The RAIN Dance: One Path to Mindfulness (Part 5 of 10)
Mindfulness, by definition, is always a combination of both awareness and acceptance. The RAIN dance helps clients increase both awareness and acceptance of intense emotions and other triggers in a highly practical and applied manner. RAIN stands for Recognize, Allow, Inquire and Nurture.
The purpose of this acronym is to help clients know precisely how to apply mindfulness in a real-life situation. Let’s suppose you want to help a client become more mindful of their anger. First, teach your client to recognize their anger — and especially where they notice it in their bodies (e.g., clenched jaw). Next, teach your client to allow their anger (instead of judging or resisting it, which will make it only more difficult to manage in the long run.). Then, teach your client to inquire about their anger — with curiosity, empathy and maybe even humor. (Fear and anger are neurologically incompatible with empathy, curiosity, and humor.) Finally, teach your client to engage in some sort of nurturing (i.e., self-soothing) behavior to release the anger in an appropriate manner (such as taking a long walk through the woods). The emotional energy will need to become appropriately discharged, especially if the intense emotion has resulted from a fight-or-flight response; otherwise, this energy will simply become frozen — and then continue to resurface when triggered.
The basic idea behind this skill is simple: Learn to “dance” with your emotions rather than avoiding, resisting, suppressing or judging them.
This blog post is an excerpt from Trauma stabilization through polyvagal theory and DBT, an article published by the American Counseling Association on September 14, 2021 by Kirby Reutter.
If you would like to learn more about how to use trauma-focused DBT with a variety of trauma-based disorders, I recommend the following resources to get started:
- The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for PTSD: Practical Exercises for Overcoming Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by Kirby Reutter, 2019
- “DBT for Trauma and PTSD” (DBT Expert Interview series at psychotherapyacademy.org/dbt-interviews)
- Survival Packet: Treatment Guide for Individual, Group, and Family Counseling by Kirby Reutter, 2019
- “The Journey From Mars: Brain Development and Trauma” webinar (youtube.com/watch?v=WSFqHS_axOc)
