Parts can have vastly different experiences at the same time. While we are calm and oriented, other parts might be highly dysregulated. Their dysregulated states can leak into our experience and make us feel uncomfortable and sometimes it can outright flood us so that we lose our own regulation. It is also unpleasant and unfair to leave parts in dysregulation and to themselves. That is why it is valuable to learn how to support them. We all do better when we support each other. This article is about stress responses and not meant for beginners. Emotional co-regulation is a slightly different matter we might cover in another article.
Ensure your own regulation
You cannot co-regulate anyone if you are dysregulated yourself. That means that your first task is to learn how to regulate yourself. There are a multitude of techniques for that on this platform. Make sure to keep a boundary between yourself and other parts to avoid getting flooded with their experience while you practice for yourself. No blending. You never allow blending for anything where you are trying to co-regulate. Separate yourself properly. Ways to do that are to move slightly away from a part, to imagine a barrier or to wrap the part into an insulating fabric for comfort. When you feel safe, oriented and calm, and fully separated you can proceed.
Orientation and Grounding
It is impossible to co-regulate parts who are stuck in a flashback experience. They don’t need co-regulation. They need Orientation and Grounding. Parts who are re-experiencing trauma cannot stay regulated, no matter how many nice things you offer to them, They are meaningless in the face of trauma. Our basic steps in regulation are, as always, creating safety, orienting towards that safety and becoming present with it and then adding resources to support further regulation. Work with one part after the other.
Grounding dysregulated parts
The probably most difficult trick in co-orientation is to get the attention of the triggered part. It is somewhere else. Somewhere where it feels like it is needed for survival. Our job is to draw their attention away from their inner experience and towards the outside world. We can do that through sensory input that will be interesting to them. Parts differ in the way that they perceive things, so it is important to speak to different senses and figure out what draws their attention. Sometimes unusual sounds work best, sometimes it’s smells or touching interesting surfaces or the hands exercise, that helps them to feel that they are not alone and someone cares. Over time, they can learn to respond to our voice alone. I call them by specific nicknames when I really need them to pay attention to me. Don’t use anything scary. We are trying to orient them towards safety, not a different kind of danger. It gets easier if we can connect them with one or more of our senses because those create a connection to the outside world where parts can notice that they are safe now. Keeping them in a safe space inside with inner helpers will never be as powerful as getting them grounded in the actual reality through the body, if our life is safe today. Everything that is solely based on an inner reality is vulnerable to inner realities of memories or sabotage by other parts. I always ground my parts in the outside reality as much as possible before we let them find a comfortable place for themselves in our life.
It might help to tell stories about our current life of safety and initiate fun activities and invite them to join. Baking is one of my favorite things to do together. While we sit in front of the oven we can watch the cake rise and explain how time passes and things change. As the cake grows and turns solid, we also grew and changed. Getting a part oriented towards the current reality and outside world is not a matter of one day or one exercise. For most parts, it needs practice and constant repetition. They need time to realize that some of their experiences are just inside experiences and don’t happen on the outside and that outside orientation can actually be a lot safer for them. Their attention span for being present might have to grow over time, that is why we keep exercises short and simple. We do our best but it is normal that this is a process and that parts will stay mostly disoriented and dysregulated for quite a while until they get the hang of being grounded. Be patient.
If you are in therapy, your therapist might guide you through a rescue mission. Those are ideal for parts who are so stuck in memory that they cannot become aware of the outside world for more than a moment before they get sucked in again. They need a bigger intervention.
You work on grounding until parts are generally grounded. Then you work on regulation until they are regulated for that moment. Then you can work on keeping them regulated and co-regulating. Don’t try to skip steps. You need to establish a foundation before you move on. People mainly fail with this because they skip steps.
Regulators
Humans are wired to calm down when we notice that we are safe. Orienting towards safety in the outside world through senses is what starts the regulation process. We can support it by adding resources. Resources are things that make us feel comfortable, cared for, connected etc. Parts will differ in the things they like and we can learn to offer them the things that are comforting to them. I use stuffed animals, figurines of loved pets, fabrics that feel good, special interests and even patterns that parts can follow with their fingers. You do you. It helps to understand which senses work best for a specific part and if they have a specific profile of needs. Then it is a matter of trying out things to see how they are received.
We can become one of the most important regulators for our parts by building a trusting relationship with them. We will always be there. Interacting with them, talking to them, asking safe questions (eg about resources and how they like them) and the repetition of our caring presence can create a bond. They learn that they can trust us to mean well (even if we sometimes fail) and that they can seek us out for support. We keep trauma memory contained together while we work on our present day relationship. Ideally, younger parts will turn towards us for help the moment they feel scared or like they are losing their grounding. We walk them through the very same steps we always use. Establish safety, orient towards that safety, add resources to support regulation. We don’t have to be scared when they turn towards us because we know how this works. Bigger problems can be brought to our therapist to see what they can add. Every time we co-regulate successfully, we build trust.
