Dr. Valerie Rein: I was watching your TEDx talk, and it's interesting timing because right now I'm doing a series here on Instagram Live talking about trauma, how patriarchy stress disorder shows up for women, and particularly unpacking what I call prison guards. These are trauma defenses that fall into different categories, depending on the intensity of that trauma or stress response. Ranging from peace, fight, flight, freeze, and then shutdown and summarization. Today is the day I will be talking about freeze. Of course, that is what you talk about in your TEDx talk. Here's the line that you said that really hit me.
“It's not just about the bad things that happen. It's about the beautiful things that never happen. These are some of the costs of going into freeze.”
Do you want to talk more about that?
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. I also wouldn't feel right beginning to speak with you without acknowledging you and your work. What I feel is one of the boldest and bravest things that you've done, that so many other people venturing into this territory miss, is the universality of this experience for women. You come from a distinguished background, being educated, and can talk about trauma, stress, and the somatic nervous system that I cannot because I don't have that background. What I got so excited about when I realised that you exist in the world is you're speaking so loudly and so articulately with the message that a woman going through this, a woman is not alone. One of the greatest unintentional tricks pulled on women suffering from the impact of patriarchy, which is all women, is that these symptoms, these problems, are individualized, personalized, and reserved for, for example, individual therapy. My psychological problems. I have trouble asking. I don't fend for myself. I freeze easily. I'm weak. I don't believe in myself. I don't stand up for myself. I don't ask for what I need. I hide when I'm hurt. I pretend I'm not mad. I, I, I. My problem. Now I need to go talk about my parents. The thing is that when you get a room with enough women, one grew up wealthy, one grew up poor, one was loved by her father but not by her mother, one was loved by her mother but not by her father. Yet even the ones that appear different – one damsel in distress and one hyper-independent, nothing in common – neither of them know how to ask.
So bold to call your book Patriarchy Stress Disorder and your work, to just call it out. It's not you, it's us. It's not me, it's us. And once the patterns are revealed, then we start being able to look in more effective places.
Why did I freeze? We're bringing up the subject of the freeze. There are so many costs. The bad things that happen. The good things that don't. If it is not acknowledged that there is a patriarchal condition, a context in which women will freeze, then the individual, a woman, will say to herself, ‘I froze and I suffered this consequence. This is what happened to me. This is what didn't happen to me. Now I'm going to 10 minutes later, 10 days later, 10 months later, punish myself for it.’ And again, I’m not qualified to speak about trauma, but it feels like compounding the trauma, through self-attack, ‘Why didn't I? Why am I so weak? What is it about me that? Why can't I stand up for myself?’ It ends up echoing through time, rather than getting undone. The doorway to that is acknowledging its universal context. And this is what you do. So I want to say that first.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Thank you, sister. I appreciated it, and I am happy that the universality is so resonant. Really the most powerful, and my favorite feedback that I've been getting from women around this conversation, around Patriarchy Stress Disorder, has been, ‘Thank you for naming and giving words to what I felt my entire life trying to figure out what's wrong with me.’ I've been on this journey my entire life. My entire journey has been driven by the question, ‘What's wrong with me?’ Two graduate degrees in psychology. Right? That gives you a little bit of an idea of the dedication that I brought to figure this shit out. The surprise discovery that the answer to the question has been nothing. So universality.
Kasia Urbaniak: One of those features, and if we're talking about the freeze, one of the observations that I made time and time again, especially because of the structure of The Academy, the school that I run, for most of its life, up until the pandemic, the nature of it were live classes that were very demonstration and exercise focus. So we could all observe the physical behavioral habit patterns of women over and over again. Something became very apparent quickly before there was even a philosophy around the school, just a desire to understand. We had men volunteer for classes so we could do work with them and comparative work, and you could watch it like in a laboratory. The moment attention was put on a woman – she was questioned, even positively questioned – a little bit heavier than was comfortable energetically, her whole body would turn inward. Whereas if you put a man in that same situation, almost 98% of the time, his attention would turn outward. So what does that mean? A very simple example: an uncomfortable question or a compliment. What do you do for a living? We're play-acting and still, the tendency is for a woman to go inward to find the answer. ‘Do you like having lots and lots of sex?’ Inappropriate question. Inward. ‘What do I say? What do I do?’ The tendency for him is like, ‘Why are you asking?’ Attention out.
