Healing Trauma Imprints
The question is can we break free from the Past?
Can we really heal our Trauma Imprints?
The answer is YES we can.
YES you can.
Our biggest learning with clients is that deep, lasting healing requires working with the mind and body simultaneously. The Psychological and the Somatic parts both need attention if past trauma is to be overcome. This is the beauty of our Rapid Imprint Resolution Method TM and why it works so well with our clients.
We are getting a bit ahead of ourselves, let’s go back to basics…
So, What is Trauma?
Trauma refers to the emotional, psychological, or physical response to a deeply distressing or disturbing experience. It is wounding that can leave an emotional scar.
It can overwhelm an individual’s ability to cope, leaving lasting feelings of fear, helplessness, depression or anxiety. It can occur in childhood or in adulthood.
Trauma exists on a scale, with experiences ranging from mild emotional distress to severe. One person might experience an event as severely traumatic while another person experiencing the same traumatic event might experience it as mild on their scale. This is not a judgement on an individual’s response; it merely points to the fact that trauma is subjective for each human being.
This is why we need to firstly establish:
1. The impact caused by what has happened: the feelings inside someone because of the trauma.
- Being hyper vigilant
- Overthinking
- Trying to control everything because they have lost their sense of feeling ‘safe inside’
2. The conclusions an individual has drawn about themselves, others and the world because of the trauma. Conclusions like:
- Believing what happened was because they were stupid or deserved it
- Believing they are broken or faulty, or it is not safe to authentically be themselves
You see, the conclusions drawn from that wounding can create ‘Wonky Beliefs’
E.g. Believing
“I am only okay if I please people”,
“I am only okay if I succeed”,
“I am only okay if I have no needs”
“It’s not okay to be angry”
“It’s not okay to put myself first”
We often carry ‘Wonky Beliefs’ stemming from these imprints and hold them as personal truths. Interestingly, these are beliefs we would never apply to a friend, yet we continue to harshly apply them to ourselves.
Trauma Imprints
This is what we call a Trauma Imprint. It becomes part of our internal dialogue, stemming from our inner ‘blueprint’ or Life Script, and can play out in our everyday lives.
Trauma Imprints can manifest as flashbacks, emotional numbness, hyper-vigilance, difficulty trusting others, and a chronic sense of ‘not being good enough’, to name just a few. If the trauma occurred in childhood or adolescence, it can impair the development of self-identity. In adulthood, this often leads to limiting beliefs that diminish the overall quality of life.
Trauma is not only about what happened but also about what didn’t happen, especially during childhood. This is where gaps can form. Imagine a child who is constantly criticised for what they didn’t achieve, while their accomplishments are ignored or dismissed. This too can leave a Trauma Imprint, such as never feeling good enough or having chronically low self-worth, which, over time, can lead to depression or anxiety.
Here’s an analogy for you: If each of us were a brick wall, our ‘wonky beliefs’ would be like crooked bricks that destabilise the structure. These beliefs can also leave gaps, further weakening the wall.
The definition of Imprint is unfinished/unprocessed emotions that get stuck in the body.
The body needs to know the trauma is finished.
Trauma Loops
Another common symptom of trauma is that the patterns associated with the Trauma Imprint continue to replay in a loop in our lives. For example, if we do not believe we are valuable, we might accept poor treatment from colleagues, friends, or partners. We may also unwittingly sabotage opportunities because, deep down, we feel we do not deserve good things or success.
The symptoms of Trauma Imprints can be as varied and diverse as the individuals who carry them. Until we heal these imprints, we will continue to repeat these patterns, no matter how much we wish to stop.
In the ‘The Body Keeps Score’, Bessel A. van der Kolk suggests:
“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.”
The challenge for many of us is that it simply feels far too painful to allow ourselves to know what we know, to sit with the feelings and allow them to complete, or process. Thus we suppress, ignore, and even deny the depth of them because it feels unsafe to feel them
Trauma Hijacks The Brain
When you enter a state of heightened arousal, your thalamus can become overwhelmed, resulting in unintegrated images, sensations, thoughts, smells, and sounds of the trauma existing separately from your conscious experience.
