In an ideal world, feeling safe in your skin would be a birthright where no danger exists. However, post-traumatic stress disorder often robs survivors of this fundamental freedom. If you’re a trauma survivor, it can be incredibly challenging to discern when you’re truly safe. Building a foundation of safety within yourself is crucial for healing from incest, sexual assault, and other forms of trauma.
Feeling safe in your body allows you to be present and engage in the necessary work to heal trauma and overcome the disruptive symptoms and chronic stress of trauma and PTSD.
Many survivors automatically numb, disconnect, or dissociate from their bodily experiences, often due to their nervous system’s response during the trauma.
This reaction, which might include collapsing, immobilizing, or freezing, was your body’s way of ensuring survival. Once the trauma ended, feeling any physical sensations associated with the assault might have been too overwhelming, leading to continued numbing or dissociation. Alternatively, you might remain on high alert, constantly scanning your surroundings for signs of danger. In either case, access to safety and pleasure becomes limited.
The cost of hypervigilance, numbing, and dissociation is significant. You lose touch with your body’s wisdom, which offers valuable insights through physical sensations and emotions. Additionally, this disconnection affects relationships.
You might struggle to trust others or maintain connections, or you might cling to others in unhealthy codependency. You also lose self-agency and empowerment when you lose access to your emotions and body sensations. This is why restoring a sense of physical safety is so important, and specific exercises to feel safe can be a powerful tool in this process.
How Can I Feel Safe after Trauma?
Restoring a sense of safety in your body is vital for healing from trauma. The following somatic therapy techniques and exercises are designed to help you feel safe and reconnect with your body’s wisdom:
Grounding
What is Grounding?
Grounding is the feeling of being physically and energetically connected to the Earth.
Why is Grounding Important, Especially Post-Trauma?
Your body is both matter and energy. While gravity constantly pulls you toward the Earth’s surface, you may have lost or never developed a strong, energetic connection.
Experiencing intense trauma, such as incest or sexual assault, can pull your energy upward, severing your connection to the Earth’s supportive presence when you need it most.
This can replace any sense of safety and trust with the feeling that the ground has been pulled out from underneath you, making it difficult to support yourself. You may feel off balance or literally knocked off your feet. These feelings might be subconscious, yet your body still reacts to them.
What is the Science Behind Grounding?
Our culture often reveres the brain, leading to our energy being focused higher in the body. When most of your energy is centered in your head, it creates an imbalance in the autonomic nervous system, producing anxiety and an overactive sympathetic nervous system.
This system initiates the fight-or-flight response, making you feel out of control or overly impacted by your emotions as your heart rate increases and your prefrontal cortex, which controls executive functioning, goes offline.
Trauma heightens this upward shift of energy, which can become chronic and lead to depression or other symptoms. Grounding helps bring awareness back into your body, increasing nervous system regulation, releasing tension, and supporting reconnection on all levels of experience.
Do you ever feel easily distracted, scattered, spacey, or excessively focused on the needs of others, or experience repetitive thoughts? These can be signs that too much of your energy is pulled upward. An ongoing grounding practice helps regulate the flow of energy in your mind and body more, eliminating energy blockages that can lead to illness.
What are the Benefits of Grounding?
Over time, grounding will improve your ability to access and feel your emotions. It brings a greater sense of safety as you experience what’s present in a more embodied way. Unlike your thoughts, your body exists 100 percent of the time in the present moment. Grounding helps you come into your body where you can be fully present.
From this grounded foundation, you’ll begin to cultivate embodied safety, a solid base of grounded support from the Earth and within, allowing for forward momentum in your healing. This allows you to feel the breadth and depth of your connection to yourself and others as you draw strength and guidance from your body and the living Earth.
Is There Such a Thing as Over-grounding?
Although not common when healing from sexual trauma, it is possible to be over-grounded, where your energy is not flowing upward from Earth’s magnetic field. Symptoms of over-grounding include a sense of heaviness and feeling stuck, trapped, or hopeless. Energy is pushed downward as if the Earth is a place to hide. These same feelings can be present if you feel under-grounded; however, they won’t include the weightiness.
In both cases, what’s needed is to begin to grow a sense of the Earth as welcoming, nourishing, and supportive.
A Great Grounding Practice: Toe Tapping
How to Practice Toe Tapping
Toe-tapping is a practice rooted in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and qigong, aimed at strengthening grounding. Here’s how to do it:
- Preparation: Lie down on a flat surface, facing up. Take a moment to scan for any body sensations, noting anything without judgment. Allow your hips and legs to rest easily, with your hips loose and feet a few inches apart.
- Execution: Rotate your feet inward and tap the sides of your big toes together before allowing your legs and feet to roll back out. Ensure that your toes meet just below the nail at the widest part of your big toe.
- Hip Movement: Rotate your feet and legs in and out from your hips, not just from your ankles. This movement helps loosen the hips, which supports grounding.
