Freeze states and the bottom of the iceberg
On the present moment
I never really experienced freeze as a protective state, even though protection is the freeze state’s whole purpose. When I was living with chronic cPTSD, I mostly experienced it as an annoying and persistent blankness that seemed to claim my aliveness and keep all the colours on grayscale.
Last week? I experienced the freeze state as protective.
The election happened, and nothing happened in me. I went blank. I shut down. I felt no impulse toward anything related to it. I definitely didn’t want to talk about it with anyone. I just went blank, and stayed that way for a few days.
I wasn’t surprised by the election outcome, but I was bewildered and injured by it. I perceive the world and its people (and their futures) to have been injured by it too. And, since the complexity of that injury, and breadth of that injury, and the intensity of that injury was like some overwhelming injurious blast, my system shut me down, and let me blink quietly by myself for a while.
That was protective. Events that intrude on your sense of How Things Work can be traumatic and destabilising, and even more so for highly sensitive/gifted minds (both types being more vulnerable to existential depression in general). Thank you, body. 🫡
Words aren’t helping me much in this aftermath. The reality of how and why we got to this place and all it means for the future is too complex, too far-reaching, and too intense for our cute wee linguistic forms. Even trying to describe the systemic realities in sentences you omit almost everything by trying to say anything, and so it seems (to me) pointless to try.
No-one really needs it anyway; I feel like we all get it, in ways we didn’t yet in 2016.
So instead of speaking directly to the events of the last couple of weeks, let us refresh our commitment to the systems-based view, which includes the following, from Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A primer (featured in this earlier post):
“Systems fool us by presenting themselves - or we fool ourselves by seeing the world - as a series of events.
…
It’s endlessly engrossing to take in the world as a series of events, and constantly surprising, because that way of seeing the world has almost no predictive or explanatory value. Like the tip of an iceberg rising above the water, events are the most visible aspect of a larger complex - but not always the most important.”
No-one reading this is unaware of the systems feeding the election’s outcome. Poverty, racism, toxic (and wounded) masculinity, information systems loss, culture shift, backlash to culture shift, stress states that prioritise self-interest and are perpetuated by all the other systems, loss of the apparatuses of community, democratic infrastructure loss, failures to adapt fast enough to systemic and cultural change, loss of shared morality…on and on and on.
But it does pay to ground ourselves in the reality that the election is only one piece of an unfathomably larger whole.
In my protective shutdown state I suddenly wanted to read memoirs: deeply personal experiences of life, no generalisations to be seen. It’s actually one of my favourite ways to better understand systems.
I read Heavy: An American memoir by Kiese Laymon. (Incidentally, that book was written in 2018 and is not about the political process but bloody hell if it wasn’t the best thing I’ve read for processing the systemic “whys” of the election.)
And, I finally read the second half of my May Sarton book that’s been in my handbag for most of the year, not being read.
May Sarton’s book is titled Journal of a Solitude, and is a personal journal of a year (ish) from 1970 to 1971, with a focus on her experiences of deliberate solitude in a forest cottage in New Hampshire. Her topics roam about, and it felt a bit like she was reaching out to me from the book itself, grabbing me by the lapels all the way from 50 years ago, to say “we share this experience of humanity”:
“In my lifetime I have seen one comforting myth after another taken apart as I, like everyone else, have tried to come to grips with hard truth. …
We have had to accept that democracy in the United States has been imperceptibly taken over and transformed into government by cartels and power groups, including organized labor and the military, and has almost eluded the grasp of “the people”; so we are engaged in a dreadful war in which no one can believe and which we seem helpless to end.
We have come to understand that blacks, far from being “liberated", are still oppressed in every possible way. And now we are increasingly aware that women must fight a difficult and painful war for their autonomy and wholeness.
We have had to swallow the hard truth that boys and girls of even the middle class are delinquent in large numbers, take to drugs because something is so lacking in the ethos we have created that they look for “illumination” from this most troubling of sources. …
The marvel is that there are still so many people of courage who go on fighting in spite of all these reasons for despair.”
I’m not saying “we’ve always been worried about this stuff so we can minimise the version that’s happening now”. I’m saying that coming to that passage the day after the election was VERY WEIRD.
The present follows similar themes from Sarton’s 1971 but with different flavours and intensities; we need not argue about who had it worse. I also don’t know that “fight” is the verb the present asks from us.
And yet, there is something in the fact that all along these challenges to goodness and mutual care have come, complex and thorny and dangerous, and all along there have been people willing to stand up against them. The systems iceberg includes those people too.
Of course, this is not some “out there” source of comfort: we are and must continue to be those people. Mr Rogers may have told the children to “look for the helpers” when disaster strikes, but as adults we must actually be those helpers.
What it means to be those people is an (enormous) topic for several other posts. For now I simply name our role as individuals in our wildly complex social, cultural and political systems.
If you want to get into it right now, I offer
’ ‘How I became ‘collapse aware’’, a beautifully nuanced reflection on all this adaptation stuff:
May you emerge from the freeze state of this iceberg tip’s event able to see and care for the whole iceberg (so to speak).
May you know that all the good stuff like resilience, democracy, and flourishing lie in mutual care with other people.
May you have those people, find those people, BE those people.
Until next time
Katie
Thanks for reading The Living Library, where we grapple with complexity and humanity and all the good stuff.
I am a coach, consultant and educator, working people who are highly self-led and who care deeply, including highly sensitive and gifted adults. I work with clients on whatever they need support with, from high sensitivity/giftedness itself, to crossroads decisions, to self actualisation and transformative change, to creative development, to leadership (and all the interconnected everything else inbetween).
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There is always a take-home insight in your posts and this time it was the phrase "loss of shared morality". Surely, a broadly shared morality is the rudder for navigating the future of this earthship. No wonder many of us feel 'all at sea'. And that sends my on a whole other philospohical wander about 'morality' itself as a concept! Very stimulating post. Thank you.
Yes, totally this - “ but I was bewildered and injured by it. I perceive the world and its people (and their futures) to have been injured by it too.”