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1.       Commit yourself to a Safety Contract – sign a contract stating to your safety, whether it be concerning self-harm, suicide, overeating, sexual behavior, etc.

2.      Grounding Method – use a strategy to detach yourself from emotional pain (drug impulses, self-harm urges, etc.) by focusing on your outward external world.

3.      Safe Place – an emotional detailed description of a scene or setting that would feel safe and soothing to you. 

4.      Containment – provide yourself with a temporary storage of overwhelming emotion, thoughts, memories, or urges.  This is something tangible, such as note cards or paper folded up, etc.

5.      Affirmations – Positive, meaningful, short statements, relevant to your mental growth.

6.      Wise Mind – combines both your reasonable mind and emotional mind abilities.

7.      Observe only – Observe troubling surroundings, others actions or events without getting caught up in the experience.

8.     Describe or put into words – Acknowledge your feelings, thoughts and actions.

9.      Participate or enter in the experience – Allowing yourself to get involved in the moment and letting go of ruminating.

10.  Nonjudgmental Stance – Notice, but do not evaluate; just look at the facts, unglue your own opinions from the facts.

11.   One-mindfully or in-the-moment – do one thing at a time by focusing your attention on the very moment you are in.

12.  Effectiveness or focus-on-what-works – Do what needs to be done in each situation and let go of anything that hurts you.

13.  Let go of emotional suffering – observe and experience your emotions, but remember you are NOT your emotions. Practice loving your emotions.

14.  Changing emotion by opposite action – do what you are afraid of doing by approaching it. Do not avoid.

Author Unknown

A safe scene visualization enables an individual to nurture and soothe himself or herself and to practice effective control over the feelings and thoughts.  

A safe scene works to utilize an individual’s natural talent for dissociation.  When doing SPV an individual chooses to experience internal stimuli that is safe, soothing, and nurturing over internal stimuli that is unsafe, traumatic and/or revictimizing.  With practice, individuals can soothe themselves at will and can exercise control over the spontaneous dissociation and flashbacks that survivors of trauma often experience.  

To create an effective safe scene, it is important to incorporate all of the senses.  The more senses involved, the more functional the scene will be.  Examples include: 

 ·         Visual – seeing colors, distance detail, and features of the safe scene.

·         Hearing – soothing sounds with varying volumes.

·         Smell – a variety of pleasant smells.

·         Touch – a variety of safe and pleasant textures.

·         Kinesthetic (Movement) – standing, walking, sitting, lying down.  

Focusing inwards and internally visualizing a safe scene can help an individual to  relax quickly.  There are no limits to the creativity or imagination an individual may employ in their safe scene work.  A safe scene can be an actual place, an imaginary place, or a combination of the two.  Safe scenes can be inside or outside, on this planet or another, and include beaches, islands, meadows, forests, or any other setting that the person would find safe and soothing.  

Safe scenes may include items that can contribute to an even greater feeling of safety and security, such as walls, moats, containment images, and safe animals.  It is best not to include real people because the security and soothing derived from the safe scene should not be dependent on others and should not reinforce dependency for safety and soothing on others.  Rather, SPV reinforces this individual’s ability to take responsibility for his or her own soothing.  

Once an individual has developed a safe scene, there are many things he or she can do to reinforce their safe scene and increase its effectiveness.  The first step in this process is to write out a detailed description of the safe scene, including the experience of all of the senses in the safe scene as described earlier.  This should then be shared and processed with others in order to receive feedback, comments and suggestions.  Then it is often helpful to make an art representation of the safe scene.  This, of course, is not to be an artists’ rendering of the safe scene, but rather a representation of it through colors, images, etc.  Most importantly, the safe scene should be practiced at least three times daily, when the person is calm and relaxed.  Safe scenes increase in their effectiveness the more they are practiced.  

Two Rivers Psychiatric Hospital (Paraphrased)