Mindfulness is often presented as though it’s a fairly straightforward solution.
Feel anxious? Be present.
Notice your breathing.
Feel your body.
Observe your thoughts.
Come back to the moment.
And for some people, this can be genuinely helpful.
But if you’ve experienced trauma, turning towards the present moment doesn’t necessarily make you feel calmer.
Sometimes it does the opposite.
You close your eyes and notice your breathing, and suddenly you’re more anxious.
You pay attention to your body and become aware of how tense everything feels.
You try to sit quietly with yourself and find that your mind becomes louder rather than quieter.
This can leave people thinking:
“I’m obviously terrible at mindfulness.”
But perhaps you’re not doing anything wrong.
Perhaps your system has a good reason for not wanting you to become more aware of what’s happening inside.
Can Mindfulness Help With Trauma?
Yes, mindfulness can be helpful when working with trauma.
But I think we need to be clear about what we mean by “helpful.”
The purpose isn’t necessarily to make you calm.
Mindfulness, at its simplest, is about becoming more aware of what is happening.
And what is happening may not be particularly comfortable.
You might notice fear.
Anger.
Tightness in your chest.
An urge to leave.
A feeling of numbness.
Or a voice inside saying:
“I don’t want to do this.”
From my perspective, that last response is just as interesting as everything else.
Rather than treating it as resistance that needs to be overcome, we can become curious about it.
What might the part of you that doesn’t want to look inward be protecting you from?
Being Present Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Feeling Safe
We often use the words present and calm as though they’re interchangeable.
They’re not.
You can be completely present and terrified.
You can be present and angry.
Present and grieving.
Present and confused.
Present and aware that your entire body wants to run away.
Mindfulness isn’t necessarily about changing any of that.
It’s about noticing it.
And perhaps, over time, developing a little more space around it.
That distinction becomes particularly important when we’re talking about trauma.
Sometimes Not Feeling Was the Solution
Imagine growing up in an environment where expressing certain emotions wasn’t safe.
Maybe anger resulted in punishment.
Perhaps sadness was dismissed.
Maybe nobody knew what to do with your fear.
Perhaps being vulnerable made things worse rather than better.
What does a child do?
They adapt.
Maybe you learn not to feel your anger.
Perhaps you become extremely good at functioning while distressed.
Maybe you disappear into your thoughts.
Or you become focused on everybody else’s emotional state rather than your own.
Perhaps you simply disconnect.
From the outside, these patterns can look dysfunctional.
But in the context in which they developed, they may have been incredibly useful.
Not feeling everything might have helped you get through something you couldn’t escape.
Then years later somebody tells you:
“Close your eyes and pay attention to your body.”
And your whole system says:
Absolutely not.
That response might make more sense than it initially appears.
Why Mindfulness Can Sometimes Make Trauma Feel Worse
If you’ve spent years keeping certain sensations, memories or emotions outside awareness, deliberately turning your attention inward can bring you closer to them.
Suddenly you notice how fast your heart is beating.
How shallow your breathing is.
How tense your stomach feels.
Perhaps a sensation reminds you of something you would rather not remember.
Or maybe nothing specific comes to mind at all.
You just feel deeply uncomfortable.
This is often what people mean when they describe mindfulness making anxiety worse; it isn’t that mindfulness has failed, it’s that it’s surfacing something that was being held out of awareness for a reason.
The temptation is to decide that mindfulness isn’t working.
But the problem may be that we’re trying to move too quickly.
Trauma-sensitive mindfulness doesn’t mean forcing yourself to remain with an experience simply because somebody told you that mindfulness is good for you.
Sometimes the mindful response is actually:
“This is too much right now.”
And then we move our attention somewhere else.
You Don’t Have to Close Your Eyes
This sounds simple, but I think it’s important.
Mindfulness doesn’t require you to sit perfectly still with your eyes closed.
You can keep your eyes open.
Look around the room.
Notice the light coming through the window.
Feel your feet against the floor.
Stand up.
Walk.
Talk.
Notice the sound of someone’s voice.
You can move your attention between what is happening inside you and what is happening around you.
Sometimes looking outward is just as important as looking inward.
If paying attention to your breathing makes you anxious, we don’t have to keep paying attention to your breathing.
There isn’t a mindfulness exam at the end.
From “I Am Anxious” to “Something in Me Is Anxious”
One of the things I find useful about mindfulness is the small amount of space it can create between us and our immediate experience.
There is a subtle difference between:
“I’m terrified.”
and:
“I’m noticing that something in me feels terrified.”
The fear hasn’t disappeared.
We’re not pretending it isn’t there.
But perhaps we’re no longer entirely inside it.
We can become curious.
Where do I feel it?
What happened just before it appeared?
What does this frightened part of me think is about to happen?
Does this feeling seem familiar?
What does it want me to do?
Run?
Hide?
Please somebody?
Fight?
Disappear?
Now we’re beginning to have a relationship with the experience rather than simply being swept away by it.
Your Body May Be Responding to Something Your Mind Doesn’t Believe
This is something many people find confusing.
Intellectually, you know you’re safe.
Your body doesn’t seem convinced.
Perhaps your partner looks irritated and your stomach immediately drops.
You know logically that an argument isn’t dangerous.
Yet something inside you responds as though the relationship itself is under threat.
Or someone criticises you at work and suddenly your heart is racing.
