What is the Freeze Response and what does it have to do with consent? Most of us have heard of the autonomic Fight and Flight responses that kick in when a person (or any mammal!) faces a perceived danger. But there is a third autonomic response – the Freeze response. The Freeze Response, also known as tonic immobility, is a physical survival mechanism that is completely outside of our conscious control. It causes changes to a person’s heart rate, circulation, breathing, visi

Consent between people becomes much more complicated when they have significantly differing positions of power in the world. In some cases it is expressly impossible to have consent between individuals, making relationships illegal between a therapist or a probation officer and their clients, for example. So, in some cases, no, they should not be asking. In many other cases power differentials between people don’t explicitly prohibit relationships, but do make the ability to

The latest consent motto is “Anything but an enthusiastic Yes is a No!” That has led to some confusion, because often we consent to something even when we are not jumping up and down with desire, and there are a lot of legitimate reasons for that. Personally, I can think of more than a few times when I did something for someone that was not my own explicit desire out of a genuine feeling of generosity, because it was something that they very much wanted. Was I enthusiastic in

Most of us have a hard time hearing “No”. It often feels like rejection, or even as an indictment of the very core of who we are. We are usually too lost in the feelings of insecurity that a “No” brings up in us, to understand that the person who just said “No” probably struggled to say something uncomfortable in order to give us important information about how they feel. There are a lot of books and courses out there to teach people how to get better at having boundaries and

Many of us have a hard time saying “No”. And we have a lot of strategies that we employ when we are put in the position of wanting or needing to say “No”, but we want to avoid doing so. Some of us avoid situations or people who we feel might put us in this position, limiting our activities or movements. Some of us laugh or try to make a joke out of the situation, or toss a word salad to distract from what we’re actually saying. Some people are so conditioned that saying “No”