Ep. 31: Why You Go Silent When It Matters Most

This episode names one of the most misunderstood and most shamed experiences in the boundaries conversation: the freeze response.

The moment you know exactly what you need to say, you’ve rehearsed it, you believe it — and when the moment arrives, your body goes somewhere else entirely. 

You go quiet. You go flat. You agree when you meant to hold the line. And then you spend the next three days hating yourself for it. 

This episode’s central argument is that the freeze is not a failure of courage, character, or communication skill. It is a nervous system response — a protective mechanism doing exactly what it was trained to do. 

Your nervous system isn’t responding to what’s happening right now. It’s responding to what it learned to expect. Those are two completely different things.

Understanding that distinction doesn’t excuse the pattern. 

It makes the pattern changeable. 

You cannot think your way to a different nervous system response. You have to experience your way there. The body learns through evidence, not insight.

The goal isn’t to never freeze. It’s to shrink the gap between the freeze and the recovery. 

That gap is trainable.

We hope today after listening you feel like the freeze finally makes sense — and like there is an actual path out that doesn’t require forcing yourself through it.

Follow along, tune in, and let’s get into your next mindset shift!

It means the world to us if you would rate, like, save, share, and most importantly hit that subscribe button! And if something you heard today hit home for you, share it with your world. There is plenty of room at our table.

She looks like she has it together.
But inside, she’s tired of being the strong one.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Low and Slow Podcast. We're your girls, Crystal and Lakin. If you press play today, trust. You made the right decision. And know whenever you're listening to this, it's exactly the right time. We invite you to pull up a seat to the conversation, get curious about your current perspective, and lean in for the opportunity to see yourself in another woman's story. We created that girl magic because we've been where you are. Here, the talk is real and the breath is steady. Let's get into your next mindset shift. You know when you've been thinking about a conversation for days, and it's like you know what you need to say, and you've practiced it in the shower, in the car, like probably in your head at 2 a.m., and you are comfortable with your position, you believe in it, you feel ready, and then when the moment comes, the person's right in front of you, or on the other end of the phone, or like in the email thread, and then something happens, and it's like your mind goes blank and your throat closes, and all of those perfectly formed sentences that were right there a couple seconds ago have completely disappeared, and you hear yourself saying something like, No, it's fine, or don't worry about it, or maybe you say nothing at all, and then they leave, and you just stand there or sit there or close the laptop, and the silence comes back immediately, and every word is just exactly as you left it, and you feel like, Why did I do that? And it's too late. Yeah. Fuck. Fuck, why did I even say anything at all? If you've lived that experience, and I would guess that most of you have, right? Um, you probably have a story about why it happened, right? A story was created. Um, maybe you were being too nice, right? You were um you were conflict averse, you were weak in that moment. Like, why didn't the fuck I just hold my ground, right? Um, you didn't love yourself enough yet. Um, you needed to work on being more assertive or more competent. And I want to offer you something different today. What happened in that moment was not a failure of your character, was not a capability issue, it was a capacity issue, right? And it's not even an issue, a capacity um pattern, right? Um, it was your nervous system doing something that it was specifically designed to do to protect you. And once you understand what that is, and you actually understand it and not uh intellectually accept it, not just accept it logically, the whole thing becomes workable and figure outable. So welcome to the Low and Slow Podcast. Um, I'm your host, Crystal, and gathered by, as always, our girl Lakin, and we're going to kick it to you with some tea today. Yeah, today, ladies, we are talking about the freeze response, what it actually is, why it happens to very smart, capable, self-aware women who absolutely know better, and what you can start doing about it. So let's uh let's get right into it. Yeah, let's just start with what's actually happening in the physical body in this neat suit when that freeze response hits, right? Because most people have heard or of fight or flight, right? Um, that's that threat response that revs you up, that makes your heart race, that puts you on high alert, right? That's that animalistic instinct in you. Um, but what rarely gets talked about is like that third option, the freeze response. It's when the nervous system has access to shut down or freeze, not do anything, right? Um, and it's not the same thing as being scared into silence, it's a completely different physiological state. Um, fight and flight are about mobilization, they're about doing something to survive your innate environment, right? Um and when you do something to survive the