Trauma can rip away a client’s sense of safety . . .
. . . and leave them with a nervous system that is primed to detect threats.
That’s why as practitioners, it’s so important that we have strategies to build a client’s feelings of safety before we help them process traumatic memories.
So in the video below, Chris Willard, PsyD shares some specific questions, movements, and psychoeducation (including some from compassion-based therapy) that can help establish a sense of safety after trauma.
Have a look.
Chris brought up a few movements that come out of the field of compassion-oriented therapy. So if you found this video helpful . . .
. . . you can get more compassion-based strategies that can bring depth to your interventions in the Clinical Application of Compassion Master Series.
In this program, you’ll hear how to integrate compassion-based approaches into your clinical practice from some of top experts in the field, including Paul Gilbert, PhD; Jack Kornfield, PhD; Kristin Neff, PhD; Chris Germer, PhD; Kelly McGonigal, PhD; Dennis Tirch, PhD; and Deborah Lee, DClinPsy.
Now we’d like to hear your thoughts. What are some other ways that you help clients build a sense of safety and security? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
If you found this helpful, here are a few more resources you might be interested in:
3 Strategies to Help Trauma Patients Feel Safe
Two Simple Techniques That Can Help Trauma Patients Feel Safe, with Peter Levine, PhD
Helping Survivors Feel Safe Again With Trauma Treatment, with Peter Levine, PhD
I build or rebuild safety through self reiki. Chance to process and self connect. It’s been invaluable and coupled with talk therapy I can process my traumas also incorporated in this is my foundation of spirituality and prayers for healing on both individual and collective levels
Jennifer
New York
Do you teach your patients some meanings of hand gestures to increase the unvoluntary expressive power of their bodies?
I like to share protection mantras or prayers with clients. This helps them feel a bit more empowered to allow themselves to believe that they can be safe from now on.
How do you share this with clients so that these mantras or prayers do not serve as safety behaviours? Interesting.
In almost 15 years of doing this work I have NEVER heard any adult child abuse survivor tell of being asked if they are CURRENTLY safe. And yet, in the worst cases, their experience is one of being life-long stalking victims, with abuse continuing in different forms throughout their life span. Even continuing after the death of their abusers via wills, groomed accomplices, etc…
It’s alarming to me just how infrequently those survivors were listened to, and how frequently their valid fears were discounted.
Just one type of example (out of many): the abusive grandparent making moves to sully their adult child’s reputation, in order to remove children from safe parents, was not unheard of and not an unfounded fear. In cases of child torture I’ve known (re: Barbara Knox) the torturers first managed to remove the children from the parents’ care.
Trauma survivors, of all types, are statistically much more likely to be victims of crime in the future than their non-abused neighbours, but I don’t see this fact acknowledged in the trauma literature.
We put too much emphasis on teaching people how to dampen down fear, with not enough emphasis on assessing and understanding the various forms of genuine threat and actual danger they might encounter. I’ve yet to see anyone teaching adult child abuse victims how to appropriately respond when the threat is real.
My experience has been that once you provide a safe space for them to assess the current threats they may be experiencing, and explore different techniques they could use to deal with them, their ability to learn and experience feelings of safety (and relief and release) will genuinely and naturally follow. Doing the exercises above without that can be entirely counter-productive.
I’m so glad you’ve brought up this subject. I’ve lived in a state of terror my whole life, and with good reason. Abusive people would gravitate to me because they could sense my vulnerability. I have done work to address the trauma but I still feel unsafe in the world. Looking back on past relationships and situations, I can see that I was in even more danger than I knew consciously because I had learned to detach from my feelings and my instincts in order to survive, which ironically makes abuse victims even more vulnerable to predators and much more likely to end up in dangerous situations because we cannot see the warning signs.
We already second guess ourselves and our feelings, so I strongly believe our feelings of danger should be respected and taken seriously. We have had our instincts and knowing invalidated constantly. The last thing we need is for therapists to further invalidate us and possibly open us up to more danger in the future.
Thank you for your very insightful comment here.
I think every practitioner would do well to take your words to heart, and ask their patients if they might feel similarly. In my experience, many do, but are loathe to admit it if they feel they’ll be discounted – as you’ve been.
I think you’ve already deduced that this can be changed, with the right skill development. You don’t have to remain vulnerable for the rest of your life. Based on your comment your instincts and observations are good, and they can be developed to be more accurate.
