Key Takeaways Functional freeze is when someone goes into autopilot as a response to chronic stress and trauma. Unlike other trauma responses, someone in functional freeze can appear completely normal ...

Fight or flight are not the only common responses to a traumatic event. I addressed this a bit in a column published on November 22, 2022 explaining that some authors describe “4 F’s”: fight, flight, ...

Functional freeze, otherwise known as the the third "F" in the fight, flight, freeze and fawn list, is a stress response defined as a feeling of numbness or paralysis when faced with a threat. This ...

You’re crushing work deadlines and leading Zoom meetings with ease, but when it comes time to decide on dinner, you freeze. Or maybe you can easily make it through a jam-packed work trip, but as soon ...

Before Porges’ (2011) polyvagal theory became widely known, it was commonly thought that the autonomous nervous system has only two branches: the sympathetic system which manages in times of stress, ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Most of us know about the “fight or flight” response, the body’s built-in survival instinct. But that framework leaves out two ...

For a long time, trauma responses were thought to be limited to just fight or flight. However, psychotherapist Pete Walker (2014) expanded this framework to include four primary trauma responses, the ...