When Grounding Doesn't Work

Five things you can see. Four things you can hear. The grounding exercise is everywhere, and it works for a particular kind of activation. But there is a quieter conversation that doesn't get had: what to do when grounding doesn't work. When you have done the work, learned the language, run the protocols, and your body is still nowhere near land. This talk is for the people who have already done the work and find themselves in territory where the standard grounding tools simply do not touch what is happening. In this long-form Sacred Talk, Abi Beri walks through the three different reasons grounding stops working, what to do in each case, an honest naming of the shame layer underneath grounding failure, a hand-on-chest practice for the harder territory, and a clear pointer to when to escalate beyond solo work.

Transcript

So welcome everyone. And thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining me. 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can touch, 2 things you can smell, 1 thing you can taste. If you've been near any kind of nervous system or trauma content and you've met this exercise, It's everywhere. It's also on coasters now. There is a reason for that. It does work. For a particular kind of activation. In a particular kind of person. At a particular stage of the work. There is also a quieter conversation that doesn't get had. And I want to have it today. The conversation is what to do when the grounding doesn't work. When the 5 4 3 2 1 feels like mocking When you've named the things you can see and your body is still nowhere near ready to settle. When the techniques that were supposed to be a lifeline have started to feel like a proof of something more broken in you than you can name. So this talk is for people who have done the work, Who know the language, Who listen to podcasts, Read the books, Attend the workshops, Downloaded the apps. And who have nonetheless found themselves in territory where the standard grounding tools simply do not touch what's happening. So if that's you. . . I want to say this clearly before we go any further. You're not fearing the tools? The tools have a domain of usefulness. You have wandered in some way beyond that domain. The question is not what's wrong with you. The question is what kind of state are you in? And what kind of intervention that state requires. Let me start by being honest about what grounding actually does. So the grounding exercises. The sensory ones, The 5-4-3-2-1 variants. Name three colors in the room. Feel your feet on the floor. Work by inviting the cortex and the oriental system back to the present moment. All of them They use external sensory information to interrupt the loop the nervous system has gotten into. It's like using something outside of you to create a break in a pattern temporarily. And they remind the body that the immediate environment is, In fact, And that's a brilliant intervention. It works particularly well for what we might call top-level activation. The anxious spiral, The mild dissociative drift, The early stages of a panic that hasn't taken root. In those states, The cortex is still partially available to you and the body is still partially in the room. And a sensory invitation back to the present is more than enough to bring the system home, Usually. Where grounding stops working. Is when the state is deeper than the cortex can reach. Or when the technique itself has become part of the problem. Or when there isn't a missing connection to the present, The present is exactly the issue. And the body is refusing to land in it. So we'll take each of those in turn because each one is a different problem and they require different responses. So the first situation is when you've gone in nervous system terms somewhere too deep for sensory grounding to be the right entry point. It just wouldn't happen to you. So if you have moved into deep dissociation, The kind where you're watching yourself from far away, Where time has become strange. And where your own voice sounds like it's coming from somewhere else. The cortex is no longer running the show. So asking it to name three colors in that moment is asking the wrong department to handle the problem. Because the system has dropped below the cortical operation and trying to drag it back up through these exercises can actually destabilize it further. So sometimes people who white knuckle their way through 5 4 3 2 1 and emerge more fragmented than they started. If you've moved into freeze. Not the everyday immobility, But the older, Deeper biological freeze. The kind that has a very tonic immobility quality, Where the body has decided the safest response is to play dead. So the sensory inputs land oddly, If at all. The system is in a mode where inputs are ignored. The cortex is partly offline. So five things you can see lands in a place that doesn't have the resources to count anything. And if you're in a flashback. Not a thought about something, But an embodied re-experiencing of it. Where the body is genuinely back in that event. Grounding can sometimes provide a thread to follow. But often what's needed first is rhythm, Weight, Warmth. Things that work at a deeper layer than the senses. So what helps in the deeper states is usually not more cortical effort. It's bottom-up input. Slow heavy movement, Pressure, Even a weighted blanket, Hand on the chest, Sitting against a wall. Actual presence of another regulated person, If that's available. Sound that is repetitive and predictable. Sometimes, Orientation through low level movement like rocking, Pacing slowly and even gentle bilateral movement with the eyes. So the principle here is simple. When the cortex is not available, You don't try to use it you work with what's available, Which is usually the deeper layers of brainstem and the body. Now the second situation is more subtle and I think it deserves an honest naming. If you've been doing grounding for years, Particularly under