Self-Soothing For Trauma & Trying Times

We all experience trauma and trying times. Trauma is any experience that is overwhelming to us because we lack the outer and inner resources to deal with it at the time it happens. One such inner resource is the ability to self-soothe. In this talk, you will learn how to identify when a present-moment experience is triggering an earlier trauma in your life. You will also learn an advanced mindfulness practice called the "empathetic witness," which means cultivating a gentle and compassionate inner voice whenever you are experiencing something difficult. (The final practice in this meditation is available as a stand-alone meditation on Insight Timer called "A Self-Soothing Practice.")

Some of the ideas in the talk were inspired by Deborah Allen, the lead teacher at the Lionheart Institute for Energy Healing in LA (now called Healers Forum).

Transcript

Hi,

This is Christina McMahon.

Today I wanted to share a talk with you on self-soothing,

Which for me has been one of the most important tools that I've learned in my years of practicing and teaching mindfulness.

This is especially helpful in trying times,

Whether you're struggling with stress or perhaps even a traumatic experience or maybe a traumatic memory has been triggered.

I actually came to meditation myself through trauma.

Meditation and mindfulness became part of my own healing from that traumatic experience and this was about seven years ago and without giving you all of the details,

It was a time in my academic career when I was doing a lot of field work in Africa and was feeling really comfortable doing that and it was a very joyful part of my life for many years.

And then there was one isolated incident that happened one time when I was working in Mozambique in Southern Africa and it was an incident of unexpected trauma and it occurred at a time when I was definitely not being mindful.

I had a million things going on in my mind about what I had to do next and what I needed to accomplish that day.

So it really came out of the blue and luckily I was not physically hurt but psychologically is quite jarring for me and when I returned to the States and began my healing process along with of course reaching out for the resources I needed in terms of therapy and counseling and support,

I also turned to meditation and mindfulness to help myself with self-soothing,

To take care of myself and really bring a lot of compassion to my experience and also to remind myself that I was doing the best I could that day so that I didn't in any way try to blame myself for what happened to me but I could truly be there for myself with a whole heart.

And also meditation and mindfulness of course helped me to stay more in the present moment which made me feel more safe and protected from there on out because it brought more of an awareness to my experiences and to what was happening around me from moment to moment.

So trauma is going to be at the center of the talk today and there are certainly a lot of traumatic events happening in our world today and maybe you've been touched by one of them and this practice that I'll be talking about of self-soothing could be an important resource for you in recovering from that especially if a memory of that experience comes up again or maybe you have experienced some form of secondary trauma simply by learning about those events going on today or hearing about them reading about them or you may actually be thinking to yourself well I haven't experienced serious trauma so maybe this talk isn't for me and what I would say to that is to keep an open mind because I want to deepen our understanding of trauma today so that we can all come to an awareness that actually all of us need support in this area no matter what our life experiences may be.

So I want to share a definition and explanation of trauma that I learned from one of my important teachers in life,

Debra Allen,

And I heard this definition from her when I was studying at the Lionheart Institute for Energy Healing in Los Angeles which is now called Healers Forum and Deb Allen is one of the lead teachers there.

So this is what I learned from her in how to actually define trauma what does that term actually mean and she said that trauma is any experience that is overwhelming to us at the time it happens because we don't have the outer or the inner resources to deal with it.

So I'll say that again and see if you can relate to this definition of trauma.

Trauma is any experience that is overwhelming to us at the time it happens because we don't have the outer or the inner resources to deal with it.

Now the outer resources may be easier to call to mind some examples of what an outer resource may be.

Obviously it could be someone to support you through that experience and that could be a therapist,

A counselor,

A healer,

A good friend and confidant,

Someone from your family.

It also could simply mean someone to defend you right so whether that's an authority whatever kind of authority figure that could be a teacher,

A professor.

So these are these kinds of outer resources often it's about reaching out for them after an experience of trauma making sure that we're surrounded by a good support team after we're recovering from a difficult experience that we didn't have the resources to deal with at the time.

The inner resources are things like self-empathy,

Self-compassion,

So the ability to witness your own experience with compassion with a gentle heart.

And this is where mindfulness meditation can really help us.

We can actually use our meditation practice to help us develop those inner resources of self-empathy and self-compassion and it's maybe a more advanced kind of mindfulness practice but those tools are extremely valuable because without developing those inner resources we may actually re-traumatize ourselves when memories or even similar experiences come up again because once again we won't have the inner resources to handle them.

