There's a bit in Richard Carlson's stupendously good book, You Can Be Happy No Matter What, where he talks about traumatic events, and really nails it.
The first thing he makes clear is that, in the very, very simplest of terms:
Because if we imagine a life where that past event no longer has any hold over us, and we’re living a happy, peaceful life, then, while we may be able to recall the event, we’ve forgotten the ‘hurt’.
Richard says,
“If we can learn to stop frightening ourselves with our own thoughts, we are on our way to a happier life, irrespective of what we had to go through.”
When we remind ourselves that 100% of our actual experience of life is brought to us via the Principle of Thought, it makes total sense that to heal, is to forget, because ultimately, if it's not there, there's no pain.
🤷♀️
But how can it be ‘not there’?
This is how an innate health practitioner (like me, Hi 👋🏻) will help you through past traumatic experiences.
In a different book, there’s a beautiful little description of a session, where the client, having been pointed in this direction—towards forgetting a deeply traumatic event—gets quite upset and protests,
“But I don’t know if I can!” 😫
The reply that comes is simply for the ages:
“That's my job. I'm going to help you learn how to forget. Your job is to want to forget.”
😙👌🏻
We’ve been so comprehensively indoctrinated into a model that says to ‘overcome’ trauma, we have to re-live it… when in reality that just keeps it alive.
This mass-hypnosis around trauma makes it look like ‘forgetting’ is either impossible, or just plain denial.
To be clear: in an Innate Health healing session, it’s not that past experiences don’t come up, or are deliberately avoided. It’s just that when we have a solid grounding in what thought is/how it works, these previously painful memories take on a completely different characteristic, and they get resolved, naturally.
They lose their power.
The forgetting begins.
And the phrase ‘post-traumatic growth’ starts to make more sense.
💟
Giles