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
2 practicesThis explains an approach used in therapy. It is not a set of instructions to follow alone.
You get to choose when to face it. Deciding not now, to stay safe today, is a valid choice, not failure.
Timing is yours. Pausing the hard work to protect yourself is part of the work, not a retreat from it.
When you are ready, face the hard memory in small, bearable doses, with support, not all at once and not never.
Avoiding forever keeps the fear alive; flooding yourself re-wounds. Small, chosen doses are how it loses its grip.