How do you feel

What do you do when you feel irrational freeze and fear?

How do you feel when fear feels very real? Yet it's not fully a threat physically.

How do you even begin to process or move through this time, when you're frozen in a moment in time? A moment that could be a trigger for another memory.

The familiar feeling of blaming yourself again for being stupid enough to let someone get closer than you wanted to.

When that person reacts in ways that for the moment feels so much bigger than it needs to be and you react once again like you are frozen in headlights waiting for the end.

When a moment of reaction has you feeling numb, confused, frozen, floundering and worthless because it feels as if it's your fault.

If only I hadn’t spoken up.

If only I hadn’t spoken my truth!

I wouldn’t have caused this!

Yet in some way you feel that it’s not entirely true, that doesn’t alter the fear or the irrational real feelings of this is my fault, that I deserve this and that it is all true.

What is it, that sits frozen within someone and not someone else?

This feeling is very real and one I believe many of us suffer silently with.

How to shift this and change it is a challenge and I wish I had a comprehensive answer for you. But I don't .

I have a few suggestions of things I use and have tried some work better than others but each one works in its own way. You will find them at the end of this reflective journal.

As I sit and feel my edges and boundaries, where I am and where the other person is I am aware that I feel insecure, no! not that, Inferior to that person like I have given them control and don’t even know when that happened, believing that this is how it is when they have certain qualifications that I don’t.

What comes up with this, is feeling stupid, not intelligent and not capable of understanding, this leads me to feel that I need to have certifications or degrees for others to value or notice me. This then leads to why I don’t matter why I have no value and why I have certain types of people coming into my life. Then I feel the edges and I feel that the reactions were projected onto me from a bigger thing that person was dealing with and that I am the brunt of it, I am the one to take the verbal beating.

Verbal beatings were a regular thing in my childhood as was not able to ask for my needs to be met, My parents didn't know how to do anything differently.

Yet the frozen feeling is still there it has thawed a little but it is real and there.

I shift in my seat and move my shoulders aware of the tightness in the shoulder blade area the all familiar feeling of protective emotional armour.

Feeling the need to stand and stretch to move some of the freeze in my body so I can try to rationalize what I'm feeling and achieve some thaw. I stand stretch bend and breath. Under that is an ever present feeling of never being approved of and never having a voice to explain or speak up. Under that, a deeper much older feeling is one of not feeling connected or acceptable to others.

Our feelings are a spiral not layers but spiralled and each time we feel something we meet a section of our spiral. My spiral today has finally begun to give me a small amount of thaw after 24 hours of freeze and fear. The Fear is still very much there with the big feeling of everything is my fault and always has been and that I don't deserve a happy prosperous life.

This I rationally know is not true yet the fearful child believes it is.

Healing is a process that takes courage and connection to ourselves. If you trust others then the trust of someone to guide you through some of this is always a good thing. But if that trust is broken or skewed in some way then be aware that it may set up more fear and freeze in your body and create another spiral of trauma. For me, as it is for many a trust broken can never be repaired, which I know is part of my fear and freeze program. If the trust can be repaired it takes a very long time for me to accept that.

Our body is wise and knows what to do if we have the tools to use to help show us how to heal.

For now, I am letting my body show me what I need to do, the tricky thing is to always be aware of going back into your head and the unhelpful mind chatter that doesn’t serve any of us.

These are some of my reflections and musing. I am not a therapist or health care professional, I only share as a way of healing myself and hopefully giving others some insights into themselves.

May we all know a calm body and mind?

Some things I use to help me with my fear and freeze process.

Journalling: This is good it helps you get the feelings in word form out of you. If you journal then you know you can ask yourself questions and write down the answers. But journaling isn’t for everyone.

Movement: Movement is good it is one of the ways we can shift stuckness in our bodies it can be dance, stretching, yoga, exercise or shaking our bodies to shake things out. It really doesn’t matter I find on some level I kind of know what it is my body needs me to do, this usually involves breathing in some way specific.

Breathing: this fits with movement but also journaling and it goes with singing or toning. we breathe every moment of the day yet we often shallow breaths. Taking some deeper breaths and blowing them out through your mouth making some type of sound helps the shifting process.

Using your voice: We don’t always use our voices for singing or toning just speaking, when we use our voice for this it uses our breathing differently.

Creative writing or Art: this is my first and fav way to process. It is my go-to when I feel fear or stuck, I write about it, this is my way of reflecting and processing what I can't always name as feelings. This helps me access the feelings and the things I need to get to in my body and work through to thaw out my freeze. Doing what I call crazy art also helps me get the energy moving in my body and out of my head. That for me is the key to getting out of my head. Crazy art is just doing what kids do best squeezing paint onto paper or cardboard canvas whatever you feel like using and finger painting or the whole hand squishing the paint around the paper this works for me if I’m anxious. But not so much when I feel frozen in fear.

Meditation or contemplation: both work if you are able to sit in stillness.

Eft: Emotional freedom technique or tapping this one is great for many things the key to it is to let yourself feel the emotions and the feelings for it to work deeply.

This time feeling frozen and all the feelings I have felt my bodies need to move and stretch it's helped gently but the frozen stuckness feels very real. when you experience a freeze in the body it locks in some level of trauma, it can have an impact on your body decades later and show up as an illness or disease.

Awareness in the moment is the key to unlocking the freeze before it sets up more trauma and compacts down onto what is already stored.

These are my personal insights reflections and musings.

May we all heal with ease and grace.