Preparing To Heal Trauma

Note: This is where it can be very helpful to work with a therapist to support you through co-regulation and being that safe person you needed when you were wounded.

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Healing trauma, and changing how we show up in our relationships, is not just about knowing differently, but about feeling differently.

We must learn to feel safe in our bodies, process our old incomplete emotions, sensations, and sympathetic / dorsal vagal responses.

We do this bit by bit, one step at a time – not all at once.

The first step of healing trauma is creating safety - regulating and grounding your nervous system through body-awareness and other techniques:

• Breathing techniques
• Physical holds
• Movement
• Connecting with or visualizing with another safe person (co-regulation)
• Looking around the room and noticing details of your outer experience and inner senses
• Focusing on the feeling of your feet on the ground or earth

Pendulation is the process of going back and forth between feeling the safety of our resources / grounding practices, and then into the trauma, bit by bit, then back and forth, gently, and safely.

Somatic awareness is about staying connected to what we feel in the body as we do this work. It is applying mindfulness to notice when we start to get triggered, or when protector parts come online. As we do trauma work, we want to stay in the body so that we can feel through sensations and emotions and complete them.

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Reflection questions:

1. Who is a safe and supportive person I can imagine and connect with the thought and feeling of when doing this work? What does it feel like in my body when I connect with this person?
2. What tools or resources have been helping me to feel most safe lately?
3. Can I remember a recent moment when I was outside of my window of tolerance (overwhelmed) and used regulation tools to come back into my window? What was that like? What happened in my body?