Healing Traumatic Injury

Remembering traumatic stress is connected to fears which are related to unattended emotional injury. It is very important to remind yourself when the trauma is over and you have survived it. You are now in the present. Free yourself from emotional memories. It is difficult to override the difficulties, however it will build on emotional intelligence. 

The response to trauma is fear and confusion. Your brain wants to re-create the old experience, preparing for the present, as a protection tool of defense, from the reflection of the emotional trauma.

Childhood trauma are often compartmentalized, resurfacing in later years. Many children get through those early traumatic years by applying their molding right creative brain hemisphere into forms of creative expression.

"Art washes away from the soul, the dust of everyday life." - Picasso

See like a child, paint like Picasso. During early developmental years, the left, cognitive brain hemisphere is only in the beginning stages of cognitive structuring development. As a child's develops into adulthood, the left cognitive brain hemisphere has formed its survival and structural functions, within its cultural influences. The inner child has become dormant, often negating creative energies to secondary.

An individual may have gotten through a past memory of a painful event, yet, it is not always passed or emotionally forgotten. Instead, it is stored into one's thought process, often emotionally blurring. Emotional intelligence can grow from a past trauma experience, but without the emotional awareness, the brain will not replace the bad with the good. Instead, it gets replaced with emotionally charged responses, anxiety, and levels of depressive symptoms, as a safety protection mode.

For this reason, as adults affected by a negative past must explore and reach out to heal, before attempting to forget or replace it. Working at making peace in the present is a better place, through creative, expressive energies. The peace within inner-self will build on emotional wisdom.

You cannot delete or replace a memory as the computer deletes or replaces its information. Deleting your past would be unlearning what you have learned.

Through the therapeutic process, traumatic memories of events need to be externalized, creatively expressed, narrated, and compartmentalized in safe brain mode to lessen emotionally charged memories.

Always remember that when we are remembering a past event, we are actually remembering the last time our brain remembered that event. It is not the event itself.

Unattended emotions from trauma will retain the reflection of its injurious memory.

If painful past events are not re-evaluated, they will retain their emotional power across decades.

Time doesn't heal all wounds. Or if it does, it only does so indirectly. We don’t need to detach from our past, but rather disengage from negative thinking. We are our past. If we forget our past, we forget ourselves. Events will retain their emotional power over the years, unless re-evaluated when emotionally re-experienced. It is the externalization and consequent re-definition that will reduce the charged emotions.

Life and healing is about branching out to new understandings and clarity of our surroundings. Psychotherapy, a therapeutic process, is a tool of self-exploration, a process leading to internal comfort, extending to new self-awareness and also the discovery of external peace.

The soul is strong. There will be times when the internal self can get lost onto the intense road of external life. Heal the present. Find ways to express through emotional creativity.

Your have learned during times that have passed; different times, years, months, hours, and the moment will make your journey. Process, dream, create. You will be happy.

The path to emotional wisdom is emotional freedom.

About Dr. Claire Vines, PsyD., DAPA