- Did you suffer, or fear that you would suffer, abandonment (either physical or emotional) by your parents when you were a child?
- Have you experienced a serious accident, child abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, mugging, a natural disaster, armed combat, or being diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness?
- Have you been in a situation where your personal safety was seriously threatened, or you witnessed someone else being threatened, and you felt completely helpless and out of control?
- Have you felt utterly devastated due to losing your job, getting divorced or being ‘dumped’ by a lover, discovering infidelity, or going bankrupt?
These types of situations may result in trauma – a type of psychological wound or injury which can, in some individuals, lead to difficulty in functioning normally or coping with life after the traumatising experience. Reactions to trauma don’t necessarily appear directly after the traumatic event; some people experience a ‘delayed response’ to trauma that may emerge months or even years later.
As harrowing as it can be, the emotional scars left by trauma can be healed!
What is trauma?
Trauma essentially involves our response to a situation that we perceive as threatening our safety (and even our life), and over which we feel we have no control.
The types of incidents mentioned above are commonly experienced as traumatic, but not every person will be traumatised if they experience these types of events, no matter how dramatic they were; and some people may suffer trauma from an event that others would not generally perceive as threatening. It largely comes down to what degree of control we perceive we have during the event.
As children, we are utterly dependent on our parents for survival, and children commonly experience trauma from events that parents may see as fairly trivial (like getting separated from Mum in a busy shopping centre).
Why do we suffer trauma?
Trauma is a response to overwhelm. The brain ‘shuts down’ or ‘freezes’ to protect you from falling to pieces when you’re overwhelmed with horror or terror. It’s almost as if the brain is saying, “we can’t deal with this now; we’ll just squash it down tight and deal with it later.”
Unfortunately, for most people that “later” never comes: they never have the opportunity to work through the intense feelings they experienced during the trauma, and release those feelings from their mind and body.
How does trauma affect us?
Unresolved trauma may be showing up in your life through symptoms such as:
- ‘Knee-jerk’, over-the-top reactions to apparently minor incidents (such as panicking and fearing the worst when your child or partner is late getting home);
- Generalised anxiety;
- Intrusive thoughts or mental images of the traumatic event;
- Nightmares and sleep disturbances;
- Intense psychological distress and/or physical symptoms such as sweating, muscle tension and rapid heartbeat when anything reminds you of the traumatic event;
- Irritability and anger;
- Impaired concentration;
- Being easily startled; and
- Hypervigilance to any possible danger – no matter how unlikely.
The way the brain responds to traumatic incidents, sets you up to be ‘triggered’ by experiences that in some way remind you of the original, traumatising incident.
The brain’s response to trauma is to ‘encode’ all your overwhelming feelings, and your perceptions and interpretations of sensory data, and store them in the body-mind in a holographic manner (called ‘holonomic’ when applied to the way we encode trauma in our physiology). This process takes only a millisecond.
Subsequently, anything that is even vaguely reminiscent of that original incident – a look on someone’s face, a thought that crosses your mind, a sensation in your body, a particular sound, even a smell – triggers that body-mind memory of the trauma, causing you to become overwhelmed by the same feelings you had during the original incident.
This holonomic encoding explains why people who have suffered trauma often feel like they keep attracting people and situations into their lives that re-traumatise them. Their hypervigilant brains are so apt to being triggered, they interpret just about everything as a threat!
It also explains why you may behave so compulsively when you’ve been triggered. The famous hypnotherapist, Milton Erickson, recognised that trauma induces a state of self-hypnosis – a way of ‘freezing’ so that we can cope. Unfortunately, anything that triggers your memory of the trauma also re-induces the hypnotic trance, so that you ‘see yourself’ and ‘hear yourself’ saying and doing things you never intended (and later regret!).
Fortunately, EFT and Matrix Reimprinting provide a fast, highly effective and virtually painless way to root out the original trauma, erase the holonomic memory of it from your body and mind, and allow you to freely respond to current situations rather than react out of past trauma.
The following 2 cases illustrate the power of these techniques to bring fast relief to trauma.
Dianne releases major childhood trauma in just one session
Dianne had been sexually abused by a friend of her father’s, when she was just a little girl. Although as an adult she recognised that it was the perpetrator who was the guilty party, and herself the innocent victim, she still felt responsible for the incident at a deep level.
We worked on every element of the incident with EFT, including allowing Dianne to express all the things she wanted to say to her abuser, and also to her parents who failed to protect her from him. Afterward, Dianne wrote me the following note:
- Dianne, Sydney
"I just wanted to say thank you for your help on Saturday. I can now say that the trauma from my childhood is like a weight being lifted from my shoulders.
I have been carrying around the guilt since I was 5 years old blaming myself for what happened when in fact it was my father's friend who was calculating and manipulating and at fault. I thank you for bringing that to my attention and helping me to really 'get' that I did nothing wrong."
David finally remembers what happened in that cave – and releases the terror!
David was troubled by an incident that happened when he was very young. The most disturbing thing for him was that he couldn’t remember what had actually happened – only that he had been in a cave with some cub scouts, and he ran out of the cave screaming in terror. Naturally enough, he feared he had been abused in some way.
We began doing EFT on the physical sensations he got when recalling what he could remember, and as he tapped, into his mind flashed little snippets of memory of what had actually happened: the other cub scouts, who were older than him, had frightened him with a toy snake while they were in the dark cave.
What a relief for David to finally remember what had happened! He could now ‘play back’ the whole incident in his mind, without being bothered by it at all.
As we worked through the incident, I asked David what belief he had formed as a consequence of the other boys’ actions. His answer was that he believed the other boys thought he was not good enough to hang out with them, and this was their way of excluding him. He was able to release this old, dysfunctional interpretation of the event and replace it with a much more likely explanation: that the boys were just being typical insensitive pre-adolescent boys!
Interestingly, a couple of days later David phoned me to relate a breakthrough he’d had with his life-long feeling of being ‘not good enough’. Resolving the cave incident allowed him to move to the next level with his personal healing.
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