This tiny detail, unmissable if you're looking for it but if you're not looking for it, almost impossible to notice, is the entire structure of how a power dynamic basically crushes a woman. What makes her freeze is that self-conscious, self-attacking, self-aware inward energy when she is put on the spot will compound on itself. It's not just a question of catching her off guard and having her freeze. She will stay stuck there. There's a long understandable history as to why we would do this. The entire system of reward and belonging has to do with moments when attention is on ourselves. How we are, how we look, how we sound. And it's not so with men. Little boys, what they're achieving. That outward-inward thing ends up being very important in the context of something like the freeze. Being aware is the first thing, the universality. In the moments of freezing, the moments after freezing, especially the low stakes freezes, being like, ‘Oh, I froze, my attention went inward.’ First loosening the grip of that by completely releasing any self-punishment. ‘Oh, this is part of the fabric of being a woman in the patriarchy today. Being a woman of the pivot, this is the moment I notice it's not my issue.’ That does so much of the work. The second thing is starting to break the freeze by practicing especially in low-stakes situations. You know, a neighbor in the elevator asks an inappropriate question. Practicing in these small ways can be really powerful. The somatic bodily freedom and expansion that happens when you can say, ‘Why do you ask?’ These small moments start to reshape the landscape.
Dr. Valerie Rein: I love that so much and it gives me chills. I have had two strands of recognition listening to you: one has to do with PSD, and one has to do with how therapists are trained and how it all trails down to power. Very interesting.
About PSD – Patriarchy Stress Disorder for those who are not familiar – women have been conditioned, well, women have had to survive, and to survive we need to check ourselves. It’s that inward attention. I'm checking myself. Am I going to say the wrong things? How am I going to come across? Is there going to be an attack? Women are checking. For men, they're not typically in danger. They're not typically in a state of survival so they have the freedom to be outwardly focused. I talk about how this as the greatest privilege that men have.
Kasia Urbaniak: Wow.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Right? It’s that privilege to actually be saved. The culture believes them. They get constant positive reinforcement in a lot of ways in which they show up. They believe it’s very important what they have to say. So there is that. That's how that power dynamic is set up. There's such inherent inequality, not only because women have not had their rights. Like women's bodies have not belonged to us. Nobody has cared about what we've had to say, and more than that, it has been punishable when we’ve spoken up. The resulting differential in how we feel safe or unsafe, male, female, and people across the gender spectrum, that's the basis of inequality there from the biological, physiological standpoint.
Now thinking about how therapists are trained. That actually gave me pause and gave me like – oh, gasp! Therapists are trained to ask questions to be outwardly focused. I used to say, you can't win with a psychoanalyst because they're always gonna put it on you. ‘Oh, what did you ask that? How did your mother mess you up?’ Unfortunately, sadly, there is retraumatization that happens in therapy through this power differential. It kind of compounds when a woman who is already carrying PSD in her system comes to a therapist, who is also unconsciously perpetuating that power, and not giving enough space for her power. I feel the purpose of healing is to help humans reclaim their power. You just helped me realize my core issue with therapy when that power is practiced unconsciously.
Kasia Urbaniak: Right. This reminds me of some of the studies they did on women and confidence. Not the parts where women rated their competence way lower, and men rated their competence way higher than the actual test results. The part where if a woman was asked how well she thought she did, her self-assessment went all the way down. If a man was asked how well he did, his self-assessment went all the way up. Just the question, ‘How well do you think you did?’, would make a woman crumble. Now I'm thinking about the dynamic with a therapist if they're not conscious of perpetuating that power. ‘Why do you think you did that, woman?’ ‘I don't know. It's probably because I'm screwed up.’ ‘Why do you think you did that, man?’ It might have a different impact.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Interesting!
