How to Get Over Trauma

Let’s start by summing up the traditional answers to this question. There are two major schools of thought:

Number 1: Get out of or change your circumstances. In other words, make a plan, change your life, and in doing so, get over your past.

Number 2: Count to ten. Take deep breaths. Take a Xanax or go on a shopping spree.

You’ll notice that all of the above are about removing pain or institution pleasure. Pain demands a response, which is either pain elimination or pleasure to offset it. You can absolutely play that game if you want, but I’ll give you one warning. If you play that game, you’ll still be playing it at age 90. It’s a vicious cycle, and there’s no exit. This is what 99 percent of counseling, psychiatry, and even a great deal of medicine and ministry are about. A few weeks ago, I wrote about M. Scott Peck’s four steps to community or success, number 2 being chaos. His conclusion was that most people never find significant change or relief from trauma, because when they hit the pain of chaos they turn back, to physical and nonphysical pain-killers and pleasures.

I do not totally dismiss the above. Certainly, if your life is in imminent danger, your first job should be to get to safety, but that is in the great minority of what people are seeking trauma relief from. Today, typically, what we’re talking about is how mom or dad treated me, or what happened in school or in a certain important relationship, or what didn’t happen in your career, etc. And despite the self-help industry being valued at 11 billion dollars per year back in 2008, for the most part, all we’re really getting for our money is false hope.

Virtually none of these are about external circumstances, they’re about internal circumstances. Need proof? Say that two people are in rush-hour traffic on the same street, side-by-side. One is in road-rage, and the other is cool as a cucumber. What’s the difference? It can’t be the circumstances, because they have the exact same circumstances! It’s all about their internal circumstances. The one who’s angry has memories that are giving him a different meaning for that traffic jam. So instead of the vicious cycle, how about fixing it at the source, once and for all?

Southwestern University Medical School and Medical Center released a headline study about this many years ago, the first of its kind, which found that the real source of illness, disease, and trauma is your memories, not your external circumstances. Those memories cause you to misinterpret what’s happening in your life right now. Some of you’ve probably heard this phrase recently because it’s become popular: perception is everything.

Applying just a tiny bit of logic, you can see that this statement violates its own premise, because it makes an absolute statement that nothing is absolute. But having said that, a wrong perception does become many people’s reality. Anorexic girls literally see a physical body that no one else can see or convince them of, to the point that it often kills them. My wife Hope was recently recounting the warm, fuzzy details of the first two movies she ever saw in theater: The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, until I happened to look it up and see that both were released before she was born. Her much more powerful unconscious mind had manufactured those memories, right down to the popcorn.

I’ve dedicated a large part of my life to helping people heal these source memories that are often in your unconscious mind once and for all. Then instead of life in a vicious circle, you can experience a straight-to-the-top life of physical and emotional health. So if you want to go with the popular view, I’m sure there are many doctors out there ready to write you another prescription or get you talking about your mother for six months to three years. Or you can use Trilogy and Memory Engineering at home in your pajamas, using brand new tools to heal these source issues, often in only minutes at a time. Are you ready to get started? Then use Trilogy, completely free, now and forever.

Have a blessed, wonderful day!

Alex Loyd