threat, freeze is about e-mobilization, right? So this is where I'm like, even if I wanted to move, I can't, right? I'm like, I'm stuck. Like, wait, fuck, freeze. Um, the system decides that below that level of consciousness, that that thought that's coming up that tells you just say the thing, right? Below that is the most protective thing that your body can do is going still by by not allowing you to speak. So this is where um that your body starts to take over, even if logically you're trying to tell your mind otherwise. This is where you go quiet. This is maybe where you disappear. This is maybe where functionally um you're doing something opposite of what you would logically want to do until that threat feels like it passes, right? So this is something that um is a lot of times the thing that happens, and then some someone feels some certain kind of way about themselves because when this happens, what did this mean about me? That in the moment I froze. And here's the thing that most people don't know that the freeze is not the lower tier or like the um like the easy or like the what is the word? Like it's not the lower tier of like the threat response. Like it's not a lesser inferior, yeah. It's not inferior to the fight or flight. Right. It's actually the more ancient one, it's actually the one that's more remembered because it's like it's a body response, right? It's the one that activates when the system has assessed that uh fighting or flighting is not going to work, right? Or excuse me, fighting or flighting, fighting or fleeing is not going to work. Um, and when that threat is perceived, right, when it's um as big or it's too close or it's too complicated to be overcome with action, the body is gonna take over and it's gonna do the next best thing, right? This is where this is not this the body has a default, and the the default sometimes is not what logically you want it to be, but what the body knows that hey, this is what I need to feel safe in this moment. And so it has a it's like that button that you hit and everything shuts down, like whether you wanted to or not. Like how many times does that happen to your computer, right? It's like there's too many things operating in the background and the shit just goes off, right? Um, so it's the next best thing. It goes inward, it waits. It's the context of a difficult conversation with someone who has maybe a social power over you, maybe a boss or a parent, right? Or someone who um whose opinion of you is load-bearing, right? Where you it feels like, gosh, I it really matters what this person thinks about me. Um and your nervous system may have a very learned, it's a very learned way of perceiving what that feeling looks like a long time ago. That um fighting or fleeing that particular type of threat is not safe to do. And so what is it gonna do? It's gonna choose the next best option. And so if it goes into the freeze instead, I'm here to tell you you're not weak, right? You're not weak for having your body take over and do that response because right now, in that moment, it is protecting you from a threat that it recognized before you consciously recognize that it did, right? Again, the flight, the the fight and the fleeing is a conscious response that is being taken over like immediately, right? That's survival. But here, this one is more so this is the body taking over. It's like logically, I can't do anything with this. Yeah, I think a lot of people tend to interpret this as like their bodies betraying them. Yeah. And that's where we have to start to reframe that because your body is doing something again that it was specifically trained to do by your history, like your lived experience, your environment, specific people and situations that taught your nervous system what was safe and what wasn't. And your nervous system isn't responding to what's actually happening in the room right now, it's responding to a pattern that it recognizes from before. Right. So, if for example, if I'd been, if I had a dog, right, and he had been aggressive towards me, or let's say go as far as like he bit me multiple times, maybe as a puppy, right? And then the dog keeps getting bigger and that behavior is not going away. I'm not going to blindly trust that dog and just assume that every time I'm around the dog, like, oh, it's not gonna bite me, right? Like there's been patterns that have shown up in the past, there's been experiences that I've had that are already ingrained in my nervous system that are going to, even if I'm not consciously displaying it, on a subconscious level, I'm showing hypervigilance or apprehension. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm expecting a negative outcome in some sense because that has been my experience to date. And so when this happens, basically your nervous system sees a cue, which could be a tone of voice, a facial expression, uh, the specific feeling of someone's disapproval being aimed at you, and it's gonna pull the old response that was ingrained because that was something that worked then. So it's a very learned pattern of behavior. And the one that kept the attachment intact is the most important, right? So this is what told us that okay, when I react or respond this way, this is what's gonna keep the peace. It's gonna keep me safe in this environment as it currently exists. And that's why that response is built, and that's what is gonna play on repeat until we change that. And the problem is that