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. This isn't in the book, but I did a pretty exhaustive study of cult leaders at one point in terms of power dynamics because there are aspects of the gaslighting of women that are cult-like. They couple it with the shame. If you have a question, the first thing they do is question you for having that question and couple it with shame. ‘Are you resisting? Do you have an issue with this?’ This is how they completely quash dissent.
Dr. Valerie Rein: I'm getting hot. Yes. This gaslighting coupled with shame is the core of gaslighting. Making you wrong. Whatever you think, whatever you feel, you're wrong. You're making shit up. Your reality is invalidated. How that's used throughout patriarchy and of course, in cults. Wow.
Kasia Urbaniak: It doesn't really take much. One of the most rewarding things about the work I get to do is all of the low-hanging fruit. All of the easy wins. So much of this lives in a very thinly veiled shadow of assumption. Making oneself wrong the moment someone asks a question. ‘Why did you do that?’ ‘I don't know. Maybe because there's something wrong with me.’ There's a whole category of things that live in that thinly veiled shadow that once you see it, it's the low-hanging fruit. The quick wins. A lot of women have difficulty asking for what they need and want. If you have a woman, this is The Asking Practice in my book, as an assignment write down 20-100 things she could ask specific things of specific people. And not ask. If she's just aware and starts using her imagination – desires, needs, people, couples in sentences –what starts to happen is the woman's oftentimes destructive self negotiation actually starts to work in our favor. When she thinks of 100 things that she could ask but isn't, she will automatically start asking without any effort for some of the things off that list. It'll just happen by itself. There's a lot of things like that.
When we look at it consciously – and again this is why I love you and adore you – we need to first make this universal. That's the first key. Once we start looking at this as not our own individual problem, it becomes so much easier to see. ‘Oh, if she's not asking, she's not asking, these are all the things I theoretically could ask for but put no pressure on myself to ask.’ All of a sudden the world starts looking different.
Freezing. The moment we start taking it out of the realm of personality. Personal. ‘I'm not confident. I don't love myself.’ Self-attacking, self-monitoring, self-policing. Once we start looking at that voice as universal, and not making ourselves wrong for it, not attacking ourselves for attacking ourselves, we can speak back to it. We can say, ‘Actually, I am not only competent, but I'm also a badass when it comes to this.’ ‘That's silly. Why would I slap my own hand for putting the toothpaste cap on wrong? I am fabulously messy,’ or whatever the case.
Dr. Valerie Rein: What I really loved, I just wanted to emphasize in what you said. Making these lists of questions. The way we approach working with Patriarchy Stress Disorder and other traumas. Because essentially, trauma is an experience that made you feel either physically or emotionally unsafe and that overwhelmed your resource, and then created trauma adaptations going forward to keep you safe. Some of those adaptations are not speaking up, holding back, having that inward talk, all of those adaptations to keep us safe. So in healing trauma, we help to establish safety by working with the nervous system. Embodied safety. I so love your practice of writing down the questions, because preparation goes a long way in establishing safety.
Kasia Urbaniak: Oh, wow. Yeah. I can see that.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Now in some situations, women can be over-prepared and get stuck in endless preparation without making a move. For example, somebody who's already over-educated, ‘No, I need to read 10 more books before I can give a talk.’ Right? That kind of thing would be an example of a trauma adaptation. I call them prison guards. It's keeping you stuck. But the preparation starts with making the invisible visible. ‘When I freeze, I can't find words. But why is that? Is it because I don't know what to ask? No, bullshit, I do.’ And preparing. So when you come, it’s kind of ingrained. It's already in your body. It's already on the tip of your tongue.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. I discovered the power of that working as a dominatrix. Sessions are generally an hour, like therapy, and they're mostly based on language. A lot of people who don't know what a BDSM session looks like, it's mostly talking. It's mostly the dominatrix talking. What is she going to say? There's a man on his knees. What is she going to say?
Dr. Valerie Rein: Makes you a great public speaker.
Kasia Urbaniak: She's gonna ask questions. ‘You like being on your knees? Don't you? What are you doing here? Was that resistance? Did you look at me? Eyes on the floor. Why did you do that so slowly?’ Constant questioning.
Dr. Valerie Rein: That's fantastic. It trains that ability to really see somebody. And you know what? It's very interesting because when you truly see somebody when that somebody feels truly seen, it actually makes them feel very safe.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Right. And when we feel safe, we can experience pleasure.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah, that's true.
Dr. Valerie Rein: You know, I've been so fascinated with what feels like right to be a dominatrix. I would love to understand that internal experience a little. I have a funny anecdote from my own life trajectory. The roads not taken. When I was setting up my private practice in New York City, I got an email from someone that read along these lines. ‘I've heard that therapists can be very strict, and I've been a really bad boy and I deserve punishment. I was wondering if I could book an appointment with you and compensate you at the rate of $400 an hour.’ And I was like, ‘Shit!’ The roads not taken. I didn't end up taking that that offer but it still gives me like a good good pick me up. If all else fails, there are so many paths to have fun and bring value.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah, it can be an amazing feeling.
We've been exploring the subject of over preparation at The Academy. One of the things that we're finding is that if a woman instead of preparing to do a good job prepares to have a great time in advance. Preparing to have a pleasurable experience and handles doing a good job inside of it, tends to temper the kind of over preparation that creates anxiety. That's been really fun. It just came out of a course that we finished teaching on confidence a week ago. It was a spontaneous discovery because the subject of over over preparation and confidence go together.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Oh, hell yes. I love that. When you're preparing to have a great time. So again, that if you remove that self evaluation, ‘Am I doing a good job? Am I not?’ You know if your having a good time.
Kasia Urbaniak: It also it also flips who's the center of the experience, who the experience is for. Even if I'm giving a speech, if I'm preparing to do a good job, I'm only thinking about their evaluation. If I’m preparing to have a good time, I'm central to the story. If somebody is having a good time, they tend to contribute more than just their work, but their their love, their passion, their joy, their good energy. Their nervous system is at a place where they're less likely to feel attacked and more likely to collaborate and play. We could really use that right now. I think all of us on the planet could use more play. It might sound self serving, but preparing a day, a life, every task as a way to have more enjoyment.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Oh, yes. I love that so much.
I really want to talk more about power and unpacking that. I've been exploring this in a whole new way in my own life and practice, and understanding that I did not use to understand what power was and how it felt. Of course, in the systems of oppression, power is power over somebody. If you have more power, somebody has less power. That's the whole messed up view on that. Maybe that is part of how it can play out but it maybe doesn't have to. I recently had an experience that showed me a whole different dimension of power.
I recently started working with horses. Horses are big animals for over 100,000 pounds and if you try to like force them into something you'll quickly understand that kind of power does not work. What works is the power of connection to yourself, connection to your body, connection to your intention, and connection to the horse. I was in a round pin with a horse at liberty, so there were no lead ropes or anything. The horse is there. I'm there. She has a really big alpha mare and she knows it. I'm tasked with asking her to move around, to start walking and running. My trainer’s like, ‘Go ahead and make an ask. Communicate your intention and energy.’ I start communicating. Nothing. I tap in a little deeper. Nothing, nothing at all. My trainer asks, ‘What are you feeling right now? What are you feeling in your body?’ I'm like, ‘Well, I'm feeling frustrated. I'm feeling ineffective. Nothing is happening.’ And he's like, ‘Gather everything that you're feeling and really go there.’ I gathered everything that I was feeling and that actually required a lot of vulnerability. I dropped into a deeper level of conviction and decided to make an ask from a deeper place and bring out more of my power. And I did. And she started going fast. She was a little pissed because I brought so much energy. She was like, ‘I didn't really want to do it. But okay, I'll play.’
It was eye opening how vulnerable it felt to go into my power. It was vulnerable. That was not something I knew about. I thought being vulnerable is when you cry, or when you allow others to see you in your weak moments or in your anger. But the vulnerability in power…that was completely new to me and completely shifted my relationship and understanding of what that is. So I would love to hear you speak about your experiences with power and if you've come across this power vulnerability dynamic?
