Hello and Welcome to The Tricks of Trauma Program
And we’re back with part 2 of,
Addressing to Trauma
Before we embark on the first step of addressing to trauma in the Tricks of Trauma Program, it's important to recognize that there is a fundamental prerequisite to the program,
and that is…
to have enough self-awareness.
This journey requires you to have a level of self-awareness that allows for some acceptance of yourself and also to have the stirrings of the tiniest beginning of the blossoming of self-love.
Remember love is not a feeling, as it’s about truly knowing and appreciating yourself. Genuine appreciation stems from expanding your awareness, which leads you to a deeper understanding of who you are. Also keep in mind, that you can’t be self-aware if you don’t allow yourself to expose yourself to yourself. Without this foundation, the journey of healing may be difficult to accomplish. This is an important point to keep in mind as we move forward.
So, let’s begin with the first step in addressing trauma.
The first step is to acknowledge your situation and the position you are in for what it is. You accept it, and you stop concentrating upon it.
This might involve recognizing physical symptoms, such as pain, disease, or tension in certain areas of your body, or acknowledging emotional patterns that keep repeating, such as anxiety or anger. For example, if you notice that certain situations you find yourself in, or certain memories constantly trigger feelings of distress or discomfort, it’s important to acknowledge these reactions without judgment. In other words, you must stop looking at them as being bad or wrong, or something that you must try to get rid of.
Therefore, step two, is you stop opposing, fighting, and concentrating upon what you don’t want.
Once you have recognized and accepted your experiences,
you can move to the third step,
which is to begin to shift your focus towards what brings you satisfaction and contentment, and what you actually do want.
This can involve whatever it is your heart desires, such as doing activities or practices that nurture your well-being, spending time in nature, practicing mindfulness or meditation, or pursuing creative outlets such as art or music.
There are also many therapeutic healing modalities you can engage to support yourself on your healing journey. I encourage you to explore some of the options I have listed at the end of this episode, so you can discover the ones that resonate with your needs and preferences.
So, let’s continue, in other words, it isn’t enough to just think about what you don’t want by thinking about what you do want. That is not enough, or you will continue to perpetuate the cycle of what?
AVOIDANCE! And you will not be able to make any progress.
Can you see how thinking about what you want is still a form of avoidance? To reach the top of your mountain you must seek out new experiences, take actions to DO what you want, what is important to you, what you find satisfying to you, and not doing what is not those things. Why is taking a proactive approach to do what you desire and value so important? Because it enables you to cultivate a sense of empowerment and resilience.
Once you can position yourself in this proactive stance, you will be ready to move to step 4, which is addressing the trauma itself.
But if you try to address the trauma before you stop opposing yourself, and you don’t begin to make changes in how you want to be living your life, you will not be successful. Why? Because you will continue to pay attention to what you don’t want, what you can’t do, and how uncomfortable you are. After all, you can’t be doing both things at the same time.
So, pick up your sword and,
SLAY THE SLITHERING SNAKE OF OPPOSING ENERGY that has wrapped itself around you, and
WAVE YOUR MAGIC WAND IN THE AIR, AND ACCEPT THE SITUATION FOR WHAT IT IS.
However, I do understand that this is significantly challenging, yet I cannot overstate how vital it is that you do not trick yourself into believing that you are not fighting with yourself either. Your ability to recognize that you have genuinely stopped fighting is pivotal and vital in your healing process. Otherwise, you will continue to find yourself in the same situation, and you cannot change it, leaving your transformation to remain as just a distant dream, fading into the sunset.
So, what is the key that unlocks your door to transformation, you might ask?
The key is to release your resistance, and to let go, and stop fighting with yourself,
and lo and behold,
“Open Sesame!”
you have opened the door to move in the direction of the possibility of change.
Why? Because as you walk through this doorway you move yourself into a state of allowing.
To put it simply,
when you stop resisting,
all the opposing energy stops persisting,
freeing you from the snare that keeps you trapped at the base of your mountain.
This is a very challenging step, and it can take months or even years to accomplish, and some people never fully achieve it. You may find it very difficult to let go of anger, guilt, bitterness, resentment, regret, shame, and blame, as let’s face it, it is a challenging task.
