Gabor Mata said, “Trauma affects your capacity to gauge safety.”

Today I want to share 5 tips for things we can do in our here and now, to create safety, especially when our ‘safety gauge’ is a little off due to trauma from our past.

Here are some questions to ask to gain awareness of where our safety gauge is right now.

**And if you are finding yourself in trauma right now as you start reading this….jump down to Tip 5, regulate and then go back to Tip 1. (These first 4 tips are to use when you are in your top down brain and can access your prefrontal cortex.)

First Tip is using questions for awareness.

Are you hyper vigilant and always looking for danger?

Are you shut down and find that you walk into danger without even realizing it?

Do you over react or under react?

Do you see yourself doing a little bit of both?

Does any of this resonate with you?

Does it seem like a vicious cycle?

Good news! It’s a cycle you can stop.

It’s powerful to gain awareness and name what’s going on - and continue to be aware and notice things about your body’s response to safety and threat - because awareness creates change.

You can’t change what you don’t see.

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Second tip is education around trauma.

Education gives understanding to why your body responds the way it does.

You are not crazy. You have trauma.

Remember Gabor Mata said trauma affects your capacity to gauge safety.

So if you keep finding yourself in dangerous situations….

And then afterwards second guessing yourself, shaming yourself, wondering how you didn’t see it coming, hating on yourself for continuing to put yourself in those situations.

You can get curious in a compassionate way.

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This is the Third Tip. Curious compassion.

What was your reaction to the situation?

Do you view it as an over reaction or an under reaction?

With this new understanding of trauma, can you offer yourself some grace?

Can you see how trauma has affected your capacity to gauge a situation as safe?

Whether it is…..Emotional safety. Physical safety. Mental safety. Sexual safety.

All of it….

Please don’t minimize your past experience.

It doesn’t have to be worse than someone else’s.

It is your truth and your unsafe experience.

Do you see how tips 1, 2, & 3 have the possibility to work together and build on one another to help you heal? The 4th tip continues to build a framework for healing.

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Fourth Tip is honoring and grieving your past. This is part of the sideways approach.

Can you honor that you were unsafe in your past? Your body, in your past trauma, had to find a way to keep surviving while being totally unsafe. And that is so sad and horrible. Let yourself grieve and acknowledge, honor, how sad that was (and how upset that might make you), honor it so you can heal.

Now, you get to honor how amazing your body was to keep you safe then.

Now, in your present you are gaining awareness and creating safety for yourself.

And that can begin with listening to that younger self, that inner child, in a way that offers that child someone who is seeking to understand and love.

Seeking to understand how the trauma did affect you then…..

That it keeps coming up now and when you don’t shove it down, it is part of healing and actually gives you space for a voice around the trauma…..

And loving how strong the younger you was and how strong you still are is empowering and offers more healing.

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Fifth Tip. Use exercises to regulate and ground yourself.

Here are 3 that I use often and love.

​The Butterfly Hug.​

​Body this is a Safe Place to be and I Choose This subtle body energy phrase.

The Image of the Fist exercise.

Please don’t skip the 5th tip. Doing grounding and regulating exercises like these is what releases the trauma from our bodies.

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Using them before I do healing work, to ground if needed, and definitely afterwards really helps to facilitate my healing faster because it offers my body, heart and mind a chance to come into alignment and sync up.

This syncing up happens because I let my body go from constriction and tightening to flow and expansion. I find the rhythm of this flow that my body, mind and heart all know because it’s innately unique to me.

Releasing the constriction and tightening is releasing the trauma from the bottom up.

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These 5 Tips can help you stop the past trauma safety response cycle in your body.

And……

Stops the cycle of viewing yourself from a shame based place afterwards.

You are strong. You are alive today. You can grieve the safety you didn’t have and you can heal and let the trauma go.

As your trauma heals, your gauge for safety regulates and becomes more accurate to your present situations.

You got this!

Remember, ❤️

You Matter. Your Healing Matters. You Are Worth It!

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P.S. If you want help to put all this into practice, I have 3 spots open in my Basic Foundation 1:1 coaching. I invite you to reach out with a FREE first chat.