Especially when you are in the middle of trauma work you might experience that your common containment safe or whatever imagery you use for containment might not work as long as you would like it to or small pieces escape your safe.
That is when we use a “BASK”-safe to lock things away for good.
The BASK-Modell is usually used for trauma work. The idea is that there are different aspects to our experience
B ehavior
A ffect (emotion)
S ensation (body)
K nowledge
and in order to process trauma properly we need to put all these aspects back together for a whole picture. Dissociation has a way of separating them and storing them in bits and pieces and it is this fragmentation of memory that makes it so hard to integrate the trauma.
The BASK-safe is imitating this form of fragmented storage, but this time we separate things on purpose. This allows us control over where we store things and how we want to handle them.
We take the disturbing scene and break it down into the BASK-elements (behavior, affect, sensation, knowledge), then put these in separate containers. There can be a different safe container for emotions felt in the scene, physical things experienced etc. Choose containers that are specially designed for holding each aspect of the experience (e.g. a photo album for pictures)
You don’t have to religiously stick to these 4 categories. Just make sure that you break down the experience into smaller categories and put them into separate safe containers.
If it is a really bad scene you can also divide the experience by senses and create containers for things seen, tasted, smelled, heard, felt, then store thoughts, feelings etc. Break it down into as many small containers as you need to be able to contain the whole experience without having to use dissociation again. It can be useful to contain known triggers for the scene as well. That sometimes makes them lose some power.
You can then place these containers into your original safe or vault or create a special safe for them.
Storing things separately is more bearable, that is why you used dissociation in the first place. This advanced way of containment can help you get the same results without losing control by dissociating. It is a lot harder for memory to escape this advanced safe.
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