You’ve heard the podcast.
You’ve read the article or posts.
The book isn’t yet published, and there may not be a BCM practitioner anywhere near you.

So what can you do?
There is actually quite a lot.

These are not instructions for trying to resolve trauma by yourself or for deliberately recreating past experiences. They are ways of changing how you relate to your nervous system now.

1. Look first at your current environment.

Make sure your present environment is not continuing to impose the same danger, consequences or relational cost that required your nervous system to protect you in the first place.

If saying no still costs you the relationship, expressing yourself still brings punishment, leaving is still not permitted, or protecting yourself still has consequences, your nervous system has good reason to remain organised around threat.

2. Stop treating your nervous system as though it is malfunctioning.

Your nervous system is not randomly producing symptoms. It is responding to what it detects as threat and organising your body for protection.

Instead of asking, What is wrong with me?, begin asking:  What is my nervous system responding to?

3. Develop somatic awareness.

Become curious about what your body is expressing.  Notice tension, posture, breathing, movement, impulses, pulling away, leaning in, bracing, shrinking, turning, reaching or wanting distance.

You do not have to change any of it.  Notice first, without resistance, judgement or immediately trying to calm yourself down.

4. Befriend your body.

Treat your body as though it is your life partner rather than something inconvenient that needs to be controlled.

Be kind to it. Be respectful of it. Listen to it.  Your body has spent your entire life trying to keep you alive.

5. Take your body’s “no” seriously.

If your whole system is saying stop, back away, not this, not now or I need space, do not immediately override it because your mind thinks you should be able to cope.

Pause.  Create distance if you need it.

Give yourself the opportunity to understand what your nervous system is responding to before forcing yourself onward.

6. Stop repeatedly overriding protective signals.

“Feel the fear and do it anyway” is not always courage.

Sometimes it is another experience of your body signalling danger while being told that its response does not matter.

Fear exists for a reason. Find out what it is protecting before deciding that it needs to disappear.

7. Understand anger differently.

Anger is not inherently destructive. When a boundary has been violated, anger mobilises the body for protection.

The important distinction is between feeling anger and dumping raw anger onto another person.

If you are highly activated, create some distance first. Let the story settle enough that you can feel what is happening in your body.

Then move. Walk. Garden. Scrub the floor. Kick a ball. Push against something safe. Let your body use some of the mobilisation rather than trapping it inside.

And do not turn anger against yourself.  You can regret something. You can be disappointed, frustrated or annoyed with yourself.  You can take responsibility and make amends.  But attacking yourself solves nothing.

When you know better, you do better. Leave it there.

8. Give the unsaid words somewhere safe to go.

Often what was inhibited was expression.  Go somewhere private—a beach, a park, the car, the paddock—and say what you could not say then.

It does not have to be polite, insightful or therapeutic.

It may be:  No.  Stop.  Get away from me.  You had no right.  I hate what you did.  Leave me alone.

You may notice movement wanting to accompany the words—a change in posture, your arms moving, your feet pressing into the ground, your hands gripping something.

You do not need to manufacture any of this.  Let what is naturally there have some room.

9. Use regulation to support your nervous system, not silence it.

Breathing, grounding, walking, being in nature, meditation, stretching and other regulating practices can be enormously useful.

But the purpose is not to make your nervous system stop communicating.

Use them to help yourself remain present, increase capacity and stay with what is happening without becoming overwhelmed.

Calm is a resource.  It is not the same thing as resolution.

10. Restore agency in ordinary life.

Trauma is not only about what happened in the past. It can also shape the thousands of small moments in which you stop yourself now.

Notice where you automatically comply when you want to decline.
Where you explain yourself when no explanation is required.
Where you stay when you want to leave.
Where you make yourself smaller to keep someone else comfortable.
Where you ask permission for choices that are yours to make.
Begin restoring choice in small, ordinary ways.
You do not have to force your nervous system to heal.

Start by creating the conditions in which it no longer has to fight you as well as the threat.