Tethers anxiety and panic most common among my group of kids and having had my own experiences with both I have a lot of interest in it. My personal interest is in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy which arose really out of behaviourism and is rooted in it but basically represents a but of a schism from ABA 'proper' and is redefining itself as 'applied contextual behavioural science'.
I'll have to be very basic here as my own understanding is developing, but my understanding of it is that we become conditioned within our verbal communities to respond in certain ways to the labels we or others put upon us. We become how we talk about ourselves, which is shaped by those around us and the broader verbal community.
In the context of trauma consider how child sexual abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence are treated in terms of the shared understanding of the victim in the media... you'll never get over it, you will have trust issues, you may be more likely to self-harm or do poorly academically Tec. These become internalized and drive behaviour. I have some limited experience of this being a 'child of a broken home' in Ireland in the 80's and how I worried about what this meant for me.
I have heard very interesting talk about, say, the conflict experienced by abused kids because of their feelings of love for abusers or even worse where they have had physical responses to sexual acts or 'complied' or even looked forward to sessions with their abuser because of the conditioning of the abuse. This is simply a product of their learning history with their abuser: they have been groomed to these responses and part of the destruction of the abuse is that it makes the abnormal typical and even reinforcing. This is why vulnerable neglected kids are more likely to be abused of course: they are targeted because their compliance can be moulded through a mixture of love and fear and over time deeply disturbing things can become reinforcing because of how the brain associates things. Many abused kids are confused and frightened by the complex and varied responses they have to their abuse and not so many initially realise abuse is abnormal. Then when this becomes apparent and they need it to stop, this puts them outside the verbal community e.g. they can't disclose or admit to these experiences because there is an agreed understanding they will be weepy and hate the abuser and not enjoy sexual activity and be relieved it is all over etc when. In reality things are often more complex..So there is a battle as suddenly there is this realisation that they can't trust what they thought was trustworthy as it is damaging and destructive and not love as they thought it was and yet there's limited scope to really explore this, admit to it or discuss it in any detail with non-abused people so they are left on shaky ground. This then increases the likelihood of negative outcomes as they may not feel they can trust anyone or may seek out experiences like the abuse to return to 'normality' as they learned it but then increasingly hate themselves and feel more isolated and damaged for doing so.
Ultimately the 'answer' is to try and see through the limited ways language can convey experience and to reduce the tendency to need to be in a box to feel okay e.g. 'damaged victim' or 'innocent Angel' or 'wanted it really' or whatever label or phrase that person comes to use internally to label experience. There's a lot of complicated stuff behind this in terms of how language works etc and how we treat words as real through our conditioning.
In real terms the practicality is about letting thoughts and feelings come and go without needing to interpret them or make them into a massive story and realise no thought is dangerous. For abuse victims this might be around fears they will abuse or that they wanted or asked for the abuse etc. A lot of it is understanding the brain tries to trap us into these evaluations and that a simple word like love or abuse or whatever is loaded with all our millions of personal experiences and can act as a trigger to feelings. Typically we chase these thoughts and then react in the ways we've been conditioned to. Mindfulness and compassion are about just recognising those triggers, being friendly to yourself about them and letting them go. Feeling the discomfort, looking at the painful memories, allowing ambiguity etc without worrying what this means. Setting then your own course following what you care about without being bogged down by labels or the past.
This is stupidly oversimplified... there are many more layers. I guess ultimately it's about understanding how experience conditions the language we use and how we understand it, how this feeds into how we interpret experience and how this complex learning history drives forward our behaviour as we grow and learn. These approaches are about trying to help people step outside that cycle and learn to recognise when language and thoughts are trapping them into unworkable destructive behaviours.