The Surrender to Healing Quicker

By Jennifer Beauvais, LMHC, BP

I have had a long, languid path to self healing. I mean, don’t get me wrong…My hair was on fire for a good portion of it, and occasionally, my graying locks flame to life again when the right breeze blows. But I stumbled into the path of growth work as an adolescent, where the most important aspect of putting myself back together again was to have a cohesive narrative.

Now, this was very helpful. In fact, having a cohesive narrative is a sign a client’s trauma is healing. But there was something of an addictive quality to stacking up the late-night journaling a-ha’s about how my younger self felt affected by my early world.

One of my graduate school teachers, Ryan Kennedy, who dropped truth bombs between classes that were so deep, I still only quote things he said on the way to another classroom, said off-hand one day, “People get addicted to the realizations they have when doing therapy work.”

I remember a sour feeling in my throat and stomach because, now armed with the new skills I was learning in therapy school, I couldn’t tell if I was helping myself or hammering on myself. Deep down, I knew he was describing me.

Looking back, I can see that I was building a new nervous system. I tried all sorts of things to get me there…ways to poetically encapsulate my trauma, find myself as a hero of endurance, slowly, letter-by-letter, thought by thought, try to transform an infinity of memories into something less prickly, more serving. I was trying to convince myself I was good. I thought I was on my way if I got that dopamine rush of connecting some cause and effect of my childhood to my current behaviors. For a long time, it was slow and excruciating. But it also became part of my identity. I loved the thrill of the hunt.

Hey, I can’t knock it. That slowness is probably what made me an enthusiastic therapist today, because I had time to log every step of my healing seven times over. Now I can use it to help you. But I realized there is only so long you can play with your baggage before you are certain of its weight, and are just ready to leave it at the station, already.

I’d tried EMDR (Eye Movement, Desensitization and Reprocessing) one session as a youth (a bunch of memories of people’s knees came back to me as I reprocessed a preschool memory), but when I trained in it in 2018 and 2019, I found this powerful modality melt pieces of my trauma, and engage my brain in a way I didn’t expect: fast. Moving my eyes back and forth while bringing up an issue made my brain do things I’d never experienced before, including call in a future part of myself to talk to a younger part of myself (whaaaat????).

And when I began training in Brainspotting (an offshoot of EMDR where one spot is focused on at a time) a few years later, I had a similar awakening: in an almost psychedelic way, trauma could, at the speed of thought, reprocess, work through the body, and organize so that I knew, on a cellular level, it was over. Without trying, I formed new beliefs — calmer, kinder beliefs– about myself. I saw my goodness and believed it.

This speed of processing revolutionized my thinking of what is possible for my self and my clients.

In terms of my self-growth, this meant letting go of the constant re-molding of the poetic justice of my trauma identity. I had to trade in dopamine boosts of realization for actual fulfillment. Often, we grip on to parts of our identity stemming from trauma, in-part because the hypervigilence keeps us from getting hurt again (we think). Maybe there is even some creative or community-based connection that can come from it (and that’s okay, too). But even scarier is not knowing what will replace the trauma if all that history of coping energy is wiped out.

Sometimes, we will process trauma slowly, on and on, for years. There is value in this, as perhaps it’s what we need to raise the motivation to relinquish beliefs we think make us safe. This is where some modalities can feel like art forms, slowly turning the trauma over and over again until we trust it really happened to us and that we are not crazy or gross. Maybe we can put off the certain doom we fear doing the work will create, but still feel that we are chipping away at it until one day, it’ll be small enough to tackle, or we’ll get so sick of it we’d set ourselves on fire to get away from it.

As a therapist, my dedication to what is true, and to what makes a good product, shifted. I want people to have actual change.

I have tons of art supplies, manipulatables, ways of touching in on the self that are useful, and build important skills. I still incorporate these. But now, I now feel it is my duty to offer to my clients the option to work faster. It’s not entirely pain-free, but it’s much faster and painless than what actually happened to you.

The beauty of EMDR and Brainspotting are that they rely on something intrinsically good and healthy within to heal you. I cannot underscore the importance of allowing your body and brain to take the reigns and come out the other side with an unexpected healing and certainty that some long-lasting pain is in the past, and some inner magic made it happen. These modalities are not the only way to reach this state– healing this way belongs to humans and many paths lead us to this breakthrough. But they are wonderful modalities I feel grateful to wield in helping folks stop trying to think their way to healing, and surrender to it instead.

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