One of the things I do with clients is to help them process original trauma differently through a form of reparenting that I call memory hacking. There are 2 key points in this technique, which are :
- to realise that we can’t change the actual event because the mind knows it happened and it will reject ‘pretending like it never happened’.
- to change the way we experienced the event. What this means is that we can help our inner child through it by giving them support and resources that they didn’t have originally.
So if our inner child is scared or lonely, or dysregulated in any way during the event, then we introduce a calm, loving, supportive ‘grown-up’ in the form of our loving adult (as per Inner Bonding) or Self (as per Internal Family Systems) who will witness the inner child, helping them to feel safe with the emotions and move through them. In neurological terms, this ‘grown-up’ helps the child to regulate their emotions, which they weren’t able to do in the first place.
After all, “trauma without emotion is just information” (credit Dr Don Wood), and through helping our past self to regulate their emotions, then the emotion is released and the event loses the emotional charge.
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