Memories
Traumatic experiences can (but don’t have to) cause us to interpret things in a disempowering way. When we experience trauma, a negative emotion is trapped in our bodies if we don’t release it. It doesn’t matter what you call them-- blockages, negative beliefs, trapped energy, wounds, traumatic memories-- most people have plenty of them. Almost every negative emotion triggers these latent problems that lie within our system. The negative emotion is resonating with the related negative emotion trapped in your body, just like a tuning fork makes a sound when a similar tone is played. This also happens when people in your environment emit the same frequency of emotion… it can resonate with yours. People who are expressing anger trigger the anger in your emotional body. The anger triggered can be traced to conditioning or a memory. If you were spanked when you cried as a toddler and you interpreted the experience with a belief such as “It’s not safe to voice myself,” you could experience a negative emotion every time you raise a concern aloud in front of others.
If you are willing to go back to a very traumatic memory and direct the power of your consciousness to it, it can be healed. Eye movement therapists have their patients relax and go back to the traumatic memory and use the eye/brain connection to force consciousness to focus on the memory. Talk therapy or hypnotherapy regression therapy work by the same principles without using the eye-brain connection. The painful memory was created through a negative belief system. According to EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) practitioners, sometimes trauma causes us to shut down as a protective mechanism. We become unable to “process” the experience fully, so it replays every time a triggering belief, thought, situation, or emotion is experienced. Just by going back and allowing the brain to process the experience more, it can be healed. The talk therapy aspect helps you to use your new perspective to reinterpret the past experience. You’re in the future now (from the perspective of your past self with its limiting beliefs.) You have more understanding about yourself, others, and how the world works. You can now go back and process the experience with a more empowering perspective. Psychologists call this reappraisal. Your mind is creating new pathway options that are better than the one that caused stagnant energy flow. This is a great source of hope for people with a traumatic past. You can change your past by changing the way you interpret it.
When any situation in life brings up a negative emotion, the Hawaiian tradition of Ho’oponopono uses the mantra, “I love you, thank you, I’m sorry, please forgive me” as an empathetic, loving, empowering and mature perspective. By approaching a negative emotion with a nonresistant, loving, and positive thought/emotion, it is said to heal the memories from this life or a past one for everyone involved. See Vitale and Len’s book Zero Limits for an in-depth explanation of the tradition.
Real Life Practice:
(If your memories are especially traumatic, I recommend doing this worksheet with a licensed therapist.)
Write down a memory that continues to cause stress in your life:
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Write down any way you may have benefited or learned from the experience
(Ex: Because of that challenging experience I learned important information about people I work with. I have become stronger and more knowledgeable when a similar situation appears in my life.)
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Watch the memory like a movie in your mind. This time imagine that all the people in the memory including yourself are children. At any point in the movie you may pause it and advise your child self. What will you tell yourself?
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