The Frozen Present
When Unprocessed Pain Returns
In 2023, I was serving as a ritual elder on a team of sixteen volunteer men delivering the Men’s Rites of Passage in Ireland. The MROP is a powerful, intensive five-day event—a held sacred space where men come to better understand their value and place in the world.
The team of elders, all initiated men who have completed their Rites, are committed to their own inner work. But no one attends the Rites unaffected. It works on the team perhaps as much as the initiates. It touches unhealed wounds. It pushes all that is not love, moving into awareness what is ready to shift.
After a deeply moving session, I was walking back to the main building. All morning I’d felt something coming up, stuck in my chest and throat, though I was unsure what it was or what it related to. I stood in the river, breathing into it with the intention of release. Something shifted. Some of it let go. I felt better and continued to our council circle.
As we sat in silence, I could feel a ball of grief rising. When it was my turn to share, there was a massive outpouring of sadness, anger, and grief. The place seemed to shake, it came up that powerfully.
I was met with memories of the intensive care unit where doctors were attempting to resuscitate my daughter with CPR and a defibrillator—eight years before.
We had arrived that evening after a call to come in. Isabelle had taken an unexpected turn. There were many staff present. When I asked how long they had been working on her lifeless body, the reply was over forty minutes.
I was enraged. I felt it was so disrespectful to continue to work on the body of a 22-month-old child—a typical Western health view: extending life by all means possible, rather than allowing her to die with dignity. I told them to stop. Just let her go.
Everything emotional was pushed down. I was in action mode, feeling a deep need to protect my family. We were there surrounded by staff who were slow to move on—understandably now, people witnessing the death of a child and the grief of parents. But at the time it felt completely overwhelming. I just wanted everyone to leave.
My reaction to that experience had been frozen in time.
The Paradox
Many years before, I had arrived at a place where I have only deep gratitude and love for the privilege of being Isabelle’s father and guardian for the short time we had together. And I would like to share how I arrived here in future letters. I thought the grief work was done. But transformation rarely moves in straight lines.
Here I was, years later, a piece I had become unaware of resurfacing.
Here, in the safety of this held space, that part of me was ready to release that deeply painful experience of letting my daughter go. To release the energy. To forgive the staff. To heal the emotional wound so the experience could become a memory and no longer affect me.
The Frozen Present
The Irish psychiatrist Ivor Browne wrote about this phenomenon in his book Music and Madness. He called it “the frozen present”—how unprocessed pain can remain suspended in the body, cut off from conscious awareness.
When someone is overwhelmed by a deeply distressing experience they cannot face, the system shuts it down as an instinctual coping mechanism. The experience doesn’t integrate into memory, not that it’s repressed, but rather unprocessed. It becomes frozen, existing outside time.
As Browne said: “You don’t remember it. You feel it. And of course, that’s when people think they’re going mad, because nothing around them seems dangerous, yet they’re flooded with fear or pain. That’s why I called it ‘the frozen present’. Because when it comes, it comes as the present, not as the past. Eventually, when you’ve experienced it and allowed it to move through you a few times, it finally becomes the past.”
Decades may go by. Then some ordinary event triggers the memory, and a person finds themselves “overreacting,” flooded with fear or pain, not understanding the cause.
The Way Through
Pain, when faced and allowed to move through us, eventually transforms.
When pain is avoided, it remains trapped within us, shaping our lives from beneath the surface.
When we choose to bring our present attention and go to the pain until it no longer affects us, we heal the emotional wound. Transformed pain no longer demands to be relived in the present. It takes its place in memory, with loving understanding.
The concept, while relatively new and even controversial in modern psychology and psychiatry, was known in indigenous wisdom traditions for thousands of years. Regardless of the lens or tradition we use, when something happens in our lives that we struggle to make sense of, we need to be able to go to it. Allow what wants to arise. Face our shadow and release it in the light of our present awareness.
It can be delayed, as we apply the many distractions and vices, we all use to try and quieten the inner tension. But it cannot be avoided, sooner or later it surfaces and at times in the most inconvenient ways. Until we stop running and finally turn toward what’s been waiting for us all along.
Blessings Jason