Levine suggests two very simple physical procedures. One is to ask the client to put one hand in the opposite arm pit, creating a physical sensation of containment of warmth and gentle pressure, directing one’s attention to something immediate, tangible, and palpable in the body. Note that the words are conveying the healing by simply directing the client’s attention to feeling their own kinesthetic sense (sense of touch) in their body. Note how much more immediate and real the experience is of such instruction than if a therapist says the words: “try to relax” to the client.
Levine also suggests asking the client to put one hand on their forehead, the other on the chest. Feel the sensation. Or self-tapping their whole body. In general, these techniques help the client to define their bodily boundary which helps them gain a feeling of security.
The practice of tapping, as in the Emotional Freedom Technique, or gently tapping all over the body to provide physical stimulation and redefining physical boundary, creates a gently directed attention to the body in the “here and now” This bypasses the emptiness of words when one is dealing with traumatic memory. Words sound hollow both to the therapist and the client when the therapist speaks to a highly agitated client.
Remember, traumatized clients are on permanent high-alert having been induced to a hyperkinetic state by the traumatic memory. The only way of reaching the psyche of such a client meaningfully is through bringing their attention back to their body.
Alternatively, the therapist could gently push a large cushion against the chest of a client and ask him/her to take a slow deep breath, hold the breath, close the eyes and slowly exhale. Use only a large cushion slowly and gently. This is to ensure that there is no physical miscommunication about the intent of the pushing.
Sometime we therapists overly rely on the use of words. I once used this method on a 59 year old man. It aroused an immediate emotional response and linking to a memory without any verbal intervention on my part. If you can assist a client to get in touch inwards, you don’t have to do a lot of talking in psychotherapy!
If these kinds of exercises are done within a trusting therapeutic relationship, the client cannot escape the physical sensation of gentle pressure against the body. This bodily experience enables them to feel the comfort of relaxation. This is what is meant by grounding, or resetting the nervous system. It is teaching the client the beginnings of re-learning the experiential feelings of comfort and security. The client is induced to re-learn that long lost sensation of good feelings in the body.
I always relied heavily on the therapeutic alliance as a pre-requisite to any procedure in trauma therapy. Then, any instruction was more likely to reach the client physically, rather than merely through words. The simplest way for me to help the client to reach a state of grounding was through that kinesthetic sense, coupled with the attention to the breath.
One key point about breathing is that I never asked my clients to breathe deeply, it seemed too invasive. He/she might end up breathing in too deeply and beginning rapid hyperventilation! If the client was exhibiting agitation, breathing deeply was almost like asking them to breathe back in all the agitation they were putting out into the environment. In fact, they might mistakenly imagine them doing exactly that. The key guidance I chose to give was to ask my clients to breathe “slowly.”
If a therapist is essentially repeating to the client that they need to try to let go and relax, well it simply is not going to work. Give them a path connected to physical sensations they can generate by themselves within their body and you have set them on the course of self-healing. You have given them an understanding of the experience of feeling safe once again – an experience they likely thought would never exist for them again.
I have mentioned aspects of the healing process in various section of my book series Engaging Multiple Personalities. I offer no apology for such repetition because the fundamentals of trauma healing, although quite simple, are very difficult to convey either to novice therapists or to clients.
We must reset the nervous system in relationship to the immediate physical experience of the living body. If we have been grasping a ball tightly, it is not so easy to simply let it go. We have to let go of our grip, muscle by muscle, making sure that we don’t begin to re-grip the ball each time we move to the next muscle. This is what we must teach clients to do with the tight grip with which they are holding their traumatic material. Small step by small step, with ongoing empathy and support, the resetting happens.
