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A Four-Step Strategy to Help Your Patient Regulate Their Freeze Response

A key component of working with freeze is helping your patient regulate their own freeze response. Pat Ogden, PhD, offers a four-step process of how to do just that.

Dr. Ogden: I think about a four-step process.

[First] I want to find the action, and sometimes that means kind of rewinding the narrative of the memory until the point before the trauma where the action is still available. Say if we’re working with a sexual abuse survivor who is remembering her abuser coming into the house and can hear him approaching the room that she’s in. Those moments when she first detects danger is where there’s still flexibility in movement before the permanent kind of frozen response. It’s called a preparatory action or an intentional action where the body is prepared to move and still can move.

[Second] So then if we’re working with the content of the memory, we find a moment when the impulse was there, and then we forget about the memory because the only purpose of the memory is to stimulate these incomplete responses that can then be metabolized and executed. So if we pause right there, and I’ll say to the client, “What are you noticing in your body?” And clients will say, “Well, my body’s tensing up.” And I’ll say, “Great. Feel the tension.” I have them describe it to me, and find out from their body what the action is that the body wants to make.

The critical point is to find that action from the body because this is not a cognitive phenomena, it’s an instinctive sub-cortical phenomena. It’s accessing the intelligence of the body to then find the action that it wants to make no matter how strange it seems. So the memory catalyzes the impulses that really have to do with our default action.

[Third] Once that action is found, whether it’s a push away, whether it’s something in the legs, whether it’s a twisting away or some kind of defense, we want to help that action become executed.

[Fourth] And the other phase is to savor the aftermath of that. Because when an action is being completed, everything will shift inside. Not only the physical organization, but often beliefs about yourself, emotions to more positive emotions of empowerment and even pleasure.

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