In Part I we explored the ECHO model for understanding the origins of your trauma. My hope is that this has helped you make sense of yourself and your history in a new way. In this part of the book, we’ll be looking at the RESET model for healing the impacts of your trauma by resetting your nervous system.
The RESET model has been at the core of my work with trauma in its many forms over the past two decades. It was shaped both by the enormous laboratory of learnings that have come from the dozens of practitioners at The Optimum Health Clinic working with thousands of patients, and by the hundreds of graduates that have come through our Therapeutic Coaching® practitioner training and the thousands of people that they’ve worked with.
The RESET model has been carefully designed to ensure that its tools and strategies are sequenced in the correct order. For example, before we work on processing and healing your trauma, we first need to make sure that you have the right foundations in place. Each step in the RESET sequence is important and skipping steps often slows down rather than speeds up the healing journey.
Indeed, one of the most common things people say when they go through my online RESET Program® is that they finally understand how previous interventions had made things worse rather than better and that they now need to sequence their healing to ensure that it works.
Here’s an overview of the five steps of the RESET model: we’ll look at these in depth in the coming chapters:
Remember what I said earlier, ‘If you can see it, you don’t have to be it.’ To work to reset your nervous system, we must first make you aware of the state it’s in right now. Both on the macro level of recognizing if your nervous system is dysregulated, and on the micro level of being aware of what’s happening with it day-to-day and moment-to-moment.
Once you’ve recognized which state your nervous system’s in right now, we need to dig deeper to understand the personality patterns, thinking, and behaviors that are driving and maintaining this state. You’ve already done a certain amount of work on this in Part I, but by bringing things together in specific ways, we can start being targeted about changing these patterns.
Two things need to happen at this stage. The first is learning to retrain your nervous system through practices such as meditation. The second is actively stopping the momentum of the patterns of thinking and behavior that are maintaining your maladaptive stress response. By habitually resetting your homeostatic balance, in time it will start to shift to a calmer state.
With trauma, one of the reasons our nervous system becomes activated is to help us escape the overwhelming emotions that we don’t have the support and resources to process. As we start to retrain our nervous system into a calmer place, we can find ourselves re-experiencing some of these emotions, and so having the tools and strategies to help us process them is an important part of our deeper healing. Furthermore, it’s this healing that allows us to stay connected to our body and emotions in a healthy and sustainable way.
As we continue to process our emotions, we now have the potential for a fundamental shift in the way we relate to ourselves and the world around us. Remember the three core emotional needs that affect the context of how events impact us – developing an inner sense of boundaries, safety, and love is critical not only for healing the past but also for increasing our emotional resilience in the future.
Before we jump into the RESET model, there’s one more thing I’d like to point out. If you were working with us one-to-one in the clinic, or through one of my self-led or group programs, we’d be constantly reminding you to not just listen to but to truly honor your own lived experience. This is even more important when your experience tells you something different to what I do in the book.
The RESET model is a framework. It’s not perfect, and everyone’s lived experience is unique to them. So, please listen to your own inner guidance, and know that the act of tuning in and responding to your experience is in itself a healing practice. Put another way: I know that my RESET model is helpful to a lot of people, but your lived experience matters more.