the response was built for context that doesn't necessarily apply to the current situation, and your nervous system doesn't know that yet. It's it's not uh something that decides, like, oh, well, this is a new input. So we're gonna, we're gonna give you a different output that's automatic. It doesn't work like that. So again, this is another situation where we've referenced this in the past. It's like you're running on old software, like there hasn't been an update yet. Keep um, yeah. And the other thing that I want to name here is that freeze doesn't always look like completely going blank or silent. Um, sometimes it looks like laughing nervously when you're meant to be holding this firm ground, right? You're like visibly feeling uncomfortable and just having like a like an awkward response. Um, sometimes this is becoming suddenly very like agreeable, like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, I agree, I agree, right? Um when with the person that's really needing to push back against, like that's what you're wanting to do, but now somehow you're agreeing with them. Um, sometimes this looks like apologizing before you even finish saying the thing that you needed to say, right? Preemptively softening the blow so that nobody gets too comfortable, right? And all of these things are like freeze-adjacent responses. This is where like the freeze is kind of like a little bit sneaky there. Um, because all of them are the nervous system trying to de-escal de-escalate a perceived threat, right? So if things are already feeling very shaky, it's like, oh, what can I put in place that gives me a little bit of safety before I actually do the thing or maybe not even do the thing? Um, none of them are proof that you don't know what you believe. None of them mean that you're not ready to have the conversation. They just mean that your they just mean that your body got there first and made a decision before you could consciously sign off on it. Yeah. And the freeze response, I think, for very self-aware women can be really maddening. Like it can be really, really frustrating because it's not happening to someone who doesn't know better, right? So these are women that have, you know, they've done the works, they that work, they've read the books, they've been in therapy, they know their attachment style, they are aware of their patterns, like they can articulate their needs in a real way with precision. And when they're talking to their best friend or their coach or themselves in the car, that's the way that it's playing out, right? It's like I have awareness of this pattern, I know how I'm trying to overcome it. And then when they get into an actual moment where there's a trigger present, whether that's, you know, a conversation or something that has like real stakes perceived to it, all of that knowing evaporates. Because again, this is something that's not happening in the brain. And they're left standing there with all of that understanding and none of the access that they need to that valuable information when it feels like it actually counts the most. And that's what we call like the knowing-doing gap. Right. And it's one of the most frustrating experiences in personal development because it feels like all of the evidence that I'm trying to collect for the work that I'm trying to do isn't working. And then I tell myself, oh, like none of this stuff is working, right? And if I understand this so well, why can't I just do it? And it's because understanding lives in your head and your freeze response lives in your body. And you're trying, again, like we we reference back to Melissa's quote all the time, right? Of like we're trying to solve feeling problems with thinking solutions. And if your body is experiencing this, it doesn't give a shit what your head has already concluded or what, you know, what diagnosis it's come up with or what reframes that you're giving it. Like your body is running a much older program and it's one that doesn't have access to your therapy insights or the affirmations that you've been crafting, or, you know, the very clear case that you've made for yourself about why this conversation is necessary and reasonable and overdue. So by the time your nervous system has decided to freeze your prefrontal cortex, right? The part that holds all that understanding, all that beautiful knowledge that you've absorbed, has essentially already gone offline. And so the sophisticated, articulate, self-aware version of you is essentially temporarily unavailable, right? Like the lights are on, but nobody's home. And you're operating from a much more primitive layer of the system. This is what we talk about about, you know, the lizard brain. And that layer doesn't speak the language of insight that you've accumulated over the course of all this work that you've done. Yeah. I like that. And I want to make sure we circle back to that of like the aim, the body is ancient. The body has, however old you are, it has that many years of knowledge on it. And even though you have made you may have started to do this work or you've gotten insight, or I've been working on this so long, where it's like, yeah, and your body, this is where it's like, especially for women, your body does know best. Your body, right? Your body is telling you, and it's it's known this certain um, I don't want to say, I guess like body does know best. It it knows this certain patterning for much longer until you just started to