"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

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

I shrink the frightening object, like shrinking an image on-screen. Not all the way to invisible (then it could sneak up on me!) but down far enough that it no longer blocks sight of the normal world. It's still there to be dealt with, like a basket of dirty laundry, but it's across the room now, and I can deal with it or guard against it in a normal way.

Sometimes I adjust the shrinkage back and forth, or move it around on screen, just to show it who's boss.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

I love that idea-- it kind of reminds me of one of the tricks I used to manage a specific compulsive thought that bothered me a lot when I had just started to drive a lot...

from an email I wrote to a friend around that time:

I'm kind of having an issue with that classic childish self-control questioning, where you think things like "well what if I stood up right now and screamed? what if I just let go of the railing and let myself drop? what if I slammed my bike into that pedestrian?" etc. i don't even notice that happening anymore in my head except when i'm driving a car, especially at high speeds on a curvy road, when i am SO aware of how heavy and huge the car is, and SO aware of the consequences of fucking up, that "WHATIFYOUJUSTLETGOANDALLOWEDTHECARTOSLAMINTOTHERAILING??" gets really loud in my head. and i need to be SO attuned to my surroundings and my own driving that i simply can't have even one fraction of my brain in charge of acknowledging and sweeping away those cobwebs.

so while i was driving last time i figured out a way to acknowledge and get rid of those thoughts/fears without recognizing them for as scary and big as they are. what i do is look at the scary black fear in my head (it's black because i'm driving at night and the car is black, btw) and then sort of zoom out a little so i see ALL the scary black variations of that fear dancing around together, they're like a pack of furry black demons, and then i zoom out even farther and see that they are furry black BABY demons and they have a big friendly furry monster mother who is putting them to bed now because they're sleepy and cranky (and that's why they are acting out). it turns my scariest fear into something cartoon adorable, and it's easy to activate quickly in my head so that the whole thing takes about two seconds.