Key moments from this episode:

I did a a Tik Tok on functional freeze. 

You know that everything's normal in public, or you put on your game face, but somehow, behind all of that, in the time that you're on your own, things just stop, just collapse, or are quiet. 

That really popped off on TikTok. 

So, I want to explain why. 

Somebody actually berated me for saying that this what was I talking about functional freeze actually was dissociative freeze. 

And I thought, okay, well, maybe that's just a more technical way of talking about it. 

Maybe that's how therapists would talk about it rather than how people generally might understand it. 

It turns out, no, actually, there's quite a spectrum. 

So I'm going to try and explain all of that. 

The first, most important way to try to understand that you may well have seen this before the window of tolerance. 

So this is quite a common topic therapists talk about. 

Essentially we all go through ups and downs during the day. 

Things can be a wee bit up a wee bit down and most of us will will kind of manage with that. 

We're fairly well regulated; most of us will manage with that. 

We've got quite a wide window of tolerance. 

Probably, actually, even on a day that things aren't going too fantastically well, things are really quite high, things are really quite low, we don't really go outside of that. 

We don't have any really dysregulated moments. 

This is where we get into fight-or-flight hyperarousal. 

So, hyper up at the top of the diagram, and at the bottom is where things sort of slow down or freeze. 

So hypo down at the bottom.

When things are going well, we're probably not really hitting either of those. 

The unfair thing, and actually, you could argue that the peaks and the troughs are going to be bigger or smaller or maybe bigger for somebody who's going through a lot of stuff, just because you're seeing more stuff. 

You're going through more. 

But theirs is much narrower. 

Let's just say it's a very narrow band across the normal day’s ups and downs.. 

So every time you go a little bit above it, you get hyperaroused. 

That's your fight or your flight. 

If things go below that, so if you're stimulated and you go into your sort of freeze or flop, freeze is down at the bottom of the diagram.

Dissociative freeze is down even further, and flop (and worse) are even further down. 

But let me explain something else. 

Now remember, it's a narrow band, but it's not a fixed band. 

So it may be that you have a narrow band here. You may go a little bit over that into fight-or-flight, but most people will actually keep going back to the same survival response. 

So if you're a fight person, you tend to get irritable. 

You tend to get angry when things happen. 

Or a flight person, you tend to disappear or get out of situations. 

You tend to choose one or the other. 

You don't tend to just swing between the two of them. 

Or you tend to be a freeze person. 

So, depending on which your brain is choosing in that moment, which one you're going to do, but whichever one your brain chooses, your narrow band might be high up, so you're much more likely to go into freeze dissociative freeze or flop. 

Or it might be down much lower in which case you're more likely to go above that and get fight or flight. 

Now, fight or flight are pretty equal in severity. 

You'll usually choose one or the other, but they're pretty much on the same kind of level. 

Okay, let's have a wee look though at the freeze. 

So, if you get functional freeze, it's not just that little line there.

It's more of a band below it. 

So, this is the sort of functional freeze. 

You're managing some of the time to do okay to be in this band. 

You're managing, you're using all your energy to stay in this wee band when you're working, when you're with family, when you're with friends. 

But when you're on your own, you can't keep that going. 

You sink just a little bit down into that band below the bottom of the regulated zone where you get that functional freeze where things do collapse a wee bit. 

You look, to all intents and purposes, the same when you're at work and when you're with family, like everything's fine. 

You may not be your perfect normal self, but everything's pretty much fine. 

Dissociative freeze is a little bit further down on that spectrum. 

So that's where things probably don't look great when you're at work. 

You might have days where you're off. 

You might be labelled a bit difficult, and outside of that, you're still having this kind of collapse, not managing to do things either. 

So that's much more difficult. 

I know I had heard it described as a slope. 

I don't really like to think about it as a slope because it kind of implies that you're on the slope and you're just going to keep going down, and there's no way out. 

That's not what happens. 

We do go up and down a bit. 

So you might drift a little bit up, a little bit down, but it's a bit of a loop. 

Sometimes things will be better. 

You might sleep better. 

You might eat better. 

You might have a good day with friends. 

You might have just had a nice weekend. 

Things might be better or things might be worse. 

Something that hits you on that Tuesday morning you're not expecting. 

Things might get this way. 

So, it's a kind of a loop depending on whether things are better or worse. 

But generally, people will be in that things look good from the outside, functional freeze. 

Things look a bit difficult, and they're not quite working dissociative freeze. 

Outside of either of them, when you're putting on that kind of performance for other people, even if you're not aware of it, they're the kind of freeze ones. 

Things get worse again, we get into that kind of flop, the kind of flop or fold where you just kind of just stop. 

You can't really go back into work or family situations. 

You've not got the capacity to go back and try and perform at all, to try and keep going with family, with work. 

Quite often, work's the last thing to go. 

Surprisingly, there's actually worse than flop. 

So there are things below that, when things really do get worse,  and I don't think we particularly want to talk about just now.

Obviously, the idea of trauma therapy or any therapy is to nudge you back up this way, back up this way, into a nice wide window of tolerance so that you're not hitting this either. 

Now the window of tolerance means that you're regulated. 

It doesn't mean that things are perfect. 

So you might still get a wee bit annoyed if somebody says the wrong thing, but you're quickly back into your normal. 

You might get a bit irritated with things, but you're generally you're in the regulated zone. 

You're not getting dysregulated. 

You're not going outside of those barriers. 

We want to get anybody who's here, anybody who's deep down in freeze to drift back up to that normal range so that whatever's happening in the day, whatever happens day-to-day, you manage it. 

Now, it's not just trauma therapy that gets you better. 

Quite often, somatic things, sleeping well, eating well, lots of other bits and pieces come together. 

The foundation of starting healing, though, often is trauma therapy because once you have the trauma therapy and you heal, all of these other things, like sleeping, eating and exercising, they all come a bit easier. 

Often, we try to do it the other way round. 

We try to say you need to go to yoga, you need to eat better, you need to sleep better. 

And it's quite hard when you really don't feel it. 

It's quite hard. 

So that's what the window of tolerance is. 

That's where we get functional freeze. 

That's where we get dissociative freeze.

I’ve included a couple of images to support this