When we get triggered our first response should not be an effort in self-soothing. That would be unnecessarily hard to accomplish as long as we are not oriented in time, space and body. Our nervous system is still reacting to the past. First we need to realize that we are safe in this situation, then we calm down. Speaking in terms of the polyvagal theory, we have to change our neuroception to one of safety first.
In literature, we find the term ‘Grounding’, newer literature speaks of ‘Orientation & Grounding’ as belonging together.
Grounding means being fully present and aware of ourselves and our environment. To get there we need to be oriented on different levels of our being: time, space and body
Orientation & Grounding is what we do every day and all the time. There is no other tool we use that often. I will share some standards as well as some more creative ideas. If you are anything like us, always doing the same exercise can start to get a little frustrating with time. Others might feel that sticking to a routine in orientation will help them to get there faster. Whatever works for you!
Time
The idea is to remember the adult things you are doing today as opposed to TraumaTime, that was before you did any of that. Only use what makes sense to you and reflect on what makes you the most aware that you are an adult and that a lot of time has passed.
Name…
- the year and who the current president is
- the date and today’s appointments
- your age, and describe the last birthday party
- the time since last meal and what you had
- all the jobs you ever worked in
- the time since your high school finals
- the time since last traumatic event
- the age of your kids and your age when you got them
- the years until retirement
- how often you got tax returns so far
- the number of places where you have lived since having your first job
- ….
- ….
Timeline
It might help to have a visual representation of the time that has passed. To do that we can use a timeline for your life. It can be imagined or visible like a piece of thread. Decide how long a year should be and then measure how very long the time is that lays between TraumaTime and Now.
For imagery we use an inner place that is set up to have a huge clock in the center room that always tells us about the present moment. To the left there is a hallway with pictures from our life in opposite order, a yard for each month, reaching back to our birth. It is a long hallway. When we help someone inside who is stuck in time and never got in contact with the Now, we usually meet them wherever they are within the hallway and lead them all the way to the clock room so they can see that a lot of things have happened and time has passed (More). When one of the generally oriented parts is having a flashback we help them to contain the memory in a jumping box and let the box jump back in the hallway, all the way back to when the incident occurred, while we stay in the clockroom and watch how very far back the box has to jump. That is usually impressive and convincing. It can be supported by calculating how many yards this must approximately be.
If imagery is not available, we could do something similar by marking a point in the room (or outside) as TraumaTime and then taking a big step for every year (or month, if things didn’t happen that long ago) that has passed. When we arrive at our current age we can look back to see the distance we have walked and let it sink in. TraumaTime is far away.
For a short intervention I recommend calculating the time that has passed. It can be tricky when we are dysregulated, because our brain shuts down a bit. If we are in a younger state or it is mainly Littles having the flashbacks we can count and use our fingers or small items to help with that. It could be putting a pebble into a glass for every year that has passed and then see how full the glas is or building a tower with building blocks and see how high it gets or whatever works for you.
We have a happiness journal that we use to keep count of days when nothing bad happened, too. Every day when we look back at all the good that happened we also choose a sticker that marks the day as one without new trauma. Especially Littles who struggle to believe that nothing bad is happening in the Now can look through the book and see how many stickers there are and how many days nothing bad has happened at all. You can absolutely do little doodles, use a stamp or just mark the day in a certain color, that is probably not as expensive as using stickers… I just wanted to mention stickers.
Space
The most classic exercise to get more oriented in the room is probably 5-4-3-2-1. It varies how exactly people use it, to the point that I am not even sure about the proposed order. I think the most practical is to do
5 things I can see
4 things I can feel
3 things I can hear
2 things I can smell
1 thing I can taste
It is supposed to cover the 5 senses and have us focus on things in the room. Sometimes it can be a bit tricky to find enough things for every category, so I have seen it switched out with ‘1 thing that was good today’ or ‘1 thing I like about myself’ or other positive ideas that are not necessarily connected to the situation or grounding. Not finding things for every category shouldn’t create stress.
