Why Integrating Stuckness (Fight/Flight/Freeze) Matters!

Have you ever felt like your body is running the show, even when your mind knows you’re safe? That’s because trauma doesn’t only live in your memories, it also lives in your nervous system. When the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) gets stuck in survival mode, life can feel overwhelming, exhausting, or numb. Whether you’re “stuck on” in constant hyperarousal (fight/flight), or “stuck off” in hypoarousal (freeze), your body struggles to return to its natural rhythm of safety and rest.

Understanding Stuck States in the Nervous System

Your ANS works 24/7 to scan your environment and decide how safe or unsafe it is. Depending on its reading, your body shifts between three primary states:

  1. Parasympathetic (Safety) – the “rest and digest” state where you feel calm, present, and connected.

  2. Sympathetic (Fight/Flight) – a state of hyperarousal that prepares you to face danger.

  3. Dorsal Vagal Freeze (Life Threat) – a shutdown state of collapse, numbness, or dissociation.

These states are meant to protect you. The challenge is when past trauma, whether childhood adversity, acute trauma, or long-term stress, locks your system into these heightened states, even when there’s no danger in the present.

When You’re Stuck “On” (Fight/Flight)

  • Racing thoughts, irritability, and hypervigilance

  • Trouble sleeping or resting

  • Poor digestion

  • Difficulty pausing before reacting emotionally

When You’re Stuck “Off” (Freeze)

  • Feeling emotionally flat or disconnected

  • Struggling to maintain close relationships

  • Low energy or chronic fatigue

  • Poor digestion and sleep

  • A sense of being collapsed or invisible

Neither state is wrong, they were once protective. But when we live there long-term, they keep us from fully engaging with life.

How Trauma Healing Unlocks Flow

To heal, the body needs more than just intellectual understanding. We must build the capacity to feel into and track uncomfortable sensations connected to fight, flight, or freeze. By staying present with these sensations and expressing the emotions linked to them, we help discharge the “bound survival energy” that keeps us stuck.

As this happens, something remarkable unfolds:

  • Your posture naturally opens and aligns.

  • Facial muscles and nerves relax.

  • Gut instincts become clearer and more trustworthy.

  • Choices begin to feel life-enhancing instead of fear-driven.

This process is not about reliving trauma, but about integrating it through the body so that the nervous system can return to balance.

Building Internal Safety and Resources

The foundation of healing is safety, or at least enough safety to explore what once felt overwhelming. Stuckness in the nervous system reflects how unsafe we once felt, often during developmental years. But healing means we can strengthen our inner resources now, at any age.

Through somatic practices like breathwork, gentle movement, and interoceptive awareness, we begin to feel into our bodies again. Over time, this shifts the nervous system out of survival mode and into regulation, creating space for vitality, connection, and joy.

A Reflection for You

Pause for a moment. When stress or conflict arises, which state do you tend to fall into?

  • Hyperarousal (Fight/Flight)?

  • Hypoarousal (Freeze)?

Recognizing your patterns is the first step toward healing them. From here, you can gently cultivate the capacity to feel into your body, shift stuck patterns, and thrive in all areas of your life.

Ready to Restore Your Flow?

If you’re ready to reconnect with your body and bring your nervous system back into balance, join me inside The Collective, my monthly Somatic Teachings membership where we practice tools that support healing, resilience, and flow.

Learn more and join The Collective here

Feel free to click here for a brief video on how to know if you are a Fight/Flight or Freezer and what to do!

Also, check out this previous blog on FFF + Fawn to learn more about what these 4 states physically look and feel like by clicking here.

How Interoception Can Rewire Your Nervous System

If you close your eyes, and sense into your gut and how it communicates to your brain via the biggest nerve in your body, the Parasympathetic Vagus nerve, what do you notice? Subtle sensations, a gentle aliveness circulating around the body, emotions surfacing, or nothing at all? In the early 1990s, Dr. Stephen Porges, founder of the Polyvagal Theory, coined interoception, our gut feedback, “as our sixth sense that allows us to become aware of our instinctual responses to our environment.”

What is Interoception?

Interoception is the physical, psychological, and social development in our bodies that allows us to sense stimulus from within our viscera, communicating our gut sense of safety, protection, good and bad stressors, and also elicits empathy. It is a feedback loop from our guts that calms our limbic brains, and can also get stuck on “on” or “off” due to trauma.

When we have a healthy Nervous System and good attunement with ourselves, others and the environment, we sense when something is off before it gets bad, e.g. we feel tired, drained, sluggish, hungry, or where we are in our cycle as women. This felt sense develops or struggles to develop within us based on how we were attuned to as young children. If we learn to ignore these signals at a young age, this eventually leads to disconnect, overwhelm and sickness as adults.

How does Interoception Develop?

When we are babies we know how to rest and digest, sense fear, hunger, know if something isn’t right, or if touch by our caregivers is kind or not. It is the job of our caregivers to attune to us and meet physiological needs, which is why babies cry: they are in physiological distress. When the baby gets fed or diapers changed, they experience co-regulation, e.g. warmth with a caregiver, eye contact, down-regulation, and soothing. This attunement helps to build Nervous System regulation, secure attachment and good experiences with our guts over time.

When babies don’t get fed when hungry, for example, while sleep training, their stomachs cramp, hurt, they cry loudly, and eventually collapse into the freeze response. If they repeatedly experience intense distress without adequate co-regulation, this sets up confused or numbed out interoception, e.g. a poor, negative experience of their insides. Many parents from previous generations also didn’t receive co-regulation, were trained not to listen to their guts and to override their paternal instincts, e.g. doctor’s told them to let babies cry to self-soothe.

How do we Repair Interoception?

To restore damage done from dysregulated interoception, we need to relearn how to feel our guts and ourselves accurately again, so that we can remember how to feel, and feel safe in our bodies. This helps us to fear our internal experiences less, regain self-compassion, regulate our attention and co-regulate with others more easily. Practicing interoceptive exercises and tuning into our gut sense within our real lives, also helps us to regain accurate gut feedback, e.g. feeling, sensing, orienting in the world.

 

What is Neuroception?

Building our capacity to feel our inner world also contributes to our brains’ ability to accurately discern and signal safety or danger from our environments or other people, which is called Neuroception. If this function is faulty, the subconscious parts of our brain will overfire to make us feel that we are in danger when we are safe, and underfire to make us feel that we are safe when we are in danger. This capacity or lack of it, is also often influenced by a history of adversity and requires support to strengthen interoception so that we can choose healthy relationships and environments to thrive in.

Strengthening Interoception and Neuroception for Resilience

Check in with yourself after reading this blog and honestly ask yourself, can you rely on the info that your gut sends to your brain when you have an important decision to make or problem to solve? If this feels like an ongoing struggle, please join us for monthly Somatic Integrations and/or the 12 month Grace & Somatics: Collective Program to receive personal and community support to reconnect! Click here for more info.

Enjoy these 2 quick exercises to strengthen healthy interoception here.

Click here to find out how to learn the difference between your gut feedback and intuition!