To move past trauma, build new memories

The main problem with traumas, which almost everyone has, is getting stuck and worse shutting down and freezing. When you do that you allow the trauma to continue to play in your head like a tormenting tape loop, playing over and over and over again and which keeps dragging you back into it.

There is one simple — but not easy — and singular key to moving past and beyond trauma. That key is to build new memories to dilute the impact of those traumas.

When I have experienced a trauma, I try to envision the rings of a tree. As you know each ring on a tree signifies a year and reveals what that tree lived through during that year.

The ideal might appear to be a tree that hasn’t endured any hardship — until it got chopped down. That might look like the following.

As symmetric it looks, it doesn’t look real. It looks synthetic and phony.

I view my life as looking much more like this tree: