Trauma Recovery Skills 4

Trauma Recovery 4

Tracking: Tracking is another basic skill to teach our patients. Tracking body sensations is useful in itself for mindfulness, for increased tolerance of distress signals, and is the main skill when we begin processing trauma memories somatically. Tracking then is helpful, again no matter what type of therapy you are doing. Even if you will not be doing trauma processing in your modality. It is helpful for increasing mindfulness.

Now we want to begin teaching the tracking process when the patient notices a positive body sensation of any sort. This is what the principle “It has to get better before it gets better” is about. Our patients live in suffering. I want the first body tracking to be something that will make the patient feel good briefly, which gives them hope and confidence they will get better as they have already experienced it in the office with you. The following are some examples:

The patient says in response to a question, “I feel a bit better” or “I am calmer” or “I feel something here (pointing to abdomen or chest). I say, “Where do you notice that (better, or calm, or something)?” The patient often will say something like, “I feel a little warm here (puts hand on heart)”.

This when the tracking comes in:

“Can you just keep your hand there and feel that warmth for a minute?” “Sure”. “Now as you feel that just notice it while it’s there and let’s just see if it goes anywhere, stops, or gets bigger, or cools off?”

The patient noticing what happens with the initial feeling is what we refer to as tracking. I want to emphasize that we want the patient to have some experiences with tracking the positive sensation before we track the negative.

“I notice that the warmth got a little bit warmer but now it’s cooling off” or “I notice I am smiling”. or “I notice I just took a deep breath” or “I don’t feel the warmth anymore but my hands are tingling” I might say “Good noticing. Now keep paying attention and see what comes next”.

Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes something happens but only for a moment. At that point the tracking is over until there is another positive sensation or feeling the patient reports. Sometimes it just moves from one part of the body to another, or travels down the legs and through the feet. It doesn’t really matter what it is or what happens. The idea is they are noticing a body sensation, attending to it, and mindfully noticing what, if anything happens next.

Once they are used to tracking positive sensations, they have the skills to track negative sensations but how we do that is in the next topic, Somatic Trauma Processing.