Most people still do not understand what freeze looks like.
And that ignorance is harming survivors.
I am exhausted by the same recycled lines: “Why didn’t she say anything sooner?” “This happened years ago. How can we believe her?” “She didn’t say no.” Let’s slow that down. Did she say yes? And if she froze, if her body shut down under threat, if her nervous system went into tonic immobility, are we really arguing that survival physiology equals consent? Freezing is not consent. Silence is not consent. Delay is not deception. The question itself reveals how little we understand trauma. When someone asks, “Why didn’t she speak up?” what they are really asking is why she did not behave like someone who felt safe. Because she was not safe.
The human nervous system has involuntary survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Freeze is not dramatic. It is not theatrical. It is an immobilization response that occurs when the brain determines escape is unlikely. Speech can disappear. Muscles go still. A person can appear compliant while internally experiencing terror. This is called tonic immobility, and it is well documented in trauma research, particularly in cases of sexual assault. The body prioritizes survival over resistance. That is neurology, not consent.
Delayed disclosure is also predictable. Trauma disrupts narrative integration. When an experience overwhelms capacity, the brain stores fragments: sensation, fear, body memory, not a clean timeline. Add shame. Add power imbalance. Add fear of retaliation. Silence becomes adaptive. Many survivors cannot name what happened until years later because their nervous system needed safety before language could form.
But there is another layer we do not talk about enough.
In high-control moral or religious systems, people are trained early to disconnect from bodily authority. Desire is labeled dangerous. Boundaries are labeled rebellion. Obedience is equated with virtue. Belonging is tied to compliance. When sexuality is moralized before it is understood, autonomy erodes quietly. The nervous system learns to override discomfort in order to preserve connection. That conditioning does not disappear in adulthood. It shows up in freeze responses. It shows up in compliance mistaken for consent. It shows up in the inability to name coercion in real time.
So when someone says, “It was years ago,” what they are really revealing is a preference for procedural certainty over psychological reality. Trauma does not run on courtroom clocks. Healing does not follow legislative timelines. The body waits for safety. The story emerges when the nervous system can tolerate it.
And when someone says, “She didn’t say no,” they are exposing how deeply we have failed to teach consent as affirmative, embodied, and mutual. Consent requires capacity. Consent requires safety. Consent requires freedom from coercion. If someone’s nervous system is in freeze, those conditions are absent. No yes means no consent.
The research on this is decades old. The clinical data is clear. The lived experience is overwhelming. The persistence of these questions is not confusion. It is resistance to confronting power. Because if we accept that freeze is common, that delayed disclosure is predictable, and that shame silences, then we must also accept something much more uncomfortable: many of our legal, educational, and religious structures were not built around survivor safety. They were built around institutional protection.
Sexual empowerment is not cultural excess. It is nervous system restoration. It is the rebuilding of autonomy in bodies that were trained not to trust themselves. It is the reclamation of moral authorship after years of external authority dictated what was right, wrong, pure, or shameful. Until we teach nervous system literacy alongside consent, until we address the belief systems that condition silence, we will keep asking survivors why they did not speak sooner instead of asking why we made speaking unsafe.
And I am tired of pretending we do not know better.
Tonic Immobility in Sexual Assault Survivors
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0145213408001532
Möller et al. (2017) Tonic immobility during sexual assault
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28335695/
National Sexual Violence Resource Center Statistics
https://www.nsvrc.org/statistics
National Institute of Mental Health – PTSD Overview
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd