When in danger.... freeze?

 Hello everyone! Welcome to another post here on my blog, hope you all are doing good. There are a lot of things that I have learned this past week. Something I haven't really thought about before is how important coping is in our lives. I kind of always just assumed it was just about hanging in there, but it's actually a lot more than that. We want our coping to set up and maintain the boundaries around ourselves. It keeps us safe, both the inside and the outside. 

 It is also very important, in a relationship, to have your spouse become your best friend. This means now going to other people outside of the relationship if you're dealing with something. If there are worries, talk it out with the spouse. I used to think that it was weird to just leave everyone behind when marriage came. To leave all of your friends who are girls behind, like they don't even exist anymore. It was a hard concept to completely wrap my head around, because I thought that I would still be able to just be friends off and on, while still being tied to whoever I'm married to. I see the logic behind that though, and it does make sense. When you're married, it's like you're cut off from everyone else, and there's only one person that matters right now in your life. Even your family, parents, or siblings, shouldn't become your go-to when dealing with a certain issue, because things like that can lead to an unhealthy relationship with the person who is your spouse. 

There are also many different stressor events that can happen inside of a marriage. No marriage is perfect. I've seen problems come up in even my parents' marriage, and I watched how they dealt with the stress and got through it together. It can throw the family in disarray. These events though, are also opportunities for us to continue to grow and fortify our marriage even more so. Most of the time, we go through these stressor events with determined sets of cognitions and resources, but then when it is finally over and we are able to come out of it, we come about with a totally different outcome than initially expected. Maybe our thinking has even changed. 

Something that's also interesting which I learned this week was the different responses when danger comes. We've all heard about fight or flight, but there's also another 'f' there as well. Freeze. Not one that I typically think about, but normally when danger comes, freeze is the first things that we do. It's our brain's response to what is perceived as danger. Freezing is also the thing that saves us the most from danger. Kind of like when there's a bear attack or something similar. If you run, the bear, being bigger and faster, will easily catch up to you. And if you fight, well obviously that's not going to work. So, freezing happens to be the best solution in these types of situations. The limbic system in the brain is the one that automatically kicks in when you perceive the danger, and then it gives the response. I've seen this a lot of times in my life and didn't realize how true it was until I heard that. But it makes so much sense. I haven't been in too many dangerous situations before, thankfully, but even when I think there might be a danger, when I'm on a hike or something, my body immediately tenses up and waits for the perceived danger to pass before feeling comfortable again. 

Hope you all enjoyed this blog post and have a great day!