Identifying Your “Safe Place”
The concept is simple: what is your safe place? The Safe Place intervention asks our clients to become very clear about what emotional and physical safety looks and feels like, to them. Maybe it’s nature or being with a loved one. It can be as simple as the feeling of being wrapped up in a warm jacket, or holding a hot cup of tea.
Drawing our safe place- making it visual and tangible makes it accessible to us. Our safe place is a place of pure comfort, total relaxation, and most importantly it is a resource for us to access any time. Using a mandala to hold the safe place image keeps it well nested, protected, and safe.
Trauma Processing and Safe Place
When we begin trauma work with our clients it is crucial to start with grounding work so that our clients feel very present and safe as they reach back and access traumatic memory. Our goal as therapists during trauma processing is to create a therapeutic climate where our client feels overwhelmingly calm and safe, as they bring up memory that will most likely yield feelings of dys-regulation. The identification of a safe place can be part of this grounding work and the image can be kept on hand for the client to access at any moment in session, thus increasing the clients ability to feel safe, grounded, and calm.
