Healing Trauma as a Christian Mama Danielle Elizabeth

This episode talks about emotional flashbacks and we go over Pete Walkers 13 steps of what to do when you have an emotional flashback

Emotional flashbacks are intense emotional states activated by past trauma (e.g., fear, shame, or feeling unsafe). 

Emotional flashbacks may be hard to recognize. They can happen suddenly and it can be hard to pinpoint what caused them.

Emotional flashbacks are not typically visual or auditory. This means they can be harder to detect, and you may not know that what you’re experiencing is an emotional flashback. You might blame yourself for these feelings or think that you’re overwhelmed or emotionally dysregulated for another reason.

Psychotherapist Pete Walker who talks about this a lot says “Emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions (‘amygdala hijackings’) to the frightening circumstances of childhood. They are typically experienced as intense and confusing episodes of fear and/or despair – or as sorrowful and/or enraged reactions to this fear and despair.”

This exercise is a great exercise if you are thinking about going on a healing journey or your already in one but are feeling stagnant or stuck plateaued.

Its a very simple exercise that helps you look at what does the future hold if you DO change and heal and what will it take. It also looks at the flip side, what are the hard parts of change and healing and where will we self-sabotage our own efforts and stand in our own way even though we do WANT healing.

This episode goes through 3 worksheets to help you know your own nervous system.

The first is a personal profile map helping you understand how Fight, Flight, Freeze AND regulation shows up in your body, thoughts, feelings & behaviours

The second is a Triggers and Glimmers worksheet that helps you know what triggers you OUT of your window of tolerance and glimmers that move you BACK into regulation.

The third is a worksheet that helps you understand what can you do alone aka self-regulation and where do you need more support aka co-regulation

These worksheets are so valuable to help you on your healing journey and in your day to day life. If you try any of the exercises from this season, this would be the top one to do!

This weeks healing exercise: Write your life story from your Inner Child’s Perspective

This exercise can be stand alone or piggy back off of last
week’s episode of doing a Life Timeline.

This is an exercise to begin to work with different ‘parts’ of ourselves. The part for this exercise is our Inner Child.

This exercise can help us not only piece together what has happened in our life and what could be impacting us, but also the uncover the emotions behind it and see where some unprocessed stuff might be.

A life time line is a tool to help us organize all the experiences we've had in our life and give us a starting point for what to work on in our healing.

It can help us see why some experiences impacted us more because of other things we had going on or happening at that same time.

It gives us a birds eye view of our life and can be a helpful tool to use in our therapy or coaching sessions

This week's episode is about creating a safety plan for yourself. Even if you never use it, it can be so beneficial to have this because we really cant predict whats going to happen in our lives and its better to be safe than sorry.

In the episode, we walk through 4 simple steps to have in our safety plan to keep it simple but effective.



Check out my social media to get a visual look at this safety plan!



https://www.instagram.com/healwith_danielleelizabeth/



https://www.facebook.com/Danielleelizabethcoaching/