Finding Safety in Your Body When Healing From Trauma

People who have experienced trauma can find themselves not feeling safe in their own bodies. This feeling can cause you to be fearful around people, to isolate and to feel constantly scared. This blog will help you understand why you may feel unsafe following trauma, and how you can restore a sense of safety within the body.

At Yatra Centre, we help our clients feel safe again, which allows them to relax and provides the nervous system conditions necessary to work with trauma. If you would like to know more about our approach or wish to arrange a tour of our facility in Krabi, Thailand, contact us on +66 96 916 3287.

What Causes Feelings of Unsafety?

Experiencing trauma can cause our body to react with a fight, flight or freeze response. These reactions are designed to protect us from danger. If the trauma is severe, or prolonged, our nervous system can become overwhelmed, causing the stress response to become “stuck”, leaving us in a heightened state of alertness or dissociation. When we have been through trauma, the amygdala – the fear center of the brain – can become overactive. This leads to heightened sensitivity to perceived threats and exaggerated fight, flight or freeze.

Feels of unsafety caused by this heightened state of alertness can cause a deep mistrust of your body, meaning you feel numb, hypervigilant, or out of touch with your emotions. Healing from trauma involves rebuilding a sense of safety and trust within the body, allowing you to reconnect with your physical self in a way that feels safe and supportive.

How to Feel Safe After Trauma

There are many approaches you can use to restore safety within the body. You may find some therapies are more effective than others. Re-finding safety after trauma is an individualized approach, and you should explore a few of these modalities to find what works for you.

Grounding Exercises

There are a number of grounding exercises that can effectively restore a sense of safety within the body. You can try chanting, tapping your body or jumping up and down. Meditation can also be helpful, though note that meditating can sometimes make a freeze response worse, if this is a dynamic you are dealing with.

Body Scan

Body scans are a type of meditating which involve you finding a comfortable position then slowly shifting your awareness throughout the body, systematically focusing on the sensations within each part. You can try finding existing sensations of safety within the body, resting your attention on this sensation of peace and so facilitating the cooling down of your nervous system.

To start with, try listening to YouTube videos or having a professional talk you through the body scan process. Once you become familiar with it, you can move yourself through a body scan without guidance, wherever you are.

Somatic Therapies

Therapies that focus on the body, like Somatic Experiencing (SE) or Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, help people gently heal from trauma through bodily sensations. These therapies focus on releasing the stress and tension stored in the body due to trauma. Approaches are best carried out with the guidance of a professional.

Establishing Boundaries

If, for whatever reason, your nervous system feels unsafe around some people, it is important to maintain clear boundaries. Try limiting the amount of time you spend interacting with people who cause turbulence within your nervous system.

If you must be around people who cause you to feel unsafe – for example if you work or live with someone who you feel unsafe around – try implementing some of the other practices listed here before you interact with them. This may prevent you from going so far into flight, fight or freeze when you communicate with them.

Supportive Relationships

Having people around you who will support you through the tough times is invaluable, and is one of the key elements of healing from trauma. The support of people you trust can be deeply reassuring and nurturing, and can restore a sense of ease within the body.

Polyvagal Exercises

The vagus nerve plays a key role in our feeling safe. Exercises that stimulate the vagus nerve, such as humming, chanting, or cold water immersion, can help regulate the autonomic nervous system, promoting a sense of calm and safety.

At Yatra Centre, we teach our clients a range of polyvagal exercises to develop feelings of safety within the body. The effectiveness of these exercises varies from person to person, and we encourage our clients to use the exercises that work for them.

This is really an extension of the ethos we have at Yatra. We want our clients to be able to maintain a level of control when healing from trauma, as we know that this sense of control can, in itself, create feelings of safety.

Self-Compassion

The way we speak with ourselves can increase feelings of safety or unsafety. Beating yourself up mentally can make it feel like you are at war with yourself. Practicing self-compassion means becoming our greatest ally. Knowing that we will always be there for ourselves and will not abandon ourselves can be of immense comfort, and can also provide us with a sense of safety.

Finding Safety With Professional Support

Having a trauma treatment professional help you refind safety in the body can be an invaluable tool when you are healing from trauma. A trauma specialist can both help guide you to find places in your body that already feel safe, and can also help you explore the parts of your body where you cannot yet feel safe.

Having someone who can guide you through this work and help you feel supported throughout the entire process is the optimal way of feeling at home within yourself.

You can either decide to connect with a trauma therapist in an outpatient setting, or work with someone at an inpatient trauma treatment center like Yatra. And while many people do find healing from trauma in an outpatient setting, we believe that for many people who are trying to find safety within their bodies, inpatient is often the best approach.

When you attend an inpatient center, you are able to step away from many of the triggers you feel in the outside world, giving your nervous system a chance to cool down. This allows you to experience more time in the “rest and digest” ventral vagal part of your nervous system, which is when you are able to feel safe.

For more information on how we help our clients feel safe following trauma, or to arrange a visit to our centre, contact us today on +66 96 916 3287.