The Golden Square: Attention

A series from The Way Through: Trauma Responsive Care for Intellectual and Developmental Disability Professionals (2021, NADD Press, Kingston NY. P. 77-78)

Attention (Self-awareness): the third side of the square.

Remember earlier I talked about the fact that emotions are in the body. This has a lot to do with the vagus nerve, that “wandering” nerve (named from the same root as “vagabond”) that travels from the head down through our core. This nerve acts as the break on our powerful heart.

We think we have an emotion in our head and then our body responds (we get scared and our heart starts pounding). But consider if it actually works the other way: your heart starts pounding, this information travels up the vagus nerve to your brain, and your brain says, “Oh! I must be scared!” Trauma therapists often get their clients to pay attention to what sensations they are having in their body in order to learn to recognize and work with emotion. People who spend a lot of time outside their window of tolerance often feel either agitated or shut down but rarely present and calm.

They experience their emotions as a tornado that sweeps them away from their thinking self, and even their awareness of where, when, or who they are. So, noticing their emotions, starting with their body “from the bottom up” as Bruce Perry would say, helps them pull the tornado apart and start to name each feeling. “I’m freaking out” or “I feel nothing” is too big and too vague to get your hands on. “I feel scared, defensive, and worried”—each one of these separate emotions is something you can deal with in turn.

So the third side of the square is paying attention to what your feelings feel like for you and then learning to name them. We'll come back to this idea in the next chapter when we talk about the CALMER Skills. Being able to tell at any given moment what you are feeling helps ground you in the middle of that Golden Square.