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Healing Traumas

By December 17, 2024No Comments

 

 

Your wounds don’t have to become your identity. They can, however, be the wisdom you need to grow and transform.

Childhood Trauma

Experiencing trauma is life changing. How have the experiences of your past changed you? How are you different now? Your past doesn’t have to define you. It doesn’t need to become your new identity. You are not what happened to you, you are the person who can observe those experiences and grow from them. While you didn’t ask for bad things to happen to you, and while it’s okay to feel grief, sadness, and any other negative emotions, please believe that there’s something better out there waiting for you. Everything we want to experience in life, such as joy, love, and freedom, could never exist without their opposites. There’s no rainbow without rain and you can’t see the stars unless it’s dark. Our negativity about negative feelings in reaction to these events can destabilize us, make us feel stuck, make us feel differently about ourselves. You know you have healed when the past is neutral. It’s just an experience you had. It doesn’t direct your life. It no longer defines you. You are not reactive to any triggers reminding you of the past. You are free and you have taken valuable lessons from the past and directed them towards your growth.

Healing Traumas

Trauma Healing

Any experience that causes you to develop self-limiting and negative beliefs about yourself is trauma. Even if you aren’t aware of it, there is likely healing that needs to take place for your overall well being. Developing compassion for oneself is a skill that’s an essential aspect of healing. No one has ever grown by being put down, abused, and judged. When accepted with compassion, people show up as their best selves. Treat yourself the way you treat others. Oftentimes, we are much nicer, kinder and more forgiving of others than of ourselves. Why is that? Every person deserves compassion. How are you different? Can you catch yourself talking negatively in your mind and replace that narrative with something more positive? What would you tell a dear friend in that situation?

EMDR Therapy

Painful memories can’t be erased and forgotten, but you can process and let go of the disturbance they carry. This is when EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy can be so helpful. As various experiences occur in our lives they leave an impact on our inner state.  Some experiences get translated into happy memories, making us smile years later when we think of them. Some memories bring up sadness, fear, and anger; and some just pass through you and you forget about them. When disturbing events happen, you resist them, and therefore, don’t allow them to pass through you. Traumatic memories get frozen in time. Disturbing events get stuck in your brain not only as memories, but also images, physical sensations in your body, emotions, thoughts, sounds and smells, beliefs, and so on. When you think of something painful that happened a while back, don’t you feel those same emotions in the present moment? If we allow our minds to go back to an earlier memory and bring up a hurtful event, we will find that we can still feel the emotions, the thoughts, and even body sensations that were there when the incident occurred. And we also will see that it’s automatic, it comes up even when we don’t want to. The process of EMDR focuses on the past, present and the future. It targets your thoughts, body sensations and feelings; images and insights, beliefs and nonverbal memories. EMDR will take you down memory lane, have you witness your own pain, glance at the part of you that’s scared about the future, give your body voice so it can share what it’s been holding all these years, and then when it’s done, you will come out of it feeling lighter. If the weight of your trauma is becoming too much to carry, reach out to an EMDR therapist today.