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. So there's a lot I want to say. First, just to acknowledge working with horses. I don't think there's been a class at the academy where one student didn't have a breakthrough or a story about understanding true power and communication through an experience with a horse. The human body doesn't lie, but we can be disconnected from it. Animal bodies are not disconnected from it. And the fact that a horse is so huge, right?
Dr. Valerie Rein: They don't bullshit.
Kasia Urbaniak: They don't. And actually, if we closely examine human bodies, in the most subtle form, it's the same thing.
You talked about this feeling of vulnerability when it comes to accessing the kind of power over a horse.
Dr. Valerie Rein: I thought I was going to die. Ironically, well maybe not ironically, we all teach what we're here to learn. I'm my own student who catches up to the content like two years into me teaching it. But ironically, that's what I talk about. Patriarchy and a woman's relationship with her power. It does feel like mortal danger stepping into our power. The trauma all along. For me like experiencing that actually was very eye-opening. Like I'm gonna die, literally, if I go and reveal my true power at this moment.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. And I think that anytime – and I'm sure you've seen this too – we start moving closer to describing the embodied experience, the experience of the body, suddenly language becomes slippery and tricky. So what's vulnerable? Because we have a lot of ideas, and the feeling is the feeling. You can have the feeling without knowing how to describe it. One thing is the almost linguistic assumptions about power and being in control, being in power, have a tensing quality. Like, I am going to use squeeze my fist into my knuckles turn white right. Our ideas about power on a bigger scale, in the political realm, mirror the mental assumption that's absolutely false. The way you can't bullshit a horse, you also can't bullshit reality for very long. Right? So a tyrant, a dictator, uses the white knuckle force to oppress. It's not power, but because of how we think about things, we might say that dude has all the guns, all the money, is shooting people, and owns everything. But we all know the greater the tension, the more fragile and temporary that power is. The people revolt and another one takes its place. The cycle continues.
When we talk about power, I think one of the fundamental misunderstandings we have is basically what power is. I'm not saying that true power is actually a soft, loving power. I mean cold, hard reality. It's not effective. It's not powerful or energy-efficient to oppress a nation as a tyrant. Having power over another human being with force, manipulation, shaming – what that does is the person you have power over, just like the people you have power, are not at liberty to share their deepest resources, their talents, their passion. They're not absolutely on board.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Oppressing women through patriarchy. Oppressing people of color through racism and control.
Kasia Urbaniak: In terms of the cold, hard definition of power, the oppressor is depriving themselves, as well as the rest of society, of the resources that would be available. So it's actually not powerful.
So back to the horse. That feeling of vulnerability, or that feeling of mortal danger. Your territory: trauma, stress, reaction. To be in a powerful communion as a top, as someone in charge, with an animal, requires connection to oneself. It requires a complete circuit of energy. The energy is moving through you into the horse. You into the people you're leading. You into the submissive.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Love this.
“Anything that’s not alive with a current of energy of the life force is not powerful.”
— Kasia Urbaniak
Kasia Urbaniak: You as a parent, as somebody who's in charge. And the reality is that we do occupy poles of power. Sometimes we are students with a teacher, and sometimes we're the teacher with the student. The misunderstanding around power is that anything that's not alive with a current of energy of the life force is not powerful. You have to plug something into a wall to get the electric current. When there's power, there's connection.
Dr. Valerie Rein: If it’s not alive, it’s not powerful. I just want to just make that connection to the freeze – when we disengage, when we're not in our body. Oh, so good.
Kasia Urbaniak: The pantomime of power: artificial structures, the performance of power. That's not alive. All we have to do is have eyes to see how that does not work. It doesn't last. It doesn't work. The feeling of vulnerability, you could say nervous aliveness or newness, of being powerful in a top position.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Realness. I love realness.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. It's not that different from being in the opposite position. When you open yourself up as somebody who's following. One may be more accustomed to one position or the other, but both require connection. Both require that current, and that's the moment where the synergy and the magic happen. Where you're having a psychic experience with a horse, or two people coming together are able to create far more than one plus one because that current is there. Sometimes that means one person's in charge and one person isn't.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Or sometimes it's like a figure eight. Passing it back and forth. There can be a lot of power inequality. I think that this kind of power is not commonly practiced in our society. What power inequality actually looks like. You lead then I lead.
