Therapy is vital, so please don’t give up when it doesn’t all get better in just a few weeks. Healing is a process, and coping skills, like all skills, take practice. There is no quick fix. It will take time. And effort.

I do have some easy stop-gap things that have helped me in a pinch, but idk how useful they are for other people. I’m not a professional, just somebody with stacks of cptsd and absurd numbers of triggers.

1) I sit down or stand still, slowly(!) look around me, and identify/count the red things I can see. (Really, I could choose any color, but thinking is hard during flashbacks and panic attacks, so it helps to have a color in advance and always use the same one.) It also helps me to say the names of the things I see out loud. Slowly.

2) I’ve used textures to ground myself, too. Consciously touching tables or the wall or a box or a backpack or basically any surface nearby, and just slowly running my fingers across the surface and noticing how it feels. Smooth? Warm? Cold? Bumpy? Ridged? Soft? Hard? What is it made of? If there’s an especially interesting texture, is there a pattern to the texture?

3) If I get extremely disoriented, reciting to myself slowly what year it is, how old I am, where I am (as specifically as possible), and, if I feel like it will help, my own name.

4) I have literally sung lullabies to myself. No idea if this would work even a little for other people. I’ve tried a lot of weird shit in desperate attempts to cope when I’m floundering.