NO MORE TRAUMA

The Trauma Release Method^TM

The story of becoming expert in transmuting pain into perspective...

I have done years of self-help groups, years of therapy, workshops and counseling. I have benefitted from all of it. Yet, in each instance, after exploring it for everything it could offer, I was thrown back on my own resources. Ultimately, it was always up to me to make the change. And I was always, after years of this, looking for a faster way, a way minus the incredible pain of rehashing the past over and over again looking for origins. I asked, and the answers came in the form of a variety of practices, some ancient, some new, but all based on finding the way home to myself. For the self that emerged as a result of trauma was warped, a maladaptive coping mechanism for living with situations that produced inconsolable anguish and immobilizing cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is the result of pretending everything is fine, when it's not. Anguish is the result of meeting death firsthand. Trauma is not what happens; it's the physiological and emotional/psychological response to what happens. "Emotion" is a word that breaks down into "e - motion" which is energy in motion. It's what drives motivation, despair and, ultimately, love. They say, "Our issues are trapped in our tissues." That's why an approach to dealing with trauma must include a physical way to release the tension tied up in the loss. There is no separation between body and mind. Thus, the response must include the whole-self.

When I was eight, I came home from school to find my mother had been drinking so much Johnny Walker Red Label, for so many years, that she was sprawled on the white couch vomiting blood into a mixing bowl. I hid after the medics came to get her. The neighbors, a family of six by the name of McLaughlin, found me and took me in for a few weeks until a relative could be found. My mother went into a coma for months. I was not allowed to see her.

Eventually, my father came and whisked me off to live with his new family up in New England where I didn't know a soul. Every few days I would get a solemn talk about how my mother might die today, they just didn't know if she would survive. That's how I became so closely acquainted with death as a daily possibility. The truth is, it's a daily possibility for all of us. We have no idea when our number will be called. I say this not to be morbid, but to clarify that I have been reconciling myself with my own mortality since I was a child.

Perhaps this is why I have a slightly different take on it than most people, society at large, and the counselors who claim to help people through it. Most people avoid all discussion of it. Society entrains us to believe it is a horrible thing. Counselors are full of platitudes such as, "time heals all wounds." Poppycock. Time can kill you if you do nothing. To survive in a way that allows you to thrive, you must deliberately make a choice to do so. Otherwise, it can and definitely will get worse because longterm grief reprograms the mind to project the worst in expectations, relationships and outcomes.

Birth and Death are but Bookends to Life

To break free, the habits of mind entrained by hurt must be reprogrammed, the habits of body that cause premature aging must be addressed and the depth of the emotion must be transmuted into something else: what better than the creative process?

The Trauma Release Method^TM is a practical way to work with

mental, physical and emotional baggage that is

faster and far less painful than conventional methods.

I began sharing this work because, firstly, part of what helps is to help others. Secondly, I suffered so much before I remembered myself, and my training, and began to put all the pieces together, and received such immense relief once I started practicing what I knew would help, that I vowed no one should ever have to suffer that much. It's unnecessary when there is a clear way out that anyone can learn.

That said, humans have free will and even the Universe, God, the Great Spirit, Jehovah, Brahman, Yahweh, the Unified Field, nor the Taoist Way, Zen, or the Buddhist path can give you any succor unless YOU make a decision that you have had enough. This is not a religious path, but it is a spiritual one; one that will lead you back to the magic of awe and wonder that you once knew as a child.

Chances are, you don't even remember what relief feels like...