Jul 13 / Matthias Behrends

The Most Important Principle to Follow When Healing Trauma

In the context of emotional work, a technique is a way of performing an intervention, usually based on some theoretical framework. Examples include trance induction, affirmations, imagery, EMDR, CBT, and many more, and their combinations.
Principles, on the other hand, are fundamental statements that transcend techniques. Principles can be manifested through different techniques. Some techniques will satisfy a principle more, others less.
The principle I want to talk about is called Emotional Stabilization. It represents the concept that experiencing positive emotions associated with a topic, activity, or memory has a variety of positive effects.
One of these effects is that it greatly increases the speed of healing emotional wounds.
Without emotional stabilization, any meaningful healing of major emotional wounds is impossible.
Since healing major emotional wounds is the main goal of emotional work and psychological interventions, emotional stabilization is a principle that must be fulfilled.
How can we ensure this? By including stabilizing techniques in our repertoire and making sure we use them with every client/patient who has major emotional wounds.
Since we must assume the presence of emotional wounds in virtually every client/patient, practitioners must use stabilizing techniques with virtually every client/patient.
A buoy is not an exciting piece of equipment in and of itself. But when you are drowning, it suddenly becomes existential.
Similarly, emotional stabilization techniques may not seem exciting. But when you are dealing with traumatic experiences, they make all the difference.

What are techniques for emotional stabilization?

Any technique that does that can be called stabilizing. Any technique that mainly has this effect can be called a stabilizing technique or technique for stabilization.
Techniques can be sorted according to empirical values of their stabilizing effect. The stabilizing effect is the highest intensity of the main positive emotion someone reaches when experiencing the imagination (either with or without trance-whichever works better).
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