“If I Resource, am I Avoiding my Trauma?”
This May Be the Most Common Question I Receive
When working with newer clients, I am typically trying to show them how to regulate their nervous system on their own. This is often slower and more nuanced work than what they are used to. Many times, they just want to dive right into the trauma sensations in an effort to release it from their system. And I don’t blame them, I used to be the same way. However, in many cases, it just doesn’t work like that.
The goal in Somatic Work is to learn how to regulate ourselves, as well as support our nervous system in its effort to process trauma energy from the past. We cannot do that without embodying some sense of felt-safety. A helpful way to nurture that is through resourcing; which is incorporating any internal or external sensory experience that brings ease, a sense of grounded-ness, goodness, calmness, regulation, joy, pleasure, neutrality, etc. A very common question I get from clients - that I would like to address in this post - is whether or not they are avoiding their trauma by resourcing.
Let’s look at how resourcing can be useful:
If you become triggered and are feeling trauma energy from the past, you can either feel those sensations of activation in your body to completion, or if they are too much to fully experience in the moment - which is often the case for newer clients - you can bring your attention to whatever is resourceful for you. That may be a fuzzy blanket, a walk around the neighborhood, playing with your dog, playing guitar, noticing the sounds around you, smelling a burning incent, etc. I have a whole list here of regulating and resourcing activities from when I was in the thick of it.
After resourcing for some time, you may feel yourself coming back to a slight sense of ease, or perhaps the original triggered sensations just aren’t as overwhelming. Now that it’s more manageable, you may feel more comfortable bringing your attention back to some of the lingering activation sensations. This is pendulation. If you keep doing this back-and-forth process between the activated sensations and the resourceful/regulating sensations and activities, you may notice that the activation completely goes away. Maybe it was through a discharge of yawning, burping, laughing, tingling in the toes, lightness in the arms, etc. Maybe there didn’t seem to be a discharge, but rather it appeared to have just “vanished" or moved. Or maybe it just tuned down to an even more manageable level.
Pendulating back and forth from the felt-activation to the resourceful/regulating sensations and activities is what allows our conscious awareness to say to itself “Oh, I can handle feeling these scary sensations right now because they are not the totality of my experience. I am not just the tightness in my chest. I am also the grounded-ness of my arms. I am safe. I can process this”.
By pendulating from the activation to the resource, you allowed yourself to titrate the little bit of trauma energy you had the capacity to feel, and it allowed you to come back to your window of tolerance. Completing this action of successfully reentering your Window of Tolerance is what nurtures resiliency (the ability to regulate after getting triggered). This is the medicine.
When we’re feeling trauma energy from the past, we’re not trying to avoid it by resourcing. But by resourcing, we can learn how to regulate, and can witness what that transitory moment from activation to regulation feels like. This is an important part of the healing process, because it gives us a sense of empowerment and agency by knowing that we have more control than we think, and that these moments of activation pass. They are not forever.
Even if you are not activated, I would recommend resourcing. You can never resource too much. And remember, we are not trying to “fix” the activated sensations, but rather be with and befriend them, while nurturing ourselves with goodness. Feeling the old, while creating the new.
If you are trying this by yourself, just remember that slow is fast in somatic work, and any change is good. Little by little. Only go into the activated sensations at which you have the capacity for. Maybe in your current process, you can’t even go into them. That’s okay. Just resource for now. This is where having a somatic practitioner can also help greatly in guiding one through their somatic journey.
In conclusion: We are not avoiding our trauma by resourcing. Rather, we are supporting our nervous system in feeling safe enough to process trauma energy, while simultaneously building the new neural network of safety, peace, regulation, happiness, joy, homeostasis - whatever you want to call it. We can utilize the power of resourcing by making the conscious choice to pendulate into the sensations of the trauma, and then back into the resource/grounding/regulating sensations and activities in an effort to titrate the activation. This process nurtures the resiliency to return to a regulated state and grows our capacity to feel, which are both crucial elements in allowing ourselves to mobilize the trauma we are seeking liberation from.