The importance of processing trauma in more healthy ways

The biggest challenge that we see with unresolved trauma experiences, big or small, is that the unresolved/unprocessed/poorly processed “trauma emotions” creates certain unhelpful narratives or “limiting beliefs” that then can impact many areas of one’s life.

Beliefs like I am not good enough. Everyone will leave me in the end.
Who would love me anyway.
If I can’t control things, bad things will happen.
Bad things always happen to me.
I am not safe.
The world is a bad place.
Conflict is BAD.
You simply can’t rely on people.
I can’t afford to get things wrong.
I can’t be my true self.
I am bad.
And many more perhaps …

It can lead to a cascade of events leading to more unresolved trauma events often with the same theme.

It’s insidious because even if the specific trauma was limited to a “time and place”, the narratives and beliefs that stemmed from that event is now generalized to many domains of one’s life and is not limited in time. 

So it’s a big challenge isn’t it?

To help long term, we may not only have to help reprocessing past traumas/gaining emotional literacy to process new traumas, we may have to clean up some of these associated/residual narratives or beliefs too.