Trauma recovery work and the grief recovery process can be combined to heal without ending a relationship or pardoning injustices. The grieving process brings conflicting emotions and injustices to the forefront. Trauma recovery work uncovers the truth of emotional thought habits. To move on from grieving and to recover from trauma, you need to heal holistically. This is your unfinished business. For example, grieving and updating your relationship with core emotions like fear can allow you to heal holistically without pardoning injustice.
Integrating grief work with trauma recovery opens a powerful path to healing unfinished emotional business. By addressing the emotional thought habits created during earlier life experiences, you can achieve a profound sense of resolve and completeness — even in the face of injustice. This article explores how combining holistic trauma work and grief processes can unlock deep, lasting healing.
Spiritual Development and Continuing a Relationship after Death
When someone passes, you may ask: what does the relationship look like now?
You may find that cultivating an empowering belief around the afterlife can provide a powerful foundation for grief integration. This will allow you to feel their support after they have died. Maybe even in ways that you might not have been able to when they were alive. If you are confronting refining your beliefs around life after death. When cultivating any belief, the best advice is to make it an empowering belief.
Trauma Recovery and Updating Thought Habits
Dr. Gabor Mate, Mo Gwadt, Dr. Tara Swart, and a few others have all made comments about early naïve childhood decisions about emotions becoming thought habits and life patterns. From an early age, when you have little information about the outside world, you create emotional associations. In these early years, your younger self made decisions based on your experiences to navigate the world safely.
What if you could go back and update this decision with the knowledge that you have now? Mo speaks to this from his software engineering experience as updating your programs, Dr. Swart speaks to this as a holistic neuroscientist, and Dr. Mate speaks to this as a trauma expert.
You can harness the power of neuroplasticity to update early emotional patterns with the knowledge you have now. However, you need a process with clearly defined steps and a way to start taking action.
Trauma Recovery with Chakra Energy Clearing
There is not a more accurate statement than “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”
Finally, a process where science and healing the energetic body overlap.
With this process, you can find what the old thought habit is, use cognitive awareness and neuroplasticity to update this old program.
Foundation for emotional energy work
Having a foundation in practices like EMDR can make chakra healing exercises even more effective. EMDR will teach you how to feel and express bodily emotions concerning a memory. EMDR will provide a solid foundation to complete these chakra healing exercises. You might not think you have disassociated from your body, but if it takes you two minutes to answer how a memory makes you feel, you have disassociated from at least that event.
If you are interested in typical therapy sessions, see some of my Where to Start articles.
Some more details on EMDR can be found in this article.
Root Chakra Clearing and Energy Clearing Example
Starting with the root chakra, clearing is very important. When you clear the root chakra fear block, you develop safety for yourself. You will create a mantra that is unique to you; you have a tool to use to progress through more sensitive areas of healing. Developing a personalized mantra provides certainty and anchoring during the healing process.
The process starts with working on your latest experience of feeling fear and tracing that emotion back to your first memory of fear.
My Root Chakra Fear Example
Recognizing strong emotions like fear as important healing signals can deepen your process. You start with your most recent experience fear, it might look like small things. The fear of not paying the bills, not making the mortgage payment, the fear of what someone will do or say. Sit and review your moment and allow yourself to feel the emotions.
Imagine a young child standing barefoot on a porch, watching a caregiver step inside the house and close the door behind them. The child, too small to open the heavy door or fully understand the situation, feels the sudden barrier as a powerful loss of connection. Unable to follow, unable to communicate their need, the child’s body floods with fear.
In the child’s undeveloped sense of time and safety, the separation feels immense—not a brief moment, but a frightening unknown. Even though the caregiver soon returns, smiling and reassuring, the emotional imprint has already been made. In the body’s energetic system, separation and helplessness link together, wiring fear into the foundation of the root chakra.
Moments like these—seemingly small in adult eyes—build the unconscious emotional programs that shape attachment styles, survival responses, and emotional regulation until they are consciously healed.
The Trauma Healing and Reprogramming
When early emotional memories are revisited from an adult perspective, the original associations to fear often shift. With greater knowledge and understanding, it becomes clear that what once felt like abandonment or danger may have simply been ordinary circumstances misunderstood by a young, developing mind.
As adults, we recognize that caregivers often acted within their own limits and contexts—not with the intent to harm or abandon. Yet as children, without the ability to comprehend time, effort, or distance, we naturally created simple, protective stories based on the limited information available.
These early emotional reasonings, designed to keep us safe, become embedded within the body’s energetic systems, particularly within the root chakra. Over time, if left unexamined, they can shape attachment styles such as anxious or avoidant patterns.
