This is a reflection on a society mostly stuck in functional freeze, the grief beneath our compliance, and the radical act of feeling.
The world is unraveling in real time and the stakes of awakening are high. To look at ourselves and see where we’ve been compliant is to risk a kind of death.
Authoritarianism is on the rise, reproductive rights are being stripped, and AI is destabilizing labor markets (I have many thoughts on this I’ll dive into at a later point). Genocide is livestreamed and sanitized, migrants are kidnapped and criminalized, and the cost of living outpaces survival.
Nervous systems are frayed from the pandemic’s aftermath, and collective grief festers without ritual or repair. This is the backdrop. This is the context in which shame, when it surfaces, threatens to collapse our fragile identities. And most people do not have anywhere to turn to when it does.
To feel all of this is radical, and it is risky.
And what about those reckoning with feeling like they may have been on the wrong side of the fence at this pivotal shifting point in human history. Is there space or acceptance for them on the other side? That is scary to sit with on so many levels.
To change political position now in the face of new information for many feels like annihilation. And it is a certain kind of death. The collapse of belonging, of ego, of identity. A disintegration of the masks that we wear that were never consciously chosen. To shift for many means exile from communities they once trusted and felt they belonged to. This is a crisis.
And so most don’t go there. Some double down, go quiet, change the subject. Some scream louder, hoping their noise will drown out the doubt within them and others.
But some, quietly, slowly, begin to unravel. They see things they cannot unsee, they feel something they did not have access to before. They start questioning, themselves and their community. What would it mean to see things from a new lens?
Marriages are ended over political perspectives, families are divided, this is not a small ask.
My own family was impacted and divided when the pandemic was at its peak, right when we needed each other the most. I didn’t see my immediate family for almost two years. For one of those years, my mom and I didn’t speak at all. Only now, that I have moved back home, are we beginning to repair and unravel the unspoken resentment, to name the scars, and to find our way back into connection, all the while still holding vastly different frameworks for viewing the world.
There is no turning back to what was before, but we can rebuild into something more honest, into coexistence.
We weren’t just separated by physical distance, we were divided by fear, by survival strategies, by an unhealed family system. Each of us coping in ways that left the others feeling abandoned, judged, or unsafe. It has taken time, space, and humility to start hearing each other again.
And now, just as that repair begins, our family faces the very real, imminent threat of deportation. And like so many families in this country right now, we haven’t even begun to fully process what we’ve already lived through over the past five years.
The nervous system cannot hold unprocessed emotions forever. And for most people emotional literacy was never part of the curriculum. Healthy coping tools were not offered. Healing was not normalized.
And in the face of current events more and more people are going to start losing their shit.
We were taught how to memorize history for a multiple choice test, not how to process it as it unfolds in real time inside our bodies, our homes, our screens.
And what I’ve come to understand is this:
What plays out in the collective always echoes through the personal. This is why astrology is so interesting to me. The macro collapse mirrors the micro ruptures.
My family’s fragmentation wasn’t isolated, it was part of a much larger pattern. A reflection of what’s happening everywhere.
The collective trauma has not been metabolized, and it’s compounding.
This is serious.
So many are trying to hold it together without the capacity, without the tools, without the space to feel. The grief, the rage, the disillusionment.
It is way too much for the body to carry alone.
This is where I refuse to stay silent.
I am committed to walking with integrity every day.
To staying awake while others go numb.
I did not leave my former life or my carefully curated identity to bypass this moment.
I left because I knew I was meant to be here, sharing my stories, my art, sitting in the fire, in service, holding as steady as I can manage amidst the chaos.
This was not just a life pivot I am standing on the threshold at.
It is a vow.
Zooming back out, I want to name what my mom recently helped me see: the role of cognitive dissonance as a survival response.
The Functional Freeze: Why Aren’t You Fighting?
Amidst societal collapse, war, mass displacement, ecological crisis, economic volatility, and AI disruption, people’s nervous systems are responding in wildly different ways.
Those who are loud, mobilized, and actively resisting?
Their systems are in fight response which is protective, fierce, confrontational.
But not all bodies respond with fire.
Some go still.
Some go silent.
Some try to please the abuser to avoid further harm.
Real-world examples of nervous system responses:
Fawn looks like:
Publicly defending the government or aligning with dominant narratives to avoid being targeted.
