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Here’s something surfers understand that most trauma survivors don’t: before you learn to ride big waves, you have to learn to get back on the board.
This sounds obvious—of course you have to get back on. But watch a beginner at any surf break and you’ll notice something interesting. They spend almost no time practicing recovery. They’re focused entirely on the ride: the pop-up, the stance, the glorious moment of gliding across the face of the wave. And then they wipe out. And they wipe out again. And eventually, many of them quit—not because they couldn’t learn to surf, but because they never learned to fall.
The surfers who stick with it learn something different. They learn that the ocean is going to knock them down, repeatedly, and that the skill that matters most isn’t staying up. It’s coming back.
This turns out to be a remarkably useful way to think about trauma.
The Wave You Didn’t Choose
In 1999, psychiatrist Daniel Siegel introduced a concept he called the “window of tolerance”—the zone of arousal in which a person can function effectively. Too much activation, and we tip into hyperarousal: panic, rage, the racing heart of fight-or-flight. Too little, and we slide into hypoarousal: numbness, dissociation, the collapse of freeze. The window is where we want to be. It’s where we can think clearly, feel our feelings without being overwhelmed by them, and respond to life rather than merely react.
Picture this window as the surface of the ocean. When the water is calm, staying on your surfboard is effortless. You paddle around, enjoy the view, maybe catch a small wave for fun. But then a swell comes—a conflict at work, a car accident, a loss, a memory that arrives without warning. The wave rises. If it stays within your window, you ride it. You feel the stress, you respond, and eventually the wave passes. You’re still on your board.
Trauma is what happens when the wave is too big.
The technical definition involves words like “overwhelming” and “dysregulation,” but the felt experience is simpler than that. You get knocked off. And here’s the crucial part: You don’t get back on. Something in your nervous system gets stuck. The wave passed hours or days or years ago, but your body is still tumbling in the whitewater, still bracing for impact, still struggling to find which way is up.
This is what makes trauma different from ordinary stress. It’s not the size of the event—though that matters—but the fact that your system couldn’t complete its natural cycle of activation and return. The arousal went up, and it never came all the way back down.
The Paradox of Resourcing
So what do we do about it? The intuitive answer is to process the trauma—to talk about what happened, to understand it, to integrate the fragmented memories into a coherent narrative. And eventually, that work is necessary. But here’s what three decades of somatic psychology research have taught us: you can’t process trauma from inside the wave.
This is the paradox that catches so many people. They want to heal, so they dive into the deep end. They tell their story in vivid detail. They try to feel all the feelings they’ve been avoiding. And sometimes it helps. But often, it just retraumatizes them. They’re practicing drowning.
The surfer’s approach is different. Before you ride the big waves, you need to know—in your bones, in your body, not just in your mind—that you can get back on the board. This is called resourcing, and it’s the first stage of trauma healing in what I call the Three Boards Model.
A resource is anything that brings your nervous system back toward equilibrium. It might be a place: the feeling of sun on your face in your grandmother’s garden. It might be a person: the memory of a friend’s laugh, the imagined presence of someone who makes you feel safe. It might be a sensation: the weight of a heavy blanket, the rhythm of your own breath, the feeling of your feet on solid ground.
The key is that resources are not ideas. They’re experiences. You can’t think your way into regulation. You have to feel it.
The Practice of Return
Here’s a simple exercise that illustrates the principle. Think of a mildly stressful situation—not your worst trauma, just something that raises your activation a notch or two. Notice what happens in your body. Maybe your shoulders tense. Maybe your breath gets shallow. Maybe you feel a flutter of anxiety in your chest.
Now, without trying to fix or change anything, shift your attention to something resourceful. It could be the feeling of the chair supporting your weight. The sensation of air entering your nostrils. A memory of a place where you felt calm.
Stay with that resource for a few breaths. Let your nervous system actually register it—not as a concept, but as a felt experience.
What most people notice is subtle but significant: something shifts. The shoulders drop a millimeter. The breath deepens. The nervous system, given a reference point for safety, begins to self-correct.
This is the surfboard. Not the processing of trauma, not the understanding of it, but the simple, repeated practice of returning to equilibrium. Of reminding your body that the wave passes. That you can get back on.
Before the Big Waves
Ask any surf instructor what they teach first, and they won’t say “how to ride a barrel” or “how to carve a cutback.” They’ll say something much less glamorous: how to fall safely. How to protect your head. How to orient yourself underwater. How to find the surface, find your board, and paddle back out.
Only after this foundation is solid do they move on to the exciting stuff.
Trauma healing works the same way. Before we can process the big stuff—the memories that still knock us off our feet—we need to build our capacity for return. We need to develop a library of resources we can actually access when our nervous system starts to spike. We need to practice, over and over, the feeling of coming back to equilibrium.
This isn’t avoidance. It’s preparation. It’s the work that makes the deeper work possible.
The ocean doesn’t care about any of us. But with practice, you can learn to stay on the board.
This is the first in a series on the Three Boards Model of trauma healing. Next: The Keyboard where we talk about what happens when parts of our experience become inaccessible.
