Remembering Trauma Isn’t Required To Recover From Trauma
Remembering trauma isn’t required to recover from trauma. Watch the short video Master Class now.
Remembering Trauma Doesn’t Remove Trauma
Now if you listen to some hypnosis experts on social media you could easily be led to believe that the most effective way to help someone with trauma is to regression hypnotherapy. This is simply not correct.
Regression For Trauma Is Highly Dangerous – Unless…
Using regression on someone who has experienced trauma is highly dangerous. and unless you are fully educated in regression work you could end up bring them back into a ‘scene’ that is traumatic. The result of this could be them reliving the event and feeling as if it’s happening all over again. How re-traumatising would that be?
Watch This Other Master Class On How To NOT Do Regression Hypnotherapy
Here’s a fact you might not know, remembering isn’t required when you are doing trauma work. This is echoed by so many different trauma treatment experts who don’t ever ask a client to ‘go back to the time you experienced trauma’. Instead, experts such as
- Bessel Van Der Kolk’s who wrote The Body Keeps Score
- Judith Herman’s seminal work Trauma and Recovery
- Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
- Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing
- Babette Rothschild Eight Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery and
- Sue Johnsons Emotionally Focused Therapy
All these experts do what highly trained hypnotherapists do when it comes to trauma – they go into the emotion, they go into the body, they go into the process, but they don’t go into the past. Most trauma experts are what we call bottom up therapists – they start in the body where the memory of trauma resides – because our clients don’t have trauma feelings – they have trauma responses.
On Healing Trauma Through Hypnosis you’ll learn how to work with the body and the trauma that resides there, you’ll work with procedural memory – that’s memory stored in the muscles and the nervous system and you’ll work with cognitive memory – if the client can remember what happened – and if they can’t – that’s ok. As Bessel Ven Der Kolk states – it is the body who keeps the score.
Another way to look at it is like this, we don’t bring our clients back into the memory or the experience – we bring the memory of the experience into the room into our S.P.A.C.E.
- SAFE
- PLACE
- ACCOMODATES
- CORRECTIVE
- EXPERIENCES
When we bring memories and experiences into the present, into the therapy space, together with our clients we can examine them, modify them and change the perceptions of them as they exist in our clients body, their beliefs, their behaviours and their cognitions. Then we return the memory reshaped and updated their historical memory – altered and changed for the better with a new set of beneficial body responses to accompany it.
So write this down and learn it off by heart. Remembering is not required to achieve closure, to heal and to move on. That is so important to know that it forms on of the eight keys of safe trauma recovery as developed by Rothschild.
Remembering is not necessary for recovery. You can recover even if you cannot remember how the trauma happened in the first place.
Common sense will also inform you of how true this statement is because attachment trauma happens at the implicit (subconscious and non verbal level) before we reach the age of two. And so many of us who were raised in anxious ambivalent or avoidant attachment systems and developed insecure attachment styles have done the work on ourselves and have managed to form secure attachment bonds and relationships and