The other day my hosusemate found Sasabe (my dog) taking a bird into her mouth….

& tossing it up into the air repeatedly, trying to play. Before he could get her away from it, she ran into the house...

Where he found her on his bed, a lifeless bird next to her, looking (apparently) verklempt.

He put the bird in the trash.

The next morning I opened the trash can & a bird fluttered out!

Very much alive.

I took it to the RI Wildlife Rehab Center, where I was told that it was completely uninjured. It was a fledgling, not yet able to fly, & would receive TLC in their care until it could.

I was relieved - AND: what a truly potent example of the freeze response (the most extreme form, a pseudo-death paralysis)!

My housemate couldn’t believe that the bird was still alive: “It was in my hand! It was dead!”

Freeze is the state that our nervous system take us into when it has made the calculation that neither fleeing nor fighting will be possible. It’s a response of last resort, but an extremely wise & adaptive one. Sometimes, predators lose interest in their prey if they believe it to be already dead. Sasabe no longer wanted to “play” with the bird once it was motionless. And if the pseudo-death of an immobility freeze doesn’t cause a predator to lose interest, it at least brings a surge of powerfully numbing endorphins to help ease the experience of actual death. Freeze is a strategy & a mercy in a sometimes brutal world.

From what we can tell, non-human, non-captive animals don’t seem to get stuck in freeze. Their nervous systems accurately assess a threat, respond appropriately, & then the animal literally “shakes it off” & moves on with its life once the threat has passed.

But many people are stuck in chronic freeze states of varying degrees of intensity. Tired, numb, disconnected, having trouble engaging their own agency & acting in defense of themselves/their relationships/the world. This essentially describes what we label clinically as “depression”, and when you think about the world we live in it’s not hard to see how so many of us get stuck there.

If you suffered abuse in childhood you had a prolonged experience of powerlessness – you could not escape the caregivers who were also harming you. If you’re working three jobs & barely making your rent, you’re constantly in danger of not being able to meet your basic need for shelter, & you can’t escape your jobs/bosses (which may be stifling, draining, demeaning, or abusive). If you’re a racialized person you face increased threat of both physical & social violence – not just in the form of one terrifying incident, but as the condition of existence in the US (for example). All of these have a few things in common: no or very little ability to escape, lack of power, & chronicity. Many of us have also lost connection to cultural practices that might help move this stuck energy through us (dancing, singing, prayer – most effectively in communal spaces).

A lot of healing/mental health discourse presumes that there’s a normal baseline level of safety that most adults can return to “after” the traumatic event is over. Healing begins once this baseline is established. But this safety is simply not available to a lot of people a lot of the time, & for many trauma is ongoing. I would argue that most of us - even the most privileged among us - are experiencing some level of ongoing trauma as a result of climate crisis, nuclear threat, & the aforementioned loss of communal rites & belonging. But we enjoy very different levels of protection from the impacts of these stressors, & face very different material consequences.

‘Healing’ requires that we build a more just world, where people’s needs are met & it’s safe (enough) to be open, curious & connected rather than numb & shut down. And while we make that world, I’m wondering how we can reimagine & practice a different relationship to the “freeze” that seems to permeate so many of our lives. Can we reclaim it as “a strategy & a mercy in a sometimes brutal world”? Can we notice when it’s useful to be able to access freeze – when surviving an attack, enduring an arrest, conserving energy for parts of the day until we can get away from our shit bosses, for example? Can we notice when it’s not so useful - when the habitual move into freeze brings us out of connection with ourselves & the world precisely when we need most to be able to stay? Can we develop a bit more flexibility, choice, & agency about when we slip into this state? Can we build practices & rituals that help us gently move out of freeze when we want to? Can we find enough safety in each other to live in the more just world that we long for, right now, at least some of the time?