SELF-CARE: How to Confidently Manage Trauma Triggers with Grounding + Vera’s Meditation Room

Recently, I shared a social media video about one of my favorite quotes about trauma: “Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you.”

Why do I love this quote by Dr. Gabor Maté so much?

Because it underscores that trauma isn’t about a past event (e.g., physical assault or accident) or, in some cases, a past experience that unfolded over a period of time (e.g., abuse, neglect, or war). Instead, it’s about how your body and mind responded to the past event or experience and how they CONTINUE to respond to it even today.

That’s the thing about trauma—it isn’t just a memory of the past that you can’t “let go of.”

It’s a lingering internal wound that can “reopen” and cause pain and distress whenever a trigger in your environment unconsciously reminds you of it.

The challenge, though, is that the distress you experience might be more than just the type of momentary pain or discomfort you experience when you accidentally put weight on an injured foot or hit your elbow in the exact same spot that you did a few days earlier.

Instead, for many of us, being triggered might lead us into a spiral of negative thoughts (e.g., “I’m not good enough” and “I can’t do anything right”) when tackling an important project for work. It might cause us to feel anxiety, panic, sadness, and other negative emotions when we’re trying to enjoy a date night that we’ve been looking forward to. And it might lead us to lash out at our partner or be disengaged with our kids—actions and choices that we may later regret.

Of course, doing inner work to uncover, process, and heal from our trauma is important for ultimately loosening the grip of trauma on our lives.

But when we’re triggered, what can we do in the moment to minimize the impact of trauma on how we think, feel, act, and show up in our relationships?

The answer is that there are many things that we can do. But one approach that can be especially helpful for managing trauma triggers in the moment is grounding.

So in this blog post, I’m going to break down what grounding is and share a few simple techniques that you can use to more confidently manage trauma triggers when they pop up.

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What Is a Trauma Trigger?

Before we dive into talking about grounding, I want to clarify what I mean when I use the word “trigger.”

You’re probably usually unaware of it. But no matter where you are and what you’re doing, your mind is constantly monitoring and assessing your environment. This is an important physiological function because without it, you wouldn’t be able to notice and react to a car that’s cutting you off on the road or a hungry bear that’s approaching you during a hike.

When your mind senses something threatening in your environment, it activates your fight-or-flight response to prepare you to deal with the threat. When the threat in your environment is something that consciously or unconsciously reminds you of a past traumatic event or experience, it’s called a trauma trigger. A trauma trigger can be anything that’s even loosely associated with the traumatic event, such as a particular smell, sound, or heated argument.

Trauma triggers seem threatening, so your mind responds to them by gearing you up to fight or flee from the threat. This is why when you’re triggered, you might notice that your heart starts to race, your breathing becomes rapid, and you feel physically tense.

In most cases, though, a trauma trigger isn’t actually a threat to your well-being or safety. So you can end up being physiologically worked up and feeling stressed and anxious when there’s no need to be and when being in this heightened physiological and emotional state can actually work against you (e.g., when you want or need to be calm, centered, focused, or present).

The good news is that when you’re triggered, using grounding can halt your fight-or-flight response and help you regain a sense of calm and centeredness.

What Is Grounding?

The term “grounding” can refer to two things.

First, it can refer to feeling connected to Mother Earth. This type of grounding stems from the fact that the earth has natural healing energy. When we physically connect with the ground of the earth (e.g., by walking barefoot outside), our body can soak up healing negative electrons from the earth.

Second, grounding can refer to being fully present and centered in your body. This is the type of grounding that I’m going to focus on in the blog post.

When we encounter a trauma trigger, we might find ourselves feeling worried, panicked, lost in our thoughts, distracted, and unable to focus on what’s going on around us in the present. In other words, we feel ungrounded. In these moments, we can use grounding to ground ourselves in the present and feel centered again.

When we’re triggered and feeling anxious, distressed, or distracted, it’s usually because we’re thinking about something in the past or worrying about something in the future. Grounding shifts our focus back to the present so that we can distance ourselves from whatever it is about the past or future that is causing us distress.

