You Don't Heal 'Specific Trauma'.
Emotional trauma builds up collectively, not in neat little piles.
Imagine that you had 10,000 people lined up to punch you in the arm. When the first person punches you, it doesn’t leave much of a mark. By the 10th person that punches you, you start developing a bruise. By the 100th, the bruise is getting really bad. By the 10,000th, the pain you’ll feel is debilitating.
That’s kind of what happened with your emotions. There were countless moments in your life where you were made to feel unsafe and where you chose to hold in your emotions (both positive and negative) and where the energy of those emotions got stored inside of you to be dealt with later. Not to mention that you created patterns, habits and defense mechanisms to avoid feeling those emotions moving forward.
The point is, that when people finally stop punching you in the arm, the bruise will start healing. But it doesn’t heal in a linear fashion where - first - it heals the first punch that happened, then the second, then the third.
The bruise isn’t a neat mosaic of each of the times you got hit placed neatly next to each other. It’s a culmination of the overall damage done to your muscle and to your capillaries over time.
The bruise itself heals as a whole. And that is what we are trying to accomplish with our emotional healing as well.
We’re not focused on healing from this trauma and from that trauma. We’re merely focused on healing the overall culmination of the unresolved emotional energy that has been stuck inside of us for years, as well as the fear based defense mechanisms that we built to protect us from that pain (but which continues to keep us stuck in that pain in the long term).
Stop trying to focus on each instance of what happened in the past. Instead, focus on working on how that pain is presenting itself right now. The more you do that, the more that the bruise will heal, and the past won’t matter so much anymore.
Tags: #mindfulness, #trauma, #shadow-work, #emotional-healing.
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Benjy Sherer is a mental health coach and emotional fitness trainer specializing in anxiety and trauma healing. His approach is about bypassing the intellectual analysis of our past traumas and focusing instead on conquering the subconscious cycles that keep us stuck in fear and which prevent us from truly healing our pain.
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