trauma healing

What’s So Good About Feeling Bad?

In the last few days I’ve had a couple of people close to me tell me that they didn’t want to talk about painful experiences that they have had. They said things like “I don’t want to dwell on it” or “I really want a cigarette”, rather than talking about something that made them feel bad.

We’re not always in an appropriate social context to heal emotional pain and it’s wise to be discerning about when and with whom we choose to share vulnerable feelings. Nobody really wants to feel bad; we all naturally want to feel happy and generally speaking we tend to get more of whatever we focus on in life.

However we live in a society which tends to glorify intellect over feelings. Many of us have been taught to suppress emotions while growing up; especially those that our family and friends were uncomfortable with. Few people really understand what emotional trauma is, how it operates or how to heal it.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How I Healed My Boys High School Choir Bullying Trauma

I went to an all-boys high school where the first grade rugby team enjoyed the highest social status. Anyone who wasn’t into aggressive body-contact sports got their head kicked in other ways, and boys on each level of the social hierarchy boosted their flagging self-esteem by bullying the boys on the level below. Any innate sensitivity in a boy was crushed both in the classroom and in the play/battle-ground.

Although I was highly intelligent and generally got good grades, this wasn’t valued as highly as sporting prowess at my high school and being a thin, nerdy kid who was the youngest in my year, I didn’t do so well at school socially.

I spent my lunch times singing in the school choir or hanging out in the computer room learning to use the new machines that the teachers didn’t know what to do with. This was a couple of years before the computer revolution went mainstream and decades before Big Bang Theory made nerds hot prime-time-viewing commodities.

Childhood bullying can leave our adult selves feeling self-conscious and hyper-vigilant to criticism from others.

Since I was a late developer my voice didn’t break until well after high school. It was embarrassing still being in the alto section of the all-boy choir as I headed into Year 11 so I quit and joined the lighting crew in the hall instead where I could feel good about solving technical problems backstage and wouldn’t have to perform in front of people and end up feeling so self-conscious.

Fast-forward 30 years to 2017 and I’m studying music full-time at a local tertiary college. My dream is to use a combination of music and comedy to teach the principles of trauma awareness and emotional intelligence to the masses. I think that would be great fun for me because along the way I’ll get to overcome my remaining insecurities in terms of freedom of self-expression, and it would also give an extra dimension of meaning and purpose to what I’m doing. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

Journey Therapy

Journey Therapy is a physical and emotional healing technique based on a guided visualization described in the book The Journey by Brandon Bays. The process is based on Neurolinguistic Programming Timeline Therapy and involves imagining yourself travelling through your body to a location where trapped emotion is stored. During the visualization you have the opportunity to get complete with people from the past, say what you feel you needed to say to them at the age that you got hurt, allow them to respond, release the painful emotion and forgive them. Releasing the trapped emotion heals the trauma and sets you free to move on with your life.

The process is guided by unconscious responses to questions from the therapist, and facilitates releasing emotions that you may not even be aware of. It works best in the context of a trusting therapeutic relationship where you feel free to let your imagination run free and express whatever emotions arise during the process. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

Emotional Release Breathwork

Breathwork is based on the idea that emotional energy from traumatic events can get stuck in our bodies, central nervous system, and/or brain; and that conscious breathing techniques can be used to liberate it. Even the trauma we experience during birth may be stuck in our subconscious affecting us on a routine daily basis despite us not consciously remembering it. Using breathwork to resolve unhealed birth trauma is sometimes referred to as rebirthing.

A facilitator takes you through a series of intense breathing exercises that bring repressed emotions to the surface, liberating them from your mind and body. Often done to background music or primal drumbeats, similar to those used in Primal Therapy.

Advantages:

  • You don’t have to go over the story

  • You don’t need to know what caused the emotional pain to heal it

  • Can be very powerful

Disadvantages:

  • Hard to know when you’ve had enough of it

  • Not a mainstream therapy

  • Practitioners may have minimal qualifications

  • Association with rebirthing can sound dubious

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By Graham Stoney, ago