Embodied Boundaries Part 2. 

You may be so good at setting boundaries and speaking your mind when it come to protecting other people. Your kids, your friends, or vulnerable groups in the world. 

You march into your child’s parent-teacher meeting and state your concerns

You have no problem telling that bully what you will do if they don’t stay away from your child.

You protect your spouse, your friends, your parents from any possible threat.

Yet, when it comes to protecting yourself with a NO, or a don’t speak to me like that, or returning that sweater to the shop, or asking for more money for your work... you freeze. 

Your throat tightens.

You shut down.

You become wobbly. 

Your mind says GO but you can’t move.

Today we are going to talk about something I don’t read about very often. It is why we don’t act when we need to and then feel resentful and beat ourselves up for the following days, months or years afterwards. 

There is a good reason for this. Your nervous system is wise and makes the best choice in any given moment with the information and experience it has.

This is the freeze response. 

You have heard of fight-flight-freeze nervous system reactions to threat. 

Your fight activates (in the principals office).

Your flight avoids, gets anxious, runs away, trying to avoid the threat (the email you haven’t responded to yet). 

They are more obvious and you can see the behaviour. 

But the freeze is a little more tricky. You often can’t do anything. You just know you feel stuck, or you don’t feel at all. You just sit like a deer in the headlights feeling confused and foggy and words won’t come.

If this is you reading this and you are saying that’s me! You are not alone. 

There is a very good reason you developed this reaction to speaking up and drawing the line in the sand. Your nervous system made the wisest choice at some point in time in your life. 

You see, there are consequences for melting the freeze response that people don’t talk about, and you have to be prepared for them so you never think you have somehow failed or not said it right. That just brings the other person’s behaviour right back on your responsibility plate.

When we shut down, it is usually for one of two reasons. 

We experienced overwhelming situations as a child where we could not speak up although every part of our body wanted to say STOP! DON’T! Maybe parents were fighting or you were shamed by a teacher, but you knew to speak up was not safe in that moment and would make things worse. 

Or, you have had situations where you DID speak up and it was not listened to, or the reaction was not worth the boundary. You were not respected. You were perhaps shamed more or sent to the corner or worse.

So when situations come up now, your body remembers. It says we did this before, it didn’t turn out so well for us, did it?

You fear losing the connection, being rejected or hurting someone, or getting hurt.

And so, you keep the peace. You prevent conflict. You move to the fawn response (people-pleasing) to change the subject, de-escalate the situation and bypass yourself.

But you get hit in the crossfire. You start to lose your sense of self and self-respect as these become patterns. 

So, it’s not as simple as just saying NO. Of course it is in a life-threatening situation where the fight or flight kicks in automatically.

But for the freeze, it will require a building of capacity, perhaps a rehearsing of what you will say, and becoming familiar with the fight (activating voice) when you most want to freeze. 

The answer lies in listening to the wisdom of your body and working with it to soothe, regulate and then move. This is what I am teaching in a workshop coming up on December 18th: Embodied Boundaries. 

If this resonates with you, I hope you will join me. I personally think that this one move will bring so much healing in different aspects of your life as you interrupt the resentment-anger cycle. 

Info and register right here: 

Embodied Boundaries

Til then, stay tuned for the next blog on boundaries. 

Wishing you love,

Madeleine