Grounding techniques can make an enormous difference for the well-being of your client, colleague or help seeker, offering an opportunity to reconnect to ones senses and release distress.
It’s an incredible feeling to know that you’ve helped someone down from the heights of distress and well worth the discomfort of learning a new skillset!
However, offering a grounding technique is somewhat of an art form, with plenty of room between basic and advanced. For today let’s take a simple look at how to offer a five senses grounding technique to someone and examine some of the underpinning philosophy.
So, without further ado…
Establish the reasoning behind offering a grounding technique
Whether it’s anxiety, overwhelm, dissociation or anything else, take your time to listen with depth and detail.
We’re not only exploring their reality but also their awareness of their reality. In other words, experience versus situation.
While in crisis, people are often knocked about not just by the sensations they’re having, but also the secondary and tertiary reactions to those sensations. Reactions which often happen far beneath the surface of conscious awareness!
Take anxiety for example. For many the feeling starts in their belly, but gets worse the more they think about not being able to control it.
Or take fixated thinking. The thought occurs about death, suicide or something taboo, then the person having the thought fixates on the morality of having such a thought, asking themselves ‘What does it mean?’ Now they’re distressed by thinking about suicide and also by thinking about the thinking about suicide.
Sensation → fixation → rumination = powerful feedback loop.
By establishing the reason for a grounding technique, you proceed with a clear intention.
Knowing clearly that your help seeker is in need of something gives you the positioning to offer it appropriately (side note; knowing clearly that the HS is in need of something will take time, experience and reflective practice. Ask yourself; ‘Is this person in need of grounding support or am I falling into the problem solvers trap?’)
To simplify here, it helps to pick a single one point on that feedback loop, rather than all of them. Just pick the one that seems most significant to roll with for now, let’s call it the ‘Target Stressor’.
With clear intention established, contextualise the offer, remaining curious and collaborative
At most you’ll want to include all of the following when you offer a grounding technique;
- The benefit of grounding techniques
- How this benefit relates exactly to the target stressor
- Tentative curiousity
- Collaborative language
Here’s an example
The deep sense of [target stressor] makes me want to ask whether you’d like to try a grounding technique with me. They can regularly help people lower [target stressor] and bring calm.
Now you’ve positioned yourself as having an option for support they either do or don’t want to engage in.
You’ve contextualised that support so it is directly meaningful to their current experience of anxiety, dissociation, overwhelm or whatever.
If you offered and they decline, that’s ok. It’s a sign you maybe misread things, perhaps there’s deeper quality listening to be done.
Another example
It’s clear how intense and disturbing you’re finding those thoughts at the moment and given all you described, it really does sound overwhelming. One thing that can help with overwhelm is grounding techniques, would you like to try one with me?
Notice the validation here; ‘it really does sound overwhelming’.
Extra credit if you answer answer this question… What could the unintended consequence be if we wrote it this way; ‘it really is overwhelming’?
And another one
With the ‘unreality’ you spoke of and the pressure to perform, it makes me wonder if you would be open to trying a grounding technique. I could guide you through one now if you want.
Did you notice how basic and simple the language has been? We don’t want our language overly institutional, intellectual or robotic or else it wont resonate with who we’re talking to. It might make you feel better to talk like a robot but it certainly doesn’t lead to better connection or better outcomes.
All that being said, there is no perfect recipe, it all depends on how accurate your map of their present world is.
So in short…
How do you offer a grounding technique to someone in crisis?
Listen deeply to establish whether a grounding technique will help and then offer that back in a way that’s likely to resonate. It helps to contextualise the offer and give a wee bit of education here about exactly how the grounding technique might help. Keep your language simple, collaborative and curious. ‘Unconditional positive regard’ means you wont be attached to the offer, therefore you can remain flexible eg. if they’re not interested, or change their mind half way. When in doubt; validate.
Key points to remember
- Remain flexible
- Just because you think they need something doesn’t mean you’re right
- Tentative curiousity is king
- When in doubt validate experience (not circumstance)
What if they say yes?!
Offering is only half the battle! You can click to read more about delivering a grounding technique.
Now you try it
It can be tough finding the words while you’re in the hotseat. That’s why it can be so powerful to edit your words when they’re not needed, like between shifts. It’s sort of like booting up your pc before you need to use it.
If you want to get started today and practice making some offers for grounding techniques, try applying what you’ve read above to the sentence stem workshopping exercise and see what you come up with!
This post is written specifically for crisis support and mental health work, if you’d like to read more, click here.
I would really appreciate every stray thought and piece of feedback you have so please do reach out via socials if you’d like to chat.