Most traditional therapy models require you to dive into your subconscious and produce memories of your traumas, abuses, and negative events that shaped your unhealthy beliefs. Is this safe and effective?
The experience is often painful for both the client and therapist. Clients have to endure recounting and recalling the intense feelings associated with hurtful events, and therapists have to encourage them to feel that misery. Is this really the only way to heal your pain?
In this article, we’re going to tell you why it’s not necessary to remember pain points in order to heal them and how you can find resolutions without recounting painful memories.
According to traditional talk therapy, the pain from your past has created negative belief systems, and to change those belief systems, you must bring the pain to the surface and process the emotions, which requires feeling the original pain.
The therapist’s role is to facilitate this process by asking leading questions to help you dig deeper. Her job is to help you feel the pain, so that you can understand it and move on from it. The standard therapeutic model suggests that you can’t move on from the pain of an event until you have brought it to light and understood if fully.
This type of therapy can be effective, but when it’s not, it’s often because:
If talk therapy isn’t effective, what else can be done? Can you process the pain from a trauma or hurtful even without recalling the emotions attached? Is it possible to dissociate from a pain and heal it?
In traditional talk therapy models, it is believed that you have to recall the pain from an event to heal it because pain and emotion are trapped in the subconscious mind, which we have no access to. But that’s not true – we do have access to our subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is the part of the brain that is beyond your conscious awareness. That’s why it’s called the (sub)conscious – it’s below the conscious mind.
In fact, a great way to think about the conscious vs. subconscious is to picture a glacier. While a glacier might look huge on the surface, the vast majority of it is held beneath the surface of the water.
Your mind works the same way with your conscious mind representing the part of the glacier you can see above the surface, and the subconscious representing what’s below the surface. In fact, 95% of your mind is composed of the subconscious, so your conscious awareness is really only 5% of your entire consciousness.
In traditional talk therapy, you have to bring what’s below the surface to the surface, because that model suggest you can’t make changes beneath the surface. But that’s not true – you can! In fact, you can use your conscious mind to access the memories beneath the surface and heal them right where they are!
There’s no need to feel the pain from a memory in order to heal it. Instead, you can recall the memory, and in an instant, begin the healing process. As a result, all the associated memories, bodily sensations, emotions, and pain will be healed.
Think of it like a flower. If you damage the roots of a flower, the petals, leaves, stems, and everything you see on the surface will be damaged. If you damage a petal, the entire flower won’t likely die. That’s because everything is connected to the root – everything in that flower requires the root to survive.
Your memories are like the flower. The pain, associated memories and sensations all need the root memory to survive. Of course, we’re not suggesting you delete the memory! Instead, you can heal that core memory, and in doing so, you’ll heal all the links without ever having to experience them.
To do this, you can follow this process:
Once you follow that process, the memory and all the associated attachments will be healed. By briefly strengthening those associations through habit, you’ll strengthen the newly made connections and experience sustainable change.
You’ll need to follow a specific process to slow down your brain waves, recall a memory, disrupt the negative associated patterns and then replace the patterns with positive associations. It takes some time and effort to find out which process will work best for you. To help you out, we’ve describe three different techniques below. Click the links on the headlines to learn more about each technique.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) – With EMDR, you work with a licensed and certified professional to recall a traumatic event and then use movement to disrupt the painful associations of that memory. This is often achieved through eye movements or other physical movements to activate multiple areas of the brain, effectively confusing the memory and shifting the energy of the event. EMDR is often successful in only a few sessions.
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) – EFT works in a very similar way to EMDR in that you work with a trained professional to recall painful memories or limiting beliefs. As you do so, you tap certain points on the body to engage different areas of the brain, again working to dislodge the painful associations of the memory.
Soul Happy Technique – The soul happy technique works in a very similar way to EMDR and EFT, except it can be performed autonomously. In other words, through guided video sessions, you learn how to self-direct the process of recalling and dislodging the memories. After the painful associations have been removed, you then work to replace those associations with feelings of confidence, joy and compassion.
We are so excited that you have stopped by! We want you to be Soul Happy too and have compiled some of our best articles and vlogs here for you to better understand our program and yourself!
XoXo,
Tracy and Cara
