Trauma healing is not about focussing on the past

Contrary to popular belief, to integrate trauma is not necessary to investigate your past, to feel all your feelings around events, to talk about it in many different angles, understanding and forgiving all parties and spending months and years in sessions and different healing modalities. 

The stories and memories of such events can give you some meaning and understanding. But what will enable you to move on with your life and finally go through life without responding from the old outdated triggers, is the discharging of “old stuck” fight/flight/freeze/ shutdown responses that stayed “locked” in your nervous system, crystallised into patterns. 

In other words, when you go through difficulties that are beyond your capacity to cope and your nervous system keeps the fight/flight/freeze/shutdown charges within it, you continue to react in such ways in the present, because these old charges stayed in your body. 

It’s a physiological phenomenon. And through years of chronic stress and/or trauma, you can accumulate many of these responses. 

By discharging these “stuck” responses from the body and building resilience in your nervous system, you will be able to face life with all its challenges and beauty, without the overwhelm and reactivity of “old stuck” response patterns.