After trauma, our clients are often left with many painful sensations and emotions . . .
. . . including shame and guilt.
And that’s especially true if they weren’t able to protect themselves or escape.
That’s why it can be so useful to help our clients understand how their brain and body did work to protect them during the traumatic event.
Because when people find out that their response was an adaptive reaction that helped them survive, that can open the door to healing.
So we thought it would be helpful for you to have a way to illustrate this for your clients. (Please feel free to share a copy with them.)
Click the image to enlarge
If you’d like to print a copy to share with your clients, just click here: Color or Print-friendly
(Please be sure to include the copyright information. We put a lot of work into creating these resources for you. Thanks!)
You can hear more about how trauma affects the brain, body, and nervous system in the Treating Trauma Master Series – it’s free to sign up.
You’ll get insights from Bessel van der Kolk, MD; Pat Ogden, PhD; Dan Siegel, MD; Stephen Porges, PhD; and Ruth Lanius, MD, PhD.
Now we’d like to hear from you. How will you use this in your work with clients? Please leave a comment below.
Very user friendly. Like the simplicity of the explanation.
Will use this. Thank you.
Some clients may blame themselves for their not being able to run away or protect themselves when danger happened. I will introduce them how their body and brain decided what to do at that time in order to keep them survive,not their cognition, so they are not to blame.
For example,one teacher may blame himself freeze not able to save students, and he felt very guilty. I would tell him, faced with so much fright, your body and brain choose to freeze to save you. Your cognition didn’t work at that time. So the result was not made by your cognition, it was made by your body and brain, esp. brain stem.
I am a #me too person who after sex abuse learned to comply instead of freezing. Reading suggests this is called ‘fawning’ . It’s rarely included in info/graphics let leads to shame / guilt and a lot of the misunderstanding of sexual assault reaction yet is not at all uncommon. It would be good to have a resource that includes this response / reaction to trauma.
Keep up the great work! Very useful info.!