Coping with the Holidays: Skills and Self Care for Trauma Survivors
Togetherness can be fun, joyful, and fulfilling for many people. Yet, for many others, the idea of coming together with certain friends and family can be triggering, isolating, distressing, and anxiety-provoking.
Below, I have outlined core skills to use whenever we think our sensitivity is high.
Radical Acceptance
Mindfulness
Self and Sensory Soothing
Boundaries with people, time, and content.
PTSD Triggers Years Later: What To Do When You Are Triggered
PTSD Triggers Years Later: what to do when you are triggered
Navigating the aftermath of trauma is a tricky journey that often resembles a winding road, filled with unexpected turns and occasional setbacks. PTSD triggers years later can still cause us to have trouble in our life and experience an uptick in trauma symptoms. Many of us struggle with what to do when you are triggered.
Evidence-based trauma treatment: How Radical Acceptance works
In Dialectical Behavior Therapy, radical acceptance shows up as a concrete coping skill, a way of dealing with intensely distressing situations. In DBT, we acknowledge that there are moments when we can be in high distress about something that we cannot change. A skill for radical acceptance can be around accepting the truth, moving out of this distress and angst around forcing something that will not change. When we finally accept the situation, the distress tends to fall into grief, the sadness we may have been trying to avoid. The opposition to change, or acceptance, was really about preventing the grief. This realization can often bring our distress down, and we learn how to cope. Acceptance and change are in a dynamic yet creative relationship with each other. By accepting the relationship is over and the change I was hoping for is not possible, I can now move to make changes that are in my power. It stops me from going to a place of intense shame or sadness where I can now find peace and comfort.
Internalized Gaslighting
Internalized gaslighting is essentially when we’ve been gaslit so much (by the world, our community, rape culture, an abuser) that our mindset has shifted, and we begin doing it to ourselves. Our automatic thoughts end up being ones that question our sanity or sense of reality. Gaslighting is a transactional process in a relationship where, by means of psychological manipulation, someone is deliberately and consciously trying to make another person question their sense of reality or their sanity. This tactic is something we commonly see in abusive relationships, and it is considered to be a method of psychological abuse.
Trauma Informed Community: Group Therapy for Trauma Survivors
Trauma Informed Community: Group Therapy for Trauma Survivors. Trauma informed community is vital for supporting survivors in trauma healing. Group therapy for trauma survivors can be a safe and helpful way to connect to community and continue to work toward trauma healing.
10 Assumptions About Survivors
These are assumptions (or beliefs) that we should make an active choice to ascribe to as a way of interacting with survivors that’s actually helpful and effective and truly sees survivorship for what it is. Understanding that survivorship is a very unique experience and the transactions that survivors have with the outside world significantly influence their recovery is crucial. When the environment can hold beliefs about survivors that are more accurate, effective, and true to their experience, we can be more effective at helping survivors, dismantling rape culture, and ending sexual violence altogether.
