Functional Freeze Recovery Workbook: Somatic Tools to Come Out of Freeze & Shutdown (PDF)

I used to assess my mental health by whether I felt calmer. Calm was the goal. Calm was what I aimed for after difficult periods. This one reframed the target for freeze recovery. The question is not are you calmer, it is are you more alive. A little more present. A little more textured. A little more in contact with the moment. That shift in measurement revealed that I had been aiming at the wrong thing and sometimes hitting it in the worst possible way. Getting calmer when you are already shut down is sinking further into the floor. Getting more alive — gently, in small increments — is the actual direction. Reorienting around aliveness instead of calm has been one of the most useful changes I have made.

47 days in a row. One orienting practice before morning coffee. That's my streak now, and it's the longest sustained daily practice I've ever maintained. Before finding this I didn't have a daily practice — I had intentions toward them that collapsed within a week and became more evidence of my inadequacy. The 'your sequence' page asked me to identify one non-negotiable, do-it-daily practice and to make it small enough to do on a bad day. Sixty seconds of letting my eyes move slowly around the kitchen before I make coffee. That's it. That's the practice. I keep the before-the-story pages and do them when something happens worth mapping.

Fifteen years of being told to try harder. First thing that explained why trying harder was making it worse.

I've been in and out of mental health care for fifteen years. In almost every encounter, the solution offered has been some version of try harder — more medication, more structure, more effort, more willingness. Each time I've tried harder I have crashed more completely. It is the first resource that correctly identified trying harder as part of the problem. The off setting is not a decision you are failing to reverse by trying harder. That sentence. I needed someone, or something, to say that to me directly. The workbook says it and then explains what to do instead. The alternative to trying harder is something I am learning. It is very different. It is working.

When you are in a deep shutdown, the idea of positive emotion can feel almost offensive. Like being told to think happy thoughts. The glimmers concept in this is different. A glimmer is a small cue of safety or aliveness. A moment the nervous system reads as okay. Not happiness. Not joy. Okay. The practice of naming a few small things that have ever made me feel even slightly more present — a specific song, the weight of a wool blanket, the sound of rain on a window — gave me a list I could reach toward when I was in the worst of it. I now have a glimmer practice that takes 90 seconds and consistently moves me a small distance up the ladder. Small is enough.

52 years old. I come from a background where men don't do this. Telling you anyway, because I lost a decade of my life to something this book could have named and started to address. The nothing feeling. The heavy limbs in the morning. The days that pass without landing. The way I functioned perfectly at work and felt nothing anywhere else. My daughter gave it to me. I read it in two sittings. I haven't told her yet how much it mattered. I'm working on it. I'm working on a lot of things now. If you're a man reading reviews to decide whether to buy something this personal — I'm the review you needed. Buy it.

The workbook builds toward a recovery map on the final page that asks five questions: the state I am working with in my words, my two most reliable practices, my earliest warning sign, the person I will not isolate from, and my one line of self-compassion. I have that page photographed on my phone. I look at it when things are hard. Not the whole workbook. Not the theory. Just those five things in my own handwriting. That's the product this book was actually building toward all along. Everything else prepares you to write five true things about your own recovery. That's the whole method.