"The trauma is in a box."

[rachelmanija]

In my abnormal psychology class, the professor mentioned "containment rituals," and used the example of visualizing the trauma safely contained in a box.

I recalled then that I have, over the years, devised a couple visualizations for myself which were helpful enough for me to continue using them:

1. "The Anxiety Dial." My anxiety is controlled by a small dial, like the volume control on my car radio. It turns by itself toward the right as I get anxious, until it is cranked all the way up to eleven. As I slowly manually turn it down, I relax. If I'm by myself, I will actually use my hand to turn the invisible dial to the left.

2. "The Trauma Backpack." This has to with crisis counseling, which involves talking to people who have just experienced some sort of sudden, horrible trauma, sometimes as early as half an hour before I show up. Their pain is a heavy burden - the trauma backpack. While I'm there, I can help them carry that weight. But their backpack belongs to them. I can't carry it off with me. If I find myself obsessing about them afterward, I remind myself that their backpack doesn't belong to me, and it has to go back to them. I have my own backpack, and I don't have room for theirs.

Do any of you do things like this? What are they? And do you have to invent them yourself for them to be useful, or can you use ones others suggested to you?

Comments

[dorothean]

I've used Tonglen for help with emotional distress. I know there is a lot more to this practice, but what I'm thinking of in this case is using it to self-soothe, acknowledge or deal with my emotions by "breathing in" the hurtful emotion I'm experiencing and "breathing out" something better. I try to visualize the hurt being transformed in my lungs. For example, earlier this week I "breathed in" shame and "breathed out" forgiveness. It worked.

[zeborah]

Interesting - I kind of do the opposite, visualising the stress as something in my body that needs to flow into my blood, to my lungs, to be breathed out. So I breathe in good air, breathe out bad air.

There's also a special loopy path through my brainspace that I... take my inner eyes along (it's in two simultaneous halves, mirror-symmetrical) as an aid to distracting myself from distress. And for similar purposes, I... invoke? use the name of, anyway, a character in a story I wrote when I was a teenager. This is pure habit: when I was a teenager I used writing to distract me from stress, so when stress was pulling too hard I'd say her name firmly to pull myself back into the story. Now I still say the name to pull myself away from stress, without going into that story.

[zeborah]

And also memorised psalms and such: when I was a teenager, Psalm 23 in French with a weird tune I made myself, and these days Psalm 8 in Latin or especially the Pater Noster (to a Gregorian tune I found somewhere) -- this one works well enough I can mentally sing it when otherwise I'd be bursting into tears, and that's been put to the test a bunch recently.

I think most of my techniques are distraction techniques rather than containment techniques. I got taught (as a destressing-to-get-to-sleep thing) about putting stuff away in a box but it wasn't very effective for me. The way I got rid of my problems sleeping was to think about the novel I was writing at the time, planning out scenes in advance and such, which I enjoyed so much that I didn't mind I was still awake two hours after going to bed; and after a while I started dropping off to sleep straight away (and being a bit disappointed in the morning that I'd missed out on my daydreaming time).

[notemily]

I've tried Tonglen, but it always makes me feel like I am taking the bad thing into my body and it's making me sick. It works better for me to visualize breathing OUT the negative emotions and breathing IN clean air.

[mildred_of_midgard]

That's exactly what I thought when I read that! Glad to know I'm not the only one.