I was standing in Harmon’s grocery store when the freeze took me.
Somewhere down the aisle a lady was doing her shopping with general conference playing out loud from her phone, that particular monotone voice I would know anywhere. I have been out of the church for over a decade, and in one breath I went frozen in the middle of the store, cart in my hands, for a solid minute. The freeze started at the top of my head and moved down through my throat and all the way into my root, and I went still.
Two different thoughts were going at once. The old one: oh my gosh, I am supposed to be watching this right now. I am doing such a bad job. Why am I shopping on Sunday, I should be home watching, taking notes and listening. Then underneath it, a calmer, steady voice was trying to reach me through my frozen icy place: Vanessa, you are not part of this anymore. You do not have to listen to these men and do what they are telling you.
For one full minute my body held me there while my mind sorted out what was true and what was not. Then, slowly, it eased. I finished my shopping. But I carried the ick of their voices for the next few hours, that trigger, that small PTSD flare, represented the life I used to live where I was told what to do and how to be, and in a minute it all came rising up in me over a stranger’s phone.
That is what I have come to call the Faith Freeze.
What the Faith Freeze actually is
The Faith Freeze is what happens in the body the moment the faith you were raised in collides with a new truth. A pause. A bracing. A silence, while your nervous system sorts out what is real and what was only ever fear.
It is a term I coined for a very particular moment. It is the one where the faith you were raised in, all of it, the beliefs, the guidelines, the covenants, the whole umbrella of how you were told the world works, suddenly meets a new thought or a new truth. And in that meeting, your body freezes.
It began with a calling I could not refuse
I know this freeze intimately, I just didn’t have a name for it while I was still an active member.
I had just had my third baby. I had three young children at home and no bandwidth to give, and the bishop called me into his office and told me he had been inspired by God to give me a new calling, to be a youth leader, to teach on Sundays and plan the activities midweek. My body knew the truth of it before I could even speak. I am at maximum capacity. I do not have room for this.
But I did not say that. I did not tell the bishop that I doubted God had really told him that. I was supposed to act honored and chosen, but instead I froze. I moved into that fawning place where I just put my head down and said yes. I did not use my no, and I did not use my yes. My voice, the truest thing that was mine, went hidden. In a sense, it simply froze.
What the freeze feels like in the body
When the Faith Freeze takes me, it feels like being paralyzed.
For me it lives high. It is a head and throat and shoulders kind of freeze, because the thing being taken from me is my voice. The reasoning part of my brain is right there, awake, quietly insisting that the words I am hearing are not true, while the older conditioned part braces hard against that knowing. That is the freeze. It is cognitive dissonance, yes, but it does not stay in the mind only, it also moves into the body.
It returns at every new threshold
The Faith Freeze does not only belong to the years you spent inside. It comes back, long after you have left the church, every time you reach a threshold the old teachings said you were never allowed to question.
It came for me around psychedelics as healing medicine for trauma. It comes for so many I sit with around sex and intimacy after a marriage ends. It comes hardest of all around worthiness, around what we were told becomes of our souls in the next life if we no longer keep the covenants, and if we break the covenant and are no longer an eternal family unit.
I think of the temple often, since I have five of them within a fifteen minute radius of where I live. Inside those walls we were told that we had a choice. But in all my years I never once watched a single person rise from their seat and walk out. There is so much terror of stepping away from the herd, of being the one who will get in so much trouble.
Why it is so hard to see clearly
The mind is merciful, and it has the ability to sort and filter. You can sit through four hours of general conference, and the only thing you remember is that one good story shared, rather than the feelings of manipulation underneath it.
Because underneath that one story is the steady drip I have come to recognize. The reminder that you are not good. That you are not doing enough, that you are not clean. That you cannot save yourself, that you need someone outside of yourself to save you. It is delivered so gently, so warmly, that you would swear it was love.
How the Faith Freeze begins to thaw
Sometimes the freeze lasts only a minute, the way it did for me in that grocery aisle. Other times you brush it off, you tell yourself oh, that was an ick, and you carry on with your day, and it is only the next morning, when something stirs it again, that your body finally does the deeper work.
Because thawing a Faith Freeze is a real process, and it happens in the body as much as the mind. It is a mental reorganization, a breath, and then a new thought laid down gently where the old one used to live. You remind yourself, on purpose: that was then. This is now. And when you send the breath down into the frozen place, you are telling your body and your brain the truth they have not yet caught up to, that this is a new moment, and you are a new person, and the danger you are bracing against is already behind you.
The reframe underneath all of it is the one that sets you free. I am still a good person. I am still good, even if I choose the very thing I was told would damn me. When your highest, wisest, most authentic self can finally say “I am making this choice not out of fear,” then the ice has begun to thaw.
What I see when I picture the thaw
When I picture this whole process, I see the first tulips of spring. The green bud pushes up through the cold soil, brave and early, and then the snow settles over it. For a week, or a month, you cannot see it at all. It is not gone. It is under there, whole, waiting.
Then the sun does what the sun always does. If light is truth, the warmth of what you now know reaches the tender thing you are growing, and the frost has no choice but to melt. The tulip opens the only way anything opens, through breath, oxygen and carbon dioxide, the in and the out, a perfect cycle. And it stands tall in its own light, in the very spot the frost tried to hold it down.
You are not broken. You are thawing.
If a monotone voice on a stranger’s phone can still stop you in an aisle, if you freeze at the threshold of every new thing your old life called forbidden, please hear me.
You are not weak. You are thawing. The freeze was only ever your body protecting you from the terror of leaving the herd. And the same body that learned to freeze is learning, one breath at a time, to stand up in the light and stay there.
A gentle note: I am a somatic and energy practitioner, not a licensed therapist. This work walks alongside healing and growth. It is not a replacement for therapy or medical care, and many of the people I sit with do both. That is a good and beautiful thing.
If this named something you have felt in your own body, there is a soft place to begin. Thawing the Faith Freeze is the heart of the somatic work I do with people who are deconstructing religion, and it can start gently, with a free discovery call, twenty unhurried minutes, no pressure and nothing to sell, just space to be heard by someone who has frozen in that same aisle and thawed on the other side.
You do not belong to the herd anymore. Let’s help your body finally believe it.