So the interesting thing about difficult especially traumatic experiences is that similar traumatic experiences often get filed in the same file folder in our psyche right so we might have a train of similar challenging experiences emotionally and psychologically and the more similar they are the more likely we are to associate them together so they could kind of get filed away in the same place in our brain and so what happens is that all of those similar experiences can then explode with the same trigger right one trigger can cause all of them to explode and when we talk about trauma we're often talking about two different categories and the first one is the one that most of us are probably familiar with shock trauma so this is as a result of war so for example anyone experiencing PTSD could be the result of a car accident or sexual violence so a rape survivor would be experiencing and recovering from shock trauma.

I knew someone who was once in a serious climbing accident once you know involving you know spending prolonged amount of time on a mountain waiting for medical help to arrive these are all incidences of shock trauma that kind of come in a very unexpected very sudden kind of way and they can obviously be very jarring to the psyche so this is what I experienced when I was doing fieldwork in Mozambique it was crime related shock trauma so obviously this requires a lot of healing after we have experienced something like that.

The other category of trauma is one that you might not necessarily have thought of before and that is strain trauma and strain trauma is an ongoing series of trauma or traumatic events that is building in that same file folder right so it's a series of incidences that don't quite seem as jarring on their own but they build up especially since we are kind of storing them in the same place in our psyche and often the original trauma in that folder is from early childhood so let's take the example of domestic violence so October is actually domestic violence awareness month so let's say that there is someone who experienced physical abuse in their childhood if they later experienced domestic violence as an adult that gets filed in the same folder as the early childhood abuse so any single incidence of trauma or abuse today could trigger all of those earlier traumas even the early childhood one and I would even say especially the early childhood one so it's compounded this holds true for any kind of trauma we may have experienced in childhood and the truth is that we all did in some way even if our parents were doing the best they could they were still human and there were still moments when our needs as a child were not met right so there's this principle called the tension of opposites which means being able to hold two different concepts that seem to be both seem to be true but both seem also to be opposite and if we can really hold the tension of opposites we'll start it's a more evolved way of thinking and of living our lives and so this is what we have to really hold when we consider our early childhood experiences that yes on the one hand you might really believe and and really know that your parents were doing the best that they could and on the other hand you had needs that were not met right so it's not about saying okay I don't want to blame my parents so for that reason I'm not going to look at my unmet needs you really want to hold that tension of opposites yes they were doing the best I could and yes I had needs that were not met so it's not about blame at all but it's about really going back to your earlier self and honoring whatever needs were unfulfilled so maybe you were crying in your room a little too long before someone came in to check on you for example or maybe something happened at school when you were quite young with a mean-spirited kid and no one was there to defend you and you might have felt really lonely or unprotected at the time so any kind of experience like that may have left you in your very young self walk away believing somehow I'm not loved or I'm not lovable so that's an example of strained trauma and it can get filed away in that folder in your psyche and similar experiences that you have today might actually trigger those earlier ones so if you ever have an experience in your life where you say to yourself why am I so upset about this it doesn't an irrational plane it doesn't feel like something I should actually implode or explode over and most likely it's because it's triggering some early event experience of strain trauma and that's when we really need those inner resources so how can we develop them I want to go over a practice that I like to call the empathetic witness and this is a mindfulness practice and it is the intention of cultivating a gentle inner voice for whatever that you are experiencing so that you'll be able to experience and hear the voice of your own empathetic witness in real time whenever something difficult or traumatic comes up in your life whether that's an experience or simply a recurring memory that comes up this is a really wonderful inner resource to call upon during those times and so I want to actually take you through this practice and the first step is simply quieting the mind so we'll start with some basic breath work and quieting the busyness of our mind whatever is going on for you today and that's called making the mind serviceable I learned that from one of my mindfulness teachers Alan Wallace we quiet the mind first to make it serviceable and then the next step in this meditation practice is that I will ask you to bring to mind a difficult experience that you had recently so actually intentionally calling up a memory of a time in your recent life when you felt a little bit off balance or even traumatized and then I'll guide you through the process of bringing in that empathetic voice now I want to caution you here don't choose the most traumatic experience in that file folder it's the first time you're doing the practice and you don't want to start with something so challenging you want to start with something that is more manageable emotionally right so maybe in that file folder you go to like the mildest occurrence of that strange trauma or maybe even moderate depending on how resilient you are feeling today but basically take it easy on yourself the first time you're doing the practice this is like building the muscle we really want to be gentle with ourselves when we're working with trauma or difficult experiences so you really want to move slowly at a pace that feels right to you so let's take a moment first to center in to this present moment you can go ahead and close your eyes if you are somewhere where it feels safe to do so and start by taking one deep cleansing breath as if you could fill all of your lungs to capacity and then a slow luxurious exhale releasing all of that air and now find yourself in a regular breathing pattern allowing your body to breathe exactly the way it wants to breathe allowing your attention to be drawn to the expansion of the abdomen with the inhale and the gentle contraction with the exhale bringing your full awareness to the experience of your body breathing and surely by now a thought or a worry will have come up planning for the rest of your day or remembering recalling something that happened earlier and if that happens just allow that thought to be there in your mind and then fade away just like a cloud in the sky mindfully returning your attention to the breath making the mind serviceable and quiet for this practice and now I invite you to call to mind the last time you are feeling something difficult this could be sadness anxiety stress or even physical pain as difficult as that moment was try to bring that memory fully to mind allowing that difficult emotion to be there take up as much space inside of you as it wants to and imagine now that even in that moment you could hear a soft inner voice saying it's okay it's okay to feel this way you're going through something really challenging right now and you're only human you're doing okay just as you are keep holding within the space of your heart and your mind that difficult memory and find your own words of self soothing now using a gentle inner voice what would you like to say to yourself that earlier version of you what would you say to take care of yourself in that difficult moment staying with the feelings staying with the emotion without going into story the story of what happened who did what bringing your focus back to the feeling you were having at that moment and to your own self soothing practice and see how that memory feels right now holding both that difficult emotion and the reassuring presence of that soft empathetic witness to your experience feeling self-acceptance feeling love for yourself and compassion for yourself telling yourself that you're okay just as you are has the weight of that memory shifted does it feel just a little bit more manageable something you can handle better with these inner resources and if it doesn't feel any different to you that's okay too just notice whatever you are experiencing right now with all of the self compassion that you can muster and if you like you can set an intention now that whenever you experience something difficult today and in the coming days you will call back the gentle voice of your own empathetic witness this soft presence inside of you that is observing your experiences with compassion with gentleness and a warm feeling of self acceptance taking a moment now to move your body around beginning to come back from this practice maybe taking one more deep cleansing breath and whenever you are ready you can open your eyes and come back into this moment thank you for sharing this time with me today for opening up and for diving into the practice of self-soothing I'm hoping it will be a valuable resource for you and whatever you experience in the coming weeks and months wishing you a peaceful and loving day today and may you practice being your own best caretaker today and every day your own best friend be well

