Fight, Flight and Freeze Response and Tapping

I've had questions asking to explain what the freeze response is, so I will answer that question here:

Freeze response is a direct reaction to abuse or trauma, if we don't activate fight or flight. We have no real control over which mechanism the subconscious mind (SC) chooses. These responses occur in fractions of seconds.  Which of the 3 the SC chooses is predicated on what other abuse, including our parental attachment, or lack of, or the trauma we have already endured years ago.  When life threatening danger comes our way, we do one of 3 things - we fight, we run, or we freeze  (neither running or punching to get us out of the dangerous situation). It is actually healthier to fight or to run, as we release/blow off/negate the built-up "energy" (hormones & neurochemicals) in our nervous system. Animals (and humans) shake after experiencing a life-threatening event. The shaking expends the reaction in that moment, blowing off those unwanted chemicals, so the horrific experience isn't trapped (freeze response) in the body to cause us to relive the trauma over and over again for decades. Never STOP a shaking person. Let them shake!

Freeze is the part of our inborn safety mechanism where the emotional pain gets stuck in our nervous system where it rattles around, remaining active, triggering us whenever some sensory input reminds of us of the original abuse or trauma. When wild animals freeze, think "playing possum", they can sometimes avoid being killed because the predator looses interest in "dead" prey. We humans do our own version of the freeze mechanism for the exact same reason. We hope the human predator forgets we are present!

While in the Freeze response we are flooded with endorphins (natural anesthetic), as this article states, so that if we are wounded (or eaten for animals) the pain is numbed. That is why people with horrible wounds can jump up and run out of danger's way or save another human. The endorphins have numbed the excruciating pain in the moment. Later they collapse, screaming, when the endorphins wear off.

Eventually, the way God created our bodies, once the immediate, short-term danger is past, the body "recovers", resuming the sympathetic response (SNS) where we will feel hungry, breathing normalizes, heart rate slows, desire for sex returns, thinking processes come back on-line (this is the same response kids with "test anxiety" have & it's why they cannot "think" during a test). Short-term stress in humans is fine; it is long-term on-going hidden chronic stress in us that eventually causes diseases.

Slower parasympathetic (PNS) is where we want to live. We don't need on-going trauma memories, as that eventually is going to cause our physical bodies to get sick. We need to use tapping to process the abuse and traumas we have endured. It's all about HOW our hormones react, so we can stay physically (and emotionally) healthy.

Yes, the bottom line is your SC thinks you are still in the on-going trauma and abuse, if you haven't processed by tapping (or other somatic technique) the abuse or trauma you have endured. The SC has no sense of time. SC "lives" in the present tense. So, any of us with an abuse/trauma background who hasn't yet used a technique to "inform" the SC to let the negative stuff go, allowing forgiveness to replace the pain, is constantly still right now reliving that abuse in the present day as if it just now occurred. You may not feel consciously like you are , but your SC is holding the emotional pain for you in the background of your mind, and it continually runs that abuse "movie" over and over again 24/7/365.

Our behaviors and reactions occur because of and due to our emotional pain being held by the SC. Our SC mind hides our abuse memories from our conscious mind to keep us functioning day to day. But the trauma is still there. Eventually, we lose control and we don't function well!

We are still in CONSTANT freeze until we tap and process whatever has happened to us. Bottom line is the PNS will take care of itself, if we have tapped and calmed our responses to the negative things that has happened to us.

Chapter 2 of the original EFT for Christians explains this process in detail, as does the physiology chapter in the EFT for Christians, Tapping in Peace & Joy, chapters 2 & 3.

Tapping is one of the emotional tools to help regulate our emotional pain. Consider giving it a try.

Remember, EFT is not a substitute for medical help, so please consult your own personal physician when physical or emotional help is needed.

Sherrie Rice Smith

Certified EFT Practitioner

EFTforChristians.com

Author of EFT for Christians 5 Book Series

Fight, Flight and Freeze Response

I found this article on Dr. Mercola's site that explains what is going on in the background when abuse happens. I thought to share it. 

"The basic idea is that when trauma occurs, whether the injury is to your body, mind or spirit, two basic processes are activated. The first is the fight-or-flight response, which when activated increases your heart rate and blood pressure. Blood is shunted from digestion into tensing muscles, heart and lungs. Stress hormones are produced to help you fight or run.

While crucial in acute situations of danger, the fight-or-flight response is meant to be turned on and back off quickly. As soon as you’re out of immediate danger, you’re supposed to return back to balance, feeling safe and at ease. Problems arise when we go into fight-or-flight and stay there long after a traumatic event is over.

“Sometimes it’s because the trauma is ongoing. That’s what happens to kids who are in abusive or neglectful situations. But sometimes, we’ve experienced a traumatic event and we’re stuck in that fight-or-flight. It’s like our foot is on the accelerator and we can’t take it off.

So, we become anxious and agitated. We have trouble sleeping, trouble concentrating. We’re impatient with other people, impatient with ourselves. Also, we’re stuck in that past. We replay the images, the images of someone abusing us, someone assaulting us or a boss treating us badly or what happened to us when we were deployed …”

The Freeze Response

The second process activated by trauma is the freeze response. Fight-or-flight is part of the sympathetic nervous system, which is one-half of the autonomic nervous system. The other half of the autonomic nervous system is the parasympathetic nervous system.

“In general, we’re trying to mobilize the parasympathetic nervous system to balance out fight-or-flight,” Gordon explains. “But sometimes, if the situation is so overwhelming and so inescapable, we go into what is called the freeze response, which is mediated and governed by the oldest part of the parasympathetic nervous system, deep in the mid-brain.