- Rhythm: Find your rhythm and gradually increase the pace as you continue tapping your big toes together. The momentum will make it easier to sustain.
- Enhancements: If you wish, close your eyes and relax as you continue tapping. You might also try listening to fast, rhythmic music to tap to the beat. Feel free to incorporate breathwork, mindfulness practice, reading, or watching a show while tapping if you prefer.
- Duration: Continue tapping for a minimum of five minutes. Ten minutes is excellent, but even five minutes can be beneficial.
- Observation: After you’ve stopped tapping, scan your body again and notice any subtle or significant shifts in your energy level. Pay attention to any changes, such as increased energy, relaxation, or a subtle tingly feeling of movement in your body.
Ongoing Practice
Toe-tapping is meant to be an ongoing daily practice. You can tap once, twice, or several times a day. While the results may seem subtle, this practice is more powerful than you might realize.
The effects are cumulative, taking up to a year to experience the full benefits. Even though change may be gradual, reflecting on your progress over time can reveal significant improvements in grounding, anxiety, and the fight-flight response. Experiencing these gradual results can instill hope, especially during challenging times in your recovery journey.
Orienting
What is Orienting?
When you orient, you focus your attention on an object, sound, or person, consciously or unconsciously turning toward the source.
Why is Orienting Important, Especially Post-Trauma?
Throughout your day, you make choices, not always consciously, about what you orient toward and what recedes into the background. For instance, you may orient toward a smile or toward a frown, potential signs of danger, avoiding signs of danger, or receiving a compliment, or dwelling on a criticism.
If you have experienced intense sexual trauma, you’ve likely developed habituated orienting responses as coping mechanisms. For example, you might focus hyper-vigilantly on subtle shifts in facial expressions to assess safety, hear and remember only negative comments from a partner while overlooking positive cues, or lose focus at work due to compulsively orienting toward a coworker’s movements behind you because that was the direction of the assault. While these orienting habits may have helped you survive during and after the trauma, your circumstances have likely changed, and these patterns may no longer serve you.
What is the science behind orienting?
The Power of Habituation
The more you repeat a pattern, the more habituated it becomes. There’s an often-quoted phrase from neuropsychologist Donald Hebb that sums this up: “Neurons that fire together wire together.” So, if, for instance, you habitually orient toward fear, you will grow more neural pathways in your brain that reinforce your pattern of looking for signs of fear in others, your relationships, and your environment.
On the other hand, if you cultivate a practice that brings you into a calm state, you’ll grow more neural pathways that reinforce your ability to orient toward signs of calm in your relationships, environment, and yourself.
Redirecting Attention
Orienting toward reminders of past trauma can bring about distress, fear, and discontent. Suppose you consciously direct your attention to where you want it to go. In that case, you’ll begin to break habitual patterns of moving toward signs of interpersonal conflict, threat, fear, and danger or patterns of avoiding these signals altogether.
When we orient toward the negative, absent a true threat, we severely limit the possibilities available to us every moment. When we no longer reside in fear or the avoidance of fear, we’ll begin to align with creativity, connection, and flow.
Orienting Practice
It’s important to begin noticing what you’re orienting toward and whether it supports your healing. The exercise below introduces the practice of mindfully orienting to your surroundings to facilitate a felt sense of safety. Orienting is an embodied body awareness practice; the only way to know if you feel safe in your skin is by listening to the signals your body gives you. This is where the vagus nerve comes in.
Orienting Toward Safety and the Vagus Nerve
The vagus nerve plays a crucial role in calming you after perceived or imagined threats activate the fight-flight-freeze response. A perceived threat occurs when you believe there’s an actual threat, even if there may not be one. In contrast, an imagined threat involves recalling past trauma as if it were happening now or worrying about potential future harm.
Both perceived and imagined threats can trigger the fight-flight-freeze response, leading to an overly activated nervous system, which negatively impacts your health and well-being.
Originating in the brainstem just behind your ears, the vagus nerve travels down each side of the neck, across the chest, and through the abdomen. It connects the brain with various organs, including the stomach, intestines, lungs, heart, spleen, liver, kidneys, and nerves involved in eye contact, speech, facial expressions, and the ability to tune into others’ voices.
How to Practice Orienting: Focus on What You See
Your eyes have a direct connection to your vagus nerve. By mindfully orienting to your environment—slowly turning your head and neck from side to side as you take in your surroundings—you alert an activated vagus nerve that there’s no present danger, signaling that it’s safe to begin to relax. This is crucial because to engage in the healing work, you need to be in a fairly calm state.
- Scan Your Body: Begin by noticing how you’re feeling. Is there any tension, stress, or anxiety present?
- Head Rotation: Slowly turn your head to one side as far as you can while scanning your surroundings.
- Slow Rotation: Then, as if in slow motion, turn your head to the other side as far as your neck will rotate while continuing to take in your surroundings.
- Observations: Notice where your attention goes as you slowly scan the room or environment.
- Repeat: Repeat this process two more times.