understand it, right? Because it's like even when we were younger, our bot our bodies, our nervous systems were being attuned, right, to the state of our parents, right? Their emotional availability. That's why emotional attunement is such a big thing in when we're younger, right? Because it's it's our nervous system not actually being given what it needs in that moment. It's actually co-regulating to the state of our parents' nervous system. So the fact that it's ancient, like, yes, that needs to, that needs to be digested. When that's understood, we can even have more of this conversation. Um, I want to hold something really important that's alongside of your point because I think that without this piece, things can start to feel hopeless, right? Like the body is always going to override here. Um, it's gonna override the mind, and there's nothing that you that you can do about it, right? And that's not really true. Um, the nervous system is not a fixed thing, it's not a permanent sentence, it's just a learned system. So this is where we have to say we have to teach the body, right? A couple episodes back, we talked about the art, the radical practice of doing absolutely nothing. It's teaching the body, right, that I can be safe doing nothing, right? And we it has to learn. So that's that's why it has to be a practice. Um, the fact that it's a learned system means that it can learn something new. This is not, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. No, we just need to teach it. And because of this, this is the part that really changes everything because it starts to learn through experience, right? Not through always understanding, but evidence, right? You cannot think your way into a different nervous system response. You have to experience aka, you have to feel your way into a nervous system response. This is why in relationship, right, we want to do all this work on our own, but it happens in relationship because that's where our nervous system is coming up against someone else's nervous system. That's where we are feeling certain things, that's where we're having a um like new, we have we're being able to access our reference points because there's someone else involved there, right? Other than ourselves. So you have to give the body repeated evidence. And that's the thing that is treating that, that's the thing that it's treating as a threat because it's actually something you can survive, right? It's like all these different experiences. That's the conversation that can happen when you stay intact, when you stay um like aware of like, okay, my body's talking to me. What is it saying? And you can hold that line and the relationship doesn't collapse, right? Um, you can be honest, and maybe in being the honest in that moment, it's like, okay, I'm staying with myself here, and maybe that means the person doesn't leave, right? They're wanting to hear more about why you're feeling that way. Um, every time your body gets another hit of that evidence, right? And not just reads about it, it doesn't just hear about it, it doesn't just um, you know, like learn about it in a course, it actually experiences it. This is why when they say like real life experience is the teacher, because that threat prediction, it gets to be updated with each experience. The freeze has a little less grip here. And over time, through enough repetitions, through enough evidence, right? The window where you can actually access yourself in those moments, it starts to get wider. Right. So that's it's not a promise of dramatic breakthrough, right? But it's meeting it different each and every time where there's an experience, I get to meet it a little bit different. And eventually, right, this description of how change actually works at the level of the body gets to be something that you get to practice, right? Because it's not, it's not gonna happen unless you practice it, unless you start to. It's a it's like a the nervous system gets to be like um a muscle, like you get to train it, it gets to learn different cues. Yeah. And practice is the key component here. Like it means that trying to force yourself to say the thing in the moment while you're like clinging for dear life through your freeze response and trying to force through with sheer willpower, right? Is not not necessarily gonna be the primary strategy that allows you to gain that valuable experience for the shift. It it might work sometimes, like it might get you that that outcome temporarily, but it's it's working against the body, not with it. And so it's not going to ingrain that new pattern. And anything that requires you essentially to override your nervous system constantly is not gonna be sustainable over time and it's gonna have a negative compound effect. And the goal is not to be louder than your freeze response, right? It's not like I can control you and like make you stop doing this thing. It's like the goal is to update the threat assessment so that the freeze has less reason to show up in the first place. So it's a preventative approach, not a reactive approach. Yeah. Yeah. And I want to explain something that I think will help reframe a lot of this frustration because I get it. Like the frustration uh is real, right? And it's like, gosh, I like I know, but right, you start to tell yourself all of these things, like, well, okay, what actually is happening in my body when all the tools that I've been learning or all the tools that you know