I opened the latch on the gate and walked into the playground of the Montessori School. All of the giggles and screams of the toddlers washed across me as I searched the area, but my little ones found me before I found them. I let out a small “oof” as twins hit the back of my legs and buckled my knees a little bit. I turned around to give hugs and sticky toddler kisses and let the day of work fade to the background as the role of mom stepped up to the forefront.

Their Guide caught my eye from the bench and said “I swear you’re Buddha mom. You never look frazzled and I’ve never seen you lose your patience. Those kids are lucky to have you.”

I felt really, really good about that compliment for a long time. But it all crashed down months later when my Somatic Experiencing practitioner/therapist told me, “Ashley, have you ever considered that you keep it together so well because your body lives in a functional freeze?”

Excuse me, WHAT?

I thought I was doing what everyone else was. Going through the motions of daily life—working, parenting, showing up for friends—and from the outside, I looked incredibly together. People often comment on how calm and centered I was. I did daily yoga for goodness’ sake! But inside? I felt numb, disconnected, like I was moving through life behind a thick pane of glass.

Sound familiar? Let me introduce you to one of the most misunderstood patterns in our nervous system.

What is Functional Freeze?

Functional freeze happens when any of your sympathetic nervous system responses happen too often, for too long, or your body doesn’t return to a state of ventral vagal between. This is referred to as dorsal vagal shut down in polyvagal theory.

While it might seem like there are different endpoints for various nervous system patterns—prolonged fight and flight collapsing into burnout, fawn collapsing into hypervigilance, and freeze leading directly to functional freeze—they all actually move the slider in your autonomic nervous system into functional freeze, even if the mechanism of how you got there is different.

Think of it like different roads leading to the same destination, but once you arrive, the landscape looks remarkably similar.

The Energy Behind the Freeze

Energetically, in sympathetic nervous system patterns, there’s an increase in what I call heat in the nervous system (really it’s just frequency). In fight and flight, it shows up in the cerebrospinal fluid. In a prolonged fawn response, it moves to the periphery of the body and in the gut. In freeze, it builds up within the neurons and nerves and burns out the myelin sheath or Schwann’s cell membrane.

To counter this overwhelming heat, your cerebrospinal fluid does something remarkable—it cools everything down.

In cases of functional freeze, the cerebrospinal fluid always appears slushy, with ice crystals forming, or perhaps even an entirely iced over exterior boundary with a slushy inside. This cooling freeze transmits through your central nervous system to the motor and sensory neurons.

The conduit slows. Information crawls along the nerves. The speed at which your body used to be able to relay information just isn’t there. This results in a persistent state of shutdown, characterized by feelings of numbness, dissociation, and possibly depression. The dorsal vagal shutdown moves you into a state of immobility or dissociation, and moves you out of social connection and awareness.

So Where Does the “Functional” Part Come In?

Your body receives the message that this frozen state is your new normal. This becomes your baseline, and in order to exist in society and keep going to work, raising kids, showing up for a partner or friends, you find a way to smile, connect, be engaged, calm, and even playful amidst the cold slush or dissociation.

Many of us can exist that way for YEARS—a superficial calm and engaging persona skating on thin ice.

It’s not always easy to recognize that this is what’s happening. Like when I was referred to as “Buddha mom” because I was always so calm, and the twins’ toddler Guide couldn’t imagine me getting mad about anything. 

Little did she know I was in therapy for postpartum PTSD and had a complex PTSD diagnosis as well. Functional freeze was my home base! But to her, I looked like a well-regulated mom coping with the stress of toddler twins remarkably well.

This is the insidious nature of functional freeze—it can look like exceptional regulation from the outside while feeling like numbness and disconnection from the inside.

The Functional Freeze Easy Button

We come out of functional freeze when we recognize the energetic damage our Nervous System Realm has sustained for years or decades, repair it, and thaw the cerebrospinal fluid. 

This is where I put my humility aside, because other ways of doing this work titrate you very slowly back into sympathetic states, hoping to create safety there, and eventually move you back all the way “up the ladder” to a place of ventral vagal regulation.

My work repairs the energetic damage, re-routes the conductivity in your body, creates safety in your nervous system for it to remain in this pattern, expands the capacity of your nervous system’s internal state, creates more space to embody your soul, and returns you to a ventral vagal state as a baseline.

From here, your body can dip into sympathetic and return quickly to the ventral vagal without having to move “up” through those sympathetic layers in order to be safe and social again. You can restore regulation to your nervous system quickly, and in a way that doesn’t require you to wrestle with years of dysregulation.

Not in a “let’s bypass the hard stuff” way, but in a “life is dysregulating enough, let’s resource you” way.

Freeing Your Nervous System

When I work with functional freeze, my goal is to have you in a ventral vagal state by the end of our session. It doesn’t matter which pattern your Nervous System Realm is expressing most frequently, or which pattern may have brought you to functional freeze—we can work with them all at the same time using the same methodology.

The goal is a place where you feel inner resourcing and space to follow your soul directives, whether it’s the BIG “oh shit that’s scary” move, or the micro-memos your soul sends on the daily.

Functional freeze often develops alongside patterns held in the Muscle Realm, as your body learns to hold stability while disconnected from sensation.

Ready to explore what your nervous system is ready to share with you? Schedule an Energy Archaeology session to discover what patterns your body is holding.