Stephen Porges on Why Freezing During Trauma Is Not a Choice
Back when trauma first became a common subject in therapy, somewhere around the mid-1990s, the whole conversation revolved around stress and fight-or-flight. Clinicians had a vocabulary for arousal and not much else. So when a client came in and said something like, 'I shut down, I disassociated, I felt like I was disappearing,' the response from psychologists and psychiatrists tended to be a correction: 'Don't you mean you were extremely stressed? That would be sympathetic activation, and the immobilization came out of that.' The client would push back and say no, that isn't what happened. And they left feeling unheard, as though their own account of their experience had been quietly overruled.
What the physiology in Polyvagal Theory did was hand those people a way to stand behind their own story. Let me give a concrete case. This past August I received an email from a woman in Australia, 90 years old. She wrote that she was reading about the theory, and she needed to tell me what had happened to her when she was 19: she was nearly strangled to death and raped. For years she carried the fact that she had told her daughter about it, and her daughter couldn't understand how she had simply sat there, didn't fight, didn't run, didn't seem to care. Now, decades later, she said the theory explained so much that she felt vindicated, and she was crying as she wrote.
Here is what she had absorbed from it. Immobilization is an adaptive response. Nobody chooses it. It carries protective value. If her body had tried to fight or flee in a situation where neither was possible, she might have been hurt far worse. Instead her system shut down. For most of her life she hadn't understood that, and she had carried guilt over it.
This is the double wound I see so often in people with trauma histories. They are harmed first by the event itself, and then harmed again by the therapy, because the therapy fails to respect what their body actually did to keep them alive. It treats freezing in the grip of fear as if it were a decision. It wasn't a decision. It's a reflex.
I use a particular word for the mechanism behind it: neuroception. It names the nervous system's reading of threat or safety in the surroundings. I keep it separate from perception, which brings in cognition and conscious choices, and separate from sensation, because sensation implies some processing happening up in the brain. Neuroception runs below all of that. It isn't thinking. If the job were handed over to thought, it would move far too slowly, and we'd be stuck in these internal debates: is this safe, is it not safe? The body answers on its own. That collapse into stillness is what neuroception produces.