Over-apologizing, over-explaining, over-performing activism to prove safety or goodness.
Staying neutral or centrist to avoid rocking the boat in families, workplaces, or communities.
Adopting performative wokeness or spiritual bypassing to appear informed while avoiding true emotional engagement.
Flight looks like:
Moving to another country to escape the chaos (literal flight).
Constantly researching exit plans or fixating on relocation fantasies.
Spiritually dissociating, seeking “new earth” timelines or alien salvation instead of engaging with real-world suffering.
Turning away from news, relationships, or responsibilities out of overwhelm masked as “minimalism” or “detox.”
Freeze looks like:
Numb scrolling, checking out, feeling paralyzed to act.
Going to work, making lunch, folding laundry, pretending things are fine.
Knowing something is wrong but unable to name or move through it.
Saying “I just can’t deal with that right now” not as apathy but as capacity overload.
Fawn and freeze are often shamed by those in fight but they are just as valid trauma responses. And in fact, they are often what keep people alive under oppressive conditions where fighting isn’t safe.
The government itself is a trauma source, especially for those marginalized.
And when your survival depends on pretending the abuser is safe, you learn to function in the face of betrayal. So we learned to freeze, not in helplessness, but in strategy.
To those speaking out, marching, organizing, refusing to stay quiet while others suffer:
I see you. I honor you. You remind us that truth is not dangerous, it’s medicine.
That we don’t have to earn our rage for it to be holy.
That clarity, even when messy, is better than complicit quiet.
Whether you’re posting even though you’re afraid of the response, leading protests, challenging your family at the dinner table and in group texts, or refusing to let the algorithm numb you, you are fighting for a reality worth living in. And I thank you.
Because your roar makes it safer for the rest of us to breathe.
So what I am offering here is a perspective on what is happening with the masses of people who seem disengaged and aren’t necessarily out there protesting or using their platforms to speak on these matters. For most, it is not because they do not care, or are immoral, unethical people, but because they truly do not know how to hold it all and their systems are responding differently.
And this frozen group also includes myself. I’ll touch on my own internal shame and deep ancestral reckoning with this below.
So, What is Functional Freeze?
In nervous system terms, it’s a trauma response where the body shuts down in order to survive what it doesn’t yet feel safe enough to process.
Functional freeze looks… “normal”… polite, productive, performed.
Smiling while dying inside. Checking boxes while checking out. Making it through the work day, the work week, the weekend, repeat.
It is a protective mechanism and the body's intelligence and wisdom.
On a soul level, many people are in fragmentation.
Their upper chakras might be blown open overstimulated by media, prophecy, panic.
Their lower chakras are blocked and safety, security, belonging all feel out of reach.
The heart is squeezed between them, desperate to care but unable to connect.
So they check out. They spiritualize avoidance, bypassing the rawness of the human condition with love and light and fantasy. I have been there.
This is overwhelm that has nowhere to go.
We don’t break out of freeze by yelling at people to “wake up.”
We break out of freeze by creating safety. By helping people feel safe enough to feel.
That’s the work of the The Priestess, the frequency holder.
To stay present when others shut down. To name the pain without amplifying panic.
When most people say they are fine what they really mean is they are frozen. And those of us who can feel it? We’re not crazy. We’re ahead of the thaw.
And so I offer this:
PROCESSING YOUR EMOTIONS IS A RADICAL ACT OF ACTIVISM.
Coming back home to yourself is how we begin to dismantle the system.
Through connection, community, art, dancing, singing.
Through self-care, proper nutrition, therapy, EFT tapping, breathwork, hypnosis, meditation, connecting to nature, ritual, psychedelics.
Through any act that brings us back into our bodies and back to the truth of who we are. There are so many tools, we just need to choose what works for us.
And in a world built on dissociation and over functioning,
NOT ENGAGING IN YOUR OWN HEALING IS COMPLIANCE.
And in a society that rewards “keeping it together,” this freeze is mistaken for stability.
But underneath? There’s rage. Grief. Powerlessness. Fear.
And all of it is so vast, so ancestral, so politically loaded and spiritually tangled that to feel it might risk a full meltdown. So people do not. We “keep going”, numb out, repress, stay busy, and our unprocessed emotions turn into disease, body pain, addiction, disconnection and death.