For me personally, this exercise is triggering because of the counting down. Always notice when standard exercises are not working for you, modify them as needed or invent something new along the same lines, making use of all your senses.
To do this with dysregulated parts inside, we need to invite them to look through the body’s eyes and feel with the body’s hands etc. Some parts would otherwise just look around in the Inner World and that might not be a safe place for them at that moment. They might even see what abusers established for them to see and get even more convinced that they are in danger.
We always need to get the dysregulated or confused parts involved when we get oriented through our senses. A host who can tell everything about the room doesn’t get us an oriented Little. With everyone disoriented the adults should get grounded first and then help the Littles.
We like to imagine colored boxes and let the Littles find every item in the room in a specific color, name it and imagine putting it in the matching box.
You could also play a game of ‘I spy’ with them so they have to look around in the room to find an item.
Another nice way to get engaged with the room is counting items of a certain category, like how many chairs, books, windows, lights, unicorns or electric socket there are. It doesn’t do any harm if we have to get up and really look around.
When you tell small kids to look at something they will try to touch it too. Do just that and feel how real the room is and how many different surfaces you can experience there. I am a very tactile person and this is more important to me that what I can see. Find out which senses work best for you, then follow that lead. It might mean carrying essential oils or small boxes of exotic spices (try cumin, star anis and cinnamon) or maybe dried cranberries and peppermints for taste.
Never underestimate the power of anchors. These are items we placed in a room on purpose that help us to remember that we are safe now. It makes sense to put an anchor in every room of our homes so that where ever we are, we can see one when we look around.
The problem with orienting in space is often that the space contains a trigger. It is what caused us to become disoriented in the first place. We need to become aware of the trigger, it is constantly signaling us that this is not a safe space. We can either remove it or remove ourselves from this space and work with a different room or we can use a short version of discrimination. For that, we only compare the differences between the situation in the past and the current situation and make a mental list of all the differences. We can use self-talk to tell ourselves that ‘It used to be like that_____ and now it is like this_____.
If we struggle badly to get grounded and nothing seems to work we might have missed a trigger within the space.
Body
When we are oriented in time and space we might still lack the feeling that we are safe because we disconnected from our bodies when we got stressed. Being in this time and space with our tangible body is what makes it real for us. That is why grounding is a very physical act of getting oriented in the body again.
Warning: If you live with chronic dissociation of your body awareness and sensation this might be too big to accomplish in one step. Please ask your T to help you to titrate the steps to become more aware of the body and don’t try to get there by force. Getting oriented in the body is an extremely important goal if you want to increase your quality of life and feel safe in this world. As long as we dissociate the body we cannot experience safety with it. But you don’t try to learn these kind of things when you are in a disoriented state and already looking for more grounding. If mindfulness exercises that focus on feeling the body cause you to panic or dissociate more or cause flashbacks this is still too advanced for you and you should lean into other areas of orientation like touch to explore the room.
Even after we’ve found a home in our body we can easily lose contact with it when stressed. It is very common to eg lose awareness of our legs. Some of the best grounding I practice includes finding my feet again and then reconnecting body regions.
I usually start by stomping the feet on the ground to make a tangible impact that shows me where my feet are. It might help to take off the shoes if that is appropriate in the situation. I like to sit down and give myself a foot massage or put the soles of my feet together while cupping them with both hands to create some connection between parts I can sense well and others I struggle with. When I found my feet again I continue by taking my hands and lightly tapping my calves and legs to create a line of awareness for the whole legs. When done a little harder that also increases blood flow and can cause a tingling that lasts for a few moments that can extend the effect and make it easier to feel the leg. The same could be done to connect hands to shoulders by tapping along the arm. If you have fibromyalgia you want to be careful not to do this too hard, you don’t need to hurt yourself to make it work. If you have no body sensation whatsoever you might want to work on feeling safe in the situation first and use relational regulation.
