Emotional Healing Isn't Intellectual.

The secret to healing trauma is to recognize that your unresolved emotions are going to come up all the time, on their own. They present themselves to you as the inner tension and resistance you feel every time you get triggered. And when they present themselves in that way, THAT'S YOUR CHANCE! That's the buried stuff (which is hard to heal when it's buried) coming right up to the surface and say "Please look at me!"

The only problem is that the emotions feel like a threat. Feeling, processing and expressing them has gotten you into trouble in the past. You've been judged, rejected, hurt, betrayed for them. You've been made to feel like if you confront them, something bad is going to happen. So you live in your head trying to analyze them, hoping that if you can intellectualize the problem then you can solve it with logic, but that's never going to get you there. You've created a false association between logic and rationality on the one hand and emotional healing on the other.

Therapy and the psychiatric approach (while helpful in their ways) have convinced us that emotional healing is an intellectual activity.

But, emotional healing is no more an intellectual activity than weight lifting is. Yes, it's best to intellectually understand the tools, skills and mechanisms that are happening, but you can't think your way to bigger muscles. And you COULD achieve bigger muscles without ever studying, in depth, how the muscle building process happens at the molecular level.

We simply need to build the strength to handle the tough emotions WITHOUT adding logic and narratives to them. The tension that you feel (for example) when you're stuck at line in the grocery store is the 5 pound weight. The way you feel when someone is attacking your core personality is like the 100 pound weight. You need to practice confronting the emotions, building the strength and the muscle to handle more and more challenging ones, until even the 100 pound weights are liftable.

Learning how to stay calm and relaxed and to process our emotions in the moments when we're getting triggered. When you can do that, THEN you'll be able to fully understand why you were using the defense mechanisms. But you will NEVER fully understand it until that happens. No matter how much you analyze it.

You can't read the label from inside the bottle. So, while you're still getting triggered, you're trying to understand it from the same versino of you that's still doing it. It's a useless cycle. But when you learn how to escape the pattern first by building those emotional muscles, then you'll be able to look back at the version of you that was doing it and see it very, very clearly. You'll be outside the bottle, looking back inwards, easily able to finally read the label.