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Is It Important To Know What Our Traumas Are?

Or is forgetting the better path forward?

Heidi Thompson
Stories Of Healing
5 min readJun 3, 2023

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Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

I recently published an article What Hustle Culture Gets Wrong About Trauma and a reader left this comment:

Is it important to know what your traumas are?

This may be one of the most important questions in trauma healing work. What we don’t know we can’t heal, but does remembering past events that caused terror or suffering really serve our healing journey?

Healing the root cause

Some healing modalities say addressing the root cause of our trauma is the solution.

The idea here is that trauma alters neuropathways in the body, which then become cemented in the nervous system. Then, anything in our environment that even remotely resembles an important detail of the original event can trigger a trauma response.

These theories say that discovering and healing the root cause rewires the nervous system.

But how do we discover the root cause? And when we do, how do we heal it? And what if we can’t remember, either because we blocked it out or we were too young? If we must remember and we can’t, is healing even possible?

The ghost trigger

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Stories Of Healing
Stories Of Healing

Published in Stories Of Healing

A medium publication focused on exploring the impact of trauma so that we can heal together.

Heidi Thompson
Heidi Thompson

Written by Heidi Thompson

Mother and writer living in Hawaii. Find me on Substack: heidithompson.substack.com

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