I would like you to picture a baby being scalded by steam, screaming in pain and fear, and a mother sitting next to it, knitting in a rocking chair, ignoring it completely, completely calm, completely detached.
This is Developmental Trauma.
The child can’t remember it, and what emerges from that is not a memory of pain, but a blankness, a nothingness. The personality of that child will not develop normally, and the features of that failure will not show in positive pathologies, most of the time, but rather in pathologies of lack. That child will lack a conscience, remorse, empathy. It will be weak in impulse control, and incapable of thinking long term.
I myself felt that steam. I am honestly not sure why I am not a much, much bigger mess than I am. I am definitely weak in impulse control and long term action, but I very certainly have a conscience, feel remorse almost too much sometimes, and am extremely empathetic.
I will add, too, that “letting go” can only happen in conditions of relaxation. If you want to “let go” of the past, you cannot think your way to accomplishing that goal. You have to learn to relax deeply, to soften the spasms.
This image, by the way, came to me in a deep relaxation.
It has been some time since I have thought about it, but Johannes Schultz and Wolfgang Luthe developed a psychotherapy around Autogenic Training. In the same way that, say, Stan Grof administered LSD to his clients, and used them to attain therapeutic goals in a therapeutic setting, Luthe taught his clients to achieve the altered state of deep relaxation, and proceed from there.
It was and remains my view that this particular type of therapy had and has a lot of potential. I suppose the limiting factor is that most traumatized people need something stronger than Autogenics to get them to loosen up. I use Neurofeedback, mostly.
But the two in tandem would be quite good, I think.
And I will repeat that for me personally the Autogenics works best if I do a series of static holds first (what I call Kum Nye 1), and do a full and leisurely body scan before starting the script.