Some asks, "I can understand going back to the source of emotional trauma and bringing awareness to it, but how exactly does one heal it? Especially as one is not supposed to analyze it. How does the healing take place?"
When we become aware of a pattern of behavior in our lives that is repeating from childhood, simply becoming aware of the particular childhood event or events that caused us to form such traumatic templates in and of itself does not heal the dysfunction.
What heals the past is the present. Only in the present can we heal painful patterns that we learned long ago and that we continue to repeat in our lives today.
In The Presence Process, Michael Brown shows that the key to changing behavior that is repeating from the past is to become aware of the emotional signature of such behavior. In other words, we take note of the thread of oft-repeated behavior that runs back into our past and pay attention to what it feels like.
Once we are truly aware of the feeling, we can spot it when it begins to arise in the present.
Simply being aware of what happened to us as a child changes nothing. Recognizing how we repeat behaviors learned back then opens the door to total transformation, so that the behavior ends.
The key is to become aware of the emotional signature so that we notice as the tendency to react to a situation in the same way arises in us in the present moment.
With this awareness comes the ability to choose. We recognize that to behave in a certain way would be to react as we have always done. Then, we make a choice not to react.
Awareness supplies a second ingredient for transformation