pressure, You don't even know what it means. Particularly with the underlying belief that doing grounding correctly is what stands between you and the unbearable feeling? Then that in itself can become an activation pattern. So here is how it goes. You start to feel something rising. The body knows what's coming. And without quite choosing to, You reach for the technique. You start naming it, You start counting, You start scanning, And the exercise begins. And what you notice is that the underlying activation hasn't gone down. It's gone underneath the technique. You're now doing 5-4-3-2-1 with a heart that is still racing, While telling yourself you're grounding. While part of you is silently noting that the grounding is not working. What's happened is that the technique has become a way of not feeling. Which is sometimes exactly what's needed in the moment. But when it becomes the default response to all internal experience, The system never actually meets what's there. That grounding is now a fancier version of dissociation. The exercise that was meant to bring you into your body has become a way of organizing attention away from it. So if this is happening to you. The answer is not better grounding. The answer is paradoxically less. Less management. Less technique. And more willingness to be with the wave. When there is safe context to do so. And of course always, It's not always possible to feel the feeling. But if you have the means to do otherwise. A regulated friend, A therapist, A safe enough space. Sometimes the work is stop reaching for the tool and let what wants to move just move. And this is very very delicate territory so I am not telling you to abandon your coping skills when you don't have anything to replace them with I am naming the stitch. That some long-term healers reach. Where the very tools that got them this far have become the obstacle to going any further. The third situation is the one I think most undernamed and is the one I want to explore. Sometimes the body refuses to ground because the present moment is not safe to land in. And I don't mean that the room contains a tiger. I mean that the present moment of your life contains something the body, With good information, Has decided not to acknowledge fully. A relationship is depleting you. A job that is misaligned with you. A grief you haven't allowed yourself to feel. A truth about a situation you have not yet been ready to know. In these cases, The body is not failing at grounding. The body is correctly perceiving that grounding would mean landing in something the system can't yet bear to land in. The refusal to come to the present is very intelligent in this situation. The protective system is doing what it's supposed to do. Telling such a body to count the things it can see is a bit like telling someone treading water in a storm to take a deep breath. It just misses the situation altogether. So the work is not to ground more skillfully. The work is to look at what the present moment actually contains. In conditions where that can be safely faced. And to give the body a chance to take in information it's been protecting itself from. And this is often slow, Body led. Moment to moment in long-term therapy where things start to shift in a different way than they had been. Not by adding more skills, Not by acknowledging, Not by grounding difficulties. There is another layer here I want to talk about. I want to talk about shame. People who have done a lot of trauma work. Who know the techniques. Who have run themselves through every protocol. Even when those techniques stop working. The first response is almost always self-limp. I am doing it wrong. I've gone backwards. I'll never get this right. I'll never heal. I'm more damaged than I thought. And the same compounds. The original distress is bad enough and the fact that grounding isn't touching it adds a layer of failure. The fact that you as a person who has done so much work are still in this state adds a layer of self-blame. By the time you actually try to talk to anyone about it. You're not just carrying the original difficulty. But also as a whole performance of having failed in your own healing. I want to say this slowly. Techniques have limits. Protocols don't cover everything. The fact that they don't reach where you currently are is not evidence of you being broken. It is simply information about the size of the territory that you're in and the type of work the next phase is going to require. Most people have done a lot of drama work that hits the wall at some point. So the wall is not the end of the work. The wall is the entry point to a different kind of work, Which is slower, Deeper, More relational and less technique-driven. The skills that you've built so far are not wasted. Let me get specific. About what tends to help. Because I don't want to leave anyone in the wall without options that you can explore. First and most importantly, Relationships. The deeper states I described, Dissociation, Freeze, Flashback territory, Present moment refusal, Are almost all responsive to the actual physical presence of a regulated nervous system that you can borrow from. This is what therapy provides at its best. But it can also be a partner or a friend who knows how to be still, An animal occasionally in a particular place. So the mechanism is co-regulation. Your nervous system on its own in those states cannot find its way back, But with another nervous system it usually can. Now second is the bottom-up input that bypasses the cortex. Slow, Heavy, Repetitive. Slow, Heavy, Repetitive. A weighted blanket. Cold water on the wrist sometimes used carefully not as a punishment but as a signal to the brainstem. Slow rocking pressure against a wall or a heavy surface. Humming or making a sound in a low register. Which engages the vagus nerve at a layer below cognition. And the third is slowing right down. Not faster grounding, Slower everything. When the standard techniques are not