“Trauma could be characterized as an event that waws much, too big, and happened too fast. Cars, for example, move way too fast for our nervous system. . . In the case of a motor vehicle accident, it can help to "make more time," to slow down the process to such an extent that the client can find a sequence of events he can respond to, one by one. . . Such expansion of time allows the titration completion of the embedded active motor responses, and the completion of these fight-flight impulses will settle the amygdala and turn off the alarm, because only now has the brain stem truly understood that the danger is over.

The same applies for all traumatic memories held in the body- tension in the muscles, the knot in the gut, the lump in the throat. All these are freeze responses: they are frozen motion, defensive movements we did not execute in the time of the event.”