I feel like I’ve discovered an amazing secret -- something that could end war and other conflicts and wipe out much of the misery in the world, help us transform our relationships and the way we feel about and inside ourselves. It amazes me that hardly anybody seems to know this secret and yet it’s so basic, it’s something that affects us all even though we don’t exactly know we’re being affected. We can feel the effects all the time but we don’t know what we’re feeling.
The secret is that all the old traumas we’ve experienced in our lives, all the bad feelings we’ve felt around and about those traumas, are still inside of us, controlling our actions, affecting how we feel now. It’s all still there -- everything we didn’t want to see or feel or remember later about whatever bad things happened to us, so we quickly boxed it up and shoved it out of sight down into the basement of the houses of our minds. There’s no time in the basement in the house of the mind, so not only is all of that down there, but let’s say that you yourself at all your different ages are still living down there as well, like the little dolls inside the bigger doll in the Russian nest of dolls. And when something happens now that resembles the traumatic thing that happened when you were a kid, then the particular version of you that reacted to that thing when it originally happened will react again inside you, as if that child version of you and the current adult version are holographs juxtaposed on top of each other. So if, say, you felt terror as a child when an angry, irrational, and possibly drunk person raged, then you will probably feel terror again whenever anyone rages now, even a little bit, in the same way. Even if you hardly know that person, even if you know that person’s anger has nothing to do with you and cannot harm you, even if you know that person is just having a bad day. And nothing -- no matter how much you tell yourself that what you’re feeling is irrational or try to control the feeling in some other way – will make the fear go away.
And that’s just one example. Whatever old things you used to feel and believe when you were a kid, you’re still feeling and believing in this shadow world, this basement in your mental house, and those feelings, those beliefs, are filtering up through the floorboards and coloring your present day reality – maybe even controlling it -- whether you know it’s happening or not.
I read a book once called Heal Your Past, Change Your Future. It said that you if you want to make something new, different, good, better happen in your life, you should heal your old, childhood pain. Which is basically what I’ve come to believe, what I’m saying now. The book had a bunch of exercises where you examined your past experiences and felt the old feelings again. I tried doing some of the exercises but I didn’t have much luck feeling the old feelings and pretty quickly I gave up. Which is about comparable to what has happened with other self-help processes and even regular therapy I’ve tried. None of them really worked for me, until I found the one thing that does work.
Actually I found two things. One of them was hypnosis, which I used a little with a hypnotherapist in the 1980s to help me get past a phobia of flying and a phobia of public speaking. The other thing, the thing that I’ve been doing with the help of a psychotherapist for the last ten years or so, the thing which has truly helped me heal my past so that I can change my future, is called EMDR (it’s short for eye motion desensitization reprocessing). Both hypnosis and EMDR work, I believe, because they help you track down the old frozen traumas inside yourself, to get to them where they’re still alive and change them, heal them finally once and for all, in the basement of the house of your mind.
Until you do that, I believe, you’ll continue to be at their mercy. Your thoughts, feelings, fears, behaviors, and relationship patterns will all be affected by them, and no matter how much you want to think and feel and act differently, no matter how much you want to think positively to manifest things in your life, no matter how hard you try to use that other Secret, parts of you will continue to remain stuck in the old fears, traumas, patterns of your past. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there’s something that really works, something that’s readily available to anyone who has the means to go to a therapist, something that’s even sometimes available through free or low-cost mental health clinics.
EMDR – that’s the real secret, the other secret nobody wants to talk about -- that’s how you can heal your past and change your future, how you can really change your thoughts and alter the trajectory of your life, how you can get truly what you want. I know it, because I’ve experienced it myself.
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