Kasia Urbaniak: Yeah. In some ways, it's maybe getting worse on a bodily level. It's hard. People aren't even making eye contact. You have to bend cues, receive them, really be present with somebody.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Oh gosh, I don't want to end on this note. The reality is that there is so much disconnection and trauma. This is actually one of the symptoms of trauma. Disconnection is one of the telltale signs of trauma: to be disconnected from yourself, parts of yourself, the wholeness, disconnection from the world, from the other. The pandemic has brought up so much intergenerational trauma. It has been so traumatic. I don't think we’re even beginning to understand how it has deeply impacted us on a physiological level and what it means. But again, I don’t want to leave it all want like a depressing note.
Let's talk about how people can come out and play in restoring their power and reconnecting to themselves. How they can play in your community, where they can find you? What breadcrumbs can we leave for people in terms of that rediscovery of themselves in their power?
Kasia Urbaniak: I don't know what to say right now. Riffing off the pandemic, one of the best things that’s happening is that a lot of people are experiencing a path to embodiment and a path to feeling. Coming out of this time period, especially women, are learning to trust what they feel. The extra edge of pain, fear, or attention. In a lot of ways, we have a leg up on the men who are conditioned and trained to not feel in a way that presents an advantage.
I think going forward, between what's happening to the planet, the body of the earth, and what’s happening with technology, there's a counter pull. I think women are the pioneers of the frontier of that counter pull. Being in the body, of feeling, of trusting nature and natural processes, trusting what the feeling sense internally says about any decision, mundane or profound.
There's been this really strong split between self-development and activism. I'm doing something to improve my life, or I'm doing something to improve the world. To improve the world is sacrifice. To improve my life is being selfish. Here, we stand up this wonderful, fruitful crux. You listen to yourself and your body to make mundane, selfish, or selfless decisions. It doesn't matter. The moment we do that, we are remaking culture, we are influencing other women, and we're making decisions that are more in harmony with what is needed all around. It's this wonderful practice of caring for oneself and everything at the same time by listening to the deepest parts of ourselves. One of the most beautiful discoveries is the collapse of ‘selfless’ and ‘selfish’. Those two distinctions don't exist if you're embodied. It only exists if you're disembodied. If you're half out of your body, you can be greedy and never satisfied. But if you're in your body, you get full.
“One of the most beautiful discoveries is the collapse of ‘selfless’ and ‘selfish’. Those two distinctions don’t exist if you’re embodied. It only exists if you’re disembodied. If you’re half out of your body, you can be greedy and never satisfied. But if you’re in your body, you get full.”
— Kasia Urbaniak
On that note, if anybody listening is interested in hearing more about the exercises or games I would suggest to explore living from an embodied way and shamelessly occupying your own power, you can read my book Unbound, or go to our website.
This is going to be a really fascinating few decades for humanity, and women occupy an important part in that. And I feel honored that you invited me to speak with you.
Dr. Valerie Rein: Oh, gosh, I feel the same way. I feel grateful to women in our communities who have been tagging us in each other's posts saying, ‘We want to hear you two in conversation.’ What a gift. I could talk to you for years, and I hope we will.
It’s such a perfect time to have this conversation. I'm sharing a series on my channel right now on trauma, reactions, adaptations, and later today, I'm going to be talking about the freeze. It all comes together so beautifully.
I love what you said about this collapse of the delusion of ‘selfish’ and ‘selfless’. It reminds me of a quote from a French philosopher, whose name escapes me right now, who said, ‘We only need morality because we cannot love’. To me, that is that ultimate bridge. Morality is something external, but when you love from a deeply embodied place, you can do that wrong. That's power.
Thank you so much for this. I look forward to more opportunities to play together.
