Areas › After harm
After harm
This area is for understanding what is happening in you after something harmful, and for settling. It is not a treatment programme.
Nothing here asks you to go back into a traumatic memory. Processing a trauma is work to do with a therapist who can hold it with you, not alone with a website. If you start to feel far away, unreal, or flooded while reading, stop and come back another time.
What works for this
Grounding, and staying inside your window
This area does one thing and does not do the others. It helps you get steady and get to somebody who can help. Nothing here asks you to go back over what happened, because processing is work for a trained person in a room with you.
One move, today
Five things you can see, four you can feel, three you can hear, two you can smell, one slow breath all the way out. Said out loud if you can.
What matches
7 practicesNotice where the fear sits in your body, the chest, the throat, the gut, and breathe gently toward it.
The body remembers what words forget. Meeting the sensation with breath, not judgement, begins to loosen it.
What happened to you is not who you are. Speak to yourself as you would to someone you love who was hurt.
Harm done to you is not a verdict on your worth. Trade the harsh inner voice for a kinder, truer one.
When trauma tells you that you are utterly alone and beyond help, treat that as the wound talking, not the truth. Do not despair.
A common voice in trauma says you are cast out, unreachable, beyond care. It feels total, but it is a symptom, not a fact, and acting against it,…
Wanting comfort when you are hurting is a built-in human need, not a weakness to be ashamed of. Let yourself ask.
The urge to seek closeness and reassurance in distress is wired into us from childhood. Honouring that need, rather than judging it, is part of how…
When the past floods in, name five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch. Come back to now.
Grounding in your senses tells the mind the danger is memory, not present. The room is safe; you are here.
Breathe out longer than you breathe in, a few times. A slow breath tells the body it is safe.
You cannot argue a frightened body calm, but you can breathe it calm. Long, slow exhales do the talking.
When you notice you are flooded, do one calming thing before any decision or hard conversation.
Do not negotiate from panic. Cool the body first, then think. The decision will still be there.