86 Recovery skills 2
TO THE TRAINER
PART II: THE TRAINING
Recovery skills 2
Aim. To practise grounding exercises and give tools that enable a person to stay in her window of tolerance.
GROUNDING EXERCISE
Grounding Exercise 5. Re-orienting to the present. This exercise is of help to survivors in‘ freeze-mode’, who feel numbed and frozen. It would be good to demonstrate this exercise before the participants do it.
Invite the participants to form pairs and change roles after five minutes. When they do so, be sure to ask the participants to brush off their old role before taking on a new one. If possible make scarves available to indicate who the Survivors are. After 10 minutes give the pairs some time to reflect on how the exercise made them feel.
It is important to make sure that helpers practise skills they will teach survivors. The techniques will be more powerful if helpers are familiar with them.
At the end, make sure that participants come out of their roles. Ask them to brush off their character and say aloud:“ Now I’ m [ me ]”.