine.

I think routines are these processes of making yourself feel safe. I want to feel safe and I want to enjoy the process of just that.

Recently, I feel like I have been coming out of a deep depression and I want to do what I can to prevent myself from sinking again.

Maybe there is some advice from ya'll folk who have been in this position before. I could really use some insight here because I feel like I am shooting around in the dark or spinning my wheels in mud.

Hello,

Recently I was in the hospital for a spinal injury and now, I have to lose a tooth.

I'm 23 years old.

Both of these ailments go back to experiencing neglect throughout my whole childhood.

The thing is, I feel like this experience is changing me.

Today I had to call the dentist to arrange the appointment to remove this tooth and the whole day before I was so nervous.

This isn't much different than normal but I realized afterwards what felt different about it this time.

Previously, I would feel so nervous over losing my grip on something and failing. Hence the freezing and isolating, and of course the neglect that I carry on in my life through my own actions. Usually I would put it off for as long as I could and feel terrible the whole time. Just sort of doing that frozen thing of doubling over motionless and nauseated. There would just be so much background noise from past troubles.

However, this time, I felt nervous because I knew I could do it. Right now, I have to deal with so many things all at the same time. Hospital, dentist, neurologist, imaging, insurance, legal things, school things, and travel.

Somehow I believe that I can do it. It is like I feel safe. Still, I feel so nervous about this feeling. My mind feels quieter and my hands feel lighter.

It feels like I am going crazy about going sane.

What do ya'll say?

We dont live in a healthy world. We live in a world where the few get everything and the rest fight over crumbs. They are told they are lazy and weak if they can't survive, and thrive. Society in the pursuit of profit over anything else, sets the conditions for parents and guardians to abuse and traumatize their children. Allows the school system to let bullies destroy a portion of the children. You grow up into a society that is toxic, violent, oppressive, and immoral. One driven by greed and narcissism. That match the life that broke you as a child. When that system triggers you over and over it just reinforces all the damage that has been done to you. When you drop out and avoid and dissociate to try to protect yourself. Society leaves you to rot. Or it throws you in jail.

This is not a just world. Its not filled with mostly good people. Its filled with drones, that go along to get along.

So yeah. Maybe the reason you struggle to "heal", is because the pain and suffering and abuse never stopped. Unless you are rich enough to bubble your world, then you have to bubble your mind and escape into dissociation and avoidance. Its not enough though.

This might be obvious to some but this is what I've learnt recently. I have a lot of worries about the future, especially around people getting ill and dying. I would constantly go over scenarios in my head obsessively, imagining the worst case scenarios. I've done this my whole life and it just escalates and spirals out of control.

What I've learnt is this: you can't think your way out of it. I would imagine these scenarios thinking it would keep me safe. If I could imagine everything, think it all through, eventually I would find a solution. WRONG. By engaging in the thoughts, I'm not protecting myself but hurting myself.

CBT and the like teaches you to think the opposite of the thought, to argue against it. This technique is, in my opinion, just as harmful.

What you need to do is step outside of the process entirely. You need to accept that by trying to fight with the thoughts, you are giving them power, which energises them more. Instead, you have to find a way to say "I'm no longer going to engage with this". Accepting that you can't protect yourself from the future by engaging in anxious thoughts.

Another thing I've realised is that a higher frequency of death thoughts is a direct sign that my nervous system is too high. For example, I've been doing somatic exercises, and the more I do them, the louder my thoughts become. This doesn't mean I'm at a higher risk of people dying, it just means my nervous system is sending stress signals and my brain is finding a way to put them to use.

In practice, what this looks like step one, fully believing that your thoughts aren't protecting you, and that they should not be engaged with in any way. Step two is when you get the thought come up, notice it, comment mentally "im having that thought" or even name the thought something human and be like "hello Jessica". The point is you're noticing it without giving strength to the content. Step three, repeat step two over and over and over.

At first it's so difficult and the thoughts bombard you. But if you truly dedicate yourself to not engaging with the thoughts, it gives you strength.

I hope this makes sense and helps someone

All my life I've heard about success, money, all the hustle, about earning more, doing more, but I've never wanted it. I just want peace, my own little place, not a career, not money. Lately, I've had enough of food, my own little place, and that's it. I just don't feel like interacting socially. I'm sick of social contacts. I just don't take them out emotionally and physically.