Getting Unstuck, Part I: Fear on Ice

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt afraid to change, yet you wanted to escape with all of your heart?

There are many levels of feeling trapped, and we all too often pretend to have no choices and no way out.

When I was in junior high school, I loved learning, but often found school tedious. I felt like I belonged somewhere else, doing something else.
And like most people, I did nothing about my conflicting feelings (except to pretend to be sick on occasion to escape school for a day or a week).

It’s not uncommon for us to feel like we don’t belong in a situation, a place, a job, a relationship.

Is it because the people around you are not like you?
Or is it that the things you have to think, say or do go against who you are, or who you want to be?

There’s something very troubling hiding in the tension between who you are and who you want to be.

Often we’re in a situation that is perfect for who we pretend to be or want to be.
But who are we right now? What are we clinging to with our current self?
You want to reveal or become a different person, and still, you’re afraid of that other person.

Other times, we’re in a situation that is perfect for who we are right now, but we want to be someone else. We want to reveal and find and become someone else.
And the situation we’re in won’t help us get there.

How do you get unstuck? How do you escape from a situation where you can’t go and you can’t stay?

Peter Levine offers unique insights about getting stuck and unstuck in his book, Waking the Tiger.

The common animal response of fight or flight is well known. When an animal faces a dangerous situation and experiences the fear that accompanies it, the common responses are to fight or flee.

But there’s another response well documented in the animal kingdom, and in human behavior which is little known:
We freeze up.

The animal plays dead and freezes up. Its body slows down. It becomes somewhat disconnected from itself, and feels less pain. If it survives, it has to break out of the frozen state, return fully to itself, and release the large amount of energy that was mobilized for dealing with the deadly situation. (Remember, that the body was fully prepared to attack or run.)

Animals release this energy through shaking, trembling, and deep, rapid breaths. They instinctively know how to release the energy, and are not left with debilitating traumas.

When you face a threatening situation where you can’t fight, and you can’t escape, you freeze up. People in this state feel dissociated from reality, physically and emotionally. As human beings with powerful minds that filter everything we experience, the threat can be physical or emotional, real or exaggerated. As long as we perceive it as a serious threat, and we cannot run or fight (or tell ourselves that we can’t) our body responds accordingly and we freeze up.

What happens when the threat passes and we’re still here?
We don’t know how to shake off being frozen. We’re stuck with the feeling of being disconnected from our feelings and the outside world.

The lingering effects of traumas are all about being trapped, seemingly forever, in a past situation that was extraordinarily threatening to us at the time (whether physically or emotionally). We remain trapped in that situation, unable to act, and charged up with energy that needs to go somewhere.

The many moments in our lives where we’ve frozen up in fear return to haunt us, over and over again.

And it gets worse.
People who are stuck in trauma have a problem with fully experiencing life and the excitement that goes with it. Normal excitement awakens the trauma, or the fear tied to the trauma, and this fear brings us to freeze up again in a different life situation.

A healthy nervous system is full of change, variety, and extremes. We readily get excited and release that excitement. Change is normal and healthy. Staying in one place is unnatural.

There are many wonderful psychological techniques for releasing us from old patterns, traumas, and phobias. Conventional therapies, along with NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), and the many Energy therapies such as EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) and EmoTrance, have a variety of ways to help free us from the past and the energy that was trapped within us like a caged animal.
For information on EFT and EmoTrance, look on the links page. Be sure to evaluate any therapies with the assistance of a health professional.

How do we minimize new frozen moments, in cases when there is no legitimate physical threat?

It’s all about choices and possibility and fixation.
Do you find yourself fixated on a fear or other feeling or thought in a situation, and unable to act? Think about being stuck as being frozen or place, or going round and round in the same pointless circle. Either way, you don’t get anywhere.

Here’s an exercise that I call a “Circle Breaker”. Try it to help you break out of the circles that we spin in, that go nowhere.

1. Ahead of time, prepare a collection of small, seemingly trivial actions. For example: hum, wiggle or tap your fingers, swirl your tongue around your mouth, look up, look down.
2. Then, in a moment where you seem stuck, cycle through your collection of actions. Show yourself that change and action are still possible.
3. Focus on the many feelings that flow through you at the time, and the way that they change from moment to moment. You may be stuck on a single feeling or thought, but there are many feelings and thoughts swirling around your head.
4. Gently move your attention around like moving a flashlight, and see that your inner and outer worlds are full of complexity and change.
5. If you can, move around. Better yet, find the simplest, smallest physical action possible that moves you in a positive direction toward a solution. Not a complete action, or a perfect action, or even the best action. Just take a positive step.
6. Keep focused on change in the environment around you, and in the physical sensations you feel in your body.

Focusing on the real change and variety around you, will open you to possibility, and when you are open to the incredible possibilities that every moment offers there is always somewhere to go.

Let me know how it works for you.