The Freeze and Fawning Response - A Trauma-Informed Guide to Set Boundaries With Family and Rebuild Self-Trust After Emotional Abuse #1012114

The Freeze and Fawning Response: A Trauma-Informed Guide to Set Boundaries With Family and Rebuild Self-Trust After Emotional Abuse is a nonfiction self-help guide for adults recovering from emotional abuse, gaslighting, and relational trauma. They struggle to set and hold boundaries with people they cannot simply leave—co-parents, aging parents, employers, and other family members.
The book explains “freeze” and “fawn” as protective nervous-system responses rather than personal failures and offers a structured, trauma-informed method for recognizing these patterns and responding to them deliberately. It is organized in three parts.
Part One addresses recognition: identifying the bodily signals that precede an automatic yes.
Part Two covers practice: short scripts for high-stress moments, strategies for designing ongoing contact with people who cannot be avoided, and methods for managing the guilt that often follows a boundary.
Part Three addresses navigation: handling situations where a boundary is ignored or met with backlash and applying these tools to specific relationships, including co-parenting, caregiving for aging or difficult family members, and the workplace.
Each chapter combines a brief case scenario, an explanation of the underlying pattern, a practical exercise, and ready-to-use scripts. The book includes a closing reference section summarizing its core tools and scripts for quick use. It does not replace professional mental health care and includes guidance on when to seek additional support.
The author, writing under the name Levitan Rich, draws on established concepts in trauma psychology to offer readers a practical, non-clinical resource for setting boundaries without requiring them to end the relationships in question.