A short, plain-language reference for the evidence-based, trauma-informed practices that show up across our morning ritual, the 30-day reparenting journal, and the Educator's Guide. No degree required. No citations to chase. Read straight through, or jump to the one that's on your mind this week.
A map of how the body sorts safety, danger, and life-threat in the half-second before the thinking brain comes online.
Stephen Porges named the “neuroception” — your nervous system reading the room before you do. The Educator’s Guide leans on this heavily in chapter one, because once a teacher can spot a dorsal shutdown versus a sympathetic spike, half of “behavior” is no longer behavior.
The zone between too much and too little arousal where thinking, feeling, and connecting can happen at the same time.
Dan Siegel’s frame for the same idea in classroom-friendly language. We use it in the morning ritual lesson plan as the picture under every “how big is the storm right now” check-in — and in the journal for adults as the threshold to widen before doing any of the harder prompts.
Working through the body, not just the story — because the body keeps the score the words sometimes can’t.
The lineage runs through Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing and Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. The journal’s later prompts are explicitly body-first — pendulation, titration, orienting — because a reparenting practice that lives only in the head rarely holds.
Borrowing a regulated nervous system from someone steadier than you are. It’s the antecedent to self-regulation, not the opposite of it.
Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Model puts co-regulation first. The Glimmer lesson plan is built around this minute one — a regulated adult is the seat the child lands in. Skip the co-regulation and nothing further down the page is going to stick.
How the earliest relationships become the blueprint for every later one, including the one you have with yourself.
Bowlby and Ainsworth, picked up by Mary Main and Dan Levine. The Educator’s Guide spends a whole chapter on disorganized attachment in schools — why “You’re safe” only lands if the body has felt it from this person before. The journal meets it on the other side: re-building that blueprint with yourself.
Every part has a job, even the loudest ones. The practice is listening for the job before deciding what to fix.
Richard Schwartz’s frame for multiplicity: the critic, the caretaker, the exile, the manager, the firefighter. The 30-day reparenting journal is an IFS journal without ever leaning on jargon — the prompts are written for the inner cast to sit down at a table together, not to argue.
Giving yourself what you didn’t get the first time around, slowly, on purpose, with the kid you used to be in the room.
This is the active practice the journal scaffolds — and the one the Educator’s Guide names as the missing layer in most “trauma-informed” PD. Reparenting isn’t a weekend retreat; it’s a daily, small, relentlessly patient practice, and it’s why we built the 30 days in the order survivors actually need.
The floor under everything else: safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment — before any technique.
SAMHSA’s pillars, in plain language. Every product in the shop — the lesson plan, the journal, the Educator’s Guide — assumes these five are already present in the room. If they aren’t, the practice teaches you how to put them in place before reaching for anything more advanced.
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