“Trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself. In order to regain control, it is crucial to develop skills and tools that help you care for yourself, manage your reactions, and build a sense of safety and stability.”
– Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
Those of us from relational trauma backgrounds often have underdeveloped self-care tool chests.
What do I mean by this?
We often lack a robust set of fundamental skills, tools, and practices to both achieve foundational biopsychosocial basics, emotional regulation, the ability to cope when we’re outside the window of tolerance, and, moreover, we often lack resilience skills once setbacks happen.
Why is this?
We come by these deficits honestly (aka: for reasons that aren’t our fault) and usually for a broad range of reasons: lack of modeling by our caregivers (because of their own knowledge gaps), inconsistent or inadequate support during critical developmental stages, and the absence of safe environments that foster healthy emotional and psychological growth (among other reasons).
And the huge irony here is that those of us from trauma backgrounds often need the biggest tool chests of all given how often we find ourselves dysregulated or in need or additional support to weather the storms of life battering our proverbial house of life.
The longer I’ve trained as a trauma therapist, I’ve come to conceptualize that the foundational self-care tool chest really comprises four main parts, all parts which I assess and then further work to strengthen with my clients in phase one of our trauma therapy together.
The fundamental relational trauma support tools.
This is a five part series of pieces on the fundamental relational trauma support tools that should be in our self-care tool chests. I’m going to share an overview of all four of these main parts and then the subsequent pieces will detail out each “drawer”. These will go into specifics about what practices and tools are included in those so-called “drawers”.
For now, in this first of the five-part series, I hope this overview of the four main components (aka: drawers) of the self-care tool chest feels helpful to you as you begin to think about what your own self-care tool chest might look like and need.
