I offer psychotherapy for traumatized children and adults through the trauma recovery model I developed, which I call Safety Stories. Safety Stories differs from many other trauma recovery models in that we do not go into detail about what happened, but instead focus on what could have provided safety during and after the traumatizing event. We also explore how the body was affected by the traumatization and we help the memory of the trauma event to come to rest by creating a story about what happened and about the safety that would have been needed.

Safety stories can be offered to children, teenagers and adults, to individuals and to couples and families. Many people find that they are greatly helped after just one session. Confidence stories can also be used by parents and other confident adults who want to help their children or other adults.

Here is a summary of what trauma and trauma recovery are and how Safety Stories work:

When we experience an event that overwhelms me, that fills me with fear and helplessness, and where I don’t have a safe person next to me, a trauma response is triggered in my body. This reaction is designed to help my body escape or defend itself. If I can’t escape or defend myself, I become frozen instead, and all the energy triggered by the trauma response remains in my body.

Many children and adults have been and are experiencing events that have overwhelmed them, where they have not had a safe person with them and have felt fear and abandonment. For children, it is particularly important to have a safe adult with them during difficult events. As children are rarely able to escape or defend themselves, the energy of trauma remains in their bodies, leading to different behaviors and symptoms. These include children who are bullied, who have experienced war, who have been subjected to violence or sexual abuse, who have experienced accidents and natural disasters, who have undergone medical examinations or procedures where they felt abandoned, but also more everyday situations where the child has repeatedly felt abandoned without the possibility of being close to and safe from an adult.

Ten years ago, I felt the need to develop a trauma recovery model that adults who are around children and who live with children can use to help children and teenagers process what they have been through, get help to get the trauma energy out of the body, and experience safety. I came to call the model Safety stories and it works well with children, teenagers and adults. Some important aspects emerged from the research I read:

– The first thing a traumatized person – child, teenager or adult – needs is to feel that there is a safe person who provides closeness, who cares, who protects, and to whom the traumatized can connect. The safe person needs to be there, and be present during the processing and recovery.

– The traumatized person needs to know that their behaviors, feelings and thoughts are normal when they have been through something overwhelming.

– It can be difficult to talk about an event that triggered a trauma. It is therefore helpful for children, teenagers and adults to be able to express what they have experienced through play, drama, pictures, music and other creative languages. The creative expressions are then given words during the process. This activates both hemispheres of the brain, which is a prerequisite for the event to be integrated into the rest of the life story. It is only then that the event “comes to rest”.

– The traumatized person’s story does not have to be detailed or extensive. The important thing is that the traumatized person feels in their body what they felt then.

– The story needs to find a continuation that leads to security. Safety can be imagined through the questions: “If someone had been able to come and help you, who would have come?”, “What would that person or animal (the imagined safety person or animal) have done?”, and “How would it have felt?”. When the traumatized person imagines safety, something happens to the memory. They still remember the horrible thing that happened, and maybe they remember it even better now that there is safety in the memory, but the memory is no longer overwhelming. When we fantasize, the same neural pathways in the brain are activated as if we were really experiencing the fantasized event, and therefore the memory can come to rest through fantasized safety.

– Since the trauma is a physical reaction in the body that produces a lot of excess energy, it is helpful for the traumatized person to move before, during and after the story.

– When the traumatized person hears their story retold by an adult in a calm voice – both the horror and the imagined safety – the memory no longer feels so dangerous. The traumatized person needs to hear: “It’s over now.” To help them understand this, the retelling can be concluded by continuing the story of what happened after the event that triggered the trauma.

Safety stories can be summarized in 10 steps:

Preparatory work:

• Step 1: Identify one or more people, preferably adults, with whom the traumatized person feels safe, and let them learn about safety stories.
• Step 2: Learn how traumatized people can be stabilized and grounded if the traumatizing memories become overwhelming.
• Step 3: Gather some facts about what happened before and after the traumatizing event. These facts are then used in the safety story to put the event in context.

Narrative:

• Step 4 – The traumatized person’s trauma narrative:

Listen to the story and give the traumatized person the opportunity to express their story in creative ways. The story does not have to be detailed. Help the traumatized person to focus on how it felt in their body.

• Step 5 – The traumatized person’s imagined safety story:

Bring the story to safety by allowing the traumatized person to invite safe people/animals/beings into the event in their imagination. Observe what the imagined safe person does and says. Help the traumatized person to focus on how it feels in the body when the safe person comes in and helps.

• Step 6 – The traumatized person’s act of victory:

Give the traumatized person the opportunity to release the trauma energy, by asking if there is any movement they want to do with their body or if there is anything they want to say/shout – an act of victory! Do the movement together. Scream together.

• Step 7 – The safe person’s retelling of the traumatized person’s trauma story, safety story and victory story, woven into a time story:

Retell the traumatized person’s story: the trauma story, the imagined safety story, and the victory story, woven into a time narrative of what happened before and after the traumatizing event. Important messages can be woven into the story, such as “You are normal.”, “You are valuable.”, “It was not your fault.”.

Sometimes storytelling needs to start with a retelling. The safe person can then tell what they know of the trauma story, set in a time context and with important messages woven in. When the traumatized person has heard their trauma story told in a safe voice in a safe context, it may be easier to continue the narrative from step 4.

Finishing touches:

• Step 8: Explore together what the traumatized person has come to think about him/herself and the world based on the traumatizing event. Identify which thoughts are not helpful, and replace them with helpful thoughts.
• Step 9: Explore together the feelings left behind by the traumatizing event – guilt, shame, anger, fear. Explore what has been lost and find ways to express and process the grief.
• Step 10: Celebrate closure, create strategies, help the traumatized person explore when and how they need to set boundaries and seek protection, and help the traumatized person find belonging, safety, joy and hope.

At www.safetystories.se you can read more about Safety Stories, both in Swedish and in English. You can also read more in the book Stories of safety. From trauma to safety which is now also available in English. Contact me at ulrika.ernvik@gmail.com if you would like to take part in training, mentoring or experience Safety Stories.