Yet it is essential to free yourself so you can find peace, cooperation, and genuine forgiveness. And if you cannot surrender and let go of whatever it is, well that is okay too. Always remember there is no judgment on your journey, or any right or wrong choices. Every step forward you take is a victory in itself.
So, how do you know if you are still fighting with it or not?
Here’s the telltale sign: if what happened in your past is constantly occupying your thoughts, or you wish those icky persistent dreadful, seemingly random feelings would vanish into a puff of smoke and just go away, then you know that you are still caught in the struggle. It’s sort of like being caught in quicksand, and the more you thrash about, the deeper down you sink.
What is preventing any real transformation from happening is that you are clinging onto that resistance. It’s as if you have pitched a tent of discontentment in your backyard, as you sit by the fire commiserating with others. And now you have resigned yourself to stagnate by the fire, rather than press forward toward your healing and transformation.
But once you decapitate the head of the slithering snake of opposing energy, you free yourself to move in new directions. Otherwise, if you continue to fight with yourself, it becomes very difficult to make any decisions and act to in new directions. Why? Because you can’t see your choices. All you can see is what you don’t want. You are swirling in the victim vortex. And as you continue to oppose yourself and you fight with what you don’t want or like, you continue to concentrate upon that, and therefore you continue to create that, instead of what you genuinely want to create.
Keep in mind, this is not about thinking that it will change either, for thinking, and hoping and trying to make something positive accomplishes nothing. It will not change your situation. Why? Because thinking doesn’t create your reality. Thinking is a translating mechanism, and when you get caught up in thinking and thinking and thinking about something, you end up on that endless loop going round and round and round on your hamster wheel, and once again nothing changes.
"But I'm not thinking about anything negative," you protest. "How can I be fighting with myself when I'm peacefully sitting in the garden, enjoying the flowers?" you cry. However, have you considered what you are doing during with the rest of your day beyond that moment of your flower admiration time?
Are you noticing any limitations, feeling or thinking about how uncomfortable you are? Perhaps you're thinking about what you can't do or what you don’t like? Simply appreciating the beauty of your backyard flowers doesn't necessarily change your circumstances, especially in the context of trauma. Remember you are never doing nothing.
It is crucial to remember as I mentioned, your thoughts don’t create your reality. That is not their function. Since they serve as a translating mechanism, they are not an avenue of communication. In other words, your thoughts don’t wield the power to create your reality. Your true avenues of communication stem from your intuition, imagination, inspiration, impulses, and emotions.
Therefore, your physical brain doesn’t operate at its full potential when you're only sitting around so to speak, engaged in thinking. You cannot fully utilize your entire brain's capacity by restricting yourself to mere thought. Thinking also doesn’t help you to process or evaluate what you are feeling or what you are experiencing either.
Furthermore, excessive thinking can inadvertently fuel your negative emotions and dark feelings, trapping you in an endless loop of despair. These mental spirals create turbulent emotional wormholes you can inadvertently fall into, making it challenging to break free from their strangling grip.
That's where mindfulness and meditation emerge as transformative tools, allowing the storm of your non-stop thinking to settle down. When you are in a calmer space, your clarity emerges, revealing more of your choices as you allow yourself to take deliberate action. By quieting your mind, you gain the perspective needed to navigate your life with purpose and intention.
This is why it is so important to share your experiences either by talking to someone and speaking your feelings, or writing down what you are feeling with pen and paper. Journaling your thoughts and feelings has a unique power to heal, because it involves both hemispheres of your brain, as does talking to someone and speaking out your feelings. It triggers the memory to move to the surface and you can access it more easily.
So, let’s move to step four.
I would like to mention that there are facilitators who conduct sessions to assist in step 4 of moving your trauma memories to the other side of your brain, when you're ready. I'll provide more information about this at another time, giving you the option to explore alternative approaches to Step 4 with tapping and someone to assist you, should you choose to do so.
This final step of the healing process can be challenging, as it involves connecting the feelings with the memory of trauma, or recalling the memory and reconnecting it with the resulting feelings.