Part of you knows:
“This isn’t a catastrophe.”
But your body has already reacted.
This gap between what we know and what we feel is really a story about trauma and the nervous system: your body reacting to protect you long before your thinking mind has had a chance to weigh in.
We can spend enormous amounts of energy arguing with these responses.
“This is ridiculous.”
“Why am I reacting like this?”
“I know better.”
Mindfulness offers another possibility.
Instead of immediately trying to convince ourselves that the response is irrational, we can ask:
Why might this make sense?
Maybe the response belongs partly to the present and partly to something learned much earlier.
Mindfulness Isn’t About Getting Rid of Anxiety
This is where I think mindfulness sometimes gets turned into another form of control.
We become anxious.
Then we use mindfulness to try to stop being anxious.
And if we’re still anxious ten minutes later, mindfulness has failed.
But notice what’s happened.
We’ve made anxiety the enemy again.
We’re still saying:
“I shouldn’t be feeling this.”
What happens if we become curious instead?
“There’s anxiety here.”
“My chest feels tight.”
“Part of me really wants this feeling to go away.”
And perhaps even:
“Can I also notice the part that desperately wants to get rid of the anxiety?”
Now something different is happening.
We’re not trying to force ourselves into a particular state.
We’re learning about ourselves.
What Does Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness Look Like?
For me, trauma-sensitive mindfulness involves choice.
You decide where your attention goes.
You can move closer to an experience.
You can move away.
You can pause.
You can open your eyes.
You can talk about what you’re noticing.
And you can say you don’t want to explore something.
This is particularly important because traumatic experiences often involve some form of helplessness or loss of choice.
Therapy shouldn’t reproduce that dynamic by telling you that you have to remain with an experience because it’s supposedly good for you.
Sometimes we stay with something.
Sometimes we don’t.
Both can be meaningful.
Curiosity Rather Than Force
A lot of my approach to therapy comes back to curiosity.
If something in you is frightened, we don’t necessarily need to get rid of it.
We can become interested in it.
If you suddenly disconnect while talking about something, rather than forcing you to reconnect, we might wonder:
What happened just before you disappeared?
If your body becomes tense when you imagine setting a boundary:
What does your body expect will happen if you say no?
If you feel nothing when describing something objectively painful:
Maybe not feeling something has been important.
Working with parts of yourself in therapy often looks exactly like this, staying curious about each response instead of trying to silence it.
This changes the question from:
“How do I stop doing this?”
to:
“What is this doing for me?”
And sometimes that is where things begin to shift.
The Past Can Appear in the Present Without Announcing Itself
Trauma doesn’t always arrive as an obvious memory.
Sometimes it appears as an expectation.
You expect someone to leave.
You expect anger to become dangerous.
You expect vulnerability to be punished.
You expect your needs to annoy people.
You expect something bad to happen when things are going well.
These expectations can feel like facts.
Mindfulness gives us an opportunity to notice them as they arise.
Not necessarily to tell ourselves they’re wrong.
But to ask:
Is this what’s actually happening now?
Sometimes the answer will be yes.
Sometimes the present really isn’t safe.
But sometimes we’re discovering that our body is preparing us for a situation that existed a long time ago.
You Don’t Need to Become a Meditator
You don’t need a meditation practice to work mindfully in therapy.
You don’t need to sit for 30 minutes every morning.
And you certainly don’t need to stop thinking.
This is really the heart of mindfulness vs meditation for trauma: one is a formal practice, the other can happen in a single breath, in the middle of a conversation.
Mindfulness can happen in a few seconds.
You’re telling me about something and suddenly notice you’ve stopped breathing normally.
That’s mindfulness.
You realise you’re smiling while talking about something painful.
That’s awareness.
You notice that when someone gets emotionally close, part of you wants to move away.
That’s something we can become curious about.
For me, mindfulness is less about achieving a special state and more about becoming increasingly interested in what is already happening.
The Aim Is More Choice
Ultimately, I don’t think the goal of trauma therapy is to become someone who never feels anxious, frightened, angry or overwhelmed.
Those experiences are part of being human.
What can change is our relationship with them.
Instead of automatically running when fear appears, perhaps we can notice it first.
Instead of automatically pleasing someone when they become disappointed, perhaps we can feel the urge and decide what we actually want to do.
Instead of immediately attacking ourselves when we make a mistake, perhaps we can notice the critical voice and become curious about where it came from.
The reaction may still appear.
But it doesn’t necessarily have to make every decision.
And perhaps that is one of the most useful things mindfulness can offer us.
Not permanent calm.
A little more awareness.
A little more space.
And, within that space, a little more choice.
Mindfulness and Trauma Therapy in Brisbane
If you recognise some of what I’ve described here, I offer Mindfulness Trauma Therapy in Brisbane and online.
My approach integrates mindfulness with somatic, relational, Gestalt and parts-informed therapy. Rather than simply trying to control symptoms, we’ll become curious about what your reactions might be communicating and how they continue to appear in your body, emotions and relationships.
You don’t need to know whether mindfulness or trauma therapy is the “right” approach for you.
We can start with what is actually happening in your life.
I offer a free 30-minute consultation where we can talk about what you’re experiencing, what you’d like to change and whether working together feels like a good fit.
Learn more about Mindfulness Trauma Therapy Brisbane
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