Freezing the Thaw: From Survival to Feeling
When it comes to working with horses, often you’ll hear about their fight and flight responses. Horses have a deeply rooted fight and flight response, with a strong preference to flight. When a horse feels threatened or in danger, they’ll quickly flee to escape harm. If a horse feels it can’t escape or is cornered, it’ll fight.
However there is a third survival response often experienced by horses. Functional freeze is a lesser known response, where a horse emotionally shuts down, despite still functioning (walking, moving, etc.). Horses learn this survival response, when they’ve been shamed and punished for their behaviours. Often horses in a functional freeze response are mistaken as compliant or calm, but in reality they’ve learned it’s safer not resist.
The functional freeze response in horses mirrors similar responses in humans, where we may appear calm, do what's asked, but are actually emotional shutdown. Other times we feel like we are “going through the motions”, but inside we feel detached from our emotions as they may be too painful, or we’ve been told to suppress and ignore our feelings.
When working with horses, we may misinterpret good behaviours as compliance, but often it’s an early warning sign that we are in a functional freeze response. In horses, early signs of functional freeze may include a lack of curiosity, dull responses, or not showing their normal emotional range (playfulness, alertness, etc.). In humans, we may notice similar feelings in addition to a lack of motivation and emotional flatness. Freeze disconnects us from the body, but with gentle awareness we can notice the subtle signs that we are in survival mode, and similar to horses, a signal that we need to explore ways to remove pressure and control.
At the end of the day, whether it’s horses or ourselves, we should always question automatic behaviours, and just because we’re functioning, doesn’t mean we’re okay.