I've been reading about that work for other people aren't working for me, right? So when the freeze hits and your body goes into this like shutdown state, there is a physiological reason why certain tools stop working, right? Journaling in the moment is not gonna reach, like doesn't reach it. Um, the affirmations maybe we crafted, right? They're they're not reaching it in that moment. And e even a really clear mental framework uh for what you want to say doesn't reach it. Like you could bullet point all the things feel like you're loading yourself for battle. Nah. And the reason why all of those part or all of those tools operate, and the reason is really because all of those tools operate from the top down, right? From the mind towards the body, not the body speaking to you, giving the mind information, right? And then you're starting to ask the brain to influence the state. So this is where when I we always say, like the mind, the body is talking to you, are you listening? Right. Because if we have been letting the mind override what the body is saying or have a say like that trumps what the body is ultimately saying, um, that's when we get into this state of like where these tools are not gonna just work, right? And then we start to get frustrated. So when you're in a freeze, the part of the brain that processes language and logic um and rational thought has significantly reduced the access to that, like when you're in that freeze response. So you're not in your head anymore, you're in your body, and the only things that can reach you there are the things that speak the body's language first. The body's language is sensation, right? Feeling, breath, movement, temperature, sound, um, rhythm, right? Of like all of these things are like our senses, right? If we could just, this is why we say, like, can you see something? Can you hear something, right? Can you taste something? Can you like bring some awareness in the moment? Um, because these are inputs that can actually shift the physiological state from the bottom up, from your body up towards the mind. Um, so this is why a lot of times, like when people are feeling overwhelmed, like we'll turn on music, right? Or um maybe we'll start to do a little shaking thing, like with our foot or our fingers or whatever, right? It's like there's there's some response coming from the body. Um, a slow extended exhale directly signals the nervous system to downshift, which is why we get the breath involved during story work, right? Um, it helps us shift into that parasympathetic state. This is not a metaphoric thing that happens, this is a physiological thing that happens. So it's gonna activate that branch of the nervous system that is incompatible with the threat response. Similarly, slow movement, grounding sensations, even humming, right? Um, accessing that vagus nerve. Um, it's making a sound that again coming from the body. And these are not like these are not just soft wellness suggestions. These are things that are like direct input um into the nervous system that's currently running the show, right? Your body needs to have a kind of response that says, like, okay, I'm here, like there's something that's happening within here, you're aware that this is happening here. And that's where some of these direct inputs what makes this like a practical um practice that you can do or try because you want to be able to access yourself in the high stake moment. If you are in a high stake moment and you're frozen, what is gonna be the thing to bring your body back into it, like bring you back online? Like you gotta, you gotta have some response from the body. And that preparation um happens before the moment. It's not gonna happen in the moment, it's gonna happen before it. So your body, you bit you start to build uh a body level, like toolkit per se, when you're already calm, right? When you can feel like, okay, I'm having the conversation, right? Um, so that when the freeze cue arrives and you go there, you can have something to reach for from the body that actually recognizes you're safe, right? So something that you can actually reach for that bypasses the part of the brain that's literally gone offline. Like the lights are off, but something from your body allows you to tap back in. This is why like people with like tapping helps, right? Or just just being able to um recognize this is gonna be different because everybody's body is different, every woman is different, but being able to have something ahead of time that can bring you back online without doing one of these, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, like essentially you're building a it's a different kind of muscle. Like most of us have spent a lot of our personal development journey building cognitive muscle. So we're very clear on frameworks or building our self-awareness or thinking differently. And that matters, all of that stuff matters. It's definitely not time and effort wasted. But for the freeze response specifically, what's needed is somatic muscular development because this is a body level capacity to recognize the state that you're in and shift it before it takes you completely offline. Because once you're in that space, that it's not, like we said, it's not available to you anymore. And just like any other kind of training, it has to be practiced when the stakes are low. So it's available when the stakes are high, right? If I'm preparing for an Olympic lifting meet, I'm not