Trauma Healing Pt. 1. 

Self Regulatory Skills. 

By Pablo Das (SEP, HHC) 

Yesterday, I posted an article about the nature of the healing process. I acknowledged that what healing looks like depends on what it is we’re trying to heal. My way of thinking about healing means engaging the items on your list of issues working with them, through various healing modalities, until they are no longer a meaningful barrier to living a life you love. That’s healing! 

Today I wanna begin talking about healing trauma. Trauma is a complex matter and it impacts people in many ways. Probably the most meaningful way trauma impacts people is that it compromises one’s capacity to regulate your emotional life. 

When people talk about being “triggered”, what they mean is that something has activated their stress response system. The human stress response involves the brain, nervous system and physiology. It exists to provide a “response” when there is a perception of threat.  It is “sensitized” by overwhelming or threatening experiences in our past. 

People who have been “traumatized” have experienced a conditioning or sensitization of the stress response system. For example, people who have been in accidents involving red Priuses may be sensitized to watch out for red Priuses. They may feel anxious around them. May want to avoid them. They may have intrusive memories of the red Prius involved in the accident. This may trigger anxiety, panic, depressive states and/ or edginess. 

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There’s an important layer of complexity here, though. What I’m describing is a rather obvious cause and effect scenario. But it’s not that simple. Humans learn to regulate and soothe ourselves early in our lives and in relationship to our primary caregivers. If our parents are present, responsive, affirming etc…then we likely get a secure and high functioning nervous system and we’re probably more resilient when the accidents come along in adulthood.  But, if our parents are not present, not responsive, not affirming, unpredictable, violent, stressed or have their own issues regulating their emotions, then we likely get nervous systems that are more fragile and susceptible to experiencing the layer accidents as a “trauma”. 

Members of marginalized communities can also have their stress response systems sensitized to invisibility, dismissals, exclusion, threat and violence over time. 

Those of us who never quite developed a solid nervous system or whose stress response system has been sensitized by overwhelming experiences in our lives need to develop other ways of regulating. 

One way of engaging this issue and learning to regulate is to develop awareness based self regulatory strategies.

One thing I train my clients to do when they are stressed, is to get in the practice redirecting their attention outside themselves. This means looking and listening to the external visual and sonic experiences around them and resting their attention on them. There are a bunch of reasons this works, but if I ask a client to rate their stress on a scale of 1 to 10. Just directing their attention to connect with a tree outside the window or the sound of the traffic outside, it’s almost always worth about a 2 point reduction in activation. 

Another self regulatory strategy that I use frequently in sessions or meetings is to bring to mind the image of a regulating place or being.  I can do this as I talk to people. One of my favorite images is a stretch of coastline in San Diego, where I lived when I was a young kid. I could be having a stressful moment with a client, stay present with them, while also bringing that image to mind and getting some regulation as a result. 

Connection with others, working with the breath, anchoring attention at a point of physical contact (like the feet on the floor) and systematically tightening and then releasing muscle groups are all ways of regulating your mind, emotions and body. 

For people who have been impacted by trauma (and on the theme of my recent articles) people in recovery would do well to develop a set of self regulatory skills to help stabilize a sensitive nervous system. Acquiring a capacity to intentionally regulate means that the sensitivity of your system may be less of a barrier to living fully, thus, for me, that constitutes “healing”.