{"id":1083,"date":"2014-07-21T17:56:59","date_gmt":"2014-07-21T23:56:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ac6.ab6.mwp.accessdomain.com\/beyond-trauma-blog\/?p=1083"},"modified":"2022-04-01T11:14:47","modified_gmt":"2022-04-01T17:14:47","slug":"hand-mirror-collision-trauma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/traumahealing.org\/hand-mirror-collision-trauma\/","title":{"rendered":"Using a Hand Mirror to Work with Collision Trauma"},"content":{"rendered":"

H<\/span>ere's a technique that came to me while working with a client who'd suffered a rear-end collision in her car with no warning. I was reflecting on the fact that she'd had no time to do any defensive orienting, when it occurred to me to use a hand-held mirror to allow her to see behind herself: as if she'd had the time to look in the rear view mirror and see the car coming. Then we could see what wanted to happen next.<\/p>\n

This client had come in to deal with long-held fear and a recent major uptick in anxiety. The uptick occurred when someone she knew had an accident and was injured. Her rear-end collision was two years before we met.<\/p>\n

In the first two sessions, she learned to track cycles of activation and de-activation, while also taking note of any discharge of energy, which she experienced as tingling all over her body.<\/p>\n

In the third session, I had her lay out her sense of her personal boundary using a rope. (This is an exercise I learned in my Beginning 2 training in SE\u00ae.) With her boundary laid out concretely around her, she felt a much greater sense of safety and empowerment. After exploring that thoroughly through her felt-sense and other elements of SIBAM,* I brought out the mirror. Letting her know what I was going to do before I did it, I slowly walked around the periphery of the rope boundary, with her watching me in the hand-held mirror as I moved behind her. We stopped to process cycles of activation, deactivation, and settling, noting any releases of energy as they occurred.<\/p>\n

*Editor's note: SIBAM stands for the five core components of human experience, upon which much of Somatic Experiencing\u00ae techniques are based:<\/em><\/p>\n