Just because you did not have happy childhood that doesn’t meant that joy can’t be part of your healing journey.
You don’t need to wait to heal and deal with all your wounds before you give your inner child permission to enjoy moments of joy in your day to day life.
Here are 5 ways to reconnect with the curious, free, joyful part of you. They will work even if you can’t remember experience such a part when you were younger. You were still born with ability to wonder and explore and feel the ease and freedom in your daily life.
5 surprising ways to reconnect with joy after childhood trauma
- Attention on imaginary realm – 3 minutes per day
- Bilateral tapping
- Notice what feels good in your body
- 3 magical daily questions
- Learn and practice felt sense-focusing process
1. Practice the language of your body – sensations
Start noticing and paying attention to your body and its sensations, no matter how small.
2. Bilateral tapping
We have in us stored memories of uplifting, joyful moments from our lives.
When we purposely recall them and feel them again, that change the chemistry of our body (releasing of feel good hormones).
According to Laurel Parnel – one of the most successful therapist for healing childhood trauma, adding bilateral stimulation strengthen that process.
What is BLS?
Simply put, bilateral stimulation (BLS) refers to the activation of the left and right sides of the brain.
It is used to stimulate or “awaken” the entire brain and, according to some, is similar to the function of “Rapid Eye Movement” (REM) sleep patterns. It is believed to promote communication between the hemispheres of the brain.
There are various ways to practice bilateral stimulation:
you can listen to bilateral sounds or
hug yourself and tap alternatively with your hands on left and right shoulders.
To use all that knowledge,
make a list of uplifting
3.Notice what feels good in your body
Scan the room that you are in. Pick the object that you really like. Pay attention to your body. How does your body feel, when you observe the object?
Notice the sensation in your body, while you are observing the object. They can be very subtle at first, if you are not used to notice them.
You could use following questions to help you with recognizing sensations:
What are the qualities of that sensation?
- Does it have a size?
- Shape?
- Color?
- Weight?
- Does it spread?
- Notice the direction as it moves.
4. 3 magical daily questions
Not the day goes by without me taking time for those powerful questions:
What surprised me today?
What moved me or touched my heart today?
What inspired me today?
5. Learn and practice felt sense-focusing process
Imagine for a moment that you never learned to talk. You grew up, you became physically and emotionally mature, yet for some reason, the whole universe of words and language that starts to unfold around the age of eighteen months simply never happened for you. How would you think? How would you experience the world?
You’d live from moment to moment, constantly awash in a sea of sensory information. You wouldn’t know what grief meant, but you’d still experience heartache. There’d be no word for joy, but there would be the same glorious physical and emotional sensation that comes when your child runs across a room and jumps into your arms. Excitement, boredom, fear, anger, indeed every shade of your emotional palette would still exist, just as they clearly exist in any healthy normal pre-verbal toddler. But how do they exist, if you have no words for them? They exist as body senses, or inner bodily states.
Of course, you did learn to talk, just like everyone else. And when you learned to talk, you learned to think in words.
Yet when we gain the gift of language, something is lost as well. With our thoughts, we can override our body signals, or they can simply be drowned out, the way sunlight blocks out the light of the stars.
But body senses are still our most elemental and direct experience. Everything else is an overlay. Our emotions, in particular, are attempts to translate our body experience into a language we can understand.
To try the process, register for my free email course HERE
Photo by dominika-roseclay