3 Steps to Effortlessly Heal Trauma

The experience of trauma is one of too much too fast. Something happens in our lives that creates an experience of overwhelm; emotions that were meant to be felt and then flow through us somehow get stuck. From personal experience, trauma is when a memory, and the physical feelings around that memory, are still being felt even though the experience itself has passed. It’s the combined physical and mental experience of loss, pain, suffering, overwhelm, fear, etc. that is trapped inside of us. These undigested emotions and experiences are like ghosts that think they are still alive. It’s the 95-year-old man who is still angry at something that happened when he was 5 years old or your best friend who still gets flushed and furious when reminded of a break-up that happened a decade ago. Trauma is a memory that hasn’t found its place in the history of your life story. In other words, it is an experience that happened in the past that no matter how long ago it happened it is still happening within you now. We feel that experience not as a memory but as if it was currently occurring in this moment and we feel it with every sense of our being often as if it just happened.

When we hold onto these painful ghosts, we often invent very creative and even subconscious methods for coping with them. We learn to manage and push them away but they are always haunting us in the background of our minds. We learn to ignore them and act as if they aren’t there so they sit and wait for that moment when someone pushes a “button” within us. That button triggers a reaction that is often uncontrollable, often bigger than the current experience calls for, and sometimes even surprises us in its ferocity. It just waits, seemingly dormant within, for an opportunity to explode out of us and be released. Even then, as it rips through us, it may never quite lessen and at times it may even build up strength and become bigger than the inciting incident.

Here are some easy things to do to lessen the strength of those traumatic ghosts stuck in our memory and stop managing the trauma so that it can finally be released and healed:

1) Make it your friend – When you can step back and redefine your relationship with the ghost of trauma past you actually take an important step towards reducing the power of the trauma. Start doing this by treating the “bad memory” as a friend that has been wounded. They are hurt. Instead of burying the pain in denial or fear and shoving it down, practice loving compassion towards the pain itself. We are always talking to ourselves so why not talk to this old memory in a way that is loving and kind? Speak to the part of you that is suffering like a beloved friend.

2) Understand how it exists within you –Your brain recorded every second of that traumatic event using all your senses (color, temperature, texture, sound, smell, taste). Become aware of how you locked in that painful moment and ask yourself the question, “What is the color, sound, temperature, texture, taste, and even smell of it?” This is how the experience has been living inside of you. Sensing how it has been recorded inside your brain can give you the opportunity to weed out those understandings and teach your brain a new color, texture, temperature, etc. around that experience therefore changing how the memory was locked into your subconscious mind. Change that and you can change perception and gain some emotional freedom away from the pain or trauma.

3) Teach it something new – Now that you understand how your brain recorded that moment in time, see if you can remember the experience with a contrary color, temperature, etc. Replace the descriptive experience with a contrary one. If the trauma was rough, bring in a sense of smooth as you practice remembering it again. If it was dark and heavy, bring in a sense of a brilliant color and the lightness of a feather and watch the old understanding start to dissolve away. Relating a new understanding to the old experience can help desensitize the ghost to the original pain and make room for the understanding of healing to take root in your mind.

Working in this way allows your brain to understand the moment as a true memory and no longer as a ghostly experience that is currently happening. By making your pain/trauma your best friend, you are changing your relationship to this part of you that is suffering and you’re giving your conscious mind the support it needs to step away from the pain. In understanding how it was looping within you through the sensory data of color, temperature, etc. you are creating space for the pain to be seen and felt differently. In teaching the brain a new experience around the pain, you are opening up healing and shifting from problem focused thinking to co-creative possibility thinking. Practice this over and over again until the original experience no longer has a grip on you. Eventually, you will be able to look back at even the darkest moments of your past and literally see, and feel, them differently.

Learn more techniques here…