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 my dad and updating my relationship with fear to resolve emotions on my terms provided a way to heal holistically on my terms and in a way that did not pardon injustice.
The grief process I completed with my dad’s passing had surprising results. It has provided me with resolve, which I did not know was possible, and a feeling of completeness. You can get to this level of resolve by combining trauma work results into my grieving process.
This article is the details of how I achieved this holistic level of healing and how you can too.
Spiritual Development and Continuing a Relationship after Death
Now that he is gone, what does my relationship look like with my dad?
I believe there is an afterlife. This belief allows me to feel my dad’s support. Support that he could not provide when he was alive. You might be confronting refining your beliefs around life after death. When cultivating any belief the best advice is to make it an empowering belief.
I believe this with certainty, from having grieved previous losses that forced me to develop my spirituality. My belief was strengthened by a closure statement that I created to clear a trauma block of the root chakra.
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.
I loved the idea of using neuroplasticity to update these early thought habits based on the knowledge that I now have. However, I needed 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 was given to me. Onami’s process turned out to be the process I needed.
With a process to find what the old thought habit is, you can use cognitive awareness and neuroplasticity to update this old program.
Foundation for emotional energy work
I genuinely believe this process worked so well for me because of my experience in EMDR work. 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. For me, it was a mantra that provided certainty to my continued relationship with my dad.
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
I had plenty of feelings of current fear, and they were strong. 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 this your moment and allow yourself to feel the emotions.
For example, my dad worked out in the backyard when I was younger. I was very young, younger than three. He’d take me outside while he ran laps between the house and the barn around the hay bail and back. I would run to keep up as fast as I could, but he would always out run me.
My dad was 6’4”, and I could never keep up. I would have to give up, and I would start to cry because I felt like I was being left behind. Being left behind felt abandoned, and I couldn’t see him when he was behind the hay bales. I didn’t know when he was coming back. In my three-year-old mind, I was on my own and would have to figure out how to survive outside by myself. I was scared.
Then he’d round the hay bale and head back toward the house. I could see and hear him yelling my name so I would stop crying. Seeing and hearing him would make me happy, and I would start laughing and get ready to run back toward the house, determined to keep up with Dad this time.
He did laps repeatedly, and I pushed myself to keep up each time, but I fell behind. Each time, I cried out of frustration and fear.
The Trauma Healing and Reprograming
Remembering and watching this memory from an adult perspective is a review of the emotional association to fear that is currently in place. It allows me to see the truth of the situation with the information I now have available. My dad was just trying to work out and was not abandoning me.
As I watched him return each time, yelling my name so I’d stop crying, I could see that he never stopped loving me even though I couldn’t see him or because he was out of sight. He hadn’t abandoned me he was an adult trying to work out in the backyard.
Our younger minds create reasoning with the knowledge that they have available. Same as our adult minds do. You create reasoning based on your previous experiences and knowledge that is available to you. My limited knowledge at three led me to create simple reasonings that felt real and true based on what I knew and with the intention to keep me safe.
This was true with the first memory of feeling fear, and with this new perspective, I could see my relationship with fear and abandonment.
The root charka is where anxious or avoidant attachment styles can be created.
My Root Chakra Closure Statement
In working with this initial fear block, I received a perfectly timed message that allowed me to feel supported at the beginning of the healing process.
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, I cried about the reality of my dad never coming back and continued with the knowledge of his death that exists now. I worked 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 and I don’t know when I will see you again doesn’t mean that you have stopped loving and 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 many types of emotion can happen in multiple layers as emotions start to flow move and be cleared, more complex emotions or different emotions can arise.
While journaling, I broke down in tears at the reality that my dad would never be coming back or turning back around those hay bales cheering my name.
Clarity in Reflection of the Truth
I realized he’d been cheering for me since I was three. Showing me love and wanting me to be happy through his actions of showing up and cheering.
I grieve harder as I realize how much my mother took from me with her lie.
“He doesn’t want you, he never wanted you. Your dad wanted a boy. He didn’t want a girl.”
To instill doubt into something so sacred and attempt to break the bond between a daughter and father with a lie is an action that will never be justified. From the age of three in the backyard and through to college, my dad cheered for me at every event I had. He even stood up and cheered when no one else did.
It is so unfair. It is spiritual warfare. This was my unfinished business, and I grieve.
I let go of the lie as I watch the memories and see my dad cheering for me in the backyard to not cry, cheering for me at sporting events in middle school, high school, and college. In healing my fear and grieving his passing.
I see new truths and identify and expose how much my mother lied.
Healing can become a complex process, but when you create truthful associations with events, you will heal for good. Because grieving is processing complex emotions, healing might happen in a few layers at a time. Integrating and releasing layer after layer is finishing all of your unfinished business.
Grief Beyond Relationships and Injustices
This is the best method of healing and grief.
When you feel fear, you use your mantra.
For example, when I feel fear, I will use my Just Because mantra and hear his voice cheering me on.
This holistic healing that utilizes ancient knowledge of the body’s energy systems and modern neuroscience. I use this process to provide myself with important holistic self-care and a tool to honor a spiritual relationship with my dad that survived the injustices done to our relationship in this lifetime.
You don’t need to make your healing public, you don’t need to survive decades of pain, you don’t need to let someone go to grieve completely and move on, and you do not need to pardon injustices. The reality and truths of the situations need to be realized, good or bad, the high moments and low moments need to be considered and addressed.
Thought leaders, scientists, and trauma survivors are figuring out processes and tools to heal physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. These tools are the best and simplest available for resolving complex trauma and grief.
Resources
A quote that my dad gave to me is specifically important if you believe your consciousness goes on after this physical life.
“… Learn as though you will live forever.” -Mahatam Ghandi
But in this context, heal as though you will live forever. It is specifically important if you think that your consciousness continues after this lifetime. Use these tools and processes to make this lifetime the last one that you struggle with these issues. The process isn’t hard. The emotions are just uncomfortable, and they are temporary.
Sovereign Rayne has some initial insights into holistic healing in the free app Lumyst. Check out those materials here.
More thought leaders and their references are linked below.
Onami Mami, a trauma survivor who refused to accept what others told her about life, made it her mission to find the most efficient way to resolve trauma completely. She has started a school that teaches the methods she has found to be most effective and efficient. She will also have a book released soon (circa April 2025).
You can check out the full Wheels: Reinvented or the free version of the class.
Dr. Gabor Mate is a trauma expert who often speaks to resolving traumas experienced during his childhood and empathizing with difficulties his mother experienced out of the World War II era.
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.”
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