Good things can be overwhelming too
Stress responses aren’t just fight, flight, and freeze. There’s also fawn and flop, which I only recently learned about and it still blows my mind.
Depending on the source, sometimes freeze and flop are combined, and sometimes flop is described as an extreme form of freezing. It helps me to think of them as separate things, so that’s what I’m going with.
I’ve never been one to use fight or flight. I’ve been working on my fawning tendencies for years now and didn’t even realize it, so I consider that response a wash. I’ve been dealing with freezing since I was teenager, and it absolutely sucks, but at this point I think it’s just an old habit that’s dying hard.
But then there’s flopping.
Flopping is going full fucking possum.
It’s a complete shutdown. I get smacked with exhaustion and desperately want to go to bed so I can lay down and not exist. I don’t want to end it all. I just want to sleep. I don’t want to do or think about a single thing. I just want the time to pass. It feels like I’m covered in a thick, heavy sludge and my body goes completely limp. If you picked up my hand, held it over my head, and let it go, I wouldn’t try to stop it from hitting my face. Possums don’t care about cuts and bruises, they just don’t want to die.
Thankfully it doesn’t happen every day; it’s more like 1-3 times a week depending on how stressed I am. It’s also not predictable, or at least I haven’t figured out the pattern yet. Getting good news, getting bad news, even waking up after having the best day ever have all wound up triggering a possum session. That doesn’t mean those things are guaranteed to trigger me though. In fact, earlier today I had plans fall through for tonight that I was really looking forward to, and everything was totally fine. But then a few hours later I got an email offering a job interview and that was it.
I’m not going to dive into why I’m like this because surely there’ll be plenty of posts about that. The point is I’m trying. I know what to call it now and I know plenty well what it feels like when it’s coming on. I also realized that I have a better chance of getting over it faster if I do anything but lay in bed. I can lay on the couch, I can rest my head on a table, I just can’t crawl into bed.
I don’t avoid situations that can trigger it because I can’t. That would literally be avoiding life. It’d go against everything I’m working so hard on changing right now. When the flop sets in, I just let myself feel like shit. Sometimes I’ll scroll reddit to read other people’s experiences with it. Eventually I’ll get up and pace for a few minutes before resting again. Then I’ll keep cycling between slowly moving around the house and taking a break until I feel the nudge to get up and do it again.
It’s hard to remember when it’s happening, but afterwards I make it a point to tell myself that no matter how awful it feels, it always ends. I always pull myself out of it and I always will.
Today, it took about an hour of freezing followed by almost two hours of flopping before I could pull it together enough to walk to my favorite coffee shop and get a cookie. Then I wrote this.
I can tell when the flop is fading because it feels like I’m slowly waking up from a nap. Once it’s completely gone I’ll still feel groggy but otherwise ok.
In this case, I finished waking up at 6:00 pm on a St. Patrick’s monday. It’s disorienting, but that’s alright. I’m not worried about how the rest of the night will go either because it doesn’t really matter. I got through a flop, that’s enough of an accomplishment for the day.