Welcome, Self-awareness is an essential part of trauma healing. Without knowing who you are and how you respond to yourself, people, and situations, everything in life becomes harder and harder. One question I ask myself is that what would it be like if it is made easy? Today, I’m here to provide an easy and simple way to practice positive self-talk for your successful healing.
Hello, my name is Hong Jeong and I’m a licensed therapist specializing in treating trauma and anxiety. This is our virtual therapy sessions #4 on how to overcome trauma. If you have missed our previous sessions, I’d highly encourage you to watch our previous session first. Firstly, the important part of healing is tracking your progress. In our last session, we talked about cultivating the power of our positive beliefs or positive thoughts.
Let’s Review
#1. How would you describe your mood in the past week on a scale of 0 to 10 (0 being the most unpleasant and 10 being the most pleasant you can feel)?
#2. What emotional and physical change did you notice when noticing your both negative and positive thoughts?
#3 Can you tell me at least 3 positive or neutral thoughts you’ve reinforced?
Well done! Today, we will continue working on tools to access our higher brain function. Self-talk happens consciously or subconsciously. This affects our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and sensations in our body. Self-talk can be both negative and positive. However, you’re conditioned or told to be positive. When forcing ourselves to have positive thoughts, this experience itself can be negative. The more effort we put into making positive experiences, the worse we can feel. I believe that authentic positive experience comes from a sense of acceptance. Accepting our experiences whether they are positive or negative is a difficult part. In this consumer society, everything is at our fingertips.
Thus, we want to practice appreciation and acceptance instead of automatically or subconsciously trying to achieve something. In order to do so, I’d like to borrow the concepts developed by the Internal Family System, IFS. The Internal Family System is a proven tool for healing trauma and developed by Ricahrd Schwatz. The premise behind Internal Family System is that we have different sub personalities. Each personality has its own characteristic, which means that they have their own life, dislikes, history, qualities, and pain. We often say that a part of me does not want to do that. We have parts within us and each part or personality has a distinct role in protecting and preserving ourselves.
There are generally 3 distinct roles. The first role is manager. Managers are the parts that maintain a daily functioning and protecting other parts from feeling any hurt or rejection. Managers control, evaluate, and take care of our internal state. You can see manager as a parent or caregiver in a way. Another role is exiles. Exiles are the parts that carry trauma and pain. We often do not want exiles to come to the surface because other parts do not feel the pain, fear, panic, or other intense emotions. Protective parts often suppress exilies. Another protective role is firefighters.
Firefighter are the parts that have the same goals as managers. Firefighter keep our internal state from feeling vulnerable or other unwanted emotions in an extreme way. Firefights tend to be very reactive when exilies are activated. Firefighters use extreme strategies such as drug or alcohol use, sex, binge-eating, binge-watching, or binge playing video games.
We experience an internal conflict when one part becomes dominant over others. That is to say that one particular part within us can feel more vulnerable or reactive due to its role. Let’s say my boss starts yelling at me. My firefighter part can be activated and wants to quit my job and do binge playing video games as a way to protect myself from feeling “insecure.”
With the use of IFS, we can practice self-talk in a way that we create a space for vulnerable parts. It’s similar to when we get frustrated, we go for a walk or take a time-out in our room. We create a safe space for us to feel safe and go back to our normal functioning. The essence of IFS is to give a time and space to vulnerable parts in hopes of restoring mental balance and harmony.
It’s better experienced than explained.
Find your seat and allow yourself to sit comfortably. Extend your awareness around your body. Let’s embrace all the sensations. Now, we’re going to get to know our parts. Let’s think of one upsetting situation. Allow yourself to feel the emotions attached to the memory and also notice the related sensations in your body. Let’s get to know this vulnerable part of you. Ask this part if it is safe to be separated from you Maintain the comfortable space from this part so you can hear it better. Now let’s see how you feel about this part. Ask this part what it wants you to know. Now if it is okay, you can ask this part what it is afraid of. Extend your gratitude for whatever it let you know. If it feels safe, ask this part what it wants from you. When it feels safe, take a deep breath and bring your attention to the room or wherever you’re, Healing comes from self-awareness. Let’s check in with yourself by using this meditation technique at least once or twice a day. To heal our trauma, we want to have at least one or two tools that we can consistently do. So now practice, practice, and practice.
Take care of yourself and do your healing every day.
If you need assistance with letting go of your childhood trauma, please schedule a 20 minute free consultation with me.