Befriending the Guardians is a trauma sensitive approach to identifying, interpreting, and integrating traumatic reactivity.

This trauma-sensitive approach is especially useful if you feel stuck in trauma reactivity. You’ll know you are stuck if you experience: bouts of sleeplessness, constant catastrophic thinking, sudden anger flashes, negative self talk, obsessive fears and suspicions, and any thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that obscure your experience of wholeness, the deeply satisfying sense of connection and competence supported by agency and self-efficacy.

What is traumatic reactivity?

Traumatic reactivity expresses the sensations of earlier traumas as if they are happening in the present. We sometimes confuse reactivity with “bad” or “deficient” character, but this reactivity is present because some earlier wound (emotional, intellectual, physical, or spiritual) has not been cleansed with attention, wisdom, and healing intentions. This reactivity may be likened to a wild beast – asleep until the familiar circumstances of the past event prod it awake – causing it to prowl the body and startling us with our own impulsive actions such as lashing out, running away, or going numb.

Another way to think of traumatic reactivity is to liken it to the sensory story a shocking event has injected into the body like a virus; its symptoms – anger, terror, and numbing out – return again and again as reminders of the unfinished business left by an event we couldn’t cope with in the past, but have been preparing to deal with ever since. In this view, traumatic reactivity is a calling card delivered to the mature, resourced self that has been growing away from the original debilitating event into the mature, responsive adult who is able to heal such wounds with attention, skill, and love.

If you’re looking to develop your agency and self-efficacy to increase your creative problem-solving abilities, this program can help.

Befriending the Guardians is about taking a trauma sensitive approach to whatever comes your way. We all deserve to feel a sense of connection rather than isolation, optimism rather than dread. That ‘we’ includes you.

What is a trauma sensitive approach?

A trauma sensitive approach includes creating and practicing thought-and-action habits to increase agency and self-efficacy; learning and practicing techniques to soothe in-the-moment trauma reactivity; and, understanding resistance to change using “Befriending the Guardians,” an approach that emphasizes your individual strengths and resources, qualities often overlooked when we are in a trauma-induced reactive state.