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!)
If you’re interested in more ways to work with the brain’s response to trauma, you can get some of the top strategies in our Advanced Master Program on the Treatment of Trauma.
In this program, you’ll hear more from Stephen Porges, PhD, along with Bessel van der Kolk, MD; Pat Ogden, PhD; Peter Levine, PhD, Thema Bryant-Davis, PhD, and other leading experts in the field. Just click here.
Now we’d like to hear from you. How will you use this in your work with clients? Please leave a comment below.
Thank you NICABM for yet another infographic.
I appreciate the variety of Courses and Teaching Aids that are being offered by your organization and highly-qualified Professionals.
This Graphic in particular, helped in the visualization and understanding of how the brain and body may respond when faced with trauma. Notably, that under continued threat… the freeze response may progress to complete shutdown of the body and it’s systems.
Very helpful!
People suffering from the effects of dissociation constantly doubt the validity of their memories. It may be helpful that the very fact that they suffer from an over-sensitive freeze response can point to the validity of their experience. Information about the severity of experience that causes this response, and the connection with its manifestation in therapy on triggering those memories, can be validating, to a mind that has been taught to doubt its own experience. Here is objective proof.