Practicing a simple standing pose like Mountain Pose in Yoga or Standing like a Tree in Qigong is an incredibly powerful tool to get grounded in the body. Both poses ask us to stand with awareness while we imagine the majority of our weight in our foundation, like a trunk with roots going down into the earth or the broad base of a mountain. I sometimes think of it as wearing snow boots made of concrete that weigh me down. It needs practice to work in stressful situations but to me this is priceless grounding that can be done everywhere without attracting attention. The key is not to just stand there but to imagine moving about 70% of the weight to the feet.
We can then draw a line with our awareness, all through the body and connect our feet to the crown. It might help to imagine a flow of energy that is lifting through the front with an inhale, from the hip points, to the chest and the crown and then flowing down the back with the exhale, grounding by letting the shoulders drop, through the tailbone and the feet down to the ground. That way we balance the front that lifts and the back that grounds and feel our whole body being present and engaged.
I very much prefer this over a body scan but it could be argued that it is the same thing just wrapped in a different appearance. If you like body scans, by all means, do that. The main goal here is to sense our body. If we only practice body scans for detached observation we might be too far away from the body to actually feel the grounding effect.
Another valuable exercise is to check your body for all the places that get in contact with something; that could be clothes or shoes, your own body (like when crossing legs), the chair you sit on or anything else. Then we can sense the place where we have contact, tell ourselves what we have contact with and how that feels. It connects us to the space we are in while also increasing our awareness of what our body is experiencing today.
Being able to feel the body today because we are grounded in the experience is one of the effective ways to reduce body flashbacks. That’s one of the main reasons why I am bothering you with such a difficult topic. The more we feel what is really there Now, the less we will freak out over physical experiences we had back Then.
Arranging life around a chronically dissociated body is not going to bring us peace. It leaves us vulnerable to flashbacks. That is why sometimes we get oriented in time and space but we are stilled spinning back into flashback experiences. We think that it is our body that makes us feel so bad because getting connected to it is so tricky. But once we are connected, that will pass. Being embodied is a lot more stable and peaceful than living dissociated from the body. I hope I can convince you to consider working on it with your T.
These are very basic exercises we can use to get oriented and grounded after a flashback or during difficult times/anniversary reactions.
Organizing your grounding skills
Take a piece of paper and go back to the different ways you could get grounded in time, space and body.
Pick a couple of things you want to try from each category and write them down. Keep the list with you because you will most probably forget what you wanted to do. Try the different orientation skills and mark those that work best for you and those that don’t work so well. Add new things to your list every now and then and try those. It should be a very dynamic list created by trial and error.
That way you can work with your own collection of groundings skills that support you personally. Make sure to modify things and come up with your own ideas of what might work. Include things that work for younger parts of yourself too and maybe mark them with their name, a specific color or symbol to remind you that this is what works for them (even if it might not mean much to you). At first, practice orientation while you are not disoriented. It doesn’t hurt to do this throughout the day to make sure we are staying oriented.
With some practice it can become second nature to go into Orientation&Grounding mode the moment things start to be shaken a bit.
It is my conviction and experience that we won’t need hard DBT Skills (that can be triggering in themself) that often, if we carefully use Orientation & Grounding. Like with every self-regulation skill, the key is to use it long enough, that is, until we are actually oriented and grounded.
It might need some patience and you might think that smelling salts would be faster. They are. But they are also not offering solid orientation and we might slide back into dissociation quickly and need smelling salts over and over again without getting any real results. Especially when the triggered and dysregulated part is one who is not fronting. They might not even be affected by DBT Skills. Inviting them to get oriented together is usually a lot more effective in that situation. Whenever we need intense stimulation because we are too deep in shutdown to be aware of our surroundings, it has to be followed up with orientation immediately. In PTSD orientation exercises are superior to mental DBT exercises because they are not just a distraction from the inner experience, they help to connect to the outside experience. I believe that some people misuse DBT for PTSD when what they are really trying to achieve is Orientation & Grounding.
Orientation & Grounding is one of our strongest tools when it comes to living with PTSD. Becoming chronically oriented creates a sense of safety in this world, a home base we can return to after we got triggered.
What is your most useful Orientation & Grounding skill? Tell me in the comments below.
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As always, you post such helpful stuff! Thank you!!!