In working with organizations on creating a trauma informed workplace I'm sometimes asked by staff for tools they can use to ground or calm themselves when triggered at work. I'm looking for a short video or article that might be helpful to share - any suggestions would be most welcome.
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Hi Karen, Below is a PDF of GREAT tools for understanding triggers and practical tools to handle them to calm yourself and your co-workers down. It was written by Laura K. Kerr, Ph.D. https://www.laurakkerr.com
Here is a link to her pdf handout:
Handling Triggers, Living Within Your WIndow of Tolerance
Great resource, Mary - thank you for sharing!
Karen, you might find more resources here: Practicing Resilience for Self Care and Healing Community
Here is the description of this community:
About this Community
“We have the capacity, within ourselves, to create better health," writes Donna Jackson Nakazawa. We can improve our health no matter what our ACE score. Learn resilience practices that reduce stress hormones in our bodies & brains. Understand how pain, shame & trauma make self-healing harder. Explore research & resources. Share stories, struggles & successes. Practice resilience.
Karen,
Dealing with triggers is tough - as many of them are unconscious for most folks and not always rooted in trauma but can be the result of cumulative stress (i.e. "like that jerk boss that "triggers you" when he starts with his patronizing tone of voice"). I encourage people to think about embedding practices of regulation into staff time and also strengthening conditions for psychological safety as a means of diminishing the likelihood of triggering others into their fight, flight, or freeze reactions.
Big Think has an excellent primer on creating psychological safety in groups. In terms of practices that regulate the nervous system or stress response, I like the diagram of the Tree for Contemplative Practice. The Center for Contemplative Practice grew out of the work by Sharon Salzberg - best known for her loving kindness meditation.
Both of these are great jumping off points for thinking about safety in groups and practices that regulate the nervous system. If you want a more in depth discussion, let me know (emily@herethisnow.org).
Best of luck,
Emily Daniels
www.herethisnow.org
Revolutionizing the Way We Care with Trauma-Informed Systems
Love this conversation. Very useful and important for so many uses and contexts! And Karen, I teach an Emotional First-Aid course that uses grounding and creating personal safety techniques I've adapted over time. I'd be happy to share some and talk with you, if you like. Kind regards. Jondi Whitis (you can reach me at my JondiWhitis@icloud.com address)
I would be happy to discuss with you in a phone conversation. I do work on this vary issue but I try and help understand the connection of trauma brain, self care, trigger care and crisis care. I believe that all of these have two components, and that you have to care for yourself in the moment, in a way that doesn't also traumatize or trigger the other person, as well as understanding and doing work to know why you were triggered in the first place. The techniques and work that I do, tie trauma into self care and trigger care.
Shenandoah, Emily, Mary, Jondi, Karen and Karen:
Thanks for these excellent links and this conversation. These are some great resources. Please keep sharing all you know and find as blog posts and within the Practicing Resilience Community. We need all of this and all of you because you bring such great stuff to this site! Thank you! I especially love this topic and know what we mean by triggers and how we get grounded can vary so widely!
Cissy
Tara Brach and Headspace have brief guided meditations you can do that are great for self calming.
Mary Giuliani: The 'Window of Tolerance' was created by Dr. Pat Ogden. It is in the book "Trauma and The Body". Dr. Ogden's book are the core of a major women's hospital trauma program we have running here in Toronto (Canada's largest city). [Their curriculum is also heavily informed by the work of Dr. Peter Levine (UCLA; NASA) and his book "Waking The Tiger".] HTH!
Emma-Lee, Thanks for clarifying the author for term or concept, "WIndow of Tolerence" is Pat Ogden. I thought that Window of Tolerance was a term that was used in the developmental trauma field, vs. the name of Pat Ogden's concept in her book.
I volunteer with a non-profit FREA.support - they have videos of practical tools that anyone can use to calm the body and emotions to self-regulate when triggered. As a survivor and a personal ACE score of 9, I can say these tools really, really work.
