When I work with clients who are on the edge of major change—leaving an abusive relationship, calling an attorney, setting a boundary they’ve avoided for years—I often hear, “I know this chaos. I can handle this chaos. I don’t know what comes next.”

This isn’t resistance. It’s not indecision or weakness. It’s a trauma response. Specifically, it’s freeze.

Freeze is your nervous system doing exactly what it’s designed to do—protect you from perceived danger when fight or flight aren’t available. If you grew up around volatility or have spent years in a relationship where anger, control, or neglect dictated the emotional temperature, your nervous system has learned that safety means stillness. That silence might prevent escalation. That waiting quietly might buy you peace.

So when you finally start contemplating change—divorce, confrontation, independence—your body sounds the alarm. It tells you: Don’t move. Don’t speak. It’s not safe yet.

This is the biology of fear, not a failure of courage.

When you find yourself tolerating pain or chaos you understand rather than facing freedom you can’t yet imagine, that’s not stagnation—it’s survival. It’s your nervous system clinging to what it knows will keep you alive, even if it doesn’t make you happy.

But here’s the shift: you can’t think your way out of freeze. You have to soothe your way out.

When I work with clients in this stage, we start small. Breathing. Grounding. Reconnecting with the body—because your body is the one that got the message it’s not safe to move. We talk about micro-choices: sending one email, making one call, allowing one truth to land without immediately pushing it away.

And slowly, your nervous system begins to understand: The threat has passed.

When I left my own abusive relationship, I remember the paralysis vividly. It wasn’t indecision—it was biology. I was terrified to make the wrong move, terrified of what might happen next. But then came the moment when my maternal instinct overrode my fear—when I realized that if I stayed, my son would learn to normalize abuse. That awareness wasn’t just emotional clarity—it was somatic permission. My body finally allowed movement.

Healing from trauma is not about flipping a switch. It’s about teaching your body that forward motion is safe again.

So if you’re frozen right now—unable to make the call, unable to take the next step—start by giving yourself grace. The freeze response doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means your system has been working overtime to keep you alive.

Your job now isn’t to bulldoze through it—it’s to build safety gently, one nervous-system-friendly step at a time.

Freedom doesn’t begin when fear disappears.
It begins when your body learns that movement is safe.