Self-compassion practices can be integrated into any form of trauma therapy, including EMDR, Somatic Experiencing®, and exposure. There are at least three elements that are common to all of these methods: a preparation stage, the task of monitoring the client’s level of emotional arousal, and an explicit reprocessing stage.
First, almost every trauma protocol includes some preparation work in which the client develops a basic capacity to relax and regulate emotions. Self-compassion practices are an excellent choice for this kind of work because they are an effective way of activating the Care Circuit in the brain, which powerfully reduces emotional distress.
Second, trauma therapies always require the therapist to monitor the client’s level of emotional arousal to ensure that he or she doesn’t become hyperaroused. We know that if a client triggers a flight–flight–freeze response during therapy, it can lead to retraumatization. This awareness is absolutely essential when using mindfulness and self-compassion with trauma.
The analogy that Thich Nhat Hanh uses when discussing this dynamic is about salt and water. If you were to drop a handful of salt into a glass of water, it would become undrinkable. However, if you drop the same amount of salt into a lake, the water would be perfectly fine. He explains that if your mindfulness and compassion are as small as a glass of water, your suffering will overwhelm you. If you can develop mindfulness and compassion that are as big as a lake, you can contain and embrace that suffering without being harmed by it.
Third, these methods all contain a reprocessing stage in which traumatic memories are activated in the therapy session. An understanding of memory reconsolidation can help clarify how this process works. As discussed earlier, reconsolidation occurs when we activate a memory and expose it to new associations. Practitioners of any trauma therapy will recognize this description as being a big part of what they do. However, a lot of trauma work achieves desensitization by activating the traumatic memory and associating it with a relatively neutral environment. If we could activate the memory and associate it with compassion instead, we could potentially expect superior results.
Finally, many (but not all) trauma therapies seek to change clients’ narratives about their traumas. Researchers who study loss and trauma talk about the central importance of the story we use to make sense out of a traumatic experience. In fact, the narrative we create about a trauma actually predicts the development of symptoms better than the intensity of the event itself (Neimeyer, 2006).