Animals in Their Freeze Instincts
Observations Which Help Us Understand Ourselves and Our Chronic Conditions
As long time readers will know, my contention is that idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease, as well as the presentation of major symptoms in many other chronic conditions, is what happens when humans get stuck in one of our Nervous System’s “freeze” programs, designed to keep us alive under conditions of perceived lethal threat.
One route by which I came to such conclusions was by observing the behaviours of animals. In this article, I will share a number of animal videos which my colleague, and biologist,
of (who independently came to the same conclusion, by similar routes) has collected. Then we will consider instances of this in the human animal. [There is no need to watch all these videos in full, just take a glance, and skip through to get the picture, although the very short funny cat video is worth watching a few times!]Let’s first look at the quintessential “freezing” animal, the opossum, after which the term “playing possum” originates.
According to the asknature article
“Playing possum is known more scientifically as death-feigning or thanatosis. But it’s not acting. It’s not voluntary at all. It’s a built-in physiological defence system that is automatically triggered as a last-resort response to an otherwise inescapable death. The body’s nervous system sets off a cascade of neurochemicals and hormones that dramatically affect the function of the many parts of the brain, as well as organs throughout the body.”
The next video shows that this defensive Nervous System instinctual response can indeed result in survival, in this case preventing the opossum being mauled or eaten by the dog. Skip to the end to see the opossum come back to life, after the threat is no longer present.
Next, since everyone loves a cat video, here is a cute cat freezing. Note the unseeing, staring fixed eyes in the cat while it freezes. Note also again that the strategy does work: the baby quickly loses curiosity about the cat once it freezes.
Dogs do it too:
Here it is in mice:
Baby deer:
We can also see it in humans, in acute stressful situations, such as public speaking.
Here is an example of humans experiencing it in a more prolonged situation, a case where it is called “catatonia”, which some folks with an autism diagnosis can encounter/be prone to:
The difference with humans and other animals is that we can seem to have a propensity to get stuck in these freeze states. Actually, I no longer believe this is due to a “malfunction” in humans, but that this is our Nervous System doing exactly what it is designed to do: save us from extreme threats, and keep us alive as a last resort, just the same as in the other animals. Instead, I now believe the actual problem is the modern environment we have created for ourselves, which is so very far from the conditions we evolved to survive and thrive in.
This modern society of ours constantly throws at us very stressful situations that we just cannot fight or run away from, so that we come to habituate the only stress response left to us: freeze. Eventually, we habituate the freeze state so often, that we get permanently stuck in it - it becomes reflexive - which then manifests in diagnoses such as “Idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease”.
If we are right about this, then in fact labels such as Idiopathic (of unknown origin) Disease are actually inappropriate, and opposite to the reality - both because it is then of known origin and also it is not a pathology of our biology at all, but a natural instinctual survival response to a very maladapted and pathological modern world and way of life.
Furthermore, this understanding points us to the “cure” for such ailments, or at least the way to reduce symptoms to an arbitrary degree, is in stress reduction and removing the threats/triggers/stressors in our environments, and in our lives, that are causing our Nervous Systems to habituate our natural freeze survival instincts. This is what Lilian and I am proving in real life.
Both Lilian and I have created online courses, designed to transfer all the pragmatic knowledge we have gathered, and all the real life practical interventions designed to help people to escape from being stuck in freeze.
For the month of October, I have also created a $25 off discount on my course for my substack readers [coupon code SUBSTACK25 at checkout].
I, myself, have gone into "freeze" mode hundreds of times throughout my life, always as a result of fear that someone will harm me in some way.
The NBA player "freeze" is a result of either 1) MK-ULTRA programming glitching out or 2) an intentional effort by someone in the room to trigger his programming with a code word, symbol, or gesture. There are numerous videos of limelight characters going into this mode: Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Wendy Williams, Eminem, Al Roker, and very recently, Mitch McConnell. There are glitches other than freezing, such as passing out, uttering gibberish, and making bizarre gestures or actions.
My mother suffers terrible night terrors in which she always freezes up in these extreme situation where she fears being harmed. Ever since I was a little kid, I’d wake up because of this inhuman sound that comes out of her. It used to frighten me so, thinking she was in some extreme pain. It often sounded as if she was possessed. I’d wake her up and she would be so terribly relieved to be awaken. As if she was stuck paralysed in her dream without being able to do anything but witness herself being harmed. Since she lives with me, I’ve experienced this phenomenon with her my entire life and only recently have the night terrors appeared leas frequently. I think she has started to remember things from her childhood that she has expressed to me that she is finally able to release? I’ve never had a direction in which to go but something about the opossum behavior is resonating. And you even mentioned it in a comment the other day, but I didn’t really put two and two together until now. Thanks, Gary.