If you work with people in any sort of coaching, therapeutic, nursing, counseling or even healing capacity, one of your biggest fears is likely to be:
What if I can’t help them?
And that can make you feel incompetent, almost like a fake…
I know I used to consistently worry about: What if they open their heart and soul to me, what if they reveal their biggest pain and emotional suffering to me and there is nothing I am able to do about it?
I know the feeling and it’s not a fun one to have…
It took me a while to realize that there might be a way around this…that there is actually something very real that doesn’t respond to the most enlightened conversations, to pep-talks, to busting the most stubborn limiting beliefs. And it’s because some things are not trapped in the mind, but they are literally trapped in the body. And such is the case of trauma.
And if you have some coaching hours, counseling or therapy practice hours under your belt, you’ll know that most of your clients carry trauma at least in some way, shape or form. But what can you do about it? Allow me to share how I came to my breakthrough realization with a little trip to the past!
My mid-twenties were a difficult period of life for me. Mostly because my mother has been battling depression and alcoholism and at that particular time (in my mid-twenties), that battle was at its peak. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do to help her as she was in complete and utter denial about her challenges. And our relationship vanished in the midst of that addiction, depression, and denial. On the bright side, I moved to beautiful Scotland to get my hands on a quality Psychology degree. I so wanted to understand how people “work” and how they can change!
Then one day, while I was already living in Scotland, I got a phone call letting me know that my mother was found unconscious at home, in very, very bad shape. It was just a matter of luck that someone actually got to her because her apartment was locked from the inside. A considerate neighbor who was alarmed by not having seen my mother for several days and suspected that something was wrong, managed to get in with an extra set of keys that I had left her before leaving. If it weren’t for this neighbor, my mother would have died then and there, completely abandoned because she was so weakened that she didn’t even manage to call for help.
To say that I was shaken when I got the phone call, is an understatement. I was completely and utterly shocked to my core! When I got the news, my mother was already in an intensive care unit, but still…the thought that she could have died this lonely death without no one noticing for days or weeks left me in a state that I now know to be trauma. This unpleasant feeling that left me in a state of panic – scared and paralyzed by some invisible threat was new to me!
I couldn’t fly back home right away to check on her (this was before the low-cost airlines were everywhere), but I did need an outlet for all that shock. I guess this would be the moment when one might want to punch something or scream at the top of their lungs or get drunk or smoke a pack of cigarettes…but for some reason, I felt drawn to go to a pharmacy. I didn’t know what I wanted to buy there, I just knew that’s where I needed to go…It was the kind of feeling when you just want to be able to do something.
As I was wandering along the aisles, something caught my eyes. It was this little yellow package that read Bach Flowers: Rescue Remedy. And I thought to myself: If there is a Rescue Remedy in this store that works, then I sure need it now! I bought it, rushed home, read the instructions and gave myself the recommended dose of my Rescue Remedy (which I had very little faith in, to be honest, not really expecting anything). I guess I was just trying to distract myself from what was going on with my mother by doing all this.
But to my surprise, I could feel a huge shift in my emotional state and in my overall sense of well-being right after the first dose. Almost instantly, all the tension left my body. The shock regarding my poor mother was gone and I felt calm and resourceful to actually think about how to help her best. AND, to my utter surprise… I felt as though I was transported into the 18-year version of me (I was 29 at the time). In that very moment, I felt like I used to feel back then – hopeful, optimistic, like life wasn’t a catastrophe waiting to be unleashed at any time. I felt like all obstacles were surmountable and I had this sense that all was well in my world.
Looking at this experience in retrospect, I now know that the reason why I felt this way, out of the blue, is because, for one reason or another, at that moment, my system got detraumatized. Thanks to those Bach Flower remedies or who knows, maybe a Placebo effect, my body managed to shake off the trauma and returned into its natural state of well-being.
This was a lightbulb moment for me because I realized that this state of wellbeing, hopefulness and aliveness is how we are meant to feel. That these feelings are not something that should disappear with age when we “get real”, but rather something that can be cultivated and carried within us all the time. This is how we naturally feel when trauma or big-time stress is not present in the body!
I was mesmerized by this finding! If I could feel a dramatic difference like this with just a couple of drops of a flower remedy, what could be possible for my clients with the right therapeutic techniques designed to release trauma from their systems?
To cut the long story short, I researched and searched for years in order to find the most efficient ways to release trauma from the body, because after my experience with the flower remedies I had a strong sense that that was the only way to go.
The question that haunted me for a long time What if I can’t help my clients? became obsolete, because now I knew that, in all likelihood, I actually can. I would love all coaches, counselors, and therapists working with clients that carry, at least some trauma in their systems, to get to this place of humble confidence, as well!
The Gentle Trauma Release Method is the result of years and years of studying, practicing, experimenting, polishing and connecting the dots so that I could have in my toolbox an absolutely reliable tool that would allow me to help my clients get rid of their traumas, decrease their emotional suffering and pain and so much more, no matter how their life has been or what was going on for them.
Izabela Viskupova, L.L.M., M.A. Psychology is the founder of the Gentle Trauma Release Institute and the author of the Gentle Trauma Release Method designed to get clients a deep and long-lasting trauma release in a way that is applicable to coaching, counseling, and therapeutic settings. Izabela is the Lead Professor in the groundbreaking Gentle Trauma Release Method Certification Program run several times a year to teach this innovative, powerful trauma-release method to students from all over the world.