Self-Care Before Trauma Therapy
Why you should start a self-care routine before beginning trauma therapy!
Self-care is a buzzword that gets tossed around in mental health and wellness spaces, and it might conjure up images of bubble baths, yoga classes, plush bedding, or something that isn’t exactly essential but helps you feel better. It can be hard for folks who have experienced trauma to believe that self-care actions and activities can help, but creating a self-care routine is enormously helpful to begin doing if you’re considering starting deep trauma work, like EMDR. Starting any routine takes practice, and being able to learn to prioritize yourself, learn what works (and what doesn’t), and get into the self-care habit are the important reasons why creating a routine before you begin trauma-focused therapy.
Become Comfortable with Prioritizing Yourself
While it may sound backward, many people who have experienced chronic stress or trauma are not comfortable prioritizing themselves. A lot of time that discomfort around being prioritized has to do with safety and vulnerability. Many of my clients learned that it wasn’t safe or useful for them to have or express their needs and preferences, so it became their practice to ignore or invalidate their own needs and preferences.
Being able to shift that backward logic can take time and practice. It’s incredibly helpful to the EMDR process for clients to work on their self-care routines before they start EMDR because then they don’t have to work so hard during the intensive process to handle the emotions that come up about their memories while trying to reorient their brain towards self-care at the same time. The clients that have the most dramatic results with me are the ones who have come to terms with the fact that they have needs that aren’t being met and they can do something about that before trauma therapy starts.
Learn What Works Best for You
Every client I work with is unique, which means that each person has a different set of needs, desires, and preferences. Trauma therapy, especially in the intensive EMDR model that I offer, requires a lot of focus and energy, so it’s much easier and more effective to discover your personal set of preferences, needs, and desires before you start going deep into therapy.
Taking the time to develop a self-care routine allows you to experiment with what works best for your needs, schedule, and overall lifestyle. In my own self-care routine, I find that it’s easier for me to plan things like vacations or time off where I have to consciously plan for things in my life, but forget that small things like keeping my favorite seltzer stocked or spending intentional quality time with my pets each day provides me and my nervous system rest and respite that I don’t need to wait until vacation to have.
In addition to being able to pepper in big and small acts of self-care, learning what works best for you helps you learn that healing is an ongoing process. As you heal, grow, and change so will your self-care needs. Beginning this process before you start with an EMDR intensive helps to reorient yourself to paying closer attention to your needs.
Get into the Habit of Self-Awareness
As you’re paying more and more attention to your needs you’ll become more habitual or ritual-focused in your self-care. Getting into the habit of self-care helps you prioritize it in your everyday life. Habits get created little by little over time and are reinforced through repetition. We all have habits and rituals in our lives, but most of them are passive and we aren’t always conscious of their purpose or outcomes. By focusing on how to take care of yourself by identifying and meeting needs and preferences you have you’ll become more aware of how you’re feeling and what’s happening for you in the moment. This self-awareness will be incredibly useful to you during EMDR.
During sessions I will often ask what you’re noticing – this can be about your thoughts, emotions, or body sensations. By practicing a self-care routine you are generating more self-awareness and will be more attuned to yourself to answer the question about noticing during your EMDR sessions.
Build Self Trust
Besides the overall benefits of self-care, taking time before starting trauma therapy to develop a self-care routine is the beginning of your long-term trauma treatment because you are practicing acknowledging and meeting your needs and preferences, which slowly helps develop self-trust. Part of why trauma feels so terrible to live with is because parts of us are constantly being denied peace and comfort.
When you live a life where you move through the day judging and rejecting those more tender parts of you, you are teaching yourself that you don’t have your own back. This ultimately makes you more vulnerable to other stressors and traumatic situations. It makes it hard to trust people, and when conflict does arise in your life you suffer more because you can’t rely on yourself. I see people all the time who tell me that they don’t trust themselves, or they don’t believe their own lived experiences or versions of events that happened in their lives. When you create a self-care routine, you are acknowledging that you have needs that deserve to be cared for, and this allows you to begin to learn about and trust yourself.
Believe me, if I could magically wave a magic wand and provide all my clients ONE thing – it would be that they can trust themselves.
It may feel difficult to unnecessary to begin a self-care routine before you start EMDR, but if you can begin to prioritize yourself, tune into your needs and desires, and get in the habit then you’ll be well on your way to having self-trust and a solid baseline of stability and resources to go into your trauma therapy work as an EMDR client.
