The Fear of Processing Trauma.

Imagine that when you were young, you had a prankster uncle who convinced you that if you burp, you will die. He told you that the feeling of pressure building up inside you is what it feels like before your chest explodes like a bomb, and if you ever allow yourself to burp, you’re going to blow up.

So, you go through your whole life actively avoiding burping. Not only that, but whenever you start feeling that internal pressure, you go immediately into fight-or-flight mode, right into fear and panic. You’ve come to associate the feeling of needing to burp as a threat, and the fear around that threat has kept you stuck.

The thing is… burping is a healthy, natural response to a buildup of gas inside your stomach. It’s the normal way that your body releases the pressure, and if you avoided doing it, it wouldn’t really serve you much good.

The point being, this is what we’ve been doing with our emotions.

In the past, we’ve come to learn that feeling, processing, and expressing our emotions has gotten us into trouble, so we have developed skills, tools, and defense mechanisms to help us avoid doing the very natural things that our bodies are programmed to do in order to release our emotions. Because of that, unresolved emotional energy has been building up, weighing us down more and more over time.

The reason I like this ‘burping’ metaphor is because I use it to explain something to my prospects and clients.

Something that we’re going to do towards the beginning of this healing journey is to get you to let out a tiny burp… right at the beginning… so that you can see that it’s not going to kill you!

This is an absolutely crucial step of the process that a lot of therapists and counselors skip.

When we can get you to let out a tiny burp (i.e., to work through a small uncomfortable emotion - without needing to analyze or intellectualize the emotion itself), then you have an opportunity to go, “Wait a minute…! Not only did that not kill me! It actually felt really good!”

Because, you know… burping actually does feel good, doesn’t it? You release the pressure. You feel lighter after you’ve done it. And that’s exactly what we want you to realize it will be like when you stop resisting your emotions.

Without the fear, even feeling your uncomfortable emotions will feel good! It’s only the belief that the discomfort is a threat that is keeping you stuck. And we need to break that barrier before we can really move on to the rest of the healing.