According to psychotherapist and author Eugene Gendlin PhD, traumatic experiences are stored in the body. In fact, all your accumulated life experiences, including traumatic events whether large or small, are held in various parts of your physical body and re-accessed through what he calls the ‘felt sense’.
Unconscious factors affecting the body keep the traumatized feelings in place and therefore no amount of talking about the experience (as in conventional therapy) can properly release these energies trapped in the body.
This explains why therapies that deal with traumatic experiences in the place where the mind and body meet are so effective – this can be understood as entering the zone between the conscious and the unconscious. Energy-based methodologies are particularly effective in accomplishing this.
EFT/Matrix Reimprinting is a particularly brilliant example of such a methodology. It combines the powerful releasing effect of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) with a skillfully structured visualization technique that allows you to be dis-identified with your traumatized self. Your traumatized self is visualized as a separate entity from your core self.
The key is in allowing someone suffering from trauma to safely access their bodily felt sense of the trauma as a observer. Tapping on acupressure points during the process rapidly and permanently dissolves the trapped emotions that occurred originally in reaction to the trauma but, being trapped in the body, were persistently disturbing the person in their day-to-day lives.
The completion of the process involves ‘reimprinting’ the subconscious on an energetic level with the relaxed and comfortable emotions that the person has themselves now accessed.
The result is typically a surprising new ability to comfortably recall and describe the past traumatic experience in detail with complete freedom from the any of the previously distressed and debilitating feelings. What may remain instead is compassionate sadness which is very healthy. A tangible sense of relief, like having a heavy load lifted, is typically felt. Self-acceptance and self-confidence magically return, and there is deeply felt relief from the gamut of stress symptoms associated with unresolved trauma.
Case study – healing from a lifetime of low self-esteem and mistrust
A client I recently worked with in my consulting room was, with this method, able to access and heal a subconscious traumatic memory from age 18 months that had profoundly impacted her whole life. For decades now she has suffered from negative self-esteem and been affected by a core mistrust of people and of life that has undermined her self-expression, her creativity and her ability to use her talents as a gifted artist and art therapist. The accessing and successful release of her trauma is a typical result with EFT-Matrix Reimprinting, and, for most people I have worked with, tends to be life-changing.
To find out more, contact me through my website.