A few things, alongside a competent therapist, you might want to consider researching to help you hone (and reality test) your instincts: e.g. self-defence, martial arts, law enforcement training/instruction, disaster/emergency preparedness, etc… Anything that takes this away from being personal, which can make you second-guess yourself. A book I highly recommend is “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes” by Amanda Ripley.
Consider discussing what you’re learning with your therapist or counsellor, to examine how and where it applies to your life. If they discount you, find someone who will take you seriously. Your instincts and observations are very good – developing them will help your sense of safety immensely. No-one deserves to live their life in terror, and hopefully that will soon begin to change for you.
George, the fact that people who have experienced trauma can be more vulnerable to future harm is WELL documented in the research. VERY well documented in the research. So well that I don’t even know where to start. Marsha Linehan, Marylene Cloitre, John Briere, Bessel Van der Kolk, the list is endless. I encourage you to read some of it, it’s enlightening.
My area of expertise is trauma, specifically childhood sexual abuse and sexual assault. I assure you that anyone with a reasonable amount of experience in this area 1. has read the literature above and 2. doesn’t teach people to “dampen down fear”. Quite the opposite. You will probably hear us say (repeatedly) that fear is an important emotion and it has a function.
You raise important points, thank you.
Thank you for your reply, Maya.
My point wasn’t that people who’ve experienced trauma are more “vulnerable”. As you’ve rightly pointed out, that’s well known.
My point comes from the study of criminology and law enforcement (as well as self-defence) – an area known as ‘victim selection’. Victims of crime (all kinds of crime: theft, burglary, assault, fraud, etc…) are statistically far MORE LIKELY to become victims again. Often repeatedly. It’s the same principle that someone who’s been burgled needs to watch out for repeat burglary, as thieves will wait until items have been replaced and strike again.
This appears to be statistically a much higher probability for child abuse victims*, who’ve been groomed, as Laura said above, to “detach from my feelings and instincts”. In addition, this is always in the context of a life-long relationship with persons who are criminally-minded (i.e. to commit assault/abuse on another person, repeatedly), which increases the odds dramatically just within their families of origin. Let alone their now increased odds of being victims of crime in the world outside their families of origin thanks to their training.
*(I’m not aware of any studies on this group, other than on SA victims who comprise a minority within it. In my experience, the results self-evidently can be generalized to all CA victims.)
Not all people (or e.g. houses/businesses) are equally targeted by criminals (nor abusers); Criminals differentiate between ‘hard targets’ and ‘soft targets’. (e.g. the Greyson/Stein study.) The solution, for all types of victimization regardless of type, is to teach victims how to become a ‘hard target’. If, in the example above, your house has been burgled, you need to correct the vulnerabilities that identified you as a soft target to a criminal, in order to break that cycle.
Again, in my experience, once patients/students are given this information, and some training* on how to recognize and counter it, they immediately start to feel safer, saner, stronger, and can start to relax their guard. That is when the advice above is appropriate to consider.
*Actually, I’ve found that it’s really ‘permission’ to explore this subject that helps the most. I can’t tell you how many people have told me they were repeatedly told to discount their fear.
“You will probably hear us say (repeatedly) that fear is an important emotion and it has a function.”
Yes, I have, and I strongly agree with you. But what I hear far more often, sadly, is the word “irrational” when it comes to speaking about patients’/students/etc… fear and anxiety – without any attempt to examine whether those fears are in fact, actually ‘irrational’.
I hope that discussions like this, and hearing from people like Laura, can bring a much needed perspective shift to practitioners and patients alike. Thank you for your comment.
Jane GB. My experience is that staff in hospital/health settings continually discount my fear of abuse, despite my history of both child and adult sexual abuse/assault within those settings. They do not WANT to believe me so accuse me of being irrational/emotional instead of acknowledging my very real fears.
I definitely know what you mean here. And I’ve wondered, since abuse of all kinds is rather prevalent, how often those who don’t/can’t/won’t believe a person are people who also have experienced something abusive and themselves are traumatized or in a place where they are surviving and so are mentally unable to give help to anyone else. Because dang it, it does happen much much too often–but there are also people out there who do not/would not respond this way; it just sometimes feels like there are hardly any of them.
If you’re working with an adopted person whose traumatic experience is so deeply ingrained, how then would you manage that to assist them in the context that you’re discussing?