Pause and come back to the room before going on

Stop the chair dialogue, open your eyes, and let your feet, breath and surroundings tell you that you are here, now.

Perché funziona

When the feeling in an exercise rises past what you can hold, feeling and a sense of the present can go offline together, and the old scene starts to feel like it is happening again. Slowing down and orienting to things around you (the floor, the light, the sound of your own breath) helps the body return to the range where you can feel something and still think. Staying in the chair while flooded tends to deepen the flood rather than finish anything.

Come farlo

1. Stop the chair work now. You do not have to finish the conversation, and the empty chair can stay where it is.
2. Stand up or stay seated, and put both feet flat on the floor. Notice the pressure of the floor under them.
3. Open your eyes and slowly name five things you can see in the room, out loud or silently.
4. Let your breathing find its own pace; you do not need to change it. Hold something with some texture, like a blanket, a mug or a cushion, and notice how it feels in your hands.
5. Do something ordinary, like making a drink, washing your face or stepping outside for a minute.
6. Come back to the exercise another day, only once you feel steady, and ideally with a trained person beside you for the chair work.

Prove scientifiche

Treleaven (2018) and Ogden, Minton and Pain (2006) are clinical texts that describe grounding and staying within a tolerable range of arousal. Siegel (1999) describes that range as a 'window of tolerance', the zone where a person can still think and feel at once. These are clinical texts, not trials of grounding for this specific exercise. (clinical)

No source here tests this pause inside the empty-chair exercise. The steps are general grounding practice from clinical texts and are not a substitute for care. If the shaking or crying does not ease, or you do not feel safe, reach a person (see the next practice).

Fonti

• Treleaven, D. A. (2018). Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing (foreword by Willoughby Britton). New York: W. W. Norton.
• Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. New York: W. W. Norton.
• Siegel, D. J. (1999). The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience. New York: Guilford Press.

Errore comune

Pushing through the crying or shaking to reach the ending you planned, because the exercise feels half-finished. Unfinished is fine; the chair will still be there another day.