Brad Schipke says people avoid trauma because the emotions feel terrifying. He suggests treating each traumatized feeling as a separate inner person you can talk to like a compassionate coach. This creates distance from the fear and lets you offer care instead of running from pain.
Most people are terrified of their trauma and their emotions associated with the trauma, so they never face it. But if you never face it, then it will never get healed. So you have to face the trauma in a manageable way for you. And one of the best ways that I learned how to do that was by seeing each one of those traumatized pieces of me as if it was its own unique person, right? So seeing this emotion as a part of my mind and then talking to that part as if it's another person. And what that does is it gives you separation from that emotion, so it grounds you, and then it also puts you in the position of a coach or a helper of that part. So you can actually show that part love and you can guide it to heal and recover. And in that sense, you are able to independently help yourself. And it's much less scary because what you realize is that all of these scary emotions that you feel are just hurt parts of yourself. It's less of a terrifying thing that you need to confront and more of a labor of love of wanting to help this terrified, distraught, traumatized part of you. If you can see that this part has just been terribly hurt, you actually want to go and help it. If you want to learn how to do that and the exact techniques to actually process your trauma, join my school community. It's in my bio. You can get a free trial.
