Making the Shift: Evolving away from multiple types of trauma, Part 2
Monday, June 28th, 2010 • PTSD Recovery Tips •
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about why PTSD coping mechanisms aren’t enough. In that post I included a comment from a blog reader about how she doesn’t often think of her abuse but the effects of it continue to surface in her present life. She wrote,
I do practice catching my negative thoughts and trying to transform them or stop them, they keep returning and replaying the more I try to get rid of them.
Today, I want to talk about why this happens. The reason begins here:
Your mind is divided into 3 parts: the conscious, the unconscious and the subconscious. You unconscious mind controls all of your autunomic functions, like regulating your breathing, for example, and the beating of your heart. For this discussion, we’ll set that part of your mind aside.
Your conscious mind controls all of your short-term memory, rational thought processes and decision-making. It equals 12% of the thinking part of your brain.
The subconscious, the other 88% of your thoughtful mind, contains all of your long-term memory, feelings, beliefs and interpretations. All of these ingredients drive your behavior and inform your conscious mind in ways it does not even recognize.
What does all of this mean? It’s the reason why you can’t “just let it go”. In your conscious mind you can make the choice not to care about your past trauma. However, the subsconcious mind has made an imprint of every experience you’ve ever had. Contained in thousands of neural pathways is encoded information that informs your subconscious mind every minute of every day. Since the subconscious mind cannot delineate between the past and present, reality and imagination, it reacts to everything as if it were real and happening in the moment.
In order to be completely free of the past it is often necessary to resolve issues in the deep levels of the subconscious mind. Story, metaphor, and symbolism are all the language of the subconscious. Popular methods of reaching and relieving the subsonscious mind include information processing therapies, hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. I used all of these methods in my recovery, and I hear from many other survivors who also found relief by working with the subconscious in some way.
There are reasons why healing PTSD is not an easy thing to do. This short explanation today is a small fragment of how tangled up things can become in the post-trauma mind. For the rest of the day, feel good about yourself. Your struggle is for good reason.
Share all of this information with the next person who says to you, “Why can’t you just get over it?”!
Photo acknowledgement.
Tags: coping mechanism, hypnosis, information processing, neuro linguistic programming, ptsd
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Hi,
I’ve been listening to the audio programs and read everything that comes through email and also joined the book club. I’d like to say that this is my one of my huge struggles. I have been seeking a therapist in my area who deals with PTSD in the methods you mention. I have two leads which I will be following up with tomorrow. Thank you for such a detailed and understandable explanation in this blog.
As always,
Many blessings to you.
@Donna — Now THAT’S what I like to hear, someone seeking information and using what she learns to put the shift into action! Good luck with the leads. Keep in touch and let us know how it goes.
This is so “right on” Michele! This is what I discovered is what I’ve come to know as the “hard work” of this healing journey; to integrate the past into my today that I can live free of that pain forever. Things will and do “come up” but are no longer enough to “shut me down” the way it was…now it’s more of a memory than a “reliving” of the past that tormented me for so many years. Great post!