Why Our Usual Defences Don’t Work After Trauma and How to Reset

Quick summary: Trauma disrupts the brain’s natural defences and forces people into coping mechanisms, such as self-blame and avoidance, that delay rather than support recovery. A clinical technique called guided imagery offers a structured path to healing by guiding individuals through five steps: remembering, feeling, expressing, releasing, and reframing the traumatic experience. Mental health practitioners working with trauma survivors may find this approach particularly effective for achieving emotional closure where conventional coping strategies have failed.

No one is ever psychologically prepared for trauma. What’s more, anyone who experiences it is forced into coping responses that are ultimately unhealthy and counterproductive.

We make our best attempts to get back to our lives and move forward, but in the meantime we carry the burden of the trauma with us. We may blame ourselves rather than try to come to terms with life’s capacity for randomness and destruction, with the reality that an anvil could fall out of the sky and there is nothing we can do about it. As humans, we feel the need to believe that the world follows some predictable logic.

We may also carry guilt following a traumatic experience, telling ourselves that we had it coming because of something bad we had done in the past. What goes around comes around, we say. Another common coping mechanism is avoidance. We go numb and repress all reminders of the incident. But while avoidance may appear to prevent us from re-experiencing the emotional pain associated with the event, it does nothing to allow healing.

In reality, the idea that “time heals all wounds” is mistaken. To the extent that we postpone coming to terms with trauma, we are unable to defuse its intensity or its hold on us.

Traumatic events are events in search of a framework or context that makes them meaningful. Such meaning provides the foundation for emotional release. The combination of letting go of the emotion and finding meaning for the trauma adds up to healing. Feeling, expressing, releasing, and finding meaning are all necessary to heal the wounds.

To support such healing, guided imagery is a clinical psychological technique with a proven record of providing relief from trauma, as well as from grief and loss. It is an effective tool for helping people revisit unresolved issues in their lives and finally achieve closure.

I worked with a young woman who had been raped at age 16. I helped her undergo a powerful guided imagery session using the scenario of a movie theatre. In this visualisation, she watched the traumatic event unfold on the screen and processed the experience from a safe space in the “theatre.” The session integrated her 16-year-old self with her current self, and she comforted her younger self. She also expressed her feelings to the perpetrator. The session gave her a sense of conclusion regarding the rape.

Guided imagery provides a way to confront and reframe a traumatic experience. The technique enables people to heal more rapidly and empowers them to move forward unshackled from the event.

Throughout guided imagery, people affected by trauma work through five steps that bring emotional closure.

• Remembering: It is necessary to fully remember all the details of the trauma. Doing so circumvents the brain’s attempt to escape through avoidance and brings all the details of the issue back to full awareness. It is important to conjure up as many details as possible across all the senses, along with the thoughts present when the event occurred. The individual must tell the tale in full.
• Feeling: Feeling the emotions associated with the trauma is necessary because avoidance means sidestepping emotional intensity as well as the facts. Anger, fear, grief: all the emotions should surface. If they do not, it is likely that treatment will not be successful. Someone who recounts the basic circumstances with no feeling remains numb to the emotions of the event. Trauma must be felt to facilitate healing.
• Expressing: The individual must express the emotions associated with the event for two reasons. First, feelings can remain internal and blocked from their own awareness. Second, verbal expression puts feelings into words. Trauma is not so much about the dry facts of the event as about the emotional impact of it. The most emotionally powerful parts of a memory are often contained in the details, and those are what get carried forward.
• Releasing: This step naturally flows from expressing. Sometimes release happens automatically: the individual expresses their bottled-up emotions, feels better, and resolves to move forward. But for some, releasing the trauma means accepting what occurred, and that can be difficult. A young person who survived a car accident in which their best friend died may struggle with this step because release means accepting that their friend is never coming back.
• Reframing: When release is not sufficient for recovery, reframing creates a new context for the trauma. Finding the right reframe is often key to emotional closure, and it must satisfy all the powerful emotions held inside. One woman who attended a Las Vegas concert where 58 people were killed and another 422 wounded needed exactly that. Healthy reframes for her included thoughts such as “I am alive because I have some special purpose to perform” and “This experience has made me realise how valuable life is.”

With guided imagery, it is important to understand that the purpose of treatment is acceptance: letting go of the trauma and releasing whatever the individual might be holding on to. This brings them to a point of decision. Do they continue living under the shadow of the trauma? Or do they let go of it and return to the enjoyment of their life?

Only the individual can actively choose to steer the ship in the direction of psychological health, but guided imagery offers them a new horizon.