How to Stop Traumatic Memories Blocking Grief

A powerful way to neutralise traumatic memories that are preventing grieving.

Key points:

• Emotionally charged memories of traumatic loss can make it hard to move beyond them.
• Traumatic memories block the opportunity for the normal grief and sadness that lead gradually to healing.
• Human givens therapists deal effectively with the trauma memories first.

A book I am reading made me momentarily very sad. Not the book itself or the subject matter, which is very thought-provoking. It’s called The Hidden Power of Questions in a World That Wants Answers by philosopher Lani Watson.¹ Watson recalls going to see her therapist, explaining, “I had begun attending therapy, not for the first or last time, to work through a traumatic experience from my late teens in which I had lost a treasured friend in unthinkable and unbearable circumstances.”

The therapist asked: “What is one thing that you can’t do now that you want to be able to do in the future?” Watson recognised later that the question could have taken her in many directions but that she understood it in terms of how she wanted things to be different as a result of the therapy. She thought about it and replied that she wished to be able to put a photo of her friend by her bed and smile when she saw it.

She continued with the therapy for another year, exploring the associated painful thoughts and feelings, and went on to comment in her book, “Yes, I do want to have a picture of my friend on my bedside (I still don’t) … but [the question] was an opportunity to reflect on why I was there and how I wanted or needed things to change.”

It is no surprise to me, as a human givens therapist, that how we ask questions is often key to transformations, but what made me sad was that Watson has seemingly remained traumatised for so long by the circumstances of her friend’s tragic death.

The Rewind Technique

Human givens therapists are trained in a refined version of the rewind technique,² a noninvasive method of neutralising persistent, disabling high emotional arousal associated with trauma, reactivated any time a reminder is triggered. The method is extremely powerful and is carried out with the client in a state of deep relaxation, to avoid any risk of retraumatisation. Although it will not help everyone (nothing helps everyone), we have extremely high success rates, usually in just one session.

What I mean by “one session” is that, by the end of that session, when successful, the traumatic event has been converted into a narrative memory of something still deeply sad or tragic but no longer emotionally overwhelming. The technique does not magic away feelings and beliefs that are held about the event or its circumstances, and that is why, in human givens training, it is stressed that the rewind technique is not a standalone technique but must always be just one tool within an overall focus on helping clients recover and go on to meet their needs effectively.

I once saw a client whose partner had died in a horrific road traffic accident that was none of his making. They were due to get married in three weeks. She came to see me over a year after the tragedy, as she was still struggling to function or find pleasure in anything. We were able to use the rewind technique successfully to neutralise the high emotion still associated with her partner’s death, eliminating the almost constant triggers that floored her.

This enabled her to start to grieve him in a calmer way, without the constant intrusion of the horror scenario that she had imagined, and truly to come to terms not only with his loss but also the loss of their future together. I encouraged her to choose a way to celebrate him—she chose to light a candle once a week and think about what they had shared together. But I have had other clients who did, indeed, want to have a photo by the bed or elsewhere in the house and be able to feel pleasure in seeing it.

Most importantly, in the case of this client, we used guided imagery as a means for her to imagine moving forward, always keeping a place for her lost partner in her heart (visualising herself lighting that candle for as long as she needed to), recognising what he would want for her and rehearsing ways that she could open up her life again. In the safe space of the therapy room, she could allow herself to imagine happiness and what it might look like, without feeling the guilt that had previously assailed her at the prospect. In deep relaxation, that negative voice was stilled, giving positive expectations a chance to be experienced.

A Crucial Starting Point

This “follow-on” from the removal of trauma is vital in the case of clients who have experienced abuse in childhood, as there is likely much work to be done to find ways to manage deep-seated fear, anger, and loss of trust, as well as difficulty in handling strong feelings—something that indeed takes longer than the neutralising of trapped traumatic emotion. But very often, that work cannot even begin until the trauma has been dealt with. And that is why the rewind technique can offer such a crucial starting point in skilled hands.

View the article on Psychology Today