Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness Practices
By: Kaylie Siu
Not all mindfulness practices like meditation and breathing can be helpful, especially for people that have experienced severe trauma. Not only may they be ineffective, they might even trigger negative responses. If traumatic memories are best addressed in the conscious mind, how can we draw them to the surface without triggering the negative emotions that usually accompany them?
Trauma is best addressed when someone is equipped with things like a strong support system, healthy ways to move their body, and proper social and emotional skills. Unfortunately, not everyone has these necessities. The use of trauma-sensitive mindfulness practices may help people without these necessities to deal with their trauma in a safe and healthy way.
The Role of Mind to Body Connection
In her book, “Teaching Mindfulness to Teens as a Path of Empowerment,” Meghan Leborious tells a story about a girl who had broken her arm on a slide at the playground. Meghan observed this little girl with her cast on, playing with her doll by sliding it down a slouchy couch arm. She explains how this was the girl’s way of revisiting the experience, but changing the outcome so that the doll properly slides her way down without hurting herself. By using the doll as an extension of herself, she is able to reprocess the event in a more favorable way, reducing the fear of the playground and the event that took place there.
This is why physical gestures and movement as methods of mindfulness can be so powerful. Most of the time, trauma is unwanted and whether it happens or not is uncontrollable. Creating movement allows people to feel more control over their bodies, actions, and thoughts, providing them with a sense that they do have power.
While Leborious mostly suggests these practices for teens in a classroom setting, they are quite broad and can easily be adapted for any age and setting. Along with movement, narrating physical sensations can further help ground people in the moment to experience present sensations and feelings. Similarly, drawing interpretations of the emotional body may help people visualize what each part of their body is experiencing in the current moment, once again highlighting the awareness and control that people have over their own bodies. Some traditional forms of mindful movement can encourage this mind to body connection as well, such as stretching, yoga, dancing, acting, tai chi, etc..
While mindfully thinking about physical movement and the movement itself may help with trauma recovery, it’s still important to take things slow. Leborious mentions a term coined by a trauma specialist, Bessel van der Kolk, called penduluming. It means to dip in a little, back away,
the dip a little more the next time, and repeat. This method ensures that people with trauma that are practicing mindfulness can avoid being overwhelmed and can slowly work their way up.
Importance of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness Practices
Why is it so important for people with trauma to be able to practice mindfulness? Suppression of trauma tends to appear as anxiety and other escape behaviors. Anxiety can make it difficult for people to engage in daily activities, hindering them from living their lives to the fullest. Also, trauma therapy may be expensive or daunting, so practicing mindfulness is a much more accessible way to manage anxiety and other unwanted behaviors associated with trauma.
The importance of trauma-sensitive mindfulness practices lies in making mindfulness accessible to people of all backgrounds, particularly those who have experienced trauma. Most of the time, trauma is not always some big, random incident, it can be taking place every single day in subtle ways. The one that Leborious emphasizes is the trauma that stems from discrimination that
comes along with belonging to one or more minority groups. Due to systemic injustice, people of color are more likely to experience race-based traumatic stress, which causes more than just anxiety, but also behaviors like ADHD, OCD, depression, and addiction. These populations tend to experience more poverty too, which makes other more traditional forms of treatments inaccessible, such as counseling, medication, yoga classes, and more.
Mindfulness is conventionally viewed as just meditation or deep breathing, or sometimes just labeled as “too white.” This is because the most common forms of it are not safe or effective for the people that need it the most. If someone with deeply-rooted trauma, stemming from experiences of discrimination, is told to sit still, close their eyes, breathe deeply, and to “really feel” their emotions, what exactly would that accomplish? While the emotions may be there, there is no process to ensure that those thoughts or memories associated with their trauma are reprocessed to no longer evoke such negative feelings.
As mindfulness becomes increasingly mainstream, it’s essential to remember that not just one form of mindfulness exists and that it’s not one size fits all. Some methods may just be ineffective, but some can trigger negative responses, especially for people that are struggling with deep-rooted trauma. For those who are interested in or are already utilizing mindfulness in their businesses, schools, workplaces, or wherever they are creating a profit, remember to think about who exactly it is that you’re helping, who actually could benefit most from mindfulness, and how you could ensure that those who could benefit are given the proper tools based on their individual needs.
References
LeBorious, M. (2022). Trauma-sensitive practice and why embodiment matters. In M. LeBorious (Ed.), Teaching mindfulness to teens as a path of empowerment (pp. [insert page range]). Norton.
