"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

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

I don't have clinical anxiety, etc., but I am frequently bothered by automatic thoughts, as well as other garden-variety obsessions and anxieties. I find this type of visualization really helpful because I am a very metaphorical thinker (and my synesthesia also means that visualizing abstract things as various colors/textures helps a lot). I always have to wriggle the idea around in my mind before I find exactly the right metaphorical frame that resonates with what I'm experiencing. The car at night/furry black monsters framework I posted above is a good example.