Emotional trauma results from a shutting down of your ongoing experience and in particular the feeling dimension of that experience.

That reaction and it’s consequences are so central to the concept of emotional trauma. Definition of emotionally traumatic experience is as follows: an emotionally traumatic experience is one that produces a shutting down of your ability to process the experience as it occurs, particularly in its feeling or emotional dimension. The severity of the trauma is related to the degree of shut down, and the extent to which it carries over into your ongoing life experience thereafter.

Each emotionally traumatic experience leaves a residue of unprocessed feelings – feelings generated at the time, but blocked from experience and held in limbo. To keep these feelings from consciousness, you restrict your general ability to feel, muting you’re feeling experience of the world. So you feel less on an ongoing basis. In this way emotional trauma also produces a disruption of the feeling process itself. This disruption seldom occurs just once. It is ongoing. The more you’re feeling process is disrupted the more you block experience, adding to your stock of unprocessed feelings.

This, in turn, increases the ongoing disruption. Unprocessed feelings may come near or to the surface in current situations, making it hard to separate past from present. They may surface has generalized discomfort, free-floating anxiety or even as flashbacks.

The emotional disorganization created by emotionally traumatic experience is both reflected in and accomplished by the accompanying somatic disorganization. The excessive tension used to block feelings at the time of a trauma may become chronic.

You may unknowingly organize your life around avoiding your unprocessed feelings.

But it is also important to understand that a common thread connects all forms of emotional trauma, across levels of severity and across different types of psychological content. That thread is the shutting down of feeling through neuromuscular disorganization, and it is through reclaiming that lost ability to feel that healing is possible.

Healing The Consequences Of Past Emotional Trauma

Emotionally traumatic experiences can have a significant negative effect on your life, even years after the experience occurred.

The disruptive consequences of past emotional trauma can be significantly reduced, if not totally eliminated.

Whatever events produced that trauma in the past are over now – what remains are the residual effects of those events on your current ongoing experience.

Healing involves mitigating those residual effects, and reclaiming capabailities and possibilities that you gave up as part of your response to the trauma. Healing as a psychosomatic process, just as emotional trauma, has both physiological and somatic dimensions, so must the healing of that emotional trauma.
On the psychological side, healing requires a willingness to process previously unprocessed feelings and to reclaim the feeling process itself. On the somatic side, healing involves letting go of the neuromuscular blocks to “off limits” feeling states and regaining access to habitually neglected states of body organization.

Psychosematic Reintergration

Emotional trauma has been characterized as a disruption of the feeling process, and the healing as the repair and restoration of that process. Approach to healing focuses strongly on feeling as a psychosomatic process, and on reintegration of the psychosomatic fragmentation that emotional trauma produces.

Emotional trauma leaves a residue of unprocessed feelings held in your body by patterns of muscular tension as those tensions are reduced, the feelings themselves can flood into consciousness.

This can be scary, because you feel as if you are right back in the original event, as threatened and helpless as you were then.
You can process that experience as it occurs. Once you do, you no longer need to expend large amounts of energy blocking the feelings, and they lose their emotional hold over you. The core of healing is in the experience – in the process and completing previously blocked feelings.

An emotionally traumatic experience is one that produces a shutting down of your ability to process the experience as it occurs, particularly in its feeling or emotional dimension.

The severity of the trauma is related to the degree of shut down, and the extent to which it carries over into your ongoing life experience thereafter.

Each emotionally traumatic experience leaves a residue of unprocessed feelings – feelings generated at the time, but blocked from experience and held in limbo.

The more you’re feeling process is disrupted the more you block experience, adding to your stock of unprocessed feelings.

Unprocessed feelings may come near or to the surface in current situations, making it hard to separate past from present.

You may unknowingly organize your life around avoiding your unprocessed feelings.

A common thread connects all forms of emotional trauma. That thread is the shutting down of feeling through neuromuscular disorganization, and it is through reclaiming that lost ability to feel- that healing is possible.

Trauma is a sensory memory.

Whatever events produced that trauma in the past are over now – what remains are the residual effects of those events on your current ongoing experience.

The core of healing is in the experience – in the process and completing previously blocked feelings.