Trauma Resolution

“We must examine and understand the universe that dwells within [our] own soul.”
Socrates

For trauma treatment to be effective, survivors, Janina Fisher writes in Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma, “do have to be able to experience some kind of clear physical and emotional sense that ‘it’ is over and that they are still here.”

This means that even when implicit trauma responses keep getting activated, and mobilized for danger, we need to learn to access resources in our minds and bodies to change the physical responses that keep us distressed, so that we can know we are remembering threat rather than being threatened in the here and now.

We want to learn how to be “here” and not “there,” to paraphrase Bessel van der Kolk.

Resolution of the past is achieved through developing the following skills, as outlined by Janina Fisher:

1. Finding a way to become calm and focused. Being able to manage our impulses and emotions and keeping our thinking brains online so we don’t either become overwhelmed with feeling or numb.
2. Recognizing that triggering still happens even after successful treatment because implicit memory (feeling and bodily states) will still get triggered.
3. Learning to maintain calm, despite triggers. Being able to say and embrace the following: “This is a feeling memory or a body memory.”
4. Seeing distressing feelings or symptoms as survival strategies, not as problems or defects to be eliminated.

You don’t need to deal with these difficulties on your own.
Please, reach out for help.

I can be reached by phone at 301-279-7779, by email at BethLCounseling@aol.com or by using the form below.

Keywords:  frontal lobes, limbic system, brain stem, thinking brain, mammalian brain, reptilian brain, body memory, emotional memory, tightening, trembling, sinking feeling, traumatic events, traumatic conditions, prefrontal cortex, triggers, disappointment, ignored, not understood, not taken seriously, being noticed, brain