Breaking the freeze in activists’ Fight-Flight-FREEZE. (1st draft)

You’re at a protest. Your comrades are by your side. A line of riot police move in to close off a street. Your comrades rush forward to push through, ready for impact. You stand, frozen to the ground. Heart pounding in your ear. Your comrades are in the thick of it. You want to help them. You have enough adrenaline to run for miles but you just. can. not. move.

This is a
first attempt at writing a short resource guide for activists who experience ‘freeze’ in high-stress situations. It’s a work in progress and contributions or feedback from activists are welcome.

Ultimately, I hope to offer some advice for activists whose ‘fight-flight-freeze’ response leans towards ‘freeze’ in activist settings and who hope to change that. Not because activists should change that (they shouldn’t, we don’t all have to be on the front line at all), but because I’m not about to tell them that they’re not allowed to try to change that if it matters to them.

It’s a five part plan:

Accepting your limits

Don’t stop reading here. I know, this isn’t what you wanted to hear, I’ll get to the practical part later. I’m going to try to help you beat the freeze, I promise.

But if you’re going to spend energy on trying to beat the freeze you are also going to run into your limits and if your sense of self-worth is tied to not being a ‘coward’, meeting those limits will be very emotional and could be a big barrier so I strongly suggest taking the time to accept your limits first.

The thing is: ‘freeze’ is a mental limit. It’s basically a stress-overload that causes you to shut down. It can feel numb or it can feel hyper-alert.
It can include dissociation or panic attacks. But however it manifests, you don’t choose it.

You don’t decide to freeze. So no, it’s not ‘cowardice’.

Freeze is just like a physical limit, when you can’t run any further, can’t jump any higher. Would you hold it against a comrade if they avoided certain actions because they physically can’t run? No, that would be cruel, right? I hope you’re better than that. I hope you’re better to yourself too.

Like a physical limit, you might be able to stretch your mental limits through practice but is hard, it takes time and energy, you can easily over-exhaust and damage yourself. And just like with physical abilities, you will still reach a limit beyond which you can not stretch yourself. So ask yourself how important breaking your freeze really is to you. Why do you want this so badly? And how prepared you are to find where your definite unchangeable limits are. Are you going to accept yourself whatever you find?

Finding your other talents

This is another thing you’ve probably heard before, but again: please read it. Like accepting your limits, finding your other talents is something I strongly advice doing before trying to break your freeze.

Because (1) you might discover that being in the heat of the fight isn’t actually where you need to be. A lot of activism is important. The medics, the legal team, the food ALL need committed activists working to make the whole action possible and there are parts of activism that you might enjoy much more and be better at than being on the front line. The support systems behind the action are as important as the front line.

And (2) if you have tried it all and you STILL want to be in high-stress actions, you’ll almost certainly discover that beating the freeze is stressful and draining. So there will be times when you won’t feel ready and there will be times when you want to take a break. If ‘taking a break’ means removing yourself entirely from your activist life, you’re likely to isolate yourself at a shitty moment and enter a downward spiral. Doing low-stress activism instead is a much better idea.

Preventing freeze

So you’ve accepted your limits, you’ve found your other talents, but you still would like to be able to control that freeze response? Well, then let’s get to it. To do so, we’ll basically be listing a variety of tactics that push away the
stress-overload

that triggers freeze. Some will work for you, some will not. None will work all the time and under every level of stress.

