Found Your Trauma... Now What?

One of my biggest frustrations with certain therapists' approach to traditional talk therapy, or methods like EMDR that focus on processing trauma via memories, is that they often don’t take the time to build up your strength and skills for dealing with trauma before delving into the memories of it.

I like to compare hunting down your trauma in this way to a dog chasing a car. Even if the dog catches the car, what’s it going to do then? The dog can’t overpower the car, so what does it expect to happen?

The core traumas you carry are like 200-pound weights of emotional distress that have been weighing you down.

Since no one has taught you how to properly purge and process the associated emotions, you're hardly able to lift even 5-pound emotional weights.

So, what do you expect to happen when you can barely lift 5 pounds but are sent right to the 200-pound weights and told to “Lift!”? It will likely bring up emotions you’re not ready to deal with, leaving you feeling even more unsafe, triggered, and resistant to emotional healing.

Instead, I believe it’s better to start with the small weights.

If you can’t learn to stay untriggered enough to process emotions when, for example, stuck in line behind someone taking too long to pay at the grocery store, how can you expect to stay calm enough to process emotions when confronted with major traumas?

Let’s build the muscle first. Let’s work with what’s coming up in your life day-to-day. As you build strength, skills, confidence, and a sense of safety and certainty to handle those small things, you’ll work your way up to the bigger weights.

That’s why I call my approach ‘Emotional Fitness Training’.

We build up tolerance for processing uncomfortable emotions naturally, bit by bit. As we do, we begin a process of ‘excavation’, clearing away unresolved emotional energy from the top down, bit by bit, until, if and when we’re ready, whatever buried trauma is underneath our defense mechanisms reveals itself naturally.

We don’t focus on finding and exposing the trauma. We focus on making you feel better and suffer less in the moment. The more you do that, the more you uncover naturally, fearlessly, and effortlessly.

Let’s build the strength to suffer less in the moment, and the rest will happen on its own.