Anya CharnaudThe incredibly powerful words from Dr Wood draw us to understand that trauma and vicarious trauma is common across the caring sector and it is not a state of weakness but more a position our nervous systems have taken up in a bid to survive a complex environment.
As a therapist, I would like to share some additional tools you can use in your self-care:
Start with taking time to understand your nervous system and understanding what feels good and what is in your window of tolerance. What does healthy, not-so-healthy, and highly stressed look like for you? Do you tend to go into fight, flight, freeze or appease in certain situations? How does that feel and is there a pathway or thought or behaviour you can interrupt before it goes too far?
Have anchors. Think about placing objects that cross your path daily which symbolise good experiences. Then engage with them and recall the positive experiences when you cross them. Pick up the object and allow the sensory experience of touching it to take a few moments.
Bookend your day with grounding techniques such as a walk, meditation, guided visualisation, yoga, and use an acumat. If you’ve been staring at a screen all day, breathe deep and enjoy the sky and the stars. This will give a boundary to the body to know that the workday is beginning and ending. Human beings seek predictability as a way of being in the window of tolerance. Bringing in a bookend provides a form of prediction. Be boundaried about when you’re checking work emails and texts. Your work needs to have a cut-off point for you to feel re-regulated. You cannot be on duty all the time as this uses precious, extensive yet limited resources inside you unnecessarily which leads to burnout and exhaustion. Take time to recharge.
It is important to understand yourself, as Dr Wood says, be curious and if you understand you, then you can separate what doesn’t belong to you. Dan Siegel American psychiatrist says we need to engage these things in one person’s effort:
- Cultivate a sense of self. Learn who you are and what you like and what fills you up.
- Understand the neuroscience of trauma and how it affects us.
There is a huge amount of information in this area which would end up a chapter in the book rather than a blog! Workplaces should be providing up-to-date and comprehensive training around understanding how to take care of ourselves, burnout, compassion fatigue and trauma-informed practice.
All workplaces should provide you with clinical supervision. Most places have access to counselling such as EAP schemes. You can see your own GP.
Talking about how you are feeling is important and human connection is often the first step. Seek out safe, empathetic people to share with appropriately. Symptoms of trauma can make us feel lonely or rejected, and empathy can massively reduce this burden.
As Dr Gabor Maté writes “The very same brain centers that interpret and feel physical pain also become activated during experiences of emotional rejection. In brain scans, they light up in response to social ostracism, just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli. When people speak of feeling hurt or of having emotional pain, they are not being abstract or poetic, but scientifically quite precise.” We literally reduce each other’s pain through empathy!
I also always suggest trauma-release exercises. These are physical exercises that engage a tremor in your muscles and facia which have been shown to reduce physical trauma symptoms. Leading trauma experts are validating this work and recommend it to their patients. We hold memory implicitly in the body and explicitly in the mind in pictures and recalled mentally. The TRE exercises, Yoga or Acumats can help with the implicit memory that doesn’t have words.
I hope you enjoy investing more time after this blog to learn more about yourself, and how to celebrate and champion yourself too. YOU matter and we all matter to each other as we tackle slavery and trafficking together.