landing, Accelerating doesn't help. What sometimes does help is dropping the pace of everything for the next few minutes. Moving more slowly. Breathing more slowly. Speaking more slowly. And the system, Given enough slowness, Finds its way down. And the last one. Is knowing when to stop trying. Sometimes the most regulating thing you can do is to give up on the regulation project for some time. Make a cup of tea. Was something predictable? The system given the right kind of rest. Often regulates itself and you stop demanding that it do so. If any of this is resonating with you, I want to offer you something for the harder territory. And you might have guessed it, It's not 5 4 3 2 1 breathing. It's something simpler. Wherever you are right now. Just put one hand on your chest, Over your heart. Just one. The other hand can rest wherever it wants to. Just put one hand on your chest. One hand on your chest, Over your heart. And that's all. Now feel the weight of your hand. Don't count anything. Don't name anything. Just feel that there is a hand on your chest. The hand has weight. And the chest is rising and falling underneath. At whatever pace it is rising and falling at. There is a hand on your chest. The hand has weight. And the chest is rising and falling underneath. At whatever pace it wants to rise and fall today. This works at a layer below cognition. The pressure of the hand on the chest is a primitive cue of safety. Self-touch. The sensation a small mammal would get from being held by another. And it activates the parasympathetic response through a different route than the senses-based grounding does. And it doesn't require the cortex to perform anything. If even this is too much for you today. The work may be for you to do nothing at all. To let the wave do what it does. The state will end. The body will return. And the work will continue in a different way than you have known so far. And that's okay. Now I'll say this briefly. I have been at the wall. The ground link doesn't work well. The point in my own healing where I'd absorbed enough techniques to be dangerous and not enough depth to actually move what was waiting to be moved. And it's a particular kind of frustration. What got me through was not better techniques. It was different company. Someone who could sit with me without trying to fix me. Someone who could let me be in this state without rushing me out of it. Who treated the wall as information rather than failure. And eventually I learned to do that for myself. To recognize that when I had hit the limit of what I could do alone. Stop trying for a while. And that alone changed more than years of skill building had. And I tell you that because if you're at the wall. What helps is not the next protocol, Not the next therapist, Not the next influencer, Not the next book. What helps is a relationship in which that wall can be witnessed. What changes when you stop trying to ground harder? You will become less afraid of your own states. Because you've learned that states don't last forever. And fighting them extends them. The relationship to anxiety, Dissociation and freeze become less adversarial. The state arrives, It's met and it passes. The toolkit becomes smaller. Instead of cycling through 20 techniques you find 2 or 3 that actually work and you use them at the right time without expecting them to do anything. And you might start to trust your bodies again. The body that wouldn't ground stops being your enemy. It becomes a collaborator that has just been signaling what kind of help it actually needs. And once that conversation begins. . . The work gets easier. Slower but easier. Because you and your body are on the same side. So whatever is going on for you, You've not failed. Remember this, Healing happens in layers. So XYZ technique may have worked for those layers. But maybe now all you need is to provide your unconditional non-judgmental witnessing to your body. With simply putting a hand on your chest with no expectations not wanting to change anything might bring you closer to that. You might have grown out of the layer that the technique was designed for. That's not regression, That's a passage. The work continues. It just looks different from there. So please be patient with yourself, Particularly today. If any of this has stirred something in you. Just let that integrate, Process that over the next few hours, Days. Before we close Just stay where you are. You can put your hand on your chest again if it helps. And just let the body do what it's doing. Trust that it knows more than the techniques have given it credit for. You can stay there as long as you need. You can come back to this if you think there is something here that helped you. Thank you for listening. Take care of yourself. And the part of you that has been working very hard to manage what it didn't need to manage that much. Thank you. And until next time, Namaste.

Reviews

Over and over again your talks seem to answer what I'm going through, almost at the same moment I need it. This talk was particularly helpful. Having studied and attempted to heal for so very very long, I have come to a point where I feel like I have too many tools. I get overwhelmed and confused when they don't seem to do what they're supposed to do. I'm grateful for the knowledge that I have, and I'm even more grateful that I found your work. I feel like it is what I've been looking for for so long. I definitely think that slowing down and simplifying is vastly more important than I've ever realized before. Thank you once again for your beautiful words, your bravery in your willingness to speak in opposition to the wellness industry. I am eternally grateful.

Wow, I've never heard anyone talk about grounding techniques like this. I so resonate. I can only do them on good days, when I'm doing well. Bringing awareness to the present moment is like a challenge to my nervous system. I can only sometimes pull it off without it making me feel more trapped. 🫂