Freeze has been one of the hardest parts of my CPTSD healing journey. Not because it’s dramatic or obvious, but because it’s quiet. For many people living with CPTSD, the freeze response is one of the most misunderstood trauma responses.
Freeze doesn’t always look like panic or crisis. Often, it looks like stillness. Numbness. Long stretches of not moving forward, even when part of you desperately wants to. It can look like watching life happen from a distance while your body feels heavy, slow, or unreachable.
For a long time, I didn’t have language for this. I just knew that there were periods when I couldn’t act, couldn’t decide, couldn’t engage the way I thought I should. I blamed myself for that. I told myself I was lazy, broken, or failing at healing.
But freeze isn’t a personal flaw.
It’s a survival response.
Freeze is a nervous system survival response, often linked to chronic trauma, where the body shuts down to conserve energy and reduce threat.
Freeze develops when the nervous system learns that fighting or fleeing isn’t safe or possible. Instead of mobilizing, the body shuts down to conserve energy and reduce threat. It’s a protective strategy. Even when it becomes limiting later in life.
What made freeze especially hard for me was how invisible it was. Other people didn’t always see it. I didn’t even see it clearly myself. I just felt stuck, ashamed, and confused about why I couldn’t “push through.”
Healing freeze hasn’t been about forcing myself to move faster. It’s been about learning to listen differently. To notice when my body is signaling overwhelm. To stop treating stillness as failure and start understanding it as communication.
Freeze has been hard, but it has also taught me a lot about patience, compassion, and the importance of safety. Not the kind of safety you think your way into, but the kind your body slowly learns through gentleness and time.
If freeze has been part of your story too, you’re not weak for that. This response is rooted in biology, not failure, and healing happens when safety, not pressure, leads the way.