going to try a weight for the first time in the meet in competition, right? I'm going to be doing lots and lots of reps to build up to that weight to get my system accustomed to that so it feels more familiar and more readily available to me when it comes time for competition when the stakes do feel high and I've got all these eyes on me in the spotlight and everything, right? So same as like you don't practice shooting free throws for the first time during the championship game, right? It's like you build the muscle in practice so that it is automatic when it counts. And what that looks like is small, which a lot of people don't like and what nobody wants to hear, because it is the little things that people tend to want to avoid or that they find irritating, and they're like, oh, like this isn't doing anything, right? It's it looks like breath practice when you already feel fine, not when you're already spiraling and waiting to do it. It looks like learning what specific early warning signs are in your body the moment that, like the moment, sorry, before your freeze locks in so that you have an actual window to work with and you're not waiting until it already happens when it's too late. And you know, something even like slowing a conversation down rather than letting it move at a pace where the freeze is ahead of you and you can clearly see that it's gonna get derailed. Like take a beat, slow it down intentionally. Say you need some space, right? Asking for the moment, stepping out, like returning to that conversation or that moment after you've had time to come back into your body. That's not something that is avoidance. And I think a lot of people will feel that way, like, oh, that you know, I'm um I'm making excuses or I'm just trying to avoid conflict. No, like it's a regulation strategy. And the difference is that avoidance closes the conversation forever. Avoidance looks like I'm not gonna talk about this, or I'm not, I'm not available for that, or no, I'm not going there, right? Regulation buys you the window to actually be able to be present for the conversation. So that looks like, hey, I'm actually not in a good space to be able to talk through this right now. Can we table it and come back in 20 minutes? Or if it's it might be, hey, can we or are you available to get back into this tomorrow? Right. Like, but we have to be able to voice those needs. And we've talked about that endlessly in other episodes as well. Yeah. Yeah. That's really what it comes down to. It's like when you're doing this, and like you said, it's not when it's just in the moment, it's doing it as a practice, it's doing it even when there's nothing going on when you or when you don't feel like doing it, even when it's just you and you're having this response and you start to become aware of it of like, can I do it? Can I start to do it with myself first? And then when I am using this toolkit, it's already in the bag, like Bob the Builder on your tool belt for when you're in in conversation with someone else. So, what does it actually look like to build the capacity to stay present in the moments that used to take you offline? And I guarantee you, just being able to ask that question, you have a couple things come up to mind of like when are the times I've been offline? Oh, these, these, and these, right? Because um, I want to be honest, it's not a quick fix and it's not primarily a mindset shift that's gonna help you immediately do that, right? This is gradual, this is repetitive, this is a body-based progress uh or process of updating that needs to happen when you're up when your nervous system has filed these things under threat, right? So we can go back into that file cabinet at any time, grab the files and like audit them, right? But that has to be done over time, not in the moment. We can't be doing the work in the moment to do that. Um, this is where ultimately it's like, can we start working with our body rather than against it? Because if we're not even wanting to listen, what comes up for it? Again, if the feelings are coming up and you're apologizing for how you're feeling or you're so overwhelmed by how you're feeling, it's like, let's acknowledge the feelings first. And then it's like when we start to the nervous system is more than just feelings here. It's like, can we start to start listening to our body in a way of like talking to it, establishing a relationship with it? Um, this is gonna work by accumulating evidence, right? Real lived felt evidence. That's the thing that you that's been protecting you uh from what is survivable, right? The way that you build that evidence is through graduate uh graduated exposure, right? So you don't start with the highest stakes conversation that you've been avoiding for three fucking years, right? You start somewhere smaller, right? And then in starting with that smaller stuff conversation, you start to say maybe a little bit of the more uh uncomfortable thing, mildly uncomfortable thing to the person where the stakes are gonna be lower, right? Where there's there's a little bit more room there if there was to be something, right? You let the slight tension in the moment exist without meeting immediately resolving it, immediately stepping in. Um, you stay in your body through it, even if your body's uncomfortable, right? So, like again, hey, I get this is uncomfortable, and like we're we're still doing this, even if your heart rate goes up a little, um, and you just