Even up until two or three, many times when a child of this age enters a room of adults, they do it with great self confidence as if to say, here I am you lucky people. Unfortunately, as a child ages, he or she starts to come up against issues they cannot control. It could be an abusive parent, a bully or not being able to do well in school. These traumas start to add up and a child starts to lose his or her power or self confidence. The amount of power lost depends on how devastating the trauma and what kind of support the child is given to help them cope with the trauma.

By the time a person reaches adulthood, he or she has established coping mechanisms to deal with the lost power. These come in the form of addictions of various types, defense mechanisms, strong emotions such as anger and sadness, and acting out behaviors to name a few. When these coping mechanisms no longer work, many time people end up in psychotherapy. And I postulate that good psychotherapy helps give people their lost power back so they can return to the self confidence they had as a baby.

When people are children, most of the time they are not allowed to show their anger. Adults are allowed to be angry with their children, but when children show signs of anger, they are often punished. So children learn not to show their anger. Every time a child gets angry, it is like he puts an unspent wooded match in a pile to light later. Then, as an adult, something small makes him angry, he lights a match, throws it in the pile of unspent matches and the whole pile ignites and explodes in anger. It is much more anger than the the one match was worth. But unlike real matches that once they are lit, they are gone, these old matches keep being reignited every time the person gets angry.

By releasing the old reasons for the anger, Gentle Reprocessing helps people let go completely of this old anger. Then when someone gets angry it is much more appropriate. For instance, a man with severe road rage had experienced an abusive childhood. When the feelings of the childhood were released, the road rage could be worked on and he no longer found traffic made him anger. That was very apparent when he called to say he would be late for therapy because of traffic. When he finally arrived he reported being in two long traffic jams. When he was asked how he felt about that, he said rather irritated with the therapist, “I could only move as fast as the car in front of me.” But when the therapist asked if that made him mad, he replied, “Of course not. What could I do?” The man did not even see the therapist’s point in asking if it made him angry. From his new perspective, what was there to be upset about?

So instead of trying to keep a lid on one’s anger by using various tools, Gentle Reprocessing simply helps a client let go of the old feelings that feed the anger.  Once this is done, out of control anger ceases to be a problem in a person’s life.

How does Gentle Reprocessing work? When a traumatic event happens in a person’s life they store is in their psyche in four ways; the event itself, the emotions connected to that event and the body sensations connected to each of those emotions, and finally a set of negative beliefs that support the event. So if you were molested as a child, that would be the event. This would come with multiple emotions such as terror, anger, shame etc. Each of those emotions would be stored somewhere in your body. The terror might be all over, whereas the anger might be in your fists and the shame in your face. You will also start to collect some negative beliefs or cognitions about yourself; it was my fault, I am bad, I am broken. Gentle Reprocessing gently, quickly, and deeply helps people release the emotions that hold the trauma together. Once someone does not feel any emotions about the event, the trauma no longer bothers the victim. At this point, positive cognitions can be installed and easily believed. The traumatized individual no longer feels traumatized.

So what is the proof that this works? Gentle Reprocessing has been developed over the past 20 years. It started being taught to other therapists in 2001. There are well over 400 therapist who have been trained in the technique. A hand full of therapists have made this their primary tool in dealing with trauma and have based their practice on the Gentle Reprocessing. These clinicians believe it works for their clients and continue to use it along with their particular therapy style. Someday a researcher will do a study and find out it works. But for now, both clients and clinicians are using it and finding excellent results.