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Healing Trauma Without Re-Traumatizing
The most important parts of the process of providing deep healing and release of past traumas include:1) The energetic somatic release of the painful emotions, which in turn releases the embedded shock and body armoring.
2) Containment of the process and of the client's energy. The hypnotic trance is induced, managed, and terminated all in an orderly way. We titrate the emotions and help create a safe resource state with anchors that they can always return to and use. Ego strengthening is begun before the therapeutic part of the session, and continued throughout with corrective experiences of empowerment. There is an agreed upon signal to use if they wish to interrupt the process or take an intermission: "1,2,3, stop."
3) The corrective experience: They abreact feelings bringing in the adult to express for the child what the child could not express at the time of the trauma, thus overcoming early inhibitions. Their experience is legitimized. They learn to attribute the abusive behavior to the abuser, not accepting it themselves, and to discriminate between self-identity and introjections. They reconnect memories and emotions to events, giving meaning to past events that were experienced as bewildering.
In this process, Carolyn is able to reach her clients in their physical and emotional experience, as well as their mental or cognitive understanding. Talking alone is not sufficient to heal trauma. The memories are carried deep in the unconscious, embedded in the body, recording fears set down at a young age in the amygdala, the one part of the brain that never forgets. That's why therapy is seldom successfully done in a session or two, and is never simply a matter of "explaining" to people how irrational their thinking is, or how counterproductive their behavior.