Seeking Safety

Seeking Safety is a counseling model that helps clients focus on the present moment to attain emotional safety from trauma and addiction. The model offers emotional relief, especially when clients are being given cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) in which a patient will face their own trauma narrative. These more intensive therapies can be exhausting for clients. Seeking Safety allows a patient to “return to center” and acknowledge what is comforting and safe in the present moment.

Seeking Safety is a coping mechanism that we help our clients learn to use in place of self-medicating or self-harm. It is a modality that has been proven effective in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), especially when co-occurring with addiction. Seeking Safety teaches 25 coping skills to apply to both trauma and addiction simultaneously. Some of these skills include: Boundary Setting, Honesty, Compassion, Healing from Anger, and Recovery Thinking. Mastering these skills helps patients attain safety in their relationships, thinking, behavior, and emotions while staying “safe” in the present moment.

Seeking Safety helps our clients put their emotional triggers into the past and self-soothe in the present. In CBT, we acknowledge what has felt unsafe and caused us harm, in seeking safety we acknowledge what we can do to “talk ourselves off the ledge” in a moment of crisis or fear, through knowing with confidence what feels right, what is “safe,” and bringing ourselves into that emotional space.

In Seeking Safety, we cover 25 topics. For each topic there are conversations and exercises that help our clients build excellent self-care habits. Seeking Safety is a comprehensive recovery model that is results-driven and allows our clients to actively engage in rebuilding their lives from the present moving forward. It is a linear approach with a clear beginning and end, with exercises designed to master each of the building blocks inherent to the model.

1. Introduction to the Model of Seeking Safety
2. What Is Safety?
3. Taking Back Your Power After Trauma
4. Finding Your Ground (Detaching from Emotional Pain)
5. When Substances Control You
6. Asking for Help
7. Taking Good Care of Yourself
8. Compassion (For Oneself)
9. Red and Green Flags: What’s Safe? And What’s Not Safe?
10. Honesty
11. Recovery Thinking
12. Integrating the “Split Self”
13. Commitment
14. Creating Meaning
15. Community Resources
16. Setting Boundaries in Relationships
17. Discovery
18. Getting Others to Support You
19. Coping with Triggers
20. Respecting Your Time
21. Healthy Relationships
22. Self-Nurturing
23. Healing from Anger
24. The Life Choices Game
25. Termination

Our program is designed to help clients move through all 25 topics of Seeking Safety.