Reading · Your Trauma Therapist

Your Trauma Therapist by Lauren Auer, LCPC is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. For more content follow me on Instagram.

So far, this series has covered fight, the response that gets mistaken for a temper, and flight, the one that gets mistaken for unreliability. Today’s response gets mistaken for absence.

Freeze is what shows up when neither fighting nor running is on the table. Going still. Going quiet. Feeling foggy or far away, sometimes losing track of time completely. It looks like nothing is happening, which is exactly why it gets misread as passivity or even indifference. Underneath it, a great deal is happening. It’s just happening in a different currency than motion.

Let’s go back to the parking lot from the last two pieces. Someone grabs for your bag. Your body has already run fight and flight through the math. This time, both come back negative.

Freeze tends to get selected when the numbers don’t work for anything else. Say there’s more than one person involved, positioned in a way that cuts off any real path out. Fighting means taking on more than you can handle. Running means someone else could cut you off before you get anywhere. Your body reads the odds and lands on a third option: stillness.

Say you’re exhausted, or hurt, or physically outmatched in a way that makes both resistance and escape genuinely dangerous rather than just uncomfortable. Movement itself starts to look like the risk. Staying still, staying quiet, waiting for an opening, reads as the safer bet.

Say you grew up somewhere that going still actually worked, a house where drawing less attention meant getting hurt less, where the people who argued or tried to leave caught the worst of it and the people who went quiet were more likely to be left alone. Your nervous system logs that as data, and it keeps reaching for it long after the situation that taught it has changed.

And say fighting or running already failed you once. Maybe you tried to push back and it made things worse. Maybe you tried to get away and there was nowhere to go. Your body remembers which strategies didn’t hold and rules them out, even in a completely different room with a completely different threat.

Psychologist Andrew Moskowitz described this in a widely cited 2004 paper as an evolutionary fear response with roots going back further than most people assume, arguing that what looks like passivity is actually an active defense the body reaches for when resistance and escape both carry more risk than staying still.

Renee (name and details changed) described it as watching herself from a slight distance during any confrontation, hearing her own voice from somewhere outside her body, unable to make her mouth form the words she wanted to say. It had started, she eventually realized, in a childhood home where a parent’s rage was unpredictable and inescapable. Fighting back had never worked. There had been nowhere to run. What had worked, again and again, was going quiet and waiting for it to pass. Decades later, in disagreements that carried no real danger at all, her body still reached for the same strategy the moment a voice was raised.

Marcus (name and details changed) blanked out completely during a performance review, unable to answer a straightforward question he knew the answer to, watching the silence stretch out and feeling powerless to fill it. He couldn’t understand it. He wasn’t afraid of his manager. But his body had learned, growing up with a parent who used questions as traps, that any answer could be used against him, and that staying silent had been the only move that didn’t make things worse. His body wasn’t malfunctioning in that meeting. It was running the only playbook it had ever been given for being questioned by someone with power over him.

Neither of them was checked out or unprepared. Both of them had a body that had learned stillness was survival, and hadn’t yet been shown enough evidence that the room had changed.

Freeze gets treated as the absence of a response, which makes it easy to misread as weakness, laziness, or not caring enough to engage. None of that is accurate. A freeze response is muscles locked and ready, attention sharpened rather than dulled, a body running a continuous, wordless assessment of whether it’s safe to move yet. It takes a considerable amount of energy to hold. It is not nothing. It’s a hold.

Peter Levine’s work on Somatic Experiencing focuses heavily on this response specifically, describing how the survival energy mobilized for a freeze response, if it never gets to complete and discharge, can stay lodged in the body long after the original threat is gone. That’s part of why freeze can resurface decades later in situations that carry only a faint resemblance to whatever it originally protected against, a raised voice, a closed door, a certain tone that sounds like the one that mattered once.

This is different from fight or flight in one specific way. Fight and flight are visible enough that other people usually notice something is happening. Freeze often gets missed entirely, by other people and sometimes by the person experiencing it. That invisibility can leave people feeling like their own trauma response doesn’t count, since nothing about it looked dramatic from the outside.

I think about this the way I think about a tree that grew around a fence. The fence went up when the tree was young and needed the protection. Years later, long after the fence stopped mattering, the trunk still carries that shape. It isn’t a flaw. It’s evidence of what the tree survived, and it can still be worked with.

Recalibrating a freeze response usually means helping the body complete something it never got to finish, often through slow, titrated movement rather than through talking the memory through. Insight alone rarely reaches it, since freeze isn’t a thought to be corrected. It’s a physical state the body needs new, felt evidence to update.

If you recognize yourself in Renee or Marcus, the goal isn’t to force yourself to speak up or stay present through something that genuinely still feels unsafe. It’s building enough capacity, slowly, that your body has room to notice when a moment is actually survivable, instead of defaulting to the same old hold.

If you’ve spent years wondering why you go blank, or quiet, or somewhere else entirely when things get hard, I want to offer you something different to sit with. That stillness wasn’t failure. It was your body choosing the option that kept you intact when nothing else looked safe enough to try.

That doesn’t mean it gets to run every room for the rest of your life. It means the work isn’t forcing yourself to override a hold your body put in place for good reason. The work is slowly showing that hold enough safety that it’s willing to loosen.

Next in this series: fawn, and why saying yes when you mean no can be its own form of survival. Subscribe below so it lands in your inbox.

A Closer Look at the Trauma Responses Part 3: The Freeze Response

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