Calm Your Emotions Naturally Using the Community Resiliency Model (CRM) - Part 2

In this video, I'm doing the second part of a series on calming your emotions naturally using the skills from the Community Resiliency Model or CRM. This video introduces the first three fundamental skills: tracking, resourcing, and grounding.

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Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'm doing the second part of a series on calming your emotions naturally using the skills from the Community Resiliency Model or CRM.   This video introduces the first three fundamental skills: tracking, resourcing, and grounding.

The Community Resiliency Model was developed by Elaine Miller-Karas with the Trauma Resource Institute as a way for people and communities to use their own resources within their own nervous systems to bring calm and balance to their lives.  These methods have been taught individually and to entire stressed out communities of all ages in multiple countries around the world.  Learning these skills allows people to gain some mastery over their emotional responses -- not by supressing them or avoiding them, but by expanding our ability to tolerate and function while still having uncomfortable emotions.  In the first video in this series, I go through a simplified overview of our nervous system and brains as a way to understand how our bodies function during times of stress or trauma.  In this video, I’m going to teach the first three most fundamental skills in the CRM toolkit.   One word of caution — if you have experienced trauma, practicing these skills on your own might be difficult.  If so, you may want to find a licensed trauma-trained professional to walk through these skills with you. Okay — the first skill is

Skill 1 - Tracking
Remember in the first video, we talked about your nervous system and how we want it to operate in the resilience zone?  That means that even though you experience stress and unpleasant surprises, your thinking brain is remains online and you can still navigate life well.  Well, how do we know where your nervous system is?  If we had you in a biofeedback lab, we could hook you up to a bunch of sensors which could give us a sense of your heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, skin response, etc.  Then we would know exactly what your body was doing.  But guess what?  For lots of reasons, we can't do that.  So instead -- YOU get to be the biofeedback monitor.  This first skill -- tracking — requires you to get in touch with how your body is feeling.  And believe me, this sounds WAY easier than it actually is.  As I said in the previous video, most of us are pretty disconnected from our bodies and if we've experience trauma, we can be almost entirely cut off from our bodily sensations.  So, the idea is to tune into your body at all different times -- when you are stressed, angry, content, relaxed -- and just notice how your body feels.  What happens when you get anxious?  Does your heart race?  Do you tense up your shoulders?  Where do you carry that anxiety in your body?  Some people feel it directly in their stomach, which has so many nerves that some people call it our second brain.  How about when you are relaxed?  Where do you feel that?  If you tense up your shoulders when you are stressed, notice what happens to them when you are relaxed -- do they feel any different?  Everyone has slightly different bodily response to our emotions, so this is really figuring out how your individual body carries things.   What you want to notice is what feelings in your body are associated with distress -- or emotions like anger, anxiety, frustration, fear, and sadness.  And what sensations are linked to happiness, contentment, and joy?  It sounds crazy, but the very first step in this process is simply noticing how our bodies react to distress and how we hold wellness.  Without this first step, we have NO idea where our nervous system is and therefore, how to calm it down.  So practice this -- all the time!  Get into the habit of checking in with your body.  How is it feeling?  How is it reacting?   What feels good?  What doesn't?  There is another set of sensations that you will have when your body is shifting from distress to the resilience zone which might be confusing if you aren't expecting it.  This shift is called release and there are a bunch of bodily feelings associated with it that could include shaking, tingling, crying, yawning, or changes in body temperature.  These all indicate that your body is coming into balance and shifting back into wellness.  Once you've been doing this a while, you are ready for the next skill which is called . . .