Painful and pervasive memories

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Our memories are truly amazing. Different sights, sounds, tastes and smells can evoke cascades of spontaneous recall from times past. Mostly these memories are either pleasant or neutral in their emotional content, but sometimes memories (or thoughts) can be emotionally painful and even traumatic. Often, significant life events such as the loss of a loved one through death or separation, witnessing or being involved in violent and traumatic events, even the loss of a job or being the object of ridicule or betrayal can really play on the mind. These thoughts, and more importantly their negatively charged emotional content, can begin to occupy more and more of your thinking, leading to a pattern of rumination - the process of obsessively thinking about the same thing for long periods of time without finding or being able to apply a positive solution.

In some cases, these patterns of negative response can be extremely debilitating and unhelpful.

Grief, loss and pain are a fact of life, and most of us will experience at least some of the above examples through the span of our lives. Many people consider these events to be opportunities for learning. Even so, if you are currently experiencing painful and/or pervasive thoughts and emotions, only you can decide when enough is enough and it’s time to move on with your life.

It’s important to remember that your memories are your own, and that no one can take them away from you. The natural healing process involves a gradual distancing and separation of memories and emotional content in a way that allows memories and events to recede naturally into the background of our thinking.

When should one seek therapy?

Because we are really good at learning things, unhelpful and obtrusive patterns of thought can dominate our day to day lives in an inappropriate way. Hidden therapy, NLP and other highly effective therapeutic strategies such as EMDR can effectively separate strong negative emotional content from a memory naturally and gently. This allows a more balanced view on past events and current perception.

If you feel that your grieving, stress, anxiety or ruminative thought processes over a particular event has gone on for too long, yet you are unable to move forward, it is time to get some help. Just a few sessions will gently ease you away from those old patterns into new positive, constructive ways of being.