By shifting our attention to what we’re experiencing in the present, grounding can interrupt our fight-or-flight response, activate our parasympathetic nervous system to induce feelings of calm, and restore a sense of safety. In this way, it can help us overcome distressing thoughts and memories and painful emotions. Because when we feel more grounded or rooted in our bodies, we’re less affected by things in our environment.

What Are Some Simple Grounding Techniques?

There are many grounding techniques that use the physical senses or visualization to help center you in your body. Here are just 3 of my favorite grounding techniques:

1. Focus On Your Breath

Focusing on your breath is an effective way to manage trauma triggers for two reasons. First, shifting your attention to your breathing brings your focus out of the past or future and into the present. And second, when you do deep breathing (also known as diaphragmatic breathing), you activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which helps you return to a calm state.

You can use this grounding technique anytime and anywhere. All you have to do is get as comfortable as possible where you are and take slow deep breaths. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. If you are breathing deeply, you will notice that both your chest and belly rise when you breathe in and fall when you breathe out. As you breathe, focus on the sensations of air flowing into your nostrils, air flowing out of your mouth, and your abdomen expanding and contracting as you breathe.

2. Try The Five Senses Exercise

I recently shared this grounding exercise on social media. However, I wanted to include it here too because it’s a very common grounding technique and I want it to be easy for you to find it again if you ever want to return to it.

The five senses exercise (also called the 5-4-3-2-1 method) is a grounding technique that uses the five senses to ground you and shift your focus to the present.

To do the five senses exercise, focus on identifying…

• 5 things that you can see around you. These can be objects that are close to you or far away.
• 4 things that you can touch or physically feel. These can be the feeling of your bare feet on the sand at the beach, the feeling of your purse on your shoulder, or the feeling of the hot sun beating down on your face.
• 3 things that you can hear. These can be any sounds in your environment, such as the sound of a bird flying in the sky or the sound of a barista making a cappuccino.
• 2 things that you can smell. Try to notice two smells in your environment. These can be scents from nature, the smell of food being cooked in a nearby restaurant, or the smell of your freshly washed hair.
• 1 thing that you can taste. See if you can notice the taste of the last thing that you ate or drank. You can also drink or eat something that you have on you and focus on this taste.

As I mentioned when I shared this exercise on social media, don’t worry if you mix up the order of the senses or can’t identify enough items for one of the senses. Just focus on really taking in the sensations that you experience and allow them to ground you in the present.

3. Do a Grounding Meditation

Meditation is another technique that you can use to ease feelings of distress and feel more centered. This is because many meditation practices involve shifting your focus to the present or drawing awareness to your body. As a result, they can help you “get out of your head” and regain a sense of calm when you feel triggered.

Feel free to use any kind of meditation practice that speaks to you. However, if you’re looking for a type of practice that focuses specifically on grounding, you can try doing a grounding meditation. You’ll find a free guided grounding meditation in this video that I made.

It’s Always a Good Time to Practice

Grounding may be considered a technique. But you can also think of it like a skill that you can perform more confidently and effectively the more that you practice it.

That’s why I always tell my clients that there’s no need to wait until you’re triggered to practice grounding. Most of us run around all day with hectic schedules and a thousand thoughts running through our mind. As a result, even when we’re not triggered, we can usually benefit from feeling less stressed, more centered, and more present.

So the next time that you feel mildly stressed or think that you could be more centered or present, set aside a few moments to practice a grounding technique—whether it’s one of the techniques above or another one that works for you.

Not only will this help you identify which grounding techniques work best for you, but it’ll also give you a chance to practice deploying them when you’re experiencing less distress. This way, you might find that when you are triggered, it feels easier and more natural to use your favorite grounding techniques.

Think you could use more help with managing trauma triggers or feelings of stress and anxiety? I’d be happy to chat with you during a FREE strategy session. During the session, we’ll talk about the challenges that you’re facing and how we can work together to help you manage triggers more confidently and successfully so that YOU remain in control of your life.

In the meantime, check out my free online library of guided meditations—Vera’s Meditation Room. In it, you’ll find a range of meditation tracks that you can access at any time from any device to help you reduce stress, regain a sense of calm, and feel more centered.

And finally, if you haven’t done so already, follow me on my Facebook page Vera Velini – The Assertive Happiness Coach. That way, you’ll be among the first to hear about new blog posts, resources, and courses.

Until next time!

Vera

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