start to see what happens, right? And usually what happens is that in low stakes, in um the uncomfortable, in the tension, it's actually survivable. Nobody dies, the relationship doesn't end, your life is not going to shit, right? You said the thing, you're still okay. Rarely ever the worst case scenario. You said the thing, your nervous system is okay, and or you said the thing, you're okay, and your nervous system files that oh, I just had an experience where I said the thing and it was okay. Check. Like, great, let's throw one in the bucket. We got one in there. It doesn't transform overnight on the basis of that one experience, but it does file it, it does register it, it does um be able to use it as evidence. And with enough of those filings, with enough of those um updating to previous reference points that we have as um unsafe, right? That threat prediction starts to shift because it has new context. The freeze starts to arrive a little later in the process, right? Or maybe not at all in the lower stake situations. And we start to build a little bit of confidence here of like, oh, okay, great. I couldn't, you know, and this is the window where you have to access for yourself that starts to get wider slowly, incrementally, and over time, like measurably. Like you can go through these low stake um conversations or situations and was like, oh, okay, I did that. So that this is the practice for when there's the big conversation and maybe it's high stake, high risk, and now you have some reps under your belt. Yeah, we have clients all the time who they successfully interrupt a pattern one time and we do acknowledge it and we do celebrate it, and then they get almost like disheartened, right? Because they're like, but I still feel this way, or I still have this underlying fear, or I still, you know, I still find myself doing the same thing where I get hemmed up in that situation. And again, it's not it's not gonna happen after just one. Like you have all of these reps in the other direction. Your body is patient. Yeah, that have been telling you that this was the way to do it. So it's not just gonna take one time to decide, oh, well, that worked that time. So everything else must be fine now, right? Again, going back to that dog analogy, just because the dog doesn't bite me one time when we're snuggling doesn't mean that I'm gonna forget all the times that it bit me before if there's a history of biting. And I think looking at it in a way of when you the way that you approach your next hard conversation is to be realistic with yourself about what goal or expectations that you have, right? It's like the goal is not to become someone who never freezes. That's not gonna happen like you're human. That's not a realistic target for anybody, and it's not really a useful one either. It the goal is to just shrink the gap between the freeze and the recovery. So, right now, for a lot of women, the freeze happens and the recovery will take days, right? Like days of replaying it, processing it, emoting it to other people, hating on yourself, talking shit, like figuring out all the things that you shoulda, coulda, woulda said. And the goal is just to make that gap smaller. So the freeze happens and you recover faster. You start to notice it in real time, again, bringing that awareness in. You have this tool to shift your state. You find a way to return the conversation and to create a new opening for it, right? Or you get to the freeze and you find the truth in it a little bit faster as far as what's going on for you internally. And then it's less damage to yourself in that middle piece. So in this way, it's like it's not about creating an identity that is absolutely fearless, it's about becoming more skilled. And that's an important way to think about it because becoming more skilled in something or adopting a skill is something that you can actually build upon, right? There, it's not this all or nothing, it's not this like perfection identity. And unlike courage, which is important, and it's a feeling which can come and go, skill is something that can be applied in multiple different scenarios, regardless of what the environment is carrying for you at that time. So you can train your body to have more access to itself, these skills, these tools, right, in the moments that really matter. And it reminding yourself that it's absolutely available to you. But if you, and this is why I think it's important to use the reflection as a tool, too, right? Even if I were not able to, in the beginning, create a scenario in which I could use these tools preventatively, yet, even in the practice of reflecting on it over time, that will start to make those awareness, the things that come through in that awareness more readily available to me. Again, closing that gap closer and closer to the time of the trigger. So the idea is to be able to access my body closer to the time of the initial trigger over time. So thinking about it as like the freeze response is not something that I was just born with, or it's like this inherent trait that I have, or I can't do anything about it. It's it is not proof that you don't know yourself, or that you haven't done the work, or that you don't believe in stuff that's important to you, or you can't send up for yourself, or that you can't have hard conversations, right? It's just a nervous system response. And it was built for a very specific context for a purpose. And it this is a solvable