Trauma Recovery Skills 1

Teaching Trauma Recovery Skills 1

These are just the way I teach my patients skills. I hope it is helpful.

Orientation: Trauma disrupts the orienting reflex. Many of our patients are not really ever in the present moment and don’t know how to be. There are many different ways to assist them but these are the ones I like and use the most.

Visual orientation: The two strongest external senses we have as humans are visual and tactile. In some ways we are primarily visual creatures like hawks and eagles. If I were able to talk to the animals and wanted to teach orientation to a rabbit or a deer I would teach them to orient through sound. If I was teaching a dog we would use the sense of smell. So, I like to start with visual orientation.

I ask the patient to just let their eyes wander around for a bit taking in the view of the office. I always ask them to look behind them as well (predators like to catch their prey from behind if possible). Then after a moment or two I ask them as they are looking around if anything draws their attention so we look at it and talk about it briefly.

I find this a good way to start a session as it brings the patient from where they were before coming in to the now.

I also have found that visual orientation works far better to help someone who is dissociating than the 5-4-3-2-1 which is often used.

I like to stand up, invite them to stand, and both of us will slowly walk around the room looking and pointing out everything we can see that is green (or blue or red or whatever). We do this together sharing with each other what we see.

It usually works very well. We are using visual orientation but this time directing a focus, we are both upright and moving and speaking, and we are orienting relationally. This is the best way I found that consistently works.

Tactile orientation: Most of us use tactile orientation to ground in various ways, both in movement as well as items they carry in their “be present” box or bag.

I take off my shoes and invite them to do as well. We stand up and really feel the “ground” under our feet. Ideally the best grounding is outside with bare feet.

For an interesting understanding of what is happening when we are standing on the ground it is helpful to know a little bit about the Schumann resonances.

Schumann resonances are low frequency energy waves that move between the earth’s surface and the atmosphere. The details will come in another post, but for now the important thing to understand is that the lowest Schumann resonance which is called the fundamental resonance is roughly 7.8 Hz-8Hz. Our brain temporal lobes (one on each side) pulse regularly at 7.8-8 Hz. They act a bit like antennas. Now when we feel most “in the flow” more of the brain begins to pulse at that frequency. The earth sends forth energy pulses at 7.8 -8 Hz. So, when we stand outside barefoot on the ground our brain waves and body become coherent with the earth’s frequency. We are in coherence with mother earth! So, grounding by standing on the earth is grounding indeed!

In our offices we can best approximate that by taking our shoes of and really feeling the floor beneath our feet and mindfully noticing what that is like. If we each say what we notice the grounding becomes relational as well.

What comes next absolutely blows my mind. In their article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 2010, Luke Hendricks, William Bengston, and Jay Gunkelman were curious if a healer and subject both had on EEG monitors, would their brainwave sync up at any time? Well, they did – when the healer’s brain waves were 7.81 Hz then the subjects brain waves became 7.81 Hz! They literally became “in tune” or optimally attuned to one another. They we “in sync”. They were in resonance with one another. They literally were “on the same wavelength!

So, if we allow ourselves to be in tune with the earth and well grounded so to speak, our patients will sync not only with us but with mother earth as well.

To allow ourselves to get to 7.8-8Hz we need to be relatively calm but also actively alert, without anxiety, and be mindfully fully present. That’s all. It puts as at the border between calm theta waves and alert alpha waves.

Well, these are my thoughts on the recovery skill of orientation.