Foundational Trauma Skills for the Body (Part 2)

This article is Part 2 in a two-part series about somatic trauma skills to help you navigate trauma in your body. You can read Part 1 here.

When I learned about trauma — what it is, how it stays in the body until we resolve it, and just how many of us are affected — it changed everything for me.

With my new understanding of trauma, the symptoms that I'd experienced since childhood sexual abuse suddenly made sense. Not only that, but for the first time in my life, I knew that I was normal.

It was a massive relief.

I felt like I'd found the secret key to myself and my inner world. I also gained empathy for my colleagues, family members, and friends who were impacted by trauma like I was. Suddenly, their behavior made sense too.

When people ask me why everyone is suddenly talking about trauma all the time, I offer that it's because trauma has been a missing piece for so many of us.

Before the lens of trauma, our symptoms were seen as a disorder, even a pathology — in other words, like something was wrong with us. But now we know that trauma is the brain and body's natural response to overwhelming situations. It's natural, and although not ideal, it is also possible to heal.

That last part is something of a miracle.

When I was growing up in the 80's, trauma was considered a life sentence and nobody wanted to talk about it. Now, we have trauma healing methods that are thoroughly researched and proven to work across cultures and age groups. Trauma is such a common word in our language now that people often use "triggered" (the initiation of a trauma response) to mean "angry" or "annoyed".

But all this new awareness doesn't mean that we know how to navigate trauma when it comes up in our bodies. It doesn't mean we have trauma resolution skills to support ourselves and others we care about.

And there is still a lot of stigma about trauma, especially in industries like humanitarian aid, international development, and entrepreneurship, where trauma symptoms are often interpreted as a weakness or a character flaw.

When we know how to navigate trauma when it arises, in ourselves or others, we become more powerful and effective leaders. We know how to stay present when others are suffering, and how to help them with tools that work. We gain people's trust because we know how to respond.

If we don't learn trauma navigation skills, it's going to be hard to live up to our full leadership potential. We won't ever know the thriving that comes with being able to speak the language of the body, and understand what it needs. We won't ever be fully trusted by others, because they will know there are things they can't express around us.

To me, knowing these skills and being trauma-informed is how leaders create that proverbial "safe space" we’re always hearing about.

So let's continue with our survey of trauma skills that you can use to help navigate when things get stressful or when a trauma response is triggered in the nervous system.

I invite you to become trauma-informed leaders by learning and practicing these skills.

Foundational Trauma Skills for the Body (Part 2)

This is Part 2 of a two-part series and these skills build on the ones we explored last time. If you haven't read about Containment, Orienting, and Grounding in Part 1, please do that here and come back when you're done.

1. Resourcing

With trauma, the body can often feel like a source of suffering or even a trap. The process of resourcing helps to make the body a safe place again by reminding us that we have a choice about how we hold ourselves through a trauma response.

When we practice resourcing, we learn to create safety for ourselves. We allow good feelings to happen at the same time as the challenging feelings, and hold space for them both to be there.

Resourcing involves recognizing that we can choose spaces inside of us that feel safe and good. Because trauma responses often involve intense feelings of fear and disconnection, it's important to create a sense of inner goodness again.

Once we know how to find that place of inner goodness, we can always return. Over time, resourcing starts to reduce the overwhelm of the trauma response.

When we resource, we focus our attention and awareness on something that brings us pleasure. Internal resourcing is when we find a place that feels good in the body. Maybe we feel warmth in the chest or softness in the lower belly. Those are examples of internal resources.

Often, with trauma, it can be hard at first to find an internal resource because we are out of the habit. It can take some guiding and comes with practice. That's why we often start with an external resource, something or someone in the outside that reliably makes you feel good.

An external resource can be a beloved friend, your favorite houseplant, or the art you have on your wall. It's anything outside your body that you can rely on to create feelings of safety, love, and belonging for yourself.

If you'd like to learn more about how to resource, I'll show you how. Sign up here for my FREE Introduction to Resourcing meditation and I'll send it to your Inbox.

2. Titration

Titration means not biting off more than we can chew. It's the wisdom of taking small bites and digesting our trauma response in pieces, bit by bit.

Titration is based on the simple fact that in trauma healing, slow and steady is more reliable than rushing and overloading the nervous system. In fact, taking on too much at a time risks re-traumatizing the body and making things worse.

The skill of titration involves slowing down, which can be difficult to do in the middle of a trauma response. When I work with clients on trauma resolution, I guide them in titration because it doesn't come naturally. In western culture, we are trained to push through our natural limits and override our boundaries, and it takes time and practice to unlearn this.

In a trauma response, we titrate when we slow down and stay present with our ourselves. We focus on one feeling at a time and give ourselves space to get curious. We meet the urge to run away with self-compassion.

When we slow down the trauma response, we create space for our nervous system to resolve it naturally. When we shift our attention to staying present with ourselves, the body will start to release in different ways.

We might feel emotions, or shake, yawn, stretch, or sigh. These are all important and undervalued ways that trauma resolves and releases from the body. When we titrate, we allow our body to digest the trauma because it's no longer overwhelming to the system.

I find it amazing that going slow and doing our healing bit by bit creates the most lasting progress.

The trick with titration is to know your limits and stay within them, not getting too activated but also not shutting down. We need to know how much is too much, and know how to step back and slow the process down. 

3. Pendulation

The body is our sanctuary, but trauma separates us from that connection. It can be hard to feel good in our bodies when we are easily overwhelmed by our trauma response.

Pendulation puts together the skills of resourcing and titration. It involves learning how to shift out of a trauma response and back into pleasure, when your system has had enough and needs a break.

With pendulation, we avoid feeling overwhelmed by our trauma response, because we know how to interrupt it when we need to. We know how to shift ourselves back into pleasure and goodness.

Pendulation is an essential skills to create more safety in the nervous system. It brings us back to ourselves because we are centering the power of choice. At any moment, we can contain the trauma response and shift into giving ourselves pleasure. (For more on containment, see Part 1.)

When we are doing trauma healing, we use pleasure as a jumping-off point to move with purpose into the intensity of the trauma and work with what is there. We know that at any time, when the body and nervous system signal that we've had enough, we can move safely back into pleasure.

Being able to pendulate a trauma response with the experience of pleasure is key to successful trauma resolution. Our bodies realize that it's safe because we are not going to overwhelm ourselves.

Once our body has a sense of safety, we naturally release what got stuck. It happens almost automatically, when we have the right support.

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Trauma resolution happens in the body. If we could think or talk our way out of it, we would've healed already. That's why learning these foundational skills for supporting the body through a trauma response can be so helpful.

To support you, I’ve created a FREE Introduction to Resourcing meditation that you can sign up for here and receive right away in your Inbox.

I hope you'll give it a try and practice the other skills we've covered in this series.

You can even use these skills in your interactions with others. Try titrating in your next stressful conversation, only going as far as feels good, and knowing when to pause and come back later. Give pendulation a try when you're in conflict with your partner, and notice how quickly a return to pleasure together can reset and restore your nervous system.

Thank you for reading. I invite you to sign up for my free email list here if you haven’t already, so you don't miss anything. And if you know someone who might benefit from reading this, sharing is caring.