Healing Trauma - The Senseless Peace Project

We'll take a general look at these verses and how they apply to our process. We also spend some time clarifying our position on taking a Biblical approach and what that might mean for for you if you aren't a follower of Jesus.

What does it mean to have peace that doesn't make sense? Let's take a look

Creating safety and a sense of sanctuary for processing trauma is essential. It helps put our brain's danger sensors at rest allowing for processing without overwhelm.

Releasing and letting go of our trauma in a full-system way that touches each part of us is maybe the biggest key to healing. This part of our process address, physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual elements to the healing process.

Healing is not simply getting rid of the negative symptoms. It also means replacing the negative with positive beliefs and actions. We'll look at doing this intentionally as the next logical step in processing and healing trauma.

Your Lifeline is a great way to help you put positive and negative events in some type of order. The basic ideas for this exercise come from an evidence-based practice for short-term trauma healing called Narrative Exposure Therapy. You might be surprised at how comforting this exercise can be. You may find that putting everything down on a few sheets of paper helps you to better understand how you reached the point in your life you currently find yourself in. In general, you can count on using some of the assessments from the previous lecture to guide you.

This introduces an exercise where you think about some of the ways you've learned to think about and described yourself...mostly as a result of the traumatic experiences you may have had. Then, you want to think about ways you would like to be able to describe yourself. The video sets introduces the handout to help you walk your way through this process.

I'm almost always surprised when I ask clients what they have worked on in previous therapy episodes and they tell me they have no idea. We think it's important for you know where this journey is heading. Not having a plan in therapy can feel a lot like playing basketball without hoops. You run really hard, move back and forth, pass the ball around, and then...never know if you're scoring. This video will help you to set up a treatment plan to measure ways you would know that healing is happening. If you are working directly with us, we will be spending your next session setting this up as your healing guide.

Safety and Stabilization starts with learning and developing resources for staying regulated and in charge in everyday situations. This helps to prepare for the trauma processing phase. This video is a way to think about why resources are critical in trauma work. The Handout is probably something you may want to print and have in a few different places for reference. This will, hopefully, help you to remember why you will be practicing different skills throughout this phase.

Each skill and resource we will be learning basically focuses on one of the areas of our Full-System Response. Increasing awareness and even paying attention to how they all interact is one way to begin regulating. Sometimes, just by writing them down without even thinking about changing one of them can help you to understand why situations are upsetting.

Becoming aware of, and learning skills to regulate, our body is a critical piece of the safety and stabilization phase. We'll talk about the 3 main areas to pay attention to. The handouts are self-regulating exercises designed to increase your awareness of different areas of your body. They are also centered around teaching important skills for regulating your body.

Don't worry! This isn't much about biology, anatomy, or neurology. While that stuff's super important when it comes to trauma, this is more about how both sides of our brains hold information. This links to some of the core aspects of EMDR and Adaptive Information Processing. The handouts talk about ways to increase awareness and mindfulness through different practices.

"How's that make you feel?" is a well-known expression for how most therapists approach clients. It seems to us, it's an irritating question lots of times because we really don't know how we feel. We'll explore the core emotions we all experience and how they impact the rest of our full-system response. Being aware of, and identifying, core emotions is key to healing. When it comes to emotions, Dan Siegel, the pioneer of the interpersonal neurobiology movement, says, "You have to name it, to tame it."

Paying attention to our actions and behaviors gives us a ton of information about the ways we react and respond to certain situations. Sometimes it's our urges or the things we want to do and choose not to that really help us understand where we might be stuck related to trauma. Pat Ogden's Sensorimotor Therapy approach calls these action tendencies. Action tendencies are the things we wanted to do in trauma and were to trapped either emotionally and/or physically. Our approach to healing incorporates noticing these urges and physically or symbolically completing them.

Our thoughts have more or less been the cornerstone of many approaches to therapy. How we perceive and think about situations has a lot to do with how we react to them. Our thoughts are usually driven by deeper level beliefs we hold. Often, these beliefs are shaped by our trauma histories in ways we may be unaware of. Identifying these negative beliefs and then considering what we would like to believe instead can be an integral part of healing.

The ways we remember are super important when it comes to trauma. We will explore Explicit and Implicit memory to help you better understand how trauma triggers often lie in the background. This means that when you're triggered, many time, you don't know why or what set your trauma reactions in motion. Pay close attention to the information on Memory Hackers and try to find the video on YouTube if at all possible. The idea that the physical structure of our memory can change when we recall in conscious thought has a great deal of promise when it comes to healing trauma.