There are two ways to accomplish this, and it’s crucial never to force yourself into either way. It is very important to be aware that your body consciousness plays a significant role in determining if you are ready for step 4. You may feel intellectually or emotionally prepared, but if you experiment and notice that you are feeling panicky, your heart begins racing, and your breathing becomes very quick and shallow, perhaps you may begin to feel ill, shaky, nauseous, or you can’t concentrate, then these are indicators that you body is not ready to process the trauma, and you stop.
Your body’s cooperation is essential, because it is very actively involved in the trauma healing process. Remember it is building new neurological pathways, and creating the new grooves in your brain and your body doesn’t think nor is it independent from you. If your body consciousness is not ready due to these symptoms, it also means that you are not fully prepared either, and that’s okay. Never try to force or push yourself through this process. Be gentle and nurturing with yourself. This is your journey, and you need to take all the time in the world that you need to process it.
When you are fully ready for step 4, continue to gently guide yourself intentionally towards what brings you satisfaction and aligns with your true desires. However, along the way, you may find yourself becoming triggered. When these feelings arise, notice that, don’t try to push them away or dismiss them.
Instead, allow yourself to observe and feel them, remembering to acknowledge what you are feeling. Here is the important part, you express that feeling in some manner. For example, if certain memories or situations evoke feelings of sadness, anxiety, hurt, or fear, you might practice journaling or speaking with a trusted friend or therapist to process these emotions in a safe and supportive environment.
This is different from addressing general feelings. In trauma what is important is to slowly and deliberately recall the feeling and express what it is. And once again, you do this either by speaking to another person, and you say I feel this and this and this, and the more you speak, you find that the memory will come closer to the surface. You can then connect the feeling with the memory. Or you can write what you feel, and it will do the same thing. But remember, you cannot simply just sit and mope thinking about it.
It is also important to release your anger, by finding a constructive outlet such as using a punching bag or taking a hike with a heavy knapsack you can fill with rocks.
After hiking for about a kilometer, drop the knapsack and unload the rocks, then let out a primal scream. Scream as loud as you can, with whatever names or words or whatever it is you associate with your anger or trauma.
Why does this work? This action helps release both the physical energy and the intense feelings associated with your anger. The physical exertion of hiking with the bag of rocks or punching a bag helps release pent-up energy, while the act of screaming allows you to express and release the feeling of anger and emotional turmoil within you.
The difficulty is that you kind of need to do this where you are not in the proximity of other people, as our society strongly disapproves of such expressions. This societal norm presents a significant issue in our world today, as it is vital for us to naturally express our feelings, as it is essential for our well-being. Yet from a very young age, we're taught to suppress feelings of anger or frustration, and only allow positive emotions to be outwardly displayed.
Consequently, this is how we accumulate and hold pent-up energy in our body consciousness, leading us to suffer from far more disease today than we ever have in our past history, to which it has almost become common place. For example, it is no longer surprising to know someone who is being diagnosed with cancer today. Mental health conditions have seen a dramatic rise since the 20th century, and emotional dysfunctions are escalating at an alarming rate. Much of this can be attributed to our body's response to unaddressed trauma.
If we simply allowed those who are angry to scream and yell about whatever is triggering them, or to express whatever they feel, then they will stop being angry or have those feelings, allowing them to puff into smoke much sooner, rather than repressing or resisting them.
Venting is actually very good for your well-being. If you stifle yourself, you know being a good person and staying quiet, and you don’t want to rock the boat, vent your irritation because you don’t want to upset anyone, you are holding onto all that energy, which can eventually lead to your physical issues if you don’t address them. But when you can spew everything out that you are irritated and angry with, and you can do this privately, by venting and yelling you dissipate all that energy far more quickly.
And as a result, you are emptying your energy container before it goes KABOOM!
Think about children at young ages, who naturally express their feelings, which is why some of them do express throwing temper tantrums. It’s the parents that struggle to cope with that, not the child. The key is to simply allow your children to express their energy by being present and to witness them, which means you don’t ignore nor do you encourage them during the tantrum either. And don’t tell them not to do it either.