We just shut down; we collapse. We put out large amounts of endorphins to protect us against the pain that’s there. We distance ourselves because the trauma is so overwhelming and inescapable. We can’t do anything else except shut down our bodies and close off our minds.

This happens, for example, to children who were abused by their parents, because the abuse is terrible and they can’t get away from it. It happens to people who were assaulted by others who are much more powerful than they are. It happens when we’re raped. It happens in a warzone when we can’t get away and we can’t fight. We’re just overpowered by the situation.”

When these two responses — fight-or-flight and freeze — continue, they are the essence of post-traumatic stress. “One way to look at it is that post-traumatic stress keeps us chained to the past, to the traumatic events, which we keep on replaying in our body and mind,” Gordon explains. “We’re worried it will happen again.”

The essence of healing psychological trauma is to return back into the present moment because, when traumatized, you’re chained to what happened in the past. You worry it will happen again. If you can relax and come into the present, then the trauma starts to dissipate."

Tapping is one of the tools to help us return to emotional homeostasis or neutrality. 

EFT is not a substitute for good medical or psychological care, so please contact your own personal physicians when this type of help is needed.

EFT & Trauma

Trauma in our lives, and I’m talking about the big “T” traumas, like physical abuse, war memories, rape, sexual abuse, etc. are huge. Anyone carrying them around knows exactly what I am talking about. These issues shape every facet and minute of our lives. They override and overwhelm every thought process we have. They cloud our thinking about who we are in Christ.

Often the memories shape our personality. It’s the physiology God put into us that makes this all so. He didn’t mean it as destructive, but as a protective mechanism.

The problem with the subconscious, if it is really a “problem” is that its main function is survival. Anything it perceives as a life threat, it will bury, hide, disguise or do anything it needs to do to protect us.  And I’m talking “us” here, because I have firsthand experience on this subject. Sadly, for me, I know it intimately, and the deep burial of the memories nearly killed me. God using EFT saved my life.

So, let me continue, explaining why traumas get buried so deeply into the subconscious, where no one or nothing, including the conscious mind, can access them. Traumas are overwhelming, trapping us in the freeze part of the limbic system’s “fight, flight or freeze” mechanism. During the trauma, the person feels helpless, hopeless, without any resources. If it happens to a child, it is even worse, because up to the age of about 7 (Remember, all you Catholics, and probably other denominations, how the Church used age 7 as the “age of reason” when the sacraments of Penance and Holy Communion were permitted?), children function purely in delta, theta, and alpha brain waves, sucking up information, with absolutely no processing ability whatsoever. They are building a lifetime of neural pathways. Repetition is what builds those. That is why 2 or 3 year olds repetitively ask the same question over and over and over again. They don’t do it to irritate the adults in their lives; they do it because that is precisely the way their brains work. Kids have no cognitive neural pathways when they are born. They are a clean slate. Every event, good or bad, that happens to them begins that neural learning, all cognitive, creating a lifetime of neural connections & memories. In order to make those learned neural bundle stick, kids must ask the same question time and again to make the bundle thick and heavy duty. Our thoughts will ascend a thickened neural pathway much quicker than a lesser used one.

It is the same process that is involved in habit changing. We always hear that it takes 3 weeks to change a habit. That’s about right based on the neurology involved. You decide you want to stop eating toast for breakfast and eat fruit instead. You’ve eaten toast your entire life, so what does your taste buds want when your feet hit the floor in the morning? Yes, toast, because it is a comfortable, known habit. You’ve done it forever, it seems. In order to change that habit, you need to become mindful that you want the toast habit changed, and keep it in your mind for a couple of days. The subconscious will want you to revert back to the old toast habit, and you might even slip up a day or so and have your toast half eaten by the time you remember you had chosen to switch to fruit. Don’t fret, get up the following morning & eat your fruit. After about 3 weeks of fruit eating, you will, in the future, probably reach for fruit without thinking. Why? Because you simply, by choice, changed that particular, mundane as it might seem, neural pathway to another idea. After about 3 weeks, the body, which never wastes a single component part in the brain, disassembles the toast pathway and puts those component parts elsewhere where repair is needed.

Young children are the same way. In order to remember that the color blue is the color blue, the concept must be repeated a 100 times, or what feels like to an adult a million times. We, as adults, tell kids to quit asking so many questions. Don’t bother telling them that – they will just continue to ask the same thing over and over. Kids have to – it’s the way God programmed them to learn and to build up the neural bundles they need to function in life.

But, back to traumas, the concept here is similar. At the time of the trauma, the event is fixed in our memories; much of the details in our subconscious, where we cannot access it, the things we tell ourselves around that memory are what begins the problems. We aren’t good enough, it was all our fault, men are scary, Mom doesn’t care, red cars crash, public speaking is uncomfortable, etc.

EFT goes in & dismantles all those encoded details that are getting into our way, causing us anxiety or fear, stalling us out in life. Once 2 or 3 or 4 aspects (details) around an event are disabled, the event becomes a non-issue, allowing us once again to move forward in life, to that abundant life that God has called us to live.

It’s all in the God created physiology. God made us this way, so why not use what He gave us to improve our relationship with Him & others.

Are you stalled, or are some emotions getting in your way of your abundant life in Christ? If so, email me. I believe EFT can help!

For more information, go to  www.eftforchristians.com

To schedule a free EFT coaching session, email me at eftforchristians@gmail.com

Always remember to take complete responsibility for your own health and well-being.