2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Grounding refers to the electrical branch of physics. The purpose of grounding is one - to protect human life and health. A. Lowen, the creator of bioenergetic analysis, used the term "grounding" in understanding how rooted a person is, that is, energetically connected to the ground under his feet. "Grounding" is a metaphor for "a full-fledged connection of the individual with the soil and reality." Awareness of the contact of the feet with the ground makes a person more stable not only physically, but also psychologically. In moments of intense excitement and overload with emotions "the earth leaves underfoot," a person dissociates, loses orientation in time and space. Grounding is the ability to navigate the present in contact with your body and the environment.
Grounding skills are very important when working with people who have experienced traumatic events. Survivors of a traumatic situation, especially at the beginning of therapy, are often not grounded. Clients are quickly overwhelmed with sensations, memories and can easily lose touch with the present. The therapist can use a variety of grounding strategies to cope with overwhelming stimulation, intrusive symptom overload, or heightened traumatic memories, and to amplify the impact of a therapeutic experience rather than a traumatic one.
1. Focusing on the therapist … The therapist may approach (bend over, move the chair closer, change the tone of voice, make short, clear lines). Depending on the nature of the injury, physical contact with the client may be indicated or, on the contrary, categorically contraindicated. If the client trusts the therapist, and the specifics of his experiences are not threatened by physical contact with the therapist, the therapist may offer his hand for "grounding", ask the client to squeeze it, or offer to squeeze the client's hand.
2. Concentration of attention on the environment and general body awareness. The client can be asked to pay attention to the chair under him, the feeling of support from the back of the chair, to feel the feet on the floor and to intensify (press the feet into the floor, stomp their feet, press their hands into the armrests, pat on the body) these sensations. You can ask the client to move, stretch, get up, walk around the office. All of this is opposed to depersonalization and derealization, frequent companions of mental trauma, designed to cope with difficult experiences through separation from bodily experience. The client's orientation in immediate reality contains two related messages: 1) the client is safe and there is no reason to be afraid, and 2) the client is in the room with the therapist and is here and now unaffected by trauma. You can ask the client to pay attention to the surrounding reality and describe it out loud (for example: "Victor, let's try to get you back to the room. Where are we now? What time is it? Describe the room. Describe what you see outside the window)." It is effective to use the client's name as an additional guide (for example: “Victor, you are here with me now, nothing terrible is happening, Victor.” “Please look at me, Victor.” “Victor, take a few sips of water.")
3. Focus on breathing and other relaxation techniques the most affordable way of grounding. Breathing is an invariable and accessible tool in therapeutic work, as well as an affordable way to regulate your condition in everyday life. The vegetative fight / run / freeze reactions always affect the nature of breathing, this is either rapid breathing, knocking the soil out of underfoot, or minimal breathing in case of need to dissociate and "go where no one can reach me."In both cases, modulating breathing helps to ground and restore orientation in the surrounding reality.
Grounding is often necessary and useful in treating traumatized clients, but it can be potentially disruptive to the therapy process, as it alters its immediate flow and “hints” that something is so “wrong” that it is necessary to use “emergency Events . Therefore, grounding should only be used when the client's observed experiences are truly excessive and threaten to overwhelm him. In addition, grounding should be designed in such a way that it does not stigmatize the client and does not overly dramatize the experience of lost self-regulation during the therapy session. Grounding should be done in such a way that the client perceives it as a healing process and not evidence of psychopathology. Working with grounding is a creative process focused on the unique experience of each client, and, of course, it should always be, in my opinion, collaborative.
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