You can’t heal a trauma until you learn its lesson

In my coaching work I encounter clients who want to ‘get rid’ of trauma. The assumption is that it’s much like going to the doctor to ‘get rid’ of an infection: a quick prescription, take your medicine, and you’re done. Where I see successful trauma release there’s a completely different pathway: learning it’s lesson.

Trauma is not the enemy. It is instruction.

An energy ‘knowledge gap’

That trauma contains a lesson may be difficult to accept, particularly if we recognise that the trauma originated with an ancestor in another lifetime.

Whether a trauma occurred in your life or is inherited—and current-life traumas are often replications, in exact or varying form of your ancestors’ traumas—the fact is the same. If a trauma is lodged in your energy system, the lesson it contains is one you haven’t yet learned.

Some part of you is dissociated, disconnected, fragmented, unloved. Each energetic ‘knowledge gap’ emits a specific distress signal—your trauma.

For much of my life I felt anxiety around tax returns. Then, in 2021, I discovered that 99 years earlier my great-grandfather went on trial for tax fraud. This precipitated a trauma around tax that cascaded through my family for a century.

My tax anxiety was an unrecognised distress signal. I never succeeded in getting rid of it. After processing the trauma, my anxiety around taxation disappeared.

A lesson in responsibility

The difference between the ‘get rid’ mentality and that of successful trauma release comes down to one factor: emotional responsibility.

It’s no surprise that people default to a ‘get rid’ mentality. Wikipedia has no definition for this term. That tells us we’re dealing with something slippery, elusive—and difficult.

Dr Margaret Paul distinguishes between emotional dependency—where we look to others for emotional validation—and emotional responsibility. She defines the latter as follows:

Primarily, it means recognizing that your feelings of anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, anger, aloneness, jealousy, irritation and so on come from your own thoughts, beliefs and behaviour, rather than from others or from circumstances. Once you understand and accept that you create many of your own feelings, rather than your feelings coming from outside yourself, then you can begin to take emotional responsibility.

Regardless of its source, the traumatised energetic structure inside you carries your signature. It resides in your being, and you express it in however way it manifests in the world. It’s your stuff, and your responsibility to clean up its mess.

Moving toward wholeness

Taking responsibility for our trauma may seem an impossible task.

Yet each unresolved trauma contains within it the blueprint for emotional completion. What overwhelmed you then is what calls you back now—not to relive, but to resolve.

In The Sufis, philosopher Idries Shah quotes from an obscure Islamic text, the Tibb-al-Arif (Medicine of the Gnostic) by Abdul-Wali: “When the lion is sick, he eats a certain shrub and cures himself. He does this because the illness has an affinity for a certain plant, or for the essence of it. The cure is always known to the disease. Release this knowledge and you will know more than the doctor who can only recall facts and memories which seem to apply.”

Principle: the system is always moving toward wholeness. Life is not meaningless. It’s an orderly system seeking to mechanically progress from lower to higher coherence.

Engage with a trauma in a sympathetic way and it will release its pain, its distorted belief framework, its origin, its lesson and its gift.

Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön writes that “nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.” What you avoid holds the lesson. What you resist contains the integration, and what you accept brings you wisdom.

The choice is yours.

Next steps

For further resources on generational trauma, both free and paid, please click on this image.

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