barefoot
MyPTSD Pro
I’ve recently been talking with my T about fight/flight/freeze responses. And how my default is freeze - I don’t remember ever doing either of the others.
It would be good to have access to fight/flight responses so I don’t end up being really vulnerable because I freeze and can’t do anything to get out of the situation.
It’s not really that I’m expecting to be attacked or assaulted at some point and am trying to equip myself to ninja my way out of an ambush and run for my life.
A key area for me where freeze gets in the way is medical appointments/procedures. I tend to freeze and my voice gets hijacked and I fail to self-advocate and things often then go pear-shaped and I end up very triggered and with a very distressing, stressful and messy experience. I would really like to find a way where I don’t just default freeze in these situations so that I can advocate for myself and have better experiences.
In the last few minutes of today’s session, T suggested a visualisation exercise for me to do on my own every day before our next session.
The exercise is:
- think of a real situation where I froze
- imagine a big tv screen in front of me and imagine that I am holding the tv remote control
- start to watch the situation unfold on the screen
- at the moment when I started to freeze in real life, imagine turning over to a different tv channel. Then imagine a different outcome where, instead of freezing, I had a fight or flight response
- allow this new direction to play out on the screen.
T says that imagining these different outcomes will create and strengthen new neural pathways so that fight/flight can become more available to my brain as response options - not just freeze.
While I want to be able to navigate medical stuff better so I don’t freeze and end up in a very stressful experience, I am aware that I feel incredibly anti doing this exercise. There are a few reasons:
- I have tried a similar process before (with a pause and rewind approach rather than changing channels) It turned into a very distressing experience - I dissociated badly and it took days to regulate myself. I do realise, however, that this was before I’d had any therapy and that I wasn’t in a psychologically safe environment or with a trusted person. But I really struggled with it.
- This kind of exercise feels very NLP to me (the above experience was with a Master NLP coach) I have done some NLP training myself as a practitioner years ago but a lot of it didn’t sit well with me and I don’t use it. My T and I talked about NLP quite near the start of our work together. We both said it wasn’t for us and that we felt uncomfortable with some of it including the ‘cultish’ of aspects of it. So, I’m surprised - and not in a good way - that this is the sort of exercise she has suggested I do.
- I’m not good at visualisations in general. I am not a visual person at all, I find it practically impossible to ‘see’ anything in my head. So, I don’t know how to ‘see’ the scene on the tv. I struggled with this before. Is is important that I can visualise it in this way? Can I just think through different outcomes instead without seeing it like a film, or would this not ‘work’?
- It’s really hard to pinpoint when a freeze started to then be able to ‘change channels’ and imagine what else could happen next. If I froze - especially if I then dissociated - it’s all so patchy and fragmented in my memory - there isn’t a clear moment when it started.
- It’s also hard to identify these specific moments where a situation (eg a medical procedure) often involves a cluster of trigger points. Again, it’s just not clear when the moment is that I’m meant to take as my key moment.
I’m aware that, as well as feeling anti the exercise I am also feeling a bit annoyed with my T. She just sort of rushed through the explanation at the end of our session and has left me to it and there just wasn’t the chance to talk through any of my concerns/previous bad experience with something similar because we had run out of time.
I could email her and tell her. Or just not do it and tell her next time why I didn’t. Or, I could just persevere. But I really feel strongly that I don’t want to do it.
Any thoughts around this?
Anyone done this sort of exercise? How did you find it?
Any tips for getting around my challenges with it?
Should I go with my gut and not do the exercise because I feel such a strong ‘no’ about it? Or should I push through this resistance and make myself try it again?
Thanks!
It would be good to have access to fight/flight responses so I don’t end up being really vulnerable because I freeze and can’t do anything to get out of the situation.
It’s not really that I’m expecting to be attacked or assaulted at some point and am trying to equip myself to ninja my way out of an ambush and run for my life.
A key area for me where freeze gets in the way is medical appointments/procedures. I tend to freeze and my voice gets hijacked and I fail to self-advocate and things often then go pear-shaped and I end up very triggered and with a very distressing, stressful and messy experience. I would really like to find a way where I don’t just default freeze in these situations so that I can advocate for myself and have better experiences.
In the last few minutes of today’s session, T suggested a visualisation exercise for me to do on my own every day before our next session.
The exercise is:
- think of a real situation where I froze
- imagine a big tv screen in front of me and imagine that I am holding the tv remote control
- start to watch the situation unfold on the screen
- at the moment when I started to freeze in real life, imagine turning over to a different tv channel. Then imagine a different outcome where, instead of freezing, I had a fight or flight response
- allow this new direction to play out on the screen.
T says that imagining these different outcomes will create and strengthen new neural pathways so that fight/flight can become more available to my brain as response options - not just freeze.
While I want to be able to navigate medical stuff better so I don’t freeze and end up in a very stressful experience, I am aware that I feel incredibly anti doing this exercise. There are a few reasons:
- I have tried a similar process before (with a pause and rewind approach rather than changing channels) It turned into a very distressing experience - I dissociated badly and it took days to regulate myself. I do realise, however, that this was before I’d had any therapy and that I wasn’t in a psychologically safe environment or with a trusted person. But I really struggled with it.
- This kind of exercise feels very NLP to me (the above experience was with a Master NLP coach) I have done some NLP training myself as a practitioner years ago but a lot of it didn’t sit well with me and I don’t use it. My T and I talked about NLP quite near the start of our work together. We both said it wasn’t for us and that we felt uncomfortable with some of it including the ‘cultish’ of aspects of it. So, I’m surprised - and not in a good way - that this is the sort of exercise she has suggested I do.
- I’m not good at visualisations in general. I am not a visual person at all, I find it practically impossible to ‘see’ anything in my head. So, I don’t know how to ‘see’ the scene on the tv. I struggled with this before. Is is important that I can visualise it in this way? Can I just think through different outcomes instead without seeing it like a film, or would this not ‘work’?
- It’s really hard to pinpoint when a freeze started to then be able to ‘change channels’ and imagine what else could happen next. If I froze - especially if I then dissociated - it’s all so patchy and fragmented in my memory - there isn’t a clear moment when it started.
- It’s also hard to identify these specific moments where a situation (eg a medical procedure) often involves a cluster of trigger points. Again, it’s just not clear when the moment is that I’m meant to take as my key moment.
I’m aware that, as well as feeling anti the exercise I am also feeling a bit annoyed with my T. She just sort of rushed through the explanation at the end of our session and has left me to it and there just wasn’t the chance to talk through any of my concerns/previous bad experience with something similar because we had run out of time.
I could email her and tell her. Or just not do it and tell her next time why I didn’t. Or, I could just persevere. But I really feel strongly that I don’t want to do it.
Any thoughts around this?
Anyone done this sort of exercise? How did you find it?
Any tips for getting around my challenges with it?
Should I go with my gut and not do the exercise because I feel such a strong ‘no’ about it? Or should I push through this resistance and make myself try it again?
Thanks!
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