Deconstructing Emotional Pain
NARM? Training Institute
Supporting mental health and other helping professionals by healing complex trauma and its effects.
Painful events in our lives are always challenging. But this pain can often be compounded by what we do to ourselves in response to the painful event.
In this NARM Inner Circle webinar clip, Dr. Laurence Heller tells us that the first step to working with our clients to address painful events is to help deconstruct their reactions to their pain. These reactions often include other emotions that accompany the pain, like anger, grief, or guilt. Simply encouraging our clients to feel their pain too quickly can be counterproductive. It's an important first step to work with our clients on resolving these accompanying emotions before moving too deeply into their pain.
Within this deconstruction process, it's essential to clarify any pain that is coming from self-shaming or self-blaming as a response to the painful event. The original pain, from the event itself, is often compounded by how our clients direct their emotions against themselves. We use open and exploratory questions to distinguish?the pain that is coming from rejecting or shaming themselves from the original pain of the event.
Learn more about how we use NARM to work with emotional pain by watching the Inner Circle webinar clip.
WorkWell Coach, MBACP Therapeutic Counsellor
1 个月It’s so true that the deepest pain often stems from how we respond to painful events, especially when we turn that pain inward through self-blame or shame. Carrying the weight of unresolved emotions is often tied to our upbringing, where we may have learned to take responsibility for things that were never ours to own. Helping clients disentangle these layers of self-inflicted pain is such important work