[Please get support from an experienced therapist if you have memories that might trigger more than you can handle!]
Memories that make us shudder
I used to shudder when I remembered an incident from junior school. A group of us in the science lab had accidentally broken a mercury thermometer. We enjoyed playing with the mercury. It was fascinating to see how it ran around on the desk and our hands, not quite liquid and not solid either. We had no idea how toxic mercury is to our bodies!
My goodness, we got into a load of trouble! It was quite a shock for young me. The telling-off was quite inappropriate, in hindsight. We didn’t realise it was a dangerous substance at all. Being shouted at and severely told off was something that came out of the blue and left me feeling deeply misjudged, ashamed and confused. I think we even got letters home as well.
For many years, whenever something triggered that memory I would go right back to feeling really horrible again, I went back to being that child again.
In life, these things happen to us periodically. It can be something big and truly horrible or as seemingly trivial as this but it gets under our skin and stored as something that we don’t want to go anywhere near. The more of these we can clear away so we can trawl through our memories without getting hooked into them the better.
Techniques to wipe out the ‘shudder.’
NLP – Neuro Linguistic Programming
I was on a work training course around 2002 when we were taught an NLP technique to release unpleasant memories such as this one. The purpose was to detach from events so we could deal with them more rationally at work! However, this mercury incident came immediately to mind for some reason, so I tried it out on that.
We were told to focus on the following steps:
- Run through the scene again and note the feelings, colours, etc.
- Run the scene backwards.
- Turn it into black and white and run it forward and backward.
- Make the characters into cartoons, and continue making them larger than life and so exaggerated that you can no longer take them seriously.
- Finally, run it through again as you did originally in full technicolour. The emotion should have gone, if not repeat the process.
There are many variations of this that I have discovered since but this is my favourite.
It is quick and easy to use for anything that is uncomfortable and, afterwards, we can smile about it and feel gentle acceptance for whatever it was.
Tapping
Tapping or EFT is another wonderful way to shift emotional and many physical issues. It is a subject in its own right and another wonderful self-help tool.
I know this has been used very effectively by skilled practitioners to assist people with severe post-traumatic stress disorder so it can be very powerful and is worth practicing.
The Ortner family have a wonderful website and app (the tapping solution), and have written a number of books on the topic that are easy to follow and effective.
Holistic Therapies
The therapies I work with will often help release/clear memories without processing with each one individually. The ones linked with a particular ailment or pattern in life get released as part of the healing work.
Do we need to clear everything?
It is only necessary to clear the things that are impacting negatively on your life in some way. Keep a note if something crops up then clear it when you get time.
The magnitude of the experience doesn’t seem to matter. Two people can go through the same experience and feel completely differently about it. Something minor may happen at a bad time or shock us, like my example above, and it stays with us.
Psychosomatic ailments
Psychosomatic ailments can be triggered by experiences we refuse to clear or store in our bodies because we don’t know how to deal with them.
Books that list symptoms and what might be going on emotionally/thought patterns to trigger them can be a useful way to gain insights. One early, well-known, book is Louise Hay’s ‘You Can Heal Your Life’.
The bio-resonance system I use (e-Lybra9) works away under the scenes to take the negative power out of anything which might be causing us to lose energy and impact in our current life. These incidents are stored in the body so may accumulate to cause physical imbalances.
The more fluidly we flow through life, the better. If we put up barriers and bury or box stuff away that we don’t want to deal with, gradually that will create a burden that will drain us.
Speaking about the memories
I attended public speaking training where we were told to tune into the horrible times in our lives and bring out the emotion again in order to make for a powerful, emotion-packed, speech.
When we listen to a speaker who evokes emotions within us through the passion used, we go on the journey with them. I do wonder what toll this has on speakers who tour around making the same speech over and over again.
What stories do you tell repeatedly because they grab the audience and get a positive response? Do take note and make sure you aren’t doing harm to yourself.
Be careful just how much of the true emotion from the event, if any, is retained. If in doubt, it is better cleared and forgotten rather than revisited regularly. We can always call on acting skills and draw on a more generic experience for the story telling!
Next time you spot a small memory that makes you shudder, please give some of these things a try.
I can always help out with my services if you want to make some big changes.
