The Future Equals The Past. Or Does It?
Posted on May 06, 2016 by Alicia Keller Thompson, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Your brain is always living in the past, recreating your future based on what it has learned from the past. For trauma survivors this means trouble!
Do you know what the crazy thing about your brain is? It is always living in the past! Well, not always, but in response to trauma, your brain believes that the future equals the past. What happened before will happen again. Your brain keeps you on high alert for danger, and anything that is vaguely reminiscent of the experience, a sound, smell, taste, or color, can trigger deep fear, anxiety, grief, anger, or a combination of those emotions. Thus, surviving is only one small piece of recovery from trauma.
This is where Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) comes in. EFT helps the brain reprogram itself to pre-trauma reality. EFT does not erase the memory of the traumatic experience, rather, it takes the “charge” out of it. When you hear that sound, smell that odor, or see that color, your brain no longer associates that sensation with the trauma.
This is my personal experience with using EFT to help reprogram my brain to stop freaking out when I ran. So, here is the story, when I was five years old, I ran out in the street and was hit by a car. I was in the hospital and then a body cast for about 3 months. My body recovered and everything was well and good.
Then, when I was 34, I started training for a half marathon. Aside from the normal discomfort of starting to run, I began to have panic attacks when I ran. I got all paranoid and felt like I couldn’t breath. Not fun, right?
At the time I was just learning EFT and decided to use it to help clear the panic and discomfort I felt when I ran. I also started getting a form of biofeedback which calmed my brain’s automatic fear and stress response to running. To be honest, even though I have seen this stuff work miracles, I was not really sure it would work for me. There was a part of me that just assumed that I was broken beyond repair.
Well, I am here to tell you that the results have been amazing. Yesterday, I did a track workout and felt only the normal discomfort of athletically pushing my body. Not just that, but a small part of me actually enjoyed the workout.
The moral of this story? If you have experienced trauma, you are not broken beyond repair! Far from it, you are stronger than you think and there are resources out there.
