This depends on each person. When one is living with freeze and/or shutdown (with the E-brake on) that automatically means there is also big sympathetic activation in the system (the gas), because remember — in a real-time survival response, freeze only comes on after fight/flight has been unsuccessful, so if freeze has become stuck in the system due to trauma you can be sure there is also fight/flight stuck in the system, though one may not always feel that if freeze or shutdown has become the more dominant state. It can act like a big, heavy, lid that keeps all that underlying sympathetic energy locked away.

The most common thing we see when someone has been living with both unresolved freeze and fight/flight in their system for a long time is autoimmune disorders, what we call Syndromes (fibromyalgia, chronic pain, Crohn’s, IBS, etc.). This is because the nervous system is so darn exhausted and confused! We have these big survival energies always running in the background, and over time that wreaks havoc with all the functions the autonomic system is supposed to support: immune function, heart rate variability, breath, digestion, cell repair, etc.

This freeze and/or freeze fluctuation with high fight/flight experience can also show up behaviourally or emotionally.  Often labeled as Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder, as nervous system experts we understand these as expressions of always being ON or OFF / HIGH or LOW, HYPER or HYPO, is essentially the system flip-flopping between high Sympathetic arousal and high dorsal vagal Parasympathetic arousal. I.e. Freeze. This may also show up more mildly as episodes of either anxiety, depression or both.