Healing from trauma requires a multi-faceted process. Bessel van der Kolk, Dan Siegel, Bruce Perry, Stephen Porges, Laura Porter and The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University all incorporate the felt sense of safety and belonging and strengthening capabilities in their protocol or frameworks for healing from trauma. All three concepts, when interconnected, create a synergy for personal and community growth and healing.
Creating safety and belonging are important first steps in the healing process. Some capacity building can become intertwined with building safety and trusting relationships. Bruce Perry states, “regulation, then relationship before reason.” Strengthening an individual’s ability to regulate energy and emotions or ground his/herself in the present moment can be vital to the felt sense of safety. Often regulation is learned within a relationship beginning with one person modeling the regulation skill, then co-regulation and ending in self-regulation. This is often referred to as “I do; We do; You do.” This process builds a skill, increases the felt sense of safety and fosters a trusting relationship all at once.
Regulation is a capability developed most often when working within a relationship. This learning relationship will strengthen attachment, help create the felt sense of safety, and build skills.
Research has also exposed the importance of regulation skills to increase our windows of opportunity to learn. When people are dysregulated, it usually means their bodies and brain are reacting instinctively to a felt sense of threat or danger. When a person is dysregulated, it decreases her/his ability to process higher brain functions needed for learning. Regulation allows people to feel a sense of control and increases the sense of safety which then allows them to use their brain to learn. Educating students about regulation and embedding it in daily routines in a learning environment is now common practice in schools. Social Emotional Learning falls under this concept; regulation skills are learned and practiced throughout the day to help transition from activities and learning moments. If the goal of education is to increase learning, we now realize we must first help students regulate their energy and emotions so their brain can efficiently and effectively process information.
A felt sense of safety allows other capabilities to be strengthened. Executive functions are capabilities science has shown can be impacted by early adversities and ongoing stressors. Working memory, flexible thinking and inhibitory control are impacted and may need to be strengthened. They are the capabilities we use to plan, make decisions, be organized, or make and carry out goals. They are vital to the healing process.
Working memory allows people to hold onto information long enough to use it; flexible thinking is shifting our thinking or attention in response to a new situation; inhibitory control is the ability to override automatic responses in order to implement more adaptive, goal-oriented behaviors. These three executive functions help create meaning and a self-identity that can focus on the positive and plan for the future. Improved executive functions lead to strengthening other capacities as well. Dr. Chan Hellman’s Pathways of Hope is a perfect example of capacities supported by executive functions.
“Hope is the idea that we are pursuing goals in our lives. The question is whether or not we have the strategies, or pathways, to achieve those goals and if we’re able to generate the motivation and persistence to pursue them.” - Chan Hellman, PhD
Creating Safety, Building Trusting Relationships, Strengthening Capabilities: none of these healing processes can be done in isolation. All are important to incorporate into work with individual trauma treatment or with organizations or communities creating trauma informed systems. They are interconnected and work synergistically. As safety increases, so does the capacity to trust and learn. Learning capabilities increases the ability to have stronger relationships and a sense of control and safety. All three should be included in systems addressing trauma. We should strive to create All Inclusive Trauma Healing.
Written by:
Cheryl Step, MS, LPC, NCC, NCSC
Trainer/Consultant
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