Emergency Coping Skills: Safe Space through Art, Senses Grounding, Tapping.

I’ve been reading a lot of great books recently about using Eye Motion Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) to treat therapy. On a train recently, I read Laurel Parnell’s Tapping In: A step-by-step guide to activating your healing resources through bilateral stimulation. I especially liked the chapter on resourcing for healing: Safe/peaceful place, nurturing figures, protector figures and inner wisdom figures. Safe place or Calm place is a pretty basic EMDR technique where the client imagines themselves into a safe and calm space, a container where they are safe and calm. Being able to toggle back and forth with that safe place and a distressing experience is a major skill in EMDR therapy, and is really great in general as a relaxing mental image. I can be in traffic freaking out about how that guy just cut me off, or I can be here in the car and also in the mountains, where nothing can touch me.

One thing I really like to do is to use art to make my safe place feel more real. I hit that point in my teens where I felt like I was “not artistic.” My mom and sister are talented studio artists, and while I did a lot of dance and theater, I was also a pretty gawky teenager, and didn’t have quite the body type that ballet really encourages. It’s been only recently, as an adult, that I’ve connected with making art for myself, for fun, because I like it. Learning to undo some of the perfectionism and managing my expectations about the gap between my taste and my abilities was so helpful. Now I feel like I can play with new media, like watercolors, to create an impression of my safe place, even if I can’t quite recreate it. Good Enough is Good Enough, and for me that’s been really freeing.

To create a safe/pleasant container using art, you can get either a large sheet of paper or a nice box (I’ve never met an ADHD person who didn’t have a small collection of nice boxes they were saving “just in case.” Break that glass: this is the perfect use for that box.). I like using magazines or old books for this, and tearing out pictures of either places that give me that comfortable feeling, or with calm colors like purple, blue and green. I also look for words that evoke that feeling, and cues that help me imagine my place, like smells, sounds, and textures. If you can’t find anything like that, THIS IS OK. You get to make them yourself! A recent version I made was a park with food trucks, and I drew swirls that remind me of scent trails on with pastels and added some lyrics to a song that plays in my head with sharpie.

If you made a box this way, you might choose to fill it with some sensory things. You have a lot of senses, the classics of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, but also awareness of pressure, temperature, and whether you’re still or moving, and more. We can use those senses to help you ground into the here and now: I like to put Altoids or strong flavored gum for taste, a piece of beeswax or a small bottle of essential oils to smell, a bell or small kazoo that I can hear, and also feel, a nice note or picture someone I care about drew for me and something with cool texture: I have some yarn ends, but a cotton ball, bouncy rubber ball, even a clothespin would do (you could experience pressure by clipping your fingers and by fussing with the spring). If you’re feeling distressed, you can pull the box out and use these things as an aid for 5-4-3-2-1 grounding: Name out loud 5 things you can see (Observe relative size, brightness, color), 4 things you can touch (name their textures, temperatures!), 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell and 1 thing you can taste. Notice how you feel: anything different? If you feel more calm or relaxed, this might be a good moment to practice tapping: cross your arms so your opposite hands are on your shoulders. Tap slowly back and forth, right and left, one, and, two, and three, and four, and… while focusing on your senses and your comfortable space.

You might note for yourself how this went, and document what you did, why you needed this grounding and how you felt afterwards. This is the kind of thing therapists love to hear about, so bring it to your therapist and let them hype you up for trying a new thing!