‘A well-documented feature of trauma, one familiar to many, is our inability to articulate what happens to us. Not only do we lose our words, but something happens with our memory as well.
During a traumatic incident, our thought processes become scattered and disorganized in such a way that we no longer recognize the memories as belonging to the original event. Instead, fragments of memory, dispersed as images, body sensations, and words, are stored in our unconscious and can become activated later by anything remotely reminiscent of the original experience.
Once they are triggered, it is as if an invisible rewind button has been pressed, causing us to re-enact aspects of the original trauma in our day-to-day lives. Unconsciously, we could find ourselves reacting to certain people, events, or situations in old, familiar ways that echo the past. Sigmund Freud identified this pattern more than one hundred years ago. Traumatic re-enactment, or “repetition compulsion,” as Freud called it, is an attempt of the unconscious to replay what’s unresolved, so we can “get it right.”’ – It didn’t start with you by Mark Wolynn.
We play the movie “getting it right” all our lives, over and over again. The situations and circumstances are not the same as the ones in our childhood, but our brains recognize those feelings and we make the same choices to correct something we couldn’t in the past. Many clients that come to me believe they are lost, stuck in that loop, that web of false beliefs, and think there’s no way out of it. That movie plays out very well in all aspects of their lives – relationships with themselves, in professional settings making them constantly feel insecure, not good/smart enough, family relations, and how they relate to children and their partners. Whenever we get triggered, we tend to point the finger at that person, or situation that caused those familiar emotions to rise up inside of us because it’s much easier if someone or something is causing all this, it makes it so much harder and painful to realize it’s something inside of us that needs our attention. That’s why clients often come to me when they’ve reached that breaking point and simply can’t go any further. Due to our past experiences (traumas), our brain is well attuned to look and recognize those painful feelings and we spend all our lives on the lookout living in fight or flight mode without even noticing it, however, our body, the entire physiology, and psyche does notice it.
The question I ask my clients is: ‘How familiar is that feeling, when was the first time you’ve felt it? How far back does it go? What did it do for you at that moment?’ It’s not about what’s wrong with those feelings, those emotions, but what is good about it. What does it give you? Safety, the ability to be seen, and heard, the comfort, whatever it is, it’s something you lacked as a child. What we come to reveal and what happens very often is that the same feelings, emotions, and triggers are coping mechanisms for abnormal situations we were once put in. It gave us comfort, escape, or temporary relief from the pain we were in. The problem is, we never got out of it, and what once became a temporary relief, is now something we firmly believe in, it limits us, disconnects us from our true selves, and our authenticity, keeps us stuck, and blocks us from moving forward in life. And we think, ‘That’s just how life is’. Nothing can be further from the truth.
It doesn’t need to be this way, you don’t need years of therapy to understand what happened to you and how you became the way you are. Once you become aware of the core beliefs, and the root cause of your issue, you gain so much liberation, so much power to turn this around and to make better choices. It’s like you disarm the ammunition and the explosive inside of you and no trigger can cause the eruption anymore. During Rapid Transformational Therapy, the unconscious mind provides profound insights into events, feelings, and beliefs we’ve once formed as children. The client is able to look at it from a different perspective, and with fascination and curiosity, we reveal layer upon layer of stuck emotions, and beliefs we created in those events. You can’t fix what you don’t understand, it’s like taking apart a TV, understanding all its parts before you can put it back together and have a better picture, sound, and visual. That’s what we do in the RTT method, that’s why it’s so profound gives fast permanent results and often succeeds when other modalities don’t provide breakthroughs.
If the feeling of not being able to connect with others, feeling of being different, or not good enough sounds familiar to you, if you seek relief from it through shopping, binge eating, trying to be perfect, self-sabotaging yourself, and criticizing yourself for everything you did or didn’t do, it’s time to unpack those emotions and to find out what lies beneath. These triggers and events have a purpose, to show us the way forward, and what we need to work on, all our insecurities are not there to play the shame and quilt game, they are there to show us where our liberation, true freedom is.