Leaving the painful memories of the past in the past, reworking them, prevents automatic and uncomfortable reactions from interfering with present well-being and future choices.
"Time does not heal wounds" and "It will not pass with growth, getting bigger". I always clarify this with adults and families when it comes to traumatic or highly stressful events whose outcomes have been expressed for some time. In daily clinical practice I help adults and children to get to know each other better and to know how their brain works and the dynamics of the trauma. Images, comics, graphics, games or metaphors are some useful tools in various age groups to understand what happens inside us when we are exposed to overwhelming events. We distinguish them into two categories: traumas with a capital "T" (those that endanger the physical safety of oneself or of close people, such as bereavement, suicide, abuse, mistreatment, assault, robbery, natural disasters, diseases) and with the small "t" (which jeopardize the positive image of oneself, of one's abilities and one's identity, that is, relational traumas). Adults and children (in this case with age-calibrated language and tools) learn a new key to the problems they are experiencing, a new language to describe themselves and their behavioral and emotional reactions. Traumatic events are then dealt with through the heart of the EMDR approach, with voluntary eye movements that lead to desensitizing the negative and disturbing emotional charge, reworking it in a more adaptive way and leading to the disappearance of symptoms associated with adverse experiences.
