Healing Implicit Wounding

Recently I have been searching for a personal Counselor to support me in my own process.  I reached out and called quite a few therapists locally.  I was wanting someone to help me get to the really old, implicit, foundational wounding that happened to me in infancy.   See, I was a baby left to cry it out, I wasn’t breast fed, I was left alone with very little touch, and there was no understanding of co-regulation or emotional connection by my parents.  My mother lived in overwhelm and dysregulation, among many other mental challenges, and she had no ability to help me to feel safe in this world.  In order for a parent to co-regulate an infant, they must be regulated themselves.  The only way we learn we are safe as infants, is by our parents being able to co-regulate (being held and emotionally comforted) us early on, and let us know we are safe. I don’t blame my parents, because they weren’t co-regulated or made to feel safe as infants either.  We can’t give what we don’t have.  This has been a generational program passed down for many generations in my family, just like the majority of generational programing in this society.  It programs us with the markers to feel lack, to feel unworthy, that relationships aren’t safe and the world isn’t safe.  It says my needs don’t matter and no matter how hard I try; my needs won’t be met. These markers create a blueprint that carries us through life from a deficit that we aren’t even conscious of.  It is this generational programing that I deeply and passionately desire to shift.  I know it is possible to shift it because I am successfully doing that work myself.

So while asking the Therapists how they help someone heal implicit wounding in infancy, the most common reply was “we talk about it”. What is missing in that response, is that you really can’t access an implicit wound through cognitive therapy because it lives somewhere else, perhaps in the subconscious, perhaps in the body, but it is a place we don’t have cognitive access to.  Talking about implicit wounding isn’t going to help heal it.  What we have to be able to get to are the feelings of the wound, the grief of the wound and the pain of the wound.  With implicit wounding, there is no memory of it because our memory doesn’t come on line until we are around 3 or 4.  Once the memory comes on line then we have what’s called explicit memory and that is more accessible than the implicit memory.  

How then do we access and heal implicit wounding, because the majority of us carry it?  The only ways I know of are counseling work in Imaginal Realm, Somatic Therapies and Plant Medicine.  In my Counseling practice, I work with my clients in the Imaginal Realm.  Einstein said, “The imaginal realm is more important than knowledge”.  Jung worked in the imaginal realm as well.  We have been lead to believe in our culture that the Imaginal Realm is just a place that kids play, but that is far from the whole truth.  The Imaginal Realm is the Shaman Journey Realm, the visualizing realm, and yes, a Healing Realm.  I have seen clients heal deep wounding by our work together in this realm.  It bypasses the Intellect and that is a good thing, same as Somatic work in the body, same as plant medicine work.  The Intellect isn’t asked for its opinion and doesn’t have currency in the Imaginal Realm. 

My focus as a Counselor is supporting people in healing and integrating all the wounded parts of themselves so that they become “whole”.   In many Shaman societies, the belief is that when a person experiences a trauma in infancy or childhood, then a piece of their soul leaves and they end up walking around like Swiss Cheese.  The Shaman healing for this is called a Soul Retrieval.  My work is very similar except we do the work together to find the wounded part that is still stuck in the past, in a very real sense, we rescue it, bring it to the present, give it what it didn’t get, and then allow it to integrate.  This allows the client to move more and more from Self, with a capital “S”.  When we do this work in the Imaginal Realm, it doesn’t matter if the wounding is implicit or explicit because we bypass that all together.

I believe the importance of this work in the Imaginal Realm is untapped; until now.  If you are curious and interested in doing this work, please visit my website https://www.michelerenaespiritualcounsel.com/ and schedule your free 15 min Inquiry Call.  You can also email me at michelerenae505@gmail.com with questions.