At any given moment, your brain receives information through your senses—ears, eyes, nose, skin, and body—and this information converges in the thalamus. The thalamus acts as the brain’s conductor, organising and integrating these sensations. Trauma often manifests as sounds and images that trigger flashbacks. When this occurs, it is largely because the thalamus is unable to perform its role of synthesising these experiences.
This creates unintegrated fragments, which is why, after trauma, the world is experienced through a different nervous system. When the brain’s alarm system is activated, it automatically triggers preprogrammed physical escape responses in the oldest part of the brain. The survivor’s energy then becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos, often at the cost of spontaneous engagement with life. It can feel like having a faulty burglar alarm that constantly goes off, even when there’s no real threat.
It is essential to engage the whole person.
Body, Mind & Brain.
Trauma Changes The Brain In 3 Ways
1. Threat Perception System
The threat perception system is heightened. They perceive danger in situations where others see something manageable. This perception doesn’t come from the cognitive part of the brain but from the more primitive, core perceptual areas. These areas are responsible for ensuring the body’s safety and are driven by fear, leading to an exaggerated sense of threat.
2. Filtering System
The filtering system, which helps you distinguish between what is relevant in the moment and what can be dismissed, becomes impaired. Located higher up in the brain, this system allows most people to ignore irrelevant information. However, in individuals with PTSD, the brain starts focusing on these details, making it hard to concentrate on the present. The filtering system’s inefficiency makes it difficult to fully engage in everyday situations.
3. Self-Sensing System
The self-sensing system, which runs through the midline structures of the brain, becomes blunted. This system is responsible for your experience of yourself, and its dulling is likely a defensive response. When in a state of terror, people feel it physically—in their hearts and gut. To cope with this discomfort, some turn to drugs or other methods to dampen these intense internal sensations. However, dampening the body’s response to pain also reduces the ability to feel pleasure, sensuality, excitement, and connection—key aspects of being human.
Additionally, the reduced ability of the prefrontal cortex to regulate emotions leads to ongoing stress, anxiety, and emotional dysregulation, as the “thinking brain” essentially goes offline after trauma.
One tool that works almost magically with all of these challenges in the way trauma becomes trapped in our bodies is Emotional Freedom Techniques.
When combined with other powerful tools like Transactional Analysis it provides massive transformation.
When we are reliving, or thinking about, what has upset or traumatised us in the past, there is a flashbulb memory that comes up and produces a rapid visual memory that triggers certain thoughts, feelings and behaviours in us. It sends a signal down a neural pathway and generates an emotional charge, and the resulting somatic – or even visceral – response in the body. We feel like we did when that original event happened.
EFT Tapping, used while thinking or talking about said memory, has a unique facet called de-potentiation. This means it literally dissolves the negative emotional charge we feel when we are thinking about the memory, meaning we no longer feel the same way when we think about it.
EFT also dissolves the neural pathways the signal comes down, literally disengaging the triggered response we have. It doesn’t take the memory away, but rather renders us able to think about the event with no emotional reaction – or even abreaction.
Another beautiful facet of EFT is that it engages the left and right hemispheres of the brain and helps with memory reconsolidation so the brain can file the memory away in the right order, and even recall parts that were missing.
This works so beautifully alongside many modalities and techniques, but has particular power when used with Transactional Analysis and Psychotherapeutic Coaching methods, because it enables powerful progress through the dismantling of the issue at the root and enabling the client to truly move forward in a way they likely couldn’t before.
Here’s how we work with clients to break free from the past and heal trauma imprints:
- Heal the root wounds
- Regulate the nervous system and reconnect with the body’s sensations
- Identify the recurring trauma patterns, ‘wonky beliefs’, and gaps that continue to show up in the present
- Challenge these wonky beliefs using cognitive tools
- Rewrite old beliefs and reinforce these changes to create new neural pathways
- Use attunement techniques from EFT/Tapping and psychotherapy to fill in the gaps
When you work this way, success is inevitable and the chains that have bound you simply dissolve away. It works like magic, yet it’s rooted in the very ways we are built – physically, energetically and emotionally.
If you’d like to chat with us about this method or anything else we’ve mentioned here, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Main – Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash
