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Functional freeze keeps your body in survival mode, even when your life looks fine on the outside. Somatic therapy helps you get unstuck.
Los Angeles-based anxiety, trauma, and attachment therapist who helps high-functioning adults break free from people-pleasing, perfectionism, and childhood patterns that no longer serve them
You’re functioning. You’re checking boxes, showing up to work, texting people back (mostly). From the outside, you look like you have it together. But inside? You feel… nothing. Or everything. It’s hard to tell. Either way, it’s exhausting.
This kind of emotional flatness and inner disconnection has a name: functional freeze. It’s a survival state where your body stays “on” just enough to get through the day—but shuts down emotionally to avoid overwhelm. And I see it all the time in clients who are high-functioning, anxious, perfectionistic, and totally disconnected from their own needs.
In this post, I’ll break down what functional freeze actually is, how it shows up in your daily life, and—most importantly—what your body needs to start feeling safe enough to shift out of it through somatic therapy. Whether you’ve felt stuck, numb, disconnected, or like therapy “didn’t work,” there’s a reason. And there’s another way forward.
I see this all the time in my practice—especially in high-achieving, kind, burned-out adults who’ve had to hold it together for everyone else. A functional freeze state is one of the most misunderstood nervous system responses because, on the outside, you look okay. But on the inside, your body is still in protection mode.
So what exactly is a functional freeze? It’s a survival response. Specifically, it’s a blend of two autonomic states: dorsal vagal shutdown (think: collapse, shut down, play dead) and fawn (appease, over-function, go along to avoid conflict). So you’re not completely immobilized like in a full freeze, but you’re definitely not in a regulated, present state either. It’s not a choice. It’s a hardwired, nonverbal response from your body.
Is Depression a Functional Freeze?
This kind of freeze response often gets mistaken for depression—but they’re not always the same. With depression, everything can feel heavy, dark, or hopeless. With functional freeze, you might not feel much of anything. It’s flatness. Disconnection. Like you’re stuck between “I can’t do this” and “I have to keep doing this.”
Functional freeze can be hard to identify because it’s so subtle. It’s scrolling Instagram for hours without realizing. It’s forgetting what you walked into the room to do. It’s telling yourself, “I’ll deal with that tomorrow,” every day for a year. And because it looks so “put together” on the outside, most people—including a lot of therapists—don’t catch it.
From a survival standpoint, your body has one job: keep you safe. Not happy. Not productive. Just alive.
And when your body decides that life is too much—whether from growing up in a household where emotions weren’t safe, constantly bracing for something bad to happen, or burning out from people-pleasing—it starts shutting down non-essential systems to conserve energy. That’s not weakness. That’s biology.
Imagine your body like a phone on 1% battery. What happens? It dims the screen. It stops running background apps. It does everything it can to save just enough power to not die. That’s what functional freeze is. Your body isn’t trying to annoy you—it’s literally saving energy.
A lot of my clients describe it as “being here, but not really here.” They’re going through the motions. Smiling at meetings. Helping their partner. Texting back with emojis. But inside? It’s flat. Their mind feels foggy. Their body feels heavy. They want to care… but they don’t.
That’s not because they’re unmotivated or broken. It’s because their body learned that shutting down felt safer than feeling everything. And honestly? That probably made a lot of sense back then. It just doesn’t work anymore.
When your body gets stuck in functional freeze state, it needs more than just mindset shifts or morning routines. It needs help feeling safe again—slowly, gently, in a way that actually works with your biology instead of fighting it.
This is where somatic therapy helps—not by talking about the freeze, but by slowly helping your body learn it doesn’t need to stay stuck in it. If this list of symptoms feels uncomfortably familiar, somatic therapy in Los Angeles might be exactly what your nervous system’s been waiting for.
First rule: you cannot think your way out of it. Functional freeze isn’t about mindset—it’s about physiology. Your prefrontal cortex (the part that plans and reasons) is dialed way down in this state. Your body doesn’t feel safe, and safety is the only thing that tells the brain it can switch gears.
You need to work from the bottom-up—body first, then brain. You have to send signals to your nervous system that say: “Hey, we’re okay. We’re not in danger anymore. You can come back now.” This can look like:
Movement: Gentle rhythmic motion (walking, rocking, stretching) activates your vestibular system. It helps shift you into a more regulated state.
Interoception: Tuning into sensations inside your body—like tension, warmth, or breath—can reconnect you to yourself. This engages your insula, which plays a role in awareness and self-regulation.
