One of the most important tools we can learn in trauma recovery and self-regulation is how to look around. It sounds too simple to be true, but I promise, it can make a huge difference. Here is how to look around Sit down so you are facing the room or your environment. Maybe keep […]
Self-regulation
EFT for self-regulation
EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique and belongs into the category of Energy Psychology, the roots are in Traditional Chinese Medicine though. Different acupressure points on the body are tapped with the fingers while speaking sentences that combine the distressing experience and a self-affirmation. Tapping energetic pathways running through the body (meridians) to influence […]
Learning relaxation with biofeedback
Trauma is not a ‘mental’ disorder, the whole body suffers from chronic stress. It sits deeply within our nervous system. Our traumatized body will struggle with relaxation and sometimes we have been tense for so many years that we actually don’t know how to relax and what that even feels like. Biofeedback technology can help […]
Befriending our nervous system
Most people who experience dysregulation and stress think of it as something bad; they are ashamed or want to make it go away. Befriending our sensations seems contra-intuitive.(If you are new to the language of stress responses you might want to start with the polyvagal ladder) When we reject our stressful experiences we reject […]
The Freeze Response and how to get out of it again
The freeze response is one of our natural, involuntary stress responses. It happens when the parasympathetic activation starts to overpower the sympathetic arousal. The sympathetic signs of high muscle tone are still visible as an underlying energy, but we moved down the polyvagal ladder into immobility. Imagine that the foot that carries your weight stepped […]
Getting out of chronic dissociation Part 1
Complex PTSD is sometimes accompanied by chronic dissociation. It means being in a permanent state of disconnection from our body, our emotions, our needs and sensations and the people around us. We are still functioning in everyday life, but certain areas of our awareness are offline. That’s why this is also called functional shutdown. This […]
The Two Hands (for soothing inner parts)
The two hands is a small exercise meant to help with self-soothing and offer a felt sense of safety, protection or support. It is ideal when working with more or less dissociated parts in cPTSD or DID, but it could also work for people who don’t experience structural dissociation at all. Sometimes parts inside might […]
Polyvagal Therapy
Science about the vagus is an exciting new trend, it gets marketed as having almost magical powers to help people feel better. So I get quite a lot of emails asking for ways to ‘strengthen’ the vagus or how to ‘stimulate’ it. I think that this is based on a misunderstanding. Let me clarify. […]
DBT Skills, chronic dissociation and a polyvagal perspective
When we learn how to stop dissociation we often get in contact with DBT skill training. It teaches us how to recognize dissociation early and then use different skills that we chain to help us regulate and return to our window of tolerance. Theoretically that is a good plan that can work really well. It […]
Titration in Trauma Therapy
Titration is a chemical term that was taken out of context to explain a technique to approach psychological problems. Say we want to neutralize HCl with NaOH. Mixing the acid with the base should, with an easy calculation, give us H2O and NaCl, harmless water and salt. The problem is that an acid and a […]
Containment (in body work)
There is a crucial part of emotional regulation that has to happen somewhere between identifying a feeling and expressing it. Because it is physical in its nature, not a mental concept, it makes it difficult for me to explain it with words. So I will use pictures in the hope that you can translate them […]
Understanding thoughts ‘bottom up’
There is a feedback-loop between our thoughts, emotions and body. A picture you will often see to describe it is this It is the foundation of CBT interventions. We change the thought, that will change our emotion and physical state. It is called top-down approach and it works well with many psychological problems but its […]
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