Dealing With Painful Memories: The 5 Steps to Help You Work Through

Things like divorce, childhood trauma, losing a job, losing a loved one, etc., can cause painful memories that affect our mental and emotional well-being and also interfere with our relationships.

How about you? Do you have painful memories that are interfering with your emotions?  Have you experienced things that caused you intense emotional pain? Is this pain keeping you from living your best life?

1. Notice and Name the Emotions

The first step towards healing painful memories is notice and name your more intense emotions as they arise. Understand that it's okay to feel sad, angry, or hurt about your memories. The key is to notice them without letting them completely overtake you.

2. Pause and Observe the Emotions

The second step is to pause and try to avoid any immediate emotional response. Take a few deep breaths, inhaling for a count of four and exhaling for a count of six. Repeat this process a few times until you feel calmer.

3. Explore How You Feel in Your Body

The next step involves exploring the situation that triggered your emotions and paying attention to your body's reactions. What happened to cause your emotions to rise? Was it a person, place, or sound that triggered you? If you have a journal, go ahead and write it down.

4. Reflection

The next step in this process is to engage in some introspection and try to recall a time when you felt the same way, either as a child or recently. Don't think of it as reliving the painful memories, but rather as examining the stored emotions and memories that have been waiting to be released.

5. Processing and Healing the Memories

The last step is to process and allow healing of the painful memories. As a byproduct of the previous steps, the pain associated with the memories will heal or integrate back into the whole psyche, leaving you feeling better emotionally.