However, if you do ignore them, they will learn that if they are naturally expressing themselves, they will be ignored and therefore invalidated, which leads to emotionally dysfunctional behaviors as they continue to grow up, and it also ignites the Not Enough Syndrome. And if you tell them they can’t express their natural feelings…which it seems this has been what we have been doing, and the pattern that has been going on for generations…well we can look out into the world and see the results. We have an epidemic of energy containers going KABOOM, with disease, cancer, auto-immune, the list goes on, mental health issues, and emotional dysregulation.
So, release your anger and feelings, but remember not to hurt yourself or others, and then either speak to someone about what you are feeling, or journal it, by writing down what you are feeling. That will begin to trigger the memory so you can access it more easily. This is your final step.
Now step number 4 is a very difficult piece in addressing trauma. Why? Because of the feeling aspect. The tendency is to follow the feelings and in turn you may end up concentrating upon them, and therefore you will allow those feelings to dictate your behavior and choices. This is why speaking to someone is so important and effective in relation to step four of this process.
The second method is to recall the memory if you haven’t blocked them. If you can recall them then what you do is replay it step by step but not in thinking. Thinking is not enough to connect those two factors in your brain. In other words, it doesn’t engage your entire brain, and your body consciousness will continue to use the pathway of keeping the feeling separate from the recall of your memory.
Therefore, once again as in the previous method, either in speaking or writing, recall every aspect of the experience in detail. What you are accomplishing in this process is resurfacing the feeling. You are pulling the feeling that has been disconnected from the memory, closer and closer to the surface so that you can connect it back to the memory.
The tricky part about feelings is that your body has generated a protective action to help you avoid recalling the memory, but the triggers are still there, because the memory is still there. Your body stores and holds memory, so even if you don’t recall anything that happened, your body reacts to the trigger of a memory.
Once you genuinely connect with a traumatic experience as outlined in one of these two methods, your body uses your senses to input information: such as where you are, what the temperature is, what the time of day is, what year it is, it logs all that information and distinguishes it between the information that was back then, and it recognizes the difference to what is now. And therefore, it dissipates the trauma.
In both methods whether you are choosing the memory or the feeling, you are pulling them both together. This intentional alignment of feeling and memory signals to your body consciousness that it's time to let go of those protective barriers that have kept the memory or feeling suppressed. With practice and patience, even fragmented memories can begin to piece together, leading to your successful recall.
The benefits of addressing traumatic experiences in this manner are profound. By objectively observing and re-experiencing the trauma, in a safe environment, you create a clear distinction between past and present. While I do admit that initially it is uncomfortable, this process allows your body consciousness to recognize the difference between then and now, and this once again is how it dissipates the trauma's hold in the present moment, which always your point of power.
Though you may still experience occasional triggers, once you have addressed your trauma, you can quickly identify and process the associated feelings of the trigger, and rapidly find relief and empowerment in your ability to navigate your past experiences.
To summarize, once again the 4 steps to addressing trauma are as follows:
1) First, acknowledge your current experiences and feelings, which is the position you are in now.
2) Second, stop the fight and your internal struggle with it.
3) Third, move yourself in the direction of what you are paying attention to. Focus and pay attention to what brings you satisfaction and comfort, and actively pursue these positive experiences – and not just sitting around while you continuously think about doing it.
4) Finally, once you have laid this groundwork, you can begin the process of aligning the memory and feeling together and address to the trauma, with either of the methods mentioned earlier, so that you can move away from it, and thereby neutralize it.
Throughout this trauma healing process, it's important to approach each step with compassion and self-care, recognizing that healing takes time and patience. That's why I am creating the Tricks of Trauma Workbook to accompany you on this journey, providing you with practical tools, exercises, and guidance to support these important steps in Addressing to Trauma. Together, we'll explore your individual trauma x-rays and develop personalized strategies for addressing and overcoming the challenges you face.
By committing to this process of self-discovery and healing, you'll not only find relief from your past traumas, but you will also discover a newfound sense of strength, resilience, and inner peace. Remember, you're capable of healing, and I'm here to support you every step of the way.