thing, right? It's it's not a quick solve, but it is something that you can provide solutions for. And the solution is not trying harder in the moment necessarily. The solution is building that body level capacity before the moment arrives so that when it does arrive, you have more of yourself available than you did before. And that's the only thing that you should be working on. I want to say something to the person who's listening and feeling like feeling some relief from this, because maybe for the first time you're actually understanding what the freeze is and the freeze is making more sense. The freeze, your body wasn't actually betraying you, right? It was protecting me. Oh my God, could that have been a possibility? Um, it in the only way it knew how, based on everything it learned before, you had the ability to update the programming. Again, this is not a capability issue, it was a it was a capacity issue. And my my nervous system was just trying to protect me because it was at capacity in the moment, right? So that protection made sense once and it's just running past its expiration date, right? It needs updating. And the fact that you can see that now, the fact that you name it, that you can trace it, a time that you felt like that, you can understand it at the level where it actually lives, and that it's not just nothing that happens when this happens. That's the beginning of starting to do something different. That's the beginning of starting to build something different within your body, right? Your body isn't broken or your body isn't failing you, right? Your nervous system isn't even failing you. It's just, it just hasn't gotten the new information yet. And this is actually uh a space where it's like, okay, well, this is where I get to give it the information. That's what we're doing here. We're slowly starting to build this in a way where together you and your body can do this. You can start to have this relationship with it. And if you've never known what this relationship has looked like before, this is a really good opportunity to be able to start exploring that so that you can start to rewrite what has once been said, right? That it's like my body's betraying me. Like, no, that doesn't have to actually be the narrative just because that was the wiring at that point in time. So it's homework time. And the homework. Not you, but we know they love the homework. Again, running it back to like where we started this episode, right? It's like every woman has had that experience where you are engaged in a situation and like everything in you is screaming, like, just say no, just say no, right? And yeah, and then so I want you to think about that, right? The next time that this is coming up, and when you start to feel that those early signals, right? Can we create some awareness around that? If you start to feel your throat tightening, like you kind of start clenching up, your mind starts going blank. And before you say, Oh, it's fine, right? Like before that sentence gets out, I don't want tree, I don't want you to try to like force through it, just notice it, like name it, right? Name it in the moment, like, oh, I can recognize where I'm freezing here, right? Naming it is not nothing, it's really important. We might break it, so there's the freeze. Yeah. Like, oh, there's the old freeze response. Okay, I'm I'm understanding, right? And in the first, it's and just by naming it alone, like that is gonna be your first opportunity of distance between you and that response, right? And from that little bit of distance, then a choice eventually becomes available to you. And it's not gonna be the first time, it's probably not gonna be the second, third, or fourth time, right? It's like not today, maybe it's okay, but you're building toward it. So just recognizing that is really important. But if you get into the habit of each time it shows up naming it, then we can get a little bit further each time. And again, we're just closing that gap. Yeah. So if you've been listening today and you named something in this episode, maybe something you've been carrying, or maybe something you that resonated with you, um, I want you to take that information for yourself, but then also share it with someone because I guarantee you another woman has had this experience, another person has had this experience. Um, and you know, what when we are all learning these things, like women are expanders of each other. Can we start to, with what we've learned, be able to share that with someone else and have them learn something about themselves? Because this is something when we can name it in this way, it's like, God, it doesn't have to mean anything about us that my body was reacting this way. Oh my gosh, that gives me so much relief. And I was just talking about talking to Sharon at work about this, and she's feeling that too, right? So share it with a gal who can find some value in it. Um, and if you have not subscribed, liked, shared, I've been really seeing those subscribers come up, y'all. So I am so thank you. Thank you so much. We have like comments on Spotify, comments on Apple Podcasts. Um, we've been seeing the likes and the subscribers shoot up on YouTube. We really, really appreciate you. We're building something here. We want you in it, we want you at the table, we want you a part of the conversation. Um, and we love that you get to hang out with us. So we'll see you in the next episode. See you next time. Bye.