I am holding myself personally accountable here. I collapsed. I broke down. A lifetime of unprocessed trauma and the pandemic cracked something open in me that could not be closed again. I spiraled. I unraveled. Full blown spiritual emergency that lasted years, but slowly, painfully, and achingly beautifully I learned how to pick myself back up. To feel without drowning. To witness without turning away.
I’ve done the internal work to become someone who can stay present in this pivotal moment in human history, not from a place of perfection, but from hard-earned capacity.
I am here now, not because I was spared the fall, but because I walked through it.
I left my successful corporate career a few months ago to pursue my art and offer my gifts, my perspective and presence today, NOW, not some day.
I know for certain that the world did not need me to continue negotiating and making money on behalf of a Fortune 500 company.
What the world needs is what I’m stepping into, the frequency of someone who can see clearly and hold steadily.
I am now someone who is ready and able to hold people through these threshold moments.
Someone who isn’t afraid to feel. To grieve. To stay with the ache of the world without being consumed by it.
That’s labor.
Soul labor.
Emotional labor.
Often unseen, often unrecognized, because it isn’t quantifiable. It’s not tracked in metrics or monetized in spreadsheets.
It is felt.
It is resonance.
It is the invisible scaffolding that keeps humanity from slipping too far into despair.
To hold.
To sit.
To stay when things unravel.
And part of that work for me right now comes with an ancestral reckoning.
Last night under the strawberry full moon I guided myself through an ancestral reclamation and soul retrieval portal. I performed ritual, invoked memory through the body, and stepped into the liminal. It is challenging to put this type of presence into words.
I set the intention and called upon my ancestors, and they came. Through a wave of feeling and understanding, clarity. And what I tapped into was a well of remorse and shame. I sat with it, witnessed it, felt it, began to unravel it.
I am third-generation German.
My lineage almost certainly includes those who were complicit, or compliant, in one of the most horrifying regimes the world has ever known.
This is my bloodline and shame is an ancestral burden I feel.
This history lives inside me, not as memory but as tension, hypervigilance, and a sense that if I do not acknowledge this, I will repeat it in another form.
Last night I tapped into this rawness, and sat with the ancestral shame in my bones. I moved through grief, regret, sorrow.
I wasn’t anticipating experiencing any of those energies. And this why the profound release and clarity that arises during ceremony feels like magic. Because an intention is set and then energy moves. To me it is undeniably real.
Epigenetics shows us that trauma imprints are not just emotional, they are biological. Our gene expressions shift in response to fear, shame, silence and survival strategies and those expressions are passed down generation to generation.
And this experience lead me into processing what I am witnessing within me and around me via this piece of writing. Because in the shadow of rising authoritarianism and collective freeze, I feel that soul contract waking up again.
So hear me now.
I’m not here to repeat their silence.
I AM here to interrupt the freeze.
I AM here to disentangle obedience from safety.
To unlearn the guilt of survival.
To refuse to confuse compliance with care.
I’m not becoming less involved. I’m becoming more honest about what true involvement looks like.
For me it looks like being held by the earth and feeling what most people are too scared to feel. Seeking connection, and support. Showing up. Processing through writing, creating, being in service to others.
Creating and co-creating in spaces where the body can thaw, where there is laughter and joy and people have the space to remember who they are beneath their programming.
This is re-rooting.
This is the start of my true service.
With all my love,
Shay Rays
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, frozen, or unsure how to move forward in any areas of your life I am offering a 1:1 support container designed to meet you where you are, right now.
This includes a 90-minute private check-in call, followed by one week of ongoing support via voice note and messaging. Whether you’re navigating an emotional crisis, transition, grief, or just need a non-judgmental space to process, I know how hard it can be to find the right support right when you need it and you are not ready for a long term commitment.
This is for the moments when therapy waitlists feel too long but you know you need support. When no one in your inner circle understands and you just need someone to hold the thread with you.
You don’t have to do this alone.
If you’re in immediate crisis or need additional support, here are some vital resources:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (USA): 988 or 988lifeline.org
Crisis Text Line: Text HELLO to 741741 (available 24/7)
Trevor Project (for LGBTQ+ youth): Call 1-866-488-7386 or text START to 678678
NAMI Helpline (National Alliance on Mental Illness): 1-800-950-NAMI (6264)
SAMHSA Helpline (for mental health & substance use): 1-800-662-HELP (4357)
You’re not weak for feeling. You’re awake.