In the 1920s, a well-known physiologist at Harvard named Walter Cannon introduced the concept of fight, flight, freeze. Coincidentally, Walter Cannon was a teacher of my relaxation teacher, Edmund Jacobsen. Commonly, the term Cannon coined is called “fight or flight.” This means that in the presence of something threatening, you either fight it to get rid of it or run away from it. However, the full term is actually “fight, flight, or freeze,” because the biological response to a threat can also be to freeze up, as a way of hiding from the threat, or indicating you offer no threat to what is chasing you. The phrase a deer in the headlights is an example of freeze. Fight, flight, and freeze are terms that make intuitive sense – we all easily understand how we either run away from, fight against, or freeze up in the presence of a threat. How the freeze response is centrally related to pelvic floor pain is a bit less obvious, but I’d like to explain it now.

Pelvic floor pain is associated with muscles in the pelvic floor being overly tightened on an ongoing basis. I’ve described this previously as a charley horse in the pelvic floor perpetuated by anxiety and protective guarding, and unhealing, sore pelvic tissue. Pelvic floor pain takes on a life of its own and remains painfully present on an ongoing basis.

Once we understand that pelvic pain represents a condition of biological “freeze” in the center of the body, we have a path to the solution: unfreezing the chronically frozen pelvis, I suggest, is the remedy for the disorder. While easier said than done, I can tell you from my own personal and professional experience that it is possible.

So, the question is, “How do you unfreeze a chronically tightened pelvic floor?” In the Wise-Anderson Protocol, we recognize that doing this is a psycho-physical task. It requires intervention in both mind and body.

Over the past 25 years we have carefully developed a method to release painful, frozen pelvic tissue. Our FDA approved Internal Trigger Point Wand, in our protocol, is a necessary tool that can enable the unfreezing the pelvis, because it centrally assists internal trigger point release. Trigger point release is a manual method of skillfully pressing on tight bands that form when muscles are held in an extended or intensely contracted state. We teach our patients to use this wand alongside our new external Trigger Point Genie, specific stretches, and other physical methods to loosen the inside of the body.

However, it is also necessary to provide an environment in which the sore tissue of a chronically tight pelvis can heal up from its tendency to freeze (hypertonia). Loosening the inside of the body without this, in our experience, will not provide long-lasting relief, because whatever triggers reflexive muscle freezing will simply cause the pelvic floor to freeze again even if the tightening has been temporarily released physically. Tissue that is sore and irritated is primed to tighten back up with little provocation. This is why most physical intervention that does not reduce nervous arousal at best provides only temporary relief for pelvic floor pain – the state of freeze prevents the healing of the sore tissue in the pelvic floor. Healing this sore tissue is essential to any real, lasting resolution

The pelvic floor in its normal state is soft and responsive, able to easily relax and tighten as the body needs. In the Wise-Anderson Protocol, we teach our patients how to physically loosen the external and internal tissue, interrupting the frozen state of the pelvic floor while reducing the nervous arousal that keeps the pelvic floor irritated and ready to jump back into a state of freeze.