To Heal Trauma Should I Focus on Beliefs or the Body?

When it comes to working with trauma, should you focus on your thoughts, your beliefs, your core beliefs, or should it be all somatic and body work? Or is that kind of a meaningless distinction? So some people will say it's all about your belief system. You know, you bring a defective belief system out of your trauma, your childhood trauma, your complex trauma, maybe. And the name of the game is to get to those beliefs and to reprogram them. A lot of them are unconscious beliefs. And I can understand why people have been critical of that approach, you know. Especially, I think, back in the 70s and 80s, maybe, there was that whole kind of, it was almost a very cognitive approach to healing, or an approach like almost a positivity movement, or even positive affirmations, things like this. People would look at themselves in the mirror, and they would say nice things about themselves, trying to reprogram that negative self-talk and those core beliefs. A lot of people went crazy doing that, you know. It's not, it's very difficult, especially if the core belief is the exact opposite, to stand in front of the mirror and say those things, and not create kind of a cognitive dissonance within yourself, where now there's this conflict taking place. So that's not to say that there's not some help from that positivity, right. I'm not totally saying that that should be thrown out, but it certainly isn't quite that simple. However, here's maybe the more interesting thing from today's video, is I often hear people say, too, and I think they go to the opposite extreme, which is just whatever is coming up in terms of trauma, maybe it's a reaction to something, some trigger, is to sit with that and bring awareness to it. Now, is the practice of sitting with feelings and bringing awareness to it helpful? Hugely helpful. I think it's fundamentally helpful. But is that enough? I'm not so sure that that's enough, because I think a lot of the time we do that. We actually do sit with the trauma response, and I can remember times when I've sat with my own responses, and it came up again. And I've talked to a lot of people in therapy, and they've said, I've done the sitting, I've sat with the reactions, and it keeps coming back up. So it's not only that, because I think there's another layer of inquiry into the response. And because there's this distinction between the emotion and the belief, we need to get rid of that. Then you go into the debate about which came first, the feeling and the body. Was it pre-verbal? And then did it belief form? Or did the belief form? And then it embedded itself in the body, chicken and egg scenario. But I think an awful lot of these energies or these traumas or these somatic things that we carry in the body due to trauma have got a narrative or a story or a belief around them. So they can also, while we bring awareness to them, we can also start to invite questions. To start to become kind of curious about them. Where is this coming from? What is this about? Why do I keep seeing this again and again? To do inquiry, even like a Byron Katie inquiry, questioning some of it, if we can find out that there is a thought behind it or a belief behind it. So I guess the idea behind today's short video is really just, it's not purely a cognitive approach or a purely mindful approach. That is going to be the answer to every experience of trauma. I think it's both and quite often, both simultaneously at the same time, the cognitive and the simple sitting in awareness. But I hope that's a useful video, guys. I think it's about becoming more sophisticated in our approach to handling trauma and healing trauma. And I think when you do that and you start to inquire into it, actually what you'll notice over time is that you actually really are healing. Now you're beginning to understand. Yes, you're bringing presence to it with that awareness, but you're also beginning to understand yourself more. You can finally understand things more. You're making the unconscious conscious really at that point. Things tends to go away, tends to not recur as often. So I'll leave it there for now, guys. But thanks again for being with me and see you next time. Bye for now.