Brad Schipke teaches how to ground yourself during a PTSD flashback using your five senses and the butterfly hug, a technique where you cross your arms and tap alternately under your collarbones to signal your brain that danger has passed.
How do you calm your body after a PTSD flashback? A PTSD flashback acts like quicksand. The more that you resist it, the stronger it gets. So you want to accept that you are currently in a flashback, and then you want to do your best to ground yourself in the present moment. You want to look around, you want to name what you see, what you hear, what you feel, and do anything you can with any of your 5 senses to really just shock yourself back into the present moment. And that's because your brain needs proof that the danger isn't here anymore, and you want to gain that separation from the present moment and the past. A great tool to help you through the flashbacks is something called the butterfly hug, where you cross your arms across your chest like this, tap left and right underneath your collarbones. And what that does is it simulates the REM sleep cycle and helps you process the flashbacks as you're going through it. So that's how to calm your body during or after a flashback. But the thing that will get rid of your flashbacks for good is by processing the trauma at the root. And if you want to learn how to do that, make sure to subscribe because I go into much more advanced processing tools in my longer videos.
