How unresolved trauma is holding you back in your business without you realising it

Most people don’t realise the effects that unresolved trauma and emotional baggage has on not only their own mindset, their relationships and the way they parent and even the amount of success they attain in their businesses.

As a licensed psychotherapist, clinical hypnotherapist and business coach, I help female entrepreneurs make the connection between unresolved trauma and emotional baggage as well as the patterns that play out in their lives, and the decisions that they make from that place of wounding.

Before we start speaking about that, let’s first talk about the concept of trauma.

Hollywood has done such a good job to teach us that trauma looks like war veterans returning with PTSD and then having extremely realistic flashbacks where they are reliving scenes from their combat experiences. Whilst that is a reality for many war veterans, most people don’t realise that trauma can be defined into ‘big T traumas’ and ‘small Trauma’ and the majority of the population have at some point experienced ‘small T’ trauma.

What is ‘Small T’ trauma?

This is the stuff that most people don’t even consider to be trauma, because it is so “normal” to them or other people that they know and it happens so often, that they don’t even think it’s a big deal. Examples can be being bullied as a child, having emotionally unavailable parents, being made to feel by a teacher, or someone you know that you’re just simply not good enough, that you’re different or don’t belong.

Now the younger we are when we experience trauma, the bigger the effect it has on us, simply because a 4 year old, 6 year old or 8 year old simply doesn’t have the mental maturity or the necessary tools to deal with trauma in a healthy, effective manner.

When a child suffers any form of abuse, they blame themselves and carry the weight of shame and guilt. Even when the abuser is a parent or a family member, the child instead of asking “what is wrong with this person?” will ask “what is wrong with me?”

That means that very often we dissaociate just to try and provide ourselves some relief from the situation. but very often our subconscious mind takes on beliefs and this, together with the emotions that we are not able to process, end up creating patterns in our life that will play out until we actually have the courage to acknowledge, process and break them.

So very often women will come to me when they’ve reached the point where they’ve spent thousands on courses, they followed all the online gurus, tried everything everyone tells them they need to be doing to have success in their businesses but, somehow, they still end up self-sabotaging and aren’t able to get the results that they so deeply desire.

In my practice I combine traditional therapy with regression hypnosis NLP and EFT together with coaching to help my clients recognize exactly when, where and why a certain negative belief came into their life, then to identify the pattern that has been playing out for them and to help them process the emotions that their subconscious mind has attached to these painful life experiences.

How trauma shows up

I’ll share an example of a woman who had been trying everything in her power to become more visible in her business.

She called me and said, “I have literally spent thousands of dollars on visibility courses and hours of my life doing research and watching YouTube videos but I still can’t seem to pull the trigger. As soon as I want to start taking action to become visible in my business something will happen or I will self-sabotage. Can you help me?”

So, I decided that we needed to start with regression hypnosis to find out exactly when, where and how her subconscious mind had taken on this belief that being visible was not safe for her.

In the first scene, she was four years old hiding in a cupboard. Her father was an alcoholic and whenever he got into these alcoholic rages, his violent nature would come out. This scared her so much that she told me that at that point, she was fearing for her life.

If the person who is supposed to love you unconditionally and be the protector of your life becomes your worst enemy and your most feared person, you can imagine that as a four year old that was very difficult for her to process and her subconscious mind had just decided right there and then that if she if it isn’t even safe for her to be visible to her own father being visible to other people, is even worse.

In the second scene, she wanted to be in the school theatre production. She learned her lines. She practised. Everything was going very well during practise every day in the empty hall.

However, opening night came and that hall and the rows and rows of chairs filled with people. She walked onto that stage and looked out over those rows and rows of people. Her mind, being her best defence mechanism, simply shut down because her mind already had the belief that being visible wasn’t safe especially to strangers) As a result, the lines that she had said so perfectly day after day simply evaporated from her brain as if by magic.

She was left standing there, confused, embarrassed, feeling totally lost and hopeless.

And so this pattern had started playing out in her life whenever she had tried to do anything that would make her visible. As you can imagine, being in her mid-thirties, she didn’t think that these occurrences were significant because her logical mind told her, “You’re in your mid-thirties now, you’re not a child anymore, your father isn’t alive anymore, you should be over this.”

She thought that she was over it and had dealt with it but that unfortunately isn’t how it works.

Self-Sabotage and Safety

Emotional baggage doesn’t magically disappear just because time has passed and the part of the brain that deals with trauma unfortunately cannot tell time; it just responds whenever triggered and “relives” all those emotions over and over again. This prompts the belief to kick in and the decision to self-sabotage is made in order to keep safe.

As you can imagine being a trauma specialist, I hear the worst of the worst stories and I always tell my clients that broken bones will heal, bruises, cuts, they will all heal.

However, the subconscious mind attaches meaning to the emotions of those events and whenever those emotions get triggered in our daily life, it takes us right back to that point where we feel that fear of rejection. The place where we feel we are simply not good enough, that we’re different and that what we really want in life is just not available to us.

I always tell my clients you can’t change what you’re not willing to acknowledge and as soon as we’ve acknowledged these events and processed these emotions in a healthy way, it becomes so much easier to take aligned action, because you are not at war with your own subconscious mind anymore.  Your mind then becomes your ally instead of your enemy and it makes the world of difference.

Positive Effects

One of the most positive side effects my clients will report after doing this work is a boost in energy. All of a sudden they feel like they’re in their twenties, bursting with energy and the reason being  that they’re not depleting their mental energy any more with their subconscious mind trying to figure out and make sense of these emotional wounds.

As soon as you have that energy to yourself again, life feels easy, taking action feels easy and getting those results that you longed for all of a sudden become so much easier.

So I help female entrepreneurs, coaches, therapists and healers to create impact and income while creating a fun and freedom lifestyle. My belief is that business gets to be easy, sales gets to be easy and you’re allowed to have both an amazing lifestyle and a busy practice which should be built around your life, not the other way around.

Otherwise you could have just stayed in your corporate job, chained to that desk and missing out on everything you think is important and that probably motivated you to become an entrepreneur in the first place.

Janine Wirth is a licensed Psychotherapist, Clinical Hypnotherapist, Advanced Rapid Transformatiional therapist and trained as both a transformational and business coach through UCI. She is a member of the National Council of Psychotherapists.

https://www.janinewirth.com