Healing begins when we revisit these early associations, honor the emotional truth of the child, and gently update the narrative through the wisdom of our adult selves.
The Root Chakra Closure Statement
A closure statement of the form “Just because….. doesn’t mean…”
After viewing the memory of fear and observing it with your adult knowledge, move on to closing out the session on the root chakra.
Focus on the event that was occurring that was causing the fear emotion…
Example, “Just because I couldn’t see you or now when you’re coming back ….
Focus on the truth of the event that you now understand with viewing the earlier memory as an adult….
Example, doesn’t mean that you stopped loving me.”
There might be a few closure statements that make sense. Flow with these to get some completeness and combine them into a succinct sentence.
For example, processing deep sadness around loss allows you to move through grief with clarity and integration. Work on the close-out statement to be truthful with the knowledge of events since these early workout days.
For example, “Just because I can’t see you doesn’t mean that you have stopped supporting me.“
Your process will be unique to your life experience and situation, but you can use the method on any life event.
Trauma Recovery and Grieving
Healing emotional layers often unfolds in stages. As initial emotions begin to flow and clear, deeper or more complex emotions may arise, revealing new aspects of the original wound.
During reflective practices like journaling or memory review, it is common to encounter waves of sadness, realization, or grief. For example, recognizing the finality of a lost relationship or a moment of separation can open deeper layers of healing that were not initially visible.
Each emotional wave offers an opportunity to acknowledge, process, and integrate truthfully — moving closer to full emotional resolution and restoring energetic flow within the body.
Clarity in Reflection of the Truth
Clarity often deepens as emotional healing progresses. In many cases, early beliefs shaped by misunderstandings, misrepresentations, or intentional distortions become visible. Grieving is not just about loss; it is also about exposing and correcting the emotional narratives that shaped personal identity.
Sometimes, those we trusted may have planted doubts or falsehoods that fractured sacred bonds — between parent and child, between love and worthiness. Healing involves confronting these distortions with truth, recognizing the love, support, or goodness that existed beneath the confusion.
It is unfair. It is spiritual warfare. This is the nature of unfinished emotional business — and it is where healthy grief integration begins and transforms.
As new layers of truth surface, the heart is given the opportunity to release inherited falsehoods and realign with authentic emotional memories. Through this process, one can honor the relationships that offered genuine love, and release the pain attached to distorted perceptions.
Healing can become a layered process. Each time a deeper truth is uncovered and integrated, emotional freedom expands. Grieving in this way — by addressing both love and injustice — completes unfinished business and restores sovereignty to the emotional body.
Grief Beyond Relationships and Injustices
Holistic healing integrates ancient knowledge of the body’s energy systems with modern neuroscience to restore balance and sovereignty. You can use this process to provide yourself with holistic self-care, emotional clarity, and a tool to honor spiritual relationships — both living and beyond.
When fear arises, your mantra becomes a powerful anchor. It connects you back to truth, grounding your energy and supporting emotional integration.
Healing does not require making your process public. You do not need to survive decades of pain, sever bonds in order to grieve, or pardon injustices to find peace. True healing is grounded in recognizing reality — honoring both the high moments and the low, acknowledging both truth and loss without distortion.
Today, thought leaders, scientists, and trauma survivors are uncovering and refining processes that allow for complete healing — physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. These tools represent some of the most effective and accessible ways to resolve complex trauma and grief.
The journey of healing is not about forgetting or erasing the past; it is about fully integrating the truth and reclaiming your wholeness.
The path to freedom lies not in forgetting, but in fully remembering — and healing what was once misunderstood.
Resources
A timeless reminder often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi offers deep relevance for the healing journey:
“Learn as though you will live forever.”
In the context of emotional healing, this can be expanded: Heal as though you will live forever. If you believe that consciousness continues beyond this lifetime, then investing fully in your healing becomes not just important, but essential.
Use the tools and processes available to you now to make this the lifetime where old patterns are completed. Healing is not difficult; it is the discomfort of emotion that makes it feel hard — and even that discomfort is temporary.
If you are interested in learning more from pioneers in trauma recovery, thought leaders such as Dr. Gabor Maté offer profound perspectives. His work often explores how unresolved childhood experiences and inherited generational trauma shape emotional patterns — and how healing them restores sovereignty.
Your healing is sacred. The tools are here. The journey is yours to walk with strength, clarity, and compassion.
Dr Joe Dispenza is a research scientist who investigates and explains the relationship between human cognition, spiritual capabilities, and physical reality in scientific terms. You can read more of his work in “Becoming Super Natural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon.”
