A New Key to PTSD and Forgiveness?
In listening to Thomas Hübl and Diane Poole Heller discuss trauma in a webinar on April 13, 2022, I got the answer to one of my longtime questions about my own life. It wasn’t anything they said; the insight popped in from the field of related inquiry they generated. (The course they are offering is https://healingbrokenconnections.com/)
Trauma, and the human neurological ongoing, repeating, and damaging loop that it sets up, happens to humans, individually and collectively, far more often than most people realize, I believe. It really doesn’t take much to set up a trauma response that lasts and lasts, whether it’s minor or major. (I regard that as one of the few “design flaws” Nature made in humans!)
So here’s a new key, and it’s related also to self-forgiveness: I have been requiring that the original event be never-done. That it never happened. I believe PTSD is an attempt at this. We replay the original scenario, or as close to it as life will allow us to get, and do our best to have it turn out differently this time—which of course it never does. But even if it did, that would not wipe out the original happening.
So a key is coming to terms with the fact that it DID happen. Reframing it, re-contextualizing it (expanding the context) so the actual nature of what happened is changed. That’s a terrific way out of the loop, I now feel.
What does that mean? Let’s look at an analogous situation. A man slices open someone’s belly with a knife. How did you imagine that, and what was your response? What context did you give it, what story did you make up?
Now what if you could see the context as a surgeon operating to save the person’s life? Does that reframe actually shift your neurological and biochemical response to the happening? I think it can.
I am not very familiar with new sophisticated and effective approaches to PTSD by retraining the brain, but I am betting this “seeing the happening in a different light” is part of it.
For myself, I’ve been unable to forgive myself for some harms I caused, because I’ve been in such resistance to the fact they happened. I’ve been demanding that I find a way to make the happening never have happened. As that is impossible, healing is impossible.
So giving up that demand, and seeking alternative approaches to dealing with the fact that it did happen, is required on path to healing, I now see. And if the trauma response is as common as I think, and often mild and subtle but still draining and damaging, this insight could actually benefit a lot of people!
And no, platitudes like “We all make mistakes, just accept being human, you were doing the best you could at the time” have NOT worked so far (for me) as reframes. They don’t address the neurological need to make it never have happened. Some people try to make it never have happened by making the memory less accessible through alcohol or other drugs or addictions. Very understandable, but the collateral damage is great. I’m now suggesting this new approach. I don’t offer a way to make it as if it never happened. That’s the demand impossible to fulfill. I am suggesting to find a way to give up the hard-wired neurological demand for it to have never happened, and then proceed with healing methods.
That’s my next step. Can you introspect and find this demand in yourself? Can you feel it blocking forgiveness, or self-forgiveness? Can you feel how it locks up and drains energy in a demand impossible to fulfill?
Let me know how you free yourself from it!
This is not mental health advice; it is sharing something I’ve realized. You are responsible for what you do with this. Consult a certified expert in PTSD treatment if you have it.
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