Picture this.

You’re out with a group of friends, having a laugh as you usually do, and someone says something. It’s innocuous enough and everyone else is unfazed by it. But your heart is now beating really hard, you can practically feel it beating out of your chest, breathing is difficult and you feel like you just need to get out.

Now picture this.

You’ve been having a tough day. Your brain is full of thoughts about how you fucked this up or how you should have been better then or even how you just are too whatever to have a meaningful and positive place in the world. 

Finally, picture this.

After one of the above situations you phone a crisis or mental health helpline for some support. They let you talk about things for a bit before proceeding to advise you to have a cup of tea or go for a walk. 

The above situations are examples of times when someone is experiencing intense emotions or intrusive, distressing thoughts. And depending on how the situations are dealt with, the journeys and outcomes can be vastly different. The response I hear most often from people who have been told to have a cuppa or go for a walk when calling for mental health support is that they felt dismissed and not listened to because “how can those things solve [their] problems?”

The interesting thing about this is that the act of going for a walk or having a cup of tea can be included under the term “grounding techniques” but the people suggesting these don’t seem to be able to explain why they’re suggesting them in the first place, let alone share some insights into how someone can benefit from doing them. 

Grounding techniques are widely acknowledged to be helpful when someone is experiencing intense emotions, intrusive thoughts and episodes of dissociation. You’ll find various different sources online sharing information on different grounding techniques including when and how to do them. I actually encourage a lot of my clients to use them and to create their own bank of grounding techniques to call upon when the need arises. What can sometimes get overlooked or not communicated well enough though, is how these actually fit in with the bigger picture of emotion regulation and better coping in the long term. So, that’s what we’re here to dig into and find out what good are grounding techniques, really?

Before we get into the actual meat of this topic, we need to look at what we mean by the term grounding technique. I know we’ve identified a couple of techniques already but let’s get really clear on things. 

Grounding is regarded as the act of finding some safety and stability in the midst of intense emotions, intrusive thoughts and dissociation. So when we talk about grounding techniques, we are talking about the methods and ways someone might tap into some feelings of safety and stability. They help by offering a way to turn the volume down on the experience someone is having - whether that’s intense emotions, intrusive thoughts, memories, flashbacks or dissociation. This is important because the thinking brain actually goes offline in these situations and then the person is just running on instinct and reactions rather than thought out responses. By turning the volume of these down, the thinking brain can come back online and they are better able to cope in the moment because of this. It cannot be overstated how vital it is to be able to think clearly and to make thought through decisions when you are looking at being better able to cope with things.

Now, going back to the suggestions of taking a walk or having a cuppa, there are ways these can be done in a manner that helps someone to ground themselves. There are also ways that same person can do them that doesn’t help them to ground, at all. As an example, you can walk round a park quite quickly, not taking in any of your surroundings, stuck in your head with all those familiar distressing thoughts and strong emotions and feel no better or even worse for it. You can also walk around the same park with a mindful energy - paying curious attention to the colours, shapes, textures, plants and animals that you see along the way. I guarantee the two are very different experiences. And this is the key to successful grounding. No one can ground themselves effectively if they aren’t paying mindful attention to the method of grounding they’re notionally engaging in. 

The options for how to ground yourself are plentiful. I love this list from HealthLine.com because it covers such a variety in one place but there are many more options that it doesn’t contain. I’ve written about grounding techniques before and you can read it here.

Some people reach adulthood with the ability to ground themselves and others are blessed to not need these types of techniques until well into adulthood. Other people haven’t learned how to even though there is a strong need and this can be for any number of reasons including that no one ever taught them how. The key indicator that someone could benefit from learning to ground themselves is that they are facing intense emotions and/or intrusive thoughts or memories (these can be in the form of flashbacks) and struggling to cope with them. Maybe they are:

• Lashing out at others and operating out of the fight trauma response

• Experiencing intense states of anxiety and fearfulness,

• Using drink or drugs to self medicate, 

• Behaving recklessly,

• Shutting down and withdrawing,

• Not feeling anything,

• Using people, things and activities to avoid thinking about, or otherwise being faced with, whatever sent them into a dysregulated state to begin with. 