1. Sleep. Eat. Relax. Make sure you are well rested and stable before an action. It makes a big difference in how quickly you overload. Try to avoid other high-stress activities in the weeks before the action. If you are going through a difficult mental-health time, now may not the time to push your limits in an action.
2. Have a clear step-by-step plan. Improvisation is very difficult when your brain is under stress. Having a clear reversed set of instructions can be make a big difference. Choose a role within an action that has clear instructions and doesn’t require a lot of spontaneous initiative.  
3. Follow instructions. This is not everyone’s cup of tea and might go against your ideals of anti-authoritarianism, but some of us function best in high-stress situations if someone else is giving us clear and direct instructions. A buddy can do this for you, if they are comfortable in that role. Experiment with this carefully and see how you react. Do you retain all your abilities for critical thinking and asserting your boundaries, or do you go on auto-pilot? We don’t all respond the same.
4. Use rhythm. Music, marching and slogans put people into a collective flow and breaks our sense of isolation in high-stress situations. As a result, they make it easier for us to follow our comrades into action at a point where we would freeze if we felt isolated.
5. Find out if you have a protection-override. Some people with freeze discover that they are able to withstand much more stress as a medic or legal observer because they are responsible for other people’s safety and that sense of responsibility can be a powerful override. 
6. Take small steps and have a back-up plan for if you do freeze. If you are testing your abilities, you will inevitably not always get the result you want. Be sensible and start with low-risk actions that do not immediately put you into the heat of a big action. Have a plan of how to get to safety if you freeze and how your comrades will be effected by it. Be honest and realistic to your comrades. If you are dishonest with your comrades and freeze at a moment when they are counting on you, you are a danger to more people than yourself!

Try some of these things and reflect what worked for you and what didn’t. Don’t expect miracles over night. Keep a sharp eye on how you respond to your experiences emotionally. Remember, this is the mental equivalent of pushing your physical limits, so it is worth checking in with your mental health.

Lowering adrenaline

If you experience freeze, you probably have a lot of adrenaline during actions. During the heat of the moment, you need that adrenaline, you do not want to lower it. But before or after the moment, the adrenaline can contribute to panic attacks, post-action stress and burn-outs. So lower adrenaline when needed, for example by:

1. Letting it out. Jumping. Dancing. Shouting. Cursing. Singing. Breaking things. Laughing. Beating an old loaf of bread into pulp.

2. Shaking it off. Shake your arms and legs as if trying to shake off water. Repeat for a long time and brush your hands over your arms and legs in a strong outward motion.

3. Focusing on your breathing. Take a moment to feel your breath. You do not need to breath a specific way, just feel the sensation of your breath going in and out of your body. If this makes you feel uncomfortable, stop. Some people find that this is counterproductive for them when they are close to panic.

4. Feel your feet on the ground. Focus on the nerves in your feet. The temperature of your feet. Your socks. The soles of your shoes. The ground below. How much can you feel?

Preventing burnout

Like an intense work-out on your body, fighting freeze is intense on your brain. And unlike a work-out, an action is an uncontrolled environment that will frequently be more intense than you expected it to be. It’s very easy to push past your own limits and end up with stress-related mental health problems or a real burn-out. This is true of every activist, but even more true of someone who is pushing their own limits. Take your mental health seriously and:

1. Sleep. Eat. Relax. After an action, recovering from all the stress is key. Taking care of your physical basics is a big part of making that happen. Do not neglect it.
2. Avoid new high-stress events for a while. Do not push your limits too often. It really is a very intense experience. Try to avoid doing a high-stress action for at least a month. If there are multiple protests in a month, use your other talents and join the kitchen, etc.
3. Be kind to yourself. Chances are you didn’t do all you hoped you could do. Maybe you didn’t manage to get beyond your limits at all. Take time to accept that. Be as kind to yourself as you would be to others.
4. Celebrate small victories. Did you make progress? That’s fucking amazing! That’s such a tough thing to do and yet you did it! No really, that’s goddamn heroic.

5. Learn about sustainable activism. (I’ll add sources here at some point.)

Is nothing working? Is the cost to your mental health to high? Then please do not destroy yourself to get past a fixed limit. You matter and you could mean so much to other parts of the struggle.
Focus on accepting that limit and letting go of the idea that you need to do high-stress action.
Find your other talents.

I promise you, you’ll find that activists in supportive roles are fucking heroes that move mountains. 

That’s all I have to share for now. What can I say? It’s a work in progress, based on a variety of experiences from a few people, none of whom have found the ultimate solution to ‘freeze’. Do you have something to contribute? Please let me know!!!