Many people consult a therapist in order to work with their traumatic memories, flashbacks, and upsetting thoughts. It’s significant to develop psychological techniques for the wellbeing of your mind like resilience, self-compassion, and mindfulness. Today, we’ll discuss how to deal with traumatic memories.
It’s significant to remember that our mind reacts differently towards various highly emotional experiences. If you’re going through a certain type of emotional experience, then the amygdala would amplify your sensory awareness and it imprints such memories more effectively.
How to Deal with Traumatic Memories
It’s time to discuss how to deal with traumatic memories. Some of the main points are as follows;
Develop a Better Experience
First of all, you should imagine an experience that you want to create within yourself like; happiness, joyfulness, connection and closeness with others, accomplishment, worthiness, calm, and a sense of gratitude. It doesn’t mean that you have to forget or deny the difficult and painful experiences of life.
It means that you should be open and mindful about beautiful, helpful, encouraging, working, and reassuring experiences in your life, and recognize them wherever you see them instead of avoiding them. You should consider this mindset as a medicine for the old wounded experiences, where you weren’t safe and completely alone.
Enrich it t
After perceiving that experience, you should hold it for some time, and have a sense of control over your body, and remember that it’s more than just an idea. You should be mindful of this experience and prolong it over time, and remember why it’s significant for you. As they say, the wiring of neurons is in alignment, and they fire together.
However, if you keep on firing these neurons in your mind, then they would leave a good experience in your mind and nervous system. It would provide you with internal strength that is useful for you wherever you go.
Absorb it
You should inhale this experience inside of you and consider it as a part of yourself and keep receiving it. You should consider this experience as a balm that offers you relief when you apply it. However, your focus should be on the good feeling that you’re experiencing.
The more you absorb these experiences, the more it would bring you positive thinking. Your goal should be to achieve maximum value from the positive mindset rather than letting it drain like water after washing.
The reason our difficult, painful, hurting, and stressful experiences are stuck in our minds is because of the unintentional negative biases that we have. If you slow down and be mindful of letting in and out any type of experience whatever you want to cultivate in your mind, and it impacts your nervous system gradually.
Linking Positive & Negative
You should be aware of the fact that positive experiences, happy and joyful thoughts act as medicine for uncomfortable, stressful, and traumatic experiences. You should remember the help and comfort of any friend that was when you get attacked in the war or childhood. If you remain mindful of it and repeat the process in your mind, then the positive influence would offer you relief and replace negative thoughts over time.
Recognize your Thoughts
You should be aware of the things that could trigger and spark traumatic memories like certain types of experiences, smells, or sounds. For instance, older kids used to bully you in the cafeteria when you were a child. You used to have orange for lunch at that time, and the smell of orange triggers those memories. Or, you spent a lot of time in the warzone, and the loud firework brings back those memories.
After finding out those sparking and triggering points, you can decide how to react to them. You can choose to ignore such things that trigger or brings back bad memories. It becomes easier to react to those memories if you know why they pop up in your mind. You should remember that they aren’t random thoughts and remind yourself that what you’re remembering currently is a part of your past. When you do that, then it makes you feel better and more in control of your life.
You should also consider attaching good and pleasant memories with those trigger points. For instance, you should remember the firework when you were having fun with friends and colleagues.
Address them
How you look at yourself, events, and other people, influences your mood and behavior. If you’re feeling scared or impatient, then your thoughts would impact your mood. Therefore, you should be mindful and aware of your thoughts because they influence your mood. It’s significant to address them before they could impact your behavior.
Mindful of your Thoughts
Practicing mindfulness of your thoughts is the best way to deal with your traumatic memories. It’s difficult to practice mindfulness for PTSD patients because they’ve got a lot of painful thoughts, and to be aware of them is even more painful. You can use mindfulness to step back from those experiences and decrease their impact on you.
Improve Self-Esteem
PTSD patients usually have a low level of self-esteem and confidence. Therefore, you should work on building up your confidence and self-esteem through positive feedback and joining social support groups. It’s very difficult to deal with PTSD by having a lower confidence level.
Conclusion: How to Deal with Traumatic Memories
After an in-depth study of how to deal with traumatic memories, we’ve realized that traumatic and painful memories could impact your life. If you’re going through such experiences, then you should follow and practice the abovementioned suggestions and be mindful of your thoughts.
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