This is not an exhaustive list as it’s intended to give some examples of how people may react if they’re struggling to ground themselves and cope with difficult situations. Grounding themselves is the first step in interrupting an automatic reaction to an internal or external stimulus. It’s through this interruption that the thinking brain has an opportunity to come back online and choose a healthier way of coping with the situation. 

Establishing a new way of doing anything is not trivial and it takes conscious thought and effort to achieve. It also requires open mindedness because trying something new may be uncomfortable purely on the basis of being new. Things such as grounding yourself are highly personal and what works for one person doesn’t work for another. Also, what works in one situation doesn’t necessarily work in another. So I do ask people to approach the whole thing of using grounding techniques in the beginning with an attitude of curiosity as well as trial and error. Some people will easily remember that they can try out a new grounding technique and either what to do or where to find that information. Other people, however, can benefit from some prompting so having a very prominent reminder or a trusted person to provide the prompt can be very useful. Whichever grounding techniques someone uses and however they remember to use them is good enough.

However helpful they can be, grounding techniques do have limitations. They can’t:

• Stop you from feeling,

• Stop the situation from happening or affecting you,

• Stop intrusive thoughts and/or memories from occurring,

• Improve your other coping strategies like problem solving.

Grounding techniques are methods that help you cope in the moment but they are very short term in how they do this. This means that other ways of coping and handling things are needed to improve things long term alongside grounding techniques. 

Other coping strategies or mechanisms, that are more effective over time, are crucial if you want to be able to regulate your emotions effectively and longer term. An example of this is problem solving where the person identifies something they can do to resolve or ease the difficulty/difficulties they are facing and they act on it. This contains a lot of positives for the person as it very actively moves them closer to where they want to be. A lot of the work I do with people utilises this coping strategy, actually, whereby we are looking at where they want to be, what their options are and how they can action one or more of those options. Another example is looking for and getting support from others. This can be just having someone to talk about their feelings with or it can be driven by the fact that the other person has the ability to make an impact and help them achieve some kind of resolution to the situation. Both of these examples, as do the rest of the coping strategies that have longer term effects, require the person in question to be able to think clearly about their situation. This is clear evidence of requiring them to be grounded before trying to utilise these strategies in a state of fight, flight, freeze or fawn because it’s through being able to ground that people are able to get the thinking brain back online. Also, not all of the coping strategies out there are going to be appropriate for each difficult situation someone finds themselves in. So, much like with grounding techniques, it’s important to have a bank of them to call upon. 

Dissociation does require some specific attention here because it does allow for the thinking brain to stay online while keeping the person separated from their feelings and I’ve mainly talked about experiences where the thinking brain is offline and grounding is needed to bring it back online. I’ve spoken a bit about dissociation and grounding here. When talking about dissociation, grounding techniques serve the purpose of bringing the dissociated person back in tune with the present moment including with their bodies and their environment. It’s a reconnection process most of all. This makes it an important step for someone who is dissociating before they can fully experience the benefits of the other coping strategies. The goal isn’t necessarily to resolve all the dissociation symptoms, it’s to reconnect enough that other coping strategies are accessible. Our ability to consider options, find the appropriate ones, access the necessary information, connect with others, take action etc is better when we are more connected with our bodies and environment than when we are severely dissociated. 

Hopefully you can see that the big picture of emotion regulation begins with the ability to stay grounded. Being grounded is necessary in order to keep the thinking brain online and the person connected with the present moment. From there, the engagement with other types of coping strategies is possible. Some people may find that they are able to ground as part of other types of coping strategies, like a two-in-one thing. Sometimes it can be necessary to do them separately. Either way, emotion regulation and the ability to cope with life are dependent on the ability to manage in the moment of intense experiences (ie grounding) as well as the ability to manage on a longer term basis. 

All images from Unsplash