Is there a role for humor when learning about, employing and discussing grounding? The threshold query is what is grounding and why is it important? This link is a great source for learning about grounding:

http://forums.psychcentral.com/showt...t=16719&page=2

As the article states, "grounding skills are interventions that assist in keeping a person in the present. They help to reorient a person to reality and the immediate here-and-now. Grounding skills are useful in many ways. They are particularly helpful with symptoms of dissociation. They can help a person prevent dissociating. However, they can be used to help re-orient oneself when experiencing intense and overwhelming feelings and intense anxiety. They help to regain one's mental focus."

Getting back to the here-and-now is important because it helps a person who has been triggered assess what is going on and get him/herself to a safe place. Triggers are associated with trauma that has occurred in the past. As one source tells us:

A trauma trigger is an experience that triggers a traumatic memory in someone who has experienced trauma. A trigger is thus a troubling reminder of a traumatic event, although the trigger itself need not be frightening or traumatic.

Triggers can be quite diverse, appearing in the form of individual people, places, noises, images, smells, tastes, emotions, animals, films, scenes within films, dates of the year, tones of voice, body positions, bodily sensations, weather conditions, time factors, or combinations thereof. Triggers can be subtle and difficult to anticipate, and can sometimes exacerbate Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a condition in which trauma survivors cannot control the recurrence of emotional or physical symptoms, or of repressed memory. A trauma trigger may also be referred to as a trauma stimulus or a trauma stressor.

Having to re-experience a traumatic event like rape or any other physical or mental abuse is no laughing matter. Making light of a trauma might very will trigger more trauma. Flashbacks are very difficult to get rid of.

On the other hand, recent studies show there is a clear relationship between a sense of humor and mental health. Participants in surveys who are found to have an elevated sense of humor also have no or little difficulty in daily life and have greater mental health. Even so, the limited studies I looked at did not disclose whether those who had experienced trauma were included as survey participants.

That said, I remain reticent to initiate humor into grounding experiences. If my efforts to ground have lead to a madcap adventure, I expect I would want to share the misadventure anticipating some banter at my expense. Nonetheless, I consider it a contingency that the humor be initiated by the one attempting to ground.

Even under that circumstance, I worry that what might well be very funny stuff for one may be a trigger for another. Perhaps if those engaged in the conversation were friends or at least knew something of the history of those present, my thought process might be somewhat different.

Ultimately, I recognize and appreciate the value of humor. I just think I would rather not focus the humor on events that have the potential to cause others so much pain.