PTSD mindfulness skills may be the answer.
Your body and mind want to work well together.
It's true. They want to be productive, attuned, harmonious partners. Not stuck in limbo, reacting to a painful point in your past.
Traditionally, PTSD treatment has relied heavily on confronting painful memories in fairly direct ways. However, the more we understand about trauma and its impact on the body and mind, a gentler, less judgemental, attention-oriented approach seems to make more sense.
When mindfulness techniques like deep breathing, meditation, and relaxation practices and used, science shows us that PTSD symptoms decrease. Your mind can change. The pent-up pain and tension in your body can go free.
Mindfulness treatment honors your recovery as a whole person. Has it been a long time since you felt whole?
PTSD mindfulness skills are well-suited to addressing the pain you’ve been trying to avoid
Essentially, mindfulness is self-compassionate and intentional awareness.
Overall, the practice teaches you to pay attention to yourself and your responses in a non-judgmental manner. Rather than remaining wholly focused on the terrible memories and cycling negativity that keeps you mentally stuck and physically reactive, you can become empowered in your PTSD recovery. You learn to notice, accept, and allow your own responses as part of understanding yourself and trusting yourself again.
Thus, mindfulness opens the door for the clarity, confidence, and progress that may have been difficult through talk therapy alone. It also permits you the time and space to be fully present and aware of your unhelpful reactions to the past and counterproductive fears of the future contribute to stuck relationships.
Generally, PTSD mindfulness skills help you make the changes you want
Commonly, mindfulness skills have some general aims as their foundation. Let’s start with the basics.
Mindfulness teaches you to pay attention to the here and now.
Simply experiencing sensations tied to the current moment and not those influenced or generated by trauma can be difficult. Mindfulness practices help slow your mind so that you can see, feel, taste, and hear what’s happening now. This effectively draws your mind away from trauma-informed sensations to a safer reality.
Mindfulness teaches you to notice your thoughts as they occur.
Mindfulness seeks to help you make peace with your thoughts and halt the exhaustion that comes from fighting the places your mind goes. This practice makes it ok to notice both the thoughts and your responses to them with curiosity.
What does that look like on the road to recovery? It’s important to check in with yourself and ask yourself some questions
How do you generally respond, think and react to stressful situations?
What thoughts come and go?
What thoughts do you allow to define you and how you experience the world since your trauma?
Which thoughts, memories, or sensations fuel the strongest reactions in you?
As you practice observing your reactions, you spend less time feeling as though you’re at the mercy of past trauma and more in charge of the fallout in your mind.
Mindfulness teaches you to refocus and return to the present
PTSD is marked by a host of intense internal and external reactions that can pull you back to the trauma. Triggers can come from anywhere. The tension in your body can leave you feeling irritated or even make you ill.
Fortunately, mindfulness can help improve your quality of life by giving you a path back to the present moment. Choosing to focus and bring your attention back to the present moment, through breathwork and body-centered therapy is a worthwhile addition to more traditional forms of therapy.
By exercising choice and guiding your thoughts, PTSD will seem to have less power to sneak up on you. You can then enjoy life knowing you can cope without fearing triggers.
Mindfulness teaches you to acceptwhat is
All in all, recovery from PTSD is about awareness and acceptance. As you more ably recognize your thoughts and responses, the more you can accept things as they are. This aids your ability to distinguish what you think and remember what is actually happening now.
Specifically, PTSD mindfulness skills help establish a life less overwhelmed by anxiety.
When it comes to PTSD in particular, recent research with veterans, abuse victims, and even natural disaster survivors shows real promise. These skills are shown to reduce rumination, negativity, isolation, and helplessness or hypervigilance by your terrible experience in some key ways
Your autopilot is disabled.
Often PTSD fosters a deep desire to avoid or bury disturbing thoughts. Other times, unhelpful, even harmful thoughts have their way as you struggle with one PTSD symptom or another. Mindfulness helps engage you out in the world outside your head and ground you here and now, beyond your trauma.
Your value as a person is affirmed.
PTSD can keep you feeling wholly stressed and perpetually upset by who you are. You may feel worthless, angry, inept, ill-prepared, lost, or unable to trust anyone. You may feel it’s better to just isolate or disappear altogether.
In conjunction with therapeutic support, mindfulness has been shown to afford relief for such deep-level loneliness, anxiety, and depression. PTSD sufferers can learn to accept themselves and their condition as reality. No need to pretend or put pressure on yourself to be okay. It’s okay to be where you are, think what you think, and feel what you feel. It is what it is and you still matter, regardless.
Your sense of hope can return:
Mindfulness is nonjudgmental, therefore you are free to accept things as they are without immediately trying to fix anything. However, you’ll likely find you are ready to embrace recovery.
Why? Because mindfulness highlights distorted thinking and encourages insight, it brings reality into focus. Soon, the promise your future holds will seem worth pursuing.
Your safety is established.
Mindfulness allows you the mental clarity and bodily awareness to breathe, notice, and focus your attention appropriately. You can see people through a healthier lens. You can slow down, back away from triggers, and observe them from a more objective, safe space.
Your stress tolerance is improved and negative escalation is mitigated.
Mindfulness supports your ability to identify negative emotions and prevent them from worsening. For instance, you can notice tension or anxiety in your mind and body, then take measures to breathe through hyper-alertness or sudden panic.
In addition, you’ll learn to pay attention to which emotions pass by and what helps you feel more in charge of your emotions and memories when PTSD symptoms occur.
PTSD mindfulness skills remind you that you are more than your trauma
You are battling a difficult condition and a difficult past. But you are also someone valuable and worthy of happiness, right now.
Training yourself to pay attention to what’s happening in the present can help you lessen trauma’s hold on your life and relationships. With your attention trained, your breath grounding you, and your thoughts directed forward, you can embrace your right to a whole life and recover with purpose and self-compassion.
If you are interested in learning and practicing PTSD mindfulness skills and want some guidance, I'm happy to get you started. Please contact me for a free 30-minute consultation to learn about how I can be of service.
To find out more about my services click here: PTSD Treatment. Serving Boulder, Longmont, Denver.
For your other needs, you can count on April Lyons Psychotherapy Group, to help you heal and grow through EMDR therapy, somatic therapy, trauma therapy, and PTSD treatment – because we believe in your strength and potential for recovery.
