Hi! Here I’m going to highlight some self-care resources specifically for people who have experienced trauma and/or those who love them. This is for educational purposes only and absolutely does not replace individual psychotherapy with a therapist.
Trauma can cause our bodies and minds to experience being stuck in the past, in the present moment. One of the antidotes to that is building up our resources to be in the present moment. Grounding activities help us to be grounded in the present moment, and can help us come out of a dissociative episode:
- A Quick Grounding Exercise: Can help our bodies know we are here, and not there.
- Benefits of Paying Attention to Your Breath: Can help us experience calm.
- Calm Yourself through Breathing: Can help calm down our nervous systems.
- Discover Our Safe Haven: Can help us experience peace.
Trauma can make it really hard to manage overwhelming emotions:
- Identifying a 10% solution: Can help us manage overwhelming emotions.
- Learn to identify a resource: Can help calm our nervous system.
- Be curious: Can help us not feel ashamed.
- Resiliency Pause: Can help us be aware of what else is true.
Trauma can keep us in a chronic state of hyperarousal (e.g. anxiety, anger, rage, etc) or hypoarousal (depressed, frozen, etc) or vacillate between the two:
- Learn about your Resilient Zone and how to widen your ability to stay in a regulated place.
- Build your mindfulness muscle to regulate or re-regulate your nervous system.
Trauma can cause us to experience a lot of self-hatred and shame. All the more reason to build our self- compassion muscle!:
- Learn about Self-Compassion (video)
- How to show yourself kindness
- Practice being healthfully proud of yourself
Anything can traumatize our nervous systems when we don’t have enough support:
- The Power of Social Support: can help us withstand and/or tolerate better the trauma
May we be gentle with ourselves and others, and also be encouraged that healing from trauma is within the realm of possibility*. Warmly, Robyn
For More:
- *If you’d like some inspiration that healing can be in the realm of possibility, you’re welcome to watch my Trauma and Healing story.
- I have a general Self-Care resources as well as self-care category of blog posts, which might also be helpful to build our self-care habits.
- I have a sub-category specifically for Self-Care for trauma survivors, which is another place to locate the information on this page.