It can make sense to partner trauma parts with adult parts whom they feel most comfortable with. A trauma part who doesn’t tolerate warmth yet might do better with a more thought-based part who gives calm and steady, clear instructions. Relationship-oriented parts might prefer a mother figure who makes them feel a certain way. Systems who are big enough to have adult parts to choose from benefit from training all the adults or mature parts to serve as co-regulators for others. We do well when we swallow our pride and allow other adult parts to support us too, if we ever need it… The more we support each other, the more stable the system becomes as a whole.
Assisting grounded parts through life
Being grounded most of the time does not keep parts from getting dysregulated. Life is stressful and there are triggers out in the real world. You can avoid major dysregulation by avoiding stress and triggers or by keeping parts hidden inside. That will limit your freedom in life. It is valid in some situations but it is best to have options to choose from.
Another way to support parts through a grounded life is to prepare them for the things that will happen. We learn about what causes them distress and when we know that we have to do difficult things, we talk them through it. We explain what we are planning to do, why it is important, what the steps will look like and how they know that it is all going according to our plan. After we have done it we repeat how our plan worked out just fine and how safe it was to do this. Read more in the article about signposting. It is a way to prepare, accompany and guide a part to limit feelings of overwhelm or fear. We take responsibility and they will learn to trust that we can keep them safe even through the tricky situations. The constant connection of making sure that they are staying oriented throughout can feel a bit like taking them by the hand and guiding them through.
The moment we feel that they are getting stressed, we re-connect them to the safety of the outside experience and to our guidance. Nothing bad is happening. We’ve got this. Watch. It is important to do that as soon as we feel that they are having a response, even if it is just a rise in anxiety level and not a full on stress response. The longer we wait the harder it will be to get them grounded again. Support them as soon as you feel their regulation slipping. Because we are so close to them we can have a better sense for when they need support than our therapist who will only intervene if they start to see something on the outside. If it’s visible on the outside, it is pretty late. We can learn to catch it way earlier than that.
To make things easier for us, we can establish routines. We repeat them so that, after a while, we don’t have to explain them step by step. They become islands of familiar processes for parts that increase their sense of safety because now they can predict what will happen all by themselves. It increases their feeling that they know how this new life works.
During especially tricky situations we can hold hands. The part moves their awareness to one hand, we take the other and we hold on tight. This creates an anchor that connects them to the outside world, to the body and to us at the same time. When they lose balance they can hold on to this anchor and use it to pull themselves out of an inner experience.
Processing trauma together
When we process trauma, it will be a lot safer when we can rely on our own support as well as the support of our therapists. I might be prejudiced because of my own experience but I really dislike waiting until Ts intervene when things start to slip out of control. It takes them too long to realize that something is happening because they have to wait for it to show in the body. And that is usually when it has started flooding us as well. Having to get 2 parts oriented and regulated is a lot more work than co-regulating one part and it is a lot less comfortable for the adult parts. Try not to wait that long. You are allowed to ask your T for breaks to keep your balance or even take them without asking.
When we co-regulate our parts through trauma processing, we prepare them by explaining things to them as usual. We also let the T explain what they are going to do and how it is supposed to work out. Our role is to pay close attention to how the trauma part is doing while they are following the instructions or participating in a process. It is more important to watch them inside than to watch what the T is doing. I personally usually lose sight of the room when I do this and only listen to the T and talk into their direction. The moment we notice that the part slips into re-experiencing too much, we guide them through the regulation process by first orienting them towards us as their guide and then returning to the room together and orienting towards safety and their resources that we brought for the session. Your T should give you a break so you can help with grounding before you pick up processing again. This creates small steps and a constant back and forth between the process and regulation, which actually helps with integration. It is not a disruption. This is how to gently and safely process memory while avoiding overwhelm and major dysregulation.
This might not be how your therapist teaches you to do things. They often teach you to rely on them. It is the way I do it and the way I surprise therapists with how stable I am and how well I can manage my inner experience by myself, even during processing. Therapists actually use the very same steps, they just don’t explain them when they do it. They too mainly struggle with getting our attention when we are stuck in re-experiencing and grounding is the bigger challenge than regulation itself. Good trauma Ts will spend a lot more time walking us through orientation exercises than handing us skills. There is no secret to it. The tools are actually very basic and almost boring. They also work.