Ego parts are parts of you that develop inside you, to protect you, in times of trauma, but stay inside your body, and can cause debilitating symptoms later in life, when their ‘protective methods’ begin to conflict with the way you are trying to live your life.
CATCH hypnotherapists are often asked, ‘where are these parts inside of me?’ We say, ‘in a cupboard, deep inside your chest, or your solar plexus, or your stomach.’
You may have experienced a lot of trauma in your life, but you may have managed fine for a while. However, at some point, you may start to feel emotional about certain things. Your reactions in everyday life may begin to get a bit extreme. Let me explain what is happening. Watch this video, or read on below.
Can you imagine that every time you have been hurt, or put in a situation you couldn’t get out of, or feared for your survival, your body has taken a polaroid image of you at that moment, and attached an emotion to the bottom of it, which may have been fear, anger, guilt, or injustice. Whatever the emotion was, it and the photo was stuffed in a cupboard, inside of you, and the door was shut.
Every soldier who has come back in from a contact on patrol will remember saying, ‘Well, that was emotional!’ Indeed. The perfect phrase.
The next time something else happens in your life, it does the same thing, and the next, and the next. It has created an autonomic – meaning automatic – pattern in your body: experience it, label it, stuff it in the cupboard. If you have only had a few traumatic experiences in your life the cupboard door stays closed easily. You might open it sometimes, look in, feel those emotions for a short time, but then shut it again and go back to your daily life.
But the more traumas you endure, the more crowded that cupboard becomes, and every younger you in there has a strong emotion, a strong grievance, a heartfelt injustice. So, you keep the door shut. Sometimes one might slip out and pile all its emotion on you, and it takes a huge effort for you to force it back in.
If the traumas keep coming, you end up with no room in the cupboard. While you are trying to push the polaroid images, with their emotional tags in, they just spill out. It is like playing ‘whack a mole’ with anger, fear, depression, grief, and loss. The good days are when you do manage to keep the doors closed – for a while. But the strain of containing them will give you pain, high blood pressure, exhaustion etc.
In the end it is impossible. Those cupboard doors will suddenly crash open and nothing is going back in there. Like your under stairs cupboard, or the kids toy box. You will find yourself just sitting there, mired in every emotion you have ever felt, knowing it is a lost cause, and no idea what to do about it, and probably, by then, no desire to do anything. This is why apathy can be a very strong indicator of PTSD.
This is when Catch hypnotherapists can step in and help you. We will sit in the middle of it with you. We will help you sort through it, address each polaroid and emotion, understand where they came from, and what they need to explain to you. Some will be mollified enough just by you finally focusing on them. Others will demand vindication – like an angry partner or child. But CATCH hypnotherapy helps you understand it all and helps you dispel all those emotions just by understanding.
If you are going to have this big cupboard inside of you, I am sure you want it filled with joy and happiness and fun. Catch hypnotherapy will help you clear that space so YOU get to decide how to fill it.
So whatever state your admin, your cupboard, is in, give a CATCH hypnotherapist a call today for a free consultation. We are here to help.
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