Co-regulation: Being around someone who feels safe and grounded literally changes your nervous system. Your body picks up on cues of safety from their voice, face, and presence. That’s neuroception—your brain’s unconscious radar for danger vs. safety.
Breath and voice: Deep, slow exhales, humming, or even singing activate the vagus nerve and can help move you out of freeze.
Somatic therapy is designed to work with your nervous system, not against it. Somatic therapy helps you safely reconnect, slowly and gently, so your body doesn’t freak out and shut down even more. It teaches you to notice what’s happening in your body without judgment, and without needing to fix or change it right away.
Here’s the science of what’s actually happening in session:
Therapy helps create new neural pathways by pairing body sensations with safety and presence. That’s what’s called neuroplasticity—your brain rewiring itself based on new experiences.
You’re calming the part of your brain that constantly thinks you’re in danger, by showing it there’s nothing to run from anymore.
In session, you’re teaching your brain to do something different by feeling what’s happening in your body while staying present and safe.
And you’re building vagal tone—which is basically your nervous system’s ability to recover from stress. More vagal tone = more resilience.
Over time, your body stops defaulting to freeze as the go-to strategy. You start to feel more present, more grounded, more alive. Want to learn more about somatic therapy? Check out my somatic therapy practice in LA.
Slowly look around the room and notice what’s safe, soft, or interesting. This reminds your body it’s not trapped.
Try lying on the floor with a weighted blanket, or pressing your hands into a pillow. This gives your body input—I exist, I have weight, I’m here.
Wiggle your toes. Turn your head side to side. Shrug your shoulders. We’re not trying to “get energy out”—we’re trying to say: it’s okay to move again.
Pet your dog, talk to someone calming, listen to someone’s voice you trust. Connection is quite literally medicine for freeze.
Ask yourself: “What’s one thing I could do?” Then only do 10% of that.
If these sound simple, it’s because they should be. Complexity overwhelms a frozen system. Somatic therapy in Los Angeles can help guide this work in a way that’s personalized, doable, and safe—especially if you don’t trust your body yet.
Cheryl Groskopf is a Los Angeles–based licensed therapist specializing in anxiety, trauma, and attachment. With a background in psychology and advanced training in somatic therapy, Cheryl helps high-functioning adults who feel stuck in chronic patterns like people-pleasing, perfectionism, emotional shutdown, and functional freeze. Her approach is grounded, direct, and designed to actually work—not just talk in circles.
Cheryl’s expertise has been featured in TIME, Verywell Mind, Today.com, Bustle, and more. She works with clients who are ready to stop overthinking their anxiety and start rewiring it at the root.
Want to know what it’s like to work with her? Learn more about Cheryl and her therapy approach here.
Functional freeze doesn’t mean your nervous system is broken. It’s just stuck in survival mode, and it’s trying to keep you safe. The good news? You can rewire it.
If you’re ready to stop living on autopilot and actually feel present again—this is the work.
A functional freeze response can be triggered by chronic stress, unresolved trauma, or situations where you feel emotionally overwhelmed but can’t escape. It often develops from long-term nervous system dysregulation—especially if your body never had a chance to fully come down from past fight-or-flight states.
Yes. Being in a chronic freeze state can lead to fatigue, digestive issues, tension, hormonal imbalances, and even chronic pain. When your body stays stuck in survival mode, it deprioritizes basic functions like rest, repair, and digestion—impacting your physical health over time.
Not exactly. Emotional numbness is part of a functional freeze response, but freeze also affects motivation, memory, and how present you feel in your body. It’s a full-body shutdown—not just an emotional one—and most people don’t realize they’re in it because they’re still “getting things done.”
Functional freeze is a body-based state, not just a mental or emotional issue. Traditional talk therapy often focuses on thoughts, which means it can miss what’s happening at the nervous system level. Somatic therapy works by helping your body feel safe enough to come out of freeze—something words alone can’t always do.
Yes, and that’s one of the most confusing parts. You can feel anxious and shut down—like your body is frozen but your mind is racing. This mix of nervous system states is more common than people think, especially in high-functioning adults with complex trauma or long-term stress patterns.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but healing from functional freeze is a gradual process. It’s not about snapping out of it—it’s about slowly teaching your body that it’s safe enough to unfreeze. With consistent somatic work, most clients start to notice shifts within weeks.
