Blake Lively walked into a press junket. Entertainment reporter Kjersti Flaa walked out feeling like she couldn’t breathe. And then she sat on the story for years because she was scared.
“I knew if I did react, then I would never get opportunities like that again,” Flaa told Page Six this week. She froze. She smiled. She kept her job.
The internet immediately wants a villain. Toxic celebrity. Weak journalist. Pick a side, post your take, move on.
I want to say something different. What happened in that hotel suite is the same thing I watch happen on my couch in San Francisco every week between two people who love each other and cannot for the life of them figure out why one of them keeps going quiet.
The Body Knew Before The Brain Did
Flaa didn’t decide to freeze. Her nervous system decided for her.
We are an interdependent species, wired from the cradle to the grave to need connection, status, and belonging. When any of those three feels threatened by someone with more perceived power, the body takes over. The thinking brain goes offline. The survival brain picks a strategy. Fight. Flight. Freeze. Placate.
Flaa placated. She kept her face neutral because protesting in that room meant exile from her career. The placater thinks, I probably deserved it anyway, I’m not that good, don’t worry, it’s fine. That’s not weakness. That’s a brilliant biological strategy running at the speed of instinct.
I see this constantly with the couples I work with. Founders, executives, high achievers. One partner is powerful out in the world. The other one walks on eggshells at home, terrified that the wrong sentence ends the marriage. They sit on my couch and describe their spouse like an unstoppable force they must appease.
They’ve become so enveloped in managing the other person’s moods that they can’t feel themselves anymore. They swallow their own truth, session after session, because they believe the cost of speaking up is total abandonment.
That’s the freeze Flaa is describing. It just happened to happen on the clock.
The Goldfish Bowl Cuts Both Ways
Here’s where I lose half the internet. Blake makes sense too.
Public figures live inside the goldfish bowl. Every move watched, judged, screenshot, archived, fed to an algorithm that rewards outrage and starves nuance. When your nervous system anticipates shame every time you open your mouth in public, you stop sending the real you into the room. You send a polished representative whose only job is to control the narrative.
The tragedy is that the exact armor a celebrity uses to survive that exposure lands on the person across the table as cold, dismissive, punishing. Both nervous systems are protecting themselves. Both people miss the humanity of the other. That’s the loop.
If you’re reading this and recognizing the dynamic from your own relationship, where one of you goes hard and the other one goes silent, you can take the Empathi relationship quiz and see which protective strategy is running the show.
Because the internet wants you to diagnose Blake. I’m more interested in what’s running you.
I’ll say the thing that loses me followers: there are no bad guys here. Your truth makes sense, their truth makes sense, your panic makes sense, their shutdown makes sense. Two truths, one loop, no villains. People constantly mistake these rigid, protective adaptations for personality flaws. They’re survival strategies. When somebody looks mad at you, they’re often really sad, longing to be cared for, and too scared to say so.
The Mango On The Couch
So, what do you actually do with this if you’re the one freezing? Or the one whose partner keeps freezing around you?
You stop litigating the argument. You will not find a cognitive solution to a limbic problem. High achievers try to fix disconnection with logic and strategy, and it never works. I tell therapists in training, you can describe a mango to a client all day, the color, the texture, the origin, but that’s not the same thing as tasting the mango.
The partner who froze is excellent at analyzing why they froze. They’re terrified of actually saying out loud, I feel small, I feel panicked, I feel sad. That sentence is the mango.
If you’re the one with more power in the room, your job is harder than it sounds. You have to let yourself be just a hurt person who doesn’t feel loved or understood, instead of the polished representative who controls every interaction. This is where I see the same pattern as the science behind dismissive avoidant shutdown, the armor goes on so fast the person wearing it doesn’t even notice it landed on someone else like a slap.
And if you’re the one who placates? You have to learn you can be hurt and share the hurt without collapsing. You can say I’m affected, something stirs in me, something hurts, and the world does not end. That’s the rep you have to build. It’s the same skill that lets people stay in murky modern situations like the science behind what is a situationship without losing themselves inside someone else’s mood.
What Flaa’s Story Is Really Telling Us
The reason Flaa’s interview is going viral isn’t Blake. It’s the freeze.
Millions of people just read that quote and felt their own jaw clench, remembering the boss, the mother-in-law, the partner, the moment they smiled when they wanted to scream. The story of other never leads to growth. But the story of your own nervous system, the one that’s been keeping you safe since you were a kid, that’s where the door is.
You’re not weak for freezing. You’re not toxic for armoring up. You’re a person whose body learned how to survive a room. The work is teaching it that not every room is that room anymore.
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Figs O’Sullivan, LMFT and his wife, Teale, are couples therapists in San Francisco, relationship experts to the Stars and Silicon Valley, founders of Empathi, and built the Figlet platform, an AI relationship coach trained on their clinical work.