- Body Check: Take note of how you feel in your body after orienting to your environment.
- Reflection: Jot down any observations or insights that arise after doing this practice.
If you were feeling calm to begin with, you may not notice any shift. However, if you were feeling anxious or overwhelmed, you may notice yourself beginning to calm down.
Conscious Breath
We take life-giving breaths around twelve times a minute, every minute of every day, yet many of us never pause to bring conscious awareness to how we breathe. Often, we underestimate and under appreciate the impact our breath hason our health and well-being.
What are the Benefits of Conscious Breathing?
The physical and mental health benefits of conscious breathing include:
- Improving immune function.
- Regulating arousal.
- Decreasing sinus problems.
- Balancing hormones, enzymes, and neurotransmitters.
- Stabilizing blood gases.
- Increasing vitality.
- Promoting digestion, circulation, and proper organ function.
- Facilitating waste metabolism.
- Aligning posture.
- Decreasing muscle tension.
- Increasing motility and mobility.
These physical effects can profoundly influence psychological well-being, particularly in the areas of mood enhancement, reduction of negative emotions, increase of positive emotions, emotional regulation, and the capacity for social engagement.
Why is Conscious Breathing Important, Especially Post-Trauma?
Unfortunately, as a result of trauma or insecure attachment to your primary caregiver in early childhood, you may have developed breathing patterns that were adaptive at the time but are not healthy in the long run. For instance, you may have a habitually shallow breathing pattern that only fills your upper lungs, or you might hold onto your breath longer than is healthy, both stemming from fear patterns. This is because restraining the breath or breathing shallowly can suppress unwelcome emotions, such as shame and fear, leading to constriction in your thorax and stomach, further inhibiting the breath.
Your breathing patterns likely developed in response to fear, which is why introducing change can be triggering. Therefore, it’s important to proceed slowly with breathwork and to stop if you feel dizzy, dissociated, disoriented, headachy, or triggered.
What is the Science Behind Conscious Breathing?
Inhaling activates your sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for exertion and increased nervous system arousal, including the fight-flight-freeze response. On the other hand, exhaling generally requires little effort and activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for relaxation and the “rest and digest” response. Habitual shallow breathing or underbreathing is often associated with depression and avoidance behaviors while overbreathing is linked to anxiety and panic attacks.
Conscious breath can serve as an entry point to awareness of your bodily sensations, emotions, and memories. A breathing practice can help clear the body-mind, encouraging higher states of consciousness to emerge and nourishing your highest self.
Many people in our culture tend to suck in their abdomens out of habit or shame. This results in physical and emotional rigidity and restriction. Tensing the abdomen may feel like protection or an attempt to resist uncomfortable feelings, especially for sexual assault survivors. However, holding tension in these areas makes it impossible to ground, relax, or move freely and comfortably.
During the breathing process, the diaphragm contracts and pulls down, allowing air to be sucked into the lungs. As it relaxes and moves back upward, the air is expelled. When the diaphragm pushes down, everything in the abdomen region is displaced outward. Infants naturally breathe this way, and fully relaxed individuals of all ages often shift to an abdominal breath. However, this is not how most adults in our culture breathe during their daily activities.
I invite you to become aware of your breath.
How to Practice: Belly Breaths
Abdominal breaths slow your breathing and calm the vagus nerve, supporting your sense of feeling safely embodied. It’s helpful to practice belly breaths as part of your healing journey, but don’t push yourself when experimenting with deep breathwork. Ensure you wear comfortable clothing; tight clothes may cause your muscles to tense up.
- Relaxation: Begin by inviting your abdomen and pelvic floor to soften and relax. If relaxation feels challenging, it’s okay; you can still proceed with the exercise.
- Hand Placement: Place your hands on your abdomen. Visualize breathing into your hands, allowing the air to gently fall down into your belly.
- Inhalation and Exhalation: Invite your lower abdomen to gently inflate with your inhalation and gently deflate with your exhalation. Visualize a balloon filling with air during inhalation and releasing air during exhalation.
- Focus: Keep your focus on your abdomen for a minimum of ten to fifteen breaths to find your rhythm and pace.
- Reflection: How did it feel to breathe this way? If you’re accustomed to sucking in your abdomen, breathing in this more relaxed manner may feel strange or uncomfortable at first. If you’re having trouble, you can lie down and place a small stone or object on your belly to observe the gentle upward movement of the inhalation. Practice belly breaths anywhere, keeping your belly the focal point of the breath.
- Reminder: Set a reminder on your phone to do several belly breaths every couple of hours while at work if your job allows. It’s a simple way to incorporate self-care into your day.
Word of Caution
Be very cautious and work with a certified somatic therapist when possible if you suffer from asthma, emphysema, seizures, heart problems, migraines, diabetes, dissociative symptoms, or anger management issues. Do not push yourself when experimenting with somatic therapy exercises. Ultimately, the goal is to cultivate relaxed, balanced breathing, with inhalation and exhalation roughly the same length.
