To dig or not to dig, that is the question.
Although my clients are always welcome to discuss and explore their life. I do not believe it is necessary to take a client back to an initial trauma and dig through and examine it in thorough detail. Pulling apart the entire experience and getting an individual to re-live the trauma of that experience.
You cannot really go into the past, just into th e memory of the past. It is not the real past, just the memory. How do you un-do the past? If I threw a brick through a window, how do i un-do that experience and the damage the brick did?
My focus is NOT on your initial trauma. My focus is on NOW, and how to manage NOW, because now is all you ever have.
Learning how to manage now is what matters.
Otherwise, its like you get a flat tyre on your car from a nail which stops your journey. And you spend your whole time trying to work out exactly where and what moment you drove over the nail. When what really matters is getting the nail out now so that you can continue your journey safely.
I believe when it comes to therapy or counselling. The focus should be on helping a person understand how they made sense of a trauma or event on a conscious and subconscious level. My focus is on helping an individual process the emotional energy and charge they were left with as a result of a traumatic event or experience.
I’d even argue that revisiting your trauma will only ever serve to re-traumatise a person.
Think about it,
It’s precisely the repetition of your body experiencing these stressful symptoms. That is continually hardwiring your brain & re-conditioning your body into an altered anxious state of being, which your body gets used to feeling.
Picture a classic therapy session. The counselor or psychologist invites the client to recall an event, time or experience and invariably, if the experience made a big and traumatic enough impression on a person. They get swept away in the river of time and are quickly overcome by grief, rage, anger and emotion.
Yes, there is enormous therapeutic value in grieving and processing your emotions. I’m not advising or suggesting you repress, ignore or deny your feelings or experience. Not for a moment.
I’m saying to simply be aware what is happening in and to your brain and body in that moment. Plus, I’d add, if a psychologist, psychiatrist or counsellor does take you for a trip back in time. Consider whether they also bring you back to the present moment by the close of the session.
As I mentioned, for the most part, our bodies are programmed to be on auto pilot. Living in the same predictable future based on our familiar state of being from the past. If we continually memorize emotions that keep us connected to the past, and those feelings drive our thoughts, then our bodies are literally living in the past and we are rarely in the safe present moment.
In fact, I’d go as far as to say, if nothing bad is happening to you now in this present moment as you read these words. Yet you are still feeling anxious, worried, stressed, guilty, depressed, negative, guilty or down. It means that your emotions are not grounded in the present moment.
It means that emotionally you have disconnected from this present moment - from NOW.
It means that the emotions you have stored in your body & that were hardwired into your brain, have taken you back to how you have felt at some point in the past. Or your worried about a future that hasn’t happened yet, based on what has happened to you in the past.
But it doesn’t end there.
I’ve observed many times with clients, that when you help a person to find the safe, peaceful and mentally quiet safe present moment. And suddenly they come face to face with themselves, after often many years of avoiding themselves, their thoughts, memory and mind. They often don’t know how to cope with it and be with themselves. They don’t know what to do with themselves and how to be with themselves, as odd as that may sound. Its unfamiliar to their body and often confuses their mind.
The result being, they very quickly want to get away from themselves again.
They have exactly what they have cried for, worked for, begged and wanted for so very long. Yet when they finally make contact with it, with themselves, they struggle to recognize it and stay in that place. Invariably their mind saves them from themselves, by generating a few painful thoughts, which create overwhelming body feelings. Then often without even realizing it, with a mixture of frustration, regret and relief, they get swept away from the present moment again.
Does that sound familiar?