When you’re frozen — whether in a conversation, a career, or a life decision — the instinct is to fight it. “Don’t freeze. Don’t freeze. Don’t freeze.” But as Joe explains, the more you try to get out of the freeze, the more you freeze. The more you try to escape the liminal space, the longer you’re stuck there.
The hack is counterintuitive: welcome the freeze. “Oh, look. I’m frozen. I wonder when I’ll thaw. I can just relax and check this out.” Or go further — double your freeze, triple it, quadruple it. This works because it’s the one thing that isn’t resistance. Intensifying the freeze deliberately exhausts the pattern, similar to psoas release exercises where you fatigue the surrounding muscles until the held tension can finally shake loose.
“You could even say that the stuckness is putting pressure on yourself. And if you are trying to resist the stuckness, you’re adding more pressure. So you’re just fighting the part of you that’s fighting yourself. Harder.”
This applies on a nervous system level specifically. The freeze response was originally adaptive — when you’re a child in a no-win situation, stillness is the safest option. The problem is that the adult keeps applying the child’s strategy, and then resisting the strategy on top of that, creating layers of self-opposition.
Related Concepts
- Resistance creates the feared outcome
- Bullying yourself creates resistance
- Welcoming fear over conquering it
- The childhood freeze response becomes the adult trap
- Intensifying a feeling moves you through it rather than trapping you