Reviews

Extremely helpful and validating...looking right now for additional talks and exercises by you, specifically for childhood trauma. Thank you!

So helpful and soothing. Many thanks Christina 🙏❤️

This talk and meditation has helped me to work on changing my core self image from self loathing to self acceptance. I will continue to use the self-talk that’s taught here. Excellent!

I found this really interesting and will try practicing this technique regularly when I need to. 🙏🌸

Thank you. The background music seemed to activate me as well as your words. I had a powerful release of old repressed grief.

Very helpful. I can see my bulging mental file where unrelated 'similar' events were co-mingled as 'just like'. I think I can sort them out using this practice of release.
Thank you

Very good. I will listen to it again. I'm in the middle of a painful heartbreak. Self love is the answer (for me).

Powerful stuff which enabled me to realise what had been hidden in me

So helpful! I am going through a difficult time. I am grateful to have found this. Namaste 🙏

Very nice mindfulness practice. It helped me with Covid trauma. Thank you.

I learned so much from this. I also lover the gentleness of her voice.

Thank you so much for this amazing, informative talk on trauma. Until today, I hadn’t recognised the type of trauma I have, and now I realise it’s strain trauma. I really appreciated the exercise too, the gentle innner voice one, thank you so much 🥰

Thank you. This was beautifully soothing, your voice was gentle and compassionate. I will certainly use this as a valuable resource .

Succinctly, respectfully, and gently explained, excellent for trauma survivors and for those who wish to support them by expanding their own awareness of trauma in general, specifically to themselves, and ultimately how human the experience is. Thank you.

Trauma is suffering from our body and minds perspective. Here the teaching has lived experience and soothing practices. A real easy introduction to trauma awareness. Namaste.

This is a wonderful healing practice Christina, thank you 🙏🏻 so much 🌸. I found the practice to be so helpful with moving through what I am experiencing at the moment. During the practice I also did some tapping for additional healing, and wow 🤩, it was wonderful and so releasing ✨💫🙌🏻🙏🏻💖

It was amazing! Thank you for the practice 🙏

Thank you Christina!

Beautifully explained and delivered in a soothing manner.

I had never heard of “Strain Trauma” as a phrase before.

I will return to this practice regularly.

Many thanks 💖🙏🏻

Exceptional - thanks for expressing clearly Trauma of all kinds

Is just the guided section available anywhere as a standalone? It's a stellar practice, but it would be better if I didn't have to wait for the talk to move into the guided element.

Edit: thank you so much for posting it separately!