Processing feelings vs. just re-experiencing them?

I am reading a book on trauma treatment that works a lot with imagery and taking care of inner child parts. the author is big on "dysidentification", separating the child experience from the adult experience. totally not our struggle. we separated that pretty well.
but if you talk to a child part you really talk to a child part with no hope for an adult.
I think that maybe we have too much of that dysidentification going on.

for anyone interested, I put out 2 new articles on trauma processing on the blog.

Something that I find predicts this for me, is if something called belief updating happens. When I feel that the past feeling has someone made it into the present (maybe I am able to change some belief that came from the traumatic experience, maybe I am able to finally feel that I am safe in another time), then I find that I start processing that experience. Acceptance and courage helped me a lot here. With experience, it gets easier to process feelings instead of just re-experiencing them; I can't remember the last time I had an unproductive contact/catharsis with my memories - things just naturally process when they come up now.

Hi agaveroselemonade! (Why do I suddenly feel thirsty??)

Welcome to the forum.

agaveroselemonade wrote:Something that I find predicts this for me, is if something called belief updating happens. When I feel that the past feeling has someone made it into the present (maybe I am able to change some belief that came from the traumatic experience, maybe I am able to finally feel that I am safe in another time), then I find that I start processing that experience. Acceptance and courage helped me a lot here. With experience, it gets easier to process feelings instead of just re-experiencing them; I can't remember the last time I had an unproductive contact/catharsis with my memories - things just naturally process when they come up now.

That makes me feel very hopeful. My T has also said that it has to do with changing beliefs.

Acceptance and courage--those are key to progress in most things, I'm finding.