We as fellow earth travelers have a tremendous aptitude towards sensitivity and compassion. Unfortunately, it is the experience of trauma is what prevents and blinds us to it.
However, with courage and determination, we can peel away the layers of trauma, allowing the light of sensitivity and compassion to brightly shine once more, as its radiance guides us on our journey towards healing and interconnectedness.
Together, we can reclaim our inherent capacity for empathy and kindness, embracing the beauty of our shared humanity and restoring HONOR for each other. This journey of restoration is essential as we address to the Shockwave of World War II and begin to heal and nurture the essence of our collective humanity.
Be gentle with yourself.
Seek out others for help and support.
Don’t isolate.
Don’t be silent.
Let's get together and embrace the kaleidoscope of gifts and talents each of us brings, and recognize the profound value all of us have to offer. Together, as we unite in our strengths and purpose, we can unleash an unimaginable potential.
With our hearts intertwined and our spirits ablaze, we set forth on a journey to heal, collaborate, and prevent further trauma by rediscovering our personal SUPER POWER - the resilience and transformation within us all. Guided by the light of transformation, enables us to weave a tapestry of healing, empowerment, and limitless possibility, casting aside the shadows of trauma to celebrate the radiant dawn of a new era. Are you ready?
Join me next time for the conclusion of this episode and the Tricks of Trauma program, where we'll delve into the crucial topic of suicide and genuine forgiveness. Together, we'll explore strategies for understanding, coping with, and healing this complex issue, as we shed light on paths to healing and resilience. Don't miss this important discussion as we navigate together towards greater awareness and support.
Until next time,
Take self-care.
Here is the wide-ranging list of trauma healing modalities I mentioned earlier. As you can see, there are a wealth of resources to explore. Each modality offers its unique approach, providing you with many avenues to assist you in processing trauma, releasing your emotional blockages, and reclaiming your sense of wholeness and empowerment.
Whether through the gentle touch of cranial sacral therapy, the rhythmic movements of yoga, the tapping of E.F.T., or the deep relaxation of hypnotherapy, these modalities offer a supportive framework to assist you in navigating your healing journey.
1. Bowen Therapy: also known as Bowenwork or the Bowen Technique, is a gentle and non-invasive form of bodywork that involves applying subtle movements over specific points on your body to stimulate your body's natural healing responses. It can help relieve pain, improve your range of motion, and promote your overall relaxation and well-being.
2. Somatic Experiencing (SE) Therapy: Developed by Dr. Peter Levine, this is a body-oriented approach to healing trauma that focuses on releasing stored traumatic energy from the body, and restoring the nervous system's natural regulation.
3. Craniosacral Therapy: is a gentle hands-on technique that works with the craniosacral system to release tension and promote relaxation and balance in your body.
4. EMDR Therapy: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy helps you process and heal from traumatic memories and experiences by stimulating bilateral brain activity through eye movements or other forms of bilateral stimulation.
5. Reiki: is a Japanese energy healing technique that involves channeling universal life force energy to promote relaxation, stress reduction, and healing on physical, emotional, and spiritual levels.
6. Acupuncture: is a traditional Chinese medicine practice that involves inserting thin needles into specific points on your body to stimulate energy flow and promote balance within your body's energy systems.
7. Massage Therapy: involves manipulating your body's soft tissues to promote relaxation, relieve muscle tension, and improve your overall physical and emotional well-being.
8. Yoga Therapy: uses yoga poses, breathing techniques, and meditation to address your physical, emotional, and mental health concerns while promoting holistic healing and well-being.
9. E.F.T. (Emotional Freedom Technique), also known as tapping, is a simple yet powerful method for addressing emotional distress. By tapping on specific points on the body while focusing on upsetting emotions or memories, E.F.T. helps release tension and restore emotional balance, leading to a sense of freedom and well-being.
10. Hypnotherapy is a therapeutic approach that utilizes guided relaxation and focused attention to access the subconscious mind. By inducing a trance-like state, hypnotherapy allows individuals to explore and address a wide range of issues, including habits, phobias, and emotional challenges. Through the power of suggestion and visualization, hypnotherapy can facilitate positive changes in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, leading to profound healing and personal transformation.
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