⚠️ Content Warning: This exercise involves intentional revisiting of painful memories. Please proceed with care, set strong grounding and self-care measures, and stop if distress becomes overwhelming. ⚠️
The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.—Carl Jung
This practice uses reverie, immersive mental replay, to gradually neutralise emotional flashpoints rooted in past trauma. By safely revisiting painful engrams in a controlled state, you weaken their unconscious hold and reclaim your emotional freedom. Because this can be intense, structure each session with affirmations, grounding rituals, and clear time limits. Proceed slowly and compassionately.
Core Ideas:
- Emotional triggers are engrams, sensory imprints of past trauma.
- Controlled reverie desensitises these triggers by re-integrating them into conscious awareness.
- Safety protocols—grounding, affirmations, time limits—are essential to prevent re-traumatisation.
- Repetition across sessions diminishes the trigger’s reflexive power and frees emotional energy.
Shadow Writing Prompts
Prompt 28a: Identifying Your Trigger
Reflect on a recent overreaction, an incident where a sight, sound, or thought set you off. Describe the trigger in vivid detail and the emotions it unleashes. Then gently allow your mind to drift back to the earliest memory this engram maps to, noting every sensory fragment (smell, texture, tone) before returning to the present.
Prompt 28b: Ground-and-Replay Ritual
Before diving in, anchor with an affirmation and three deep breaths. Re-enter the trigger memory, weaving together the sensory clues you uncovered. Stay until the intensity peaks, then anchor back with a grounding technique (body scan or safe-object focus). Journal how the emotional charge shifted.
Prompt 28c: Collateral Insights
Identify additional details—gestures, words, or environments—that amplify your reaction when replayed together. During reverie, note how each element contributes to the surge. Write about how knowing these connections helps you dismantle the trigger’s power.
Prompt 28d: Building Tolerance
Plan your next three sessions: schedule time limits, choose grounding tools, and set compassionate intentions. After each rehearsal, track the trigger’s intensity on a 1–10 scale. Reflect on any reduction in reactivity and the sense of liberation gained. Use this data to guide your ongoing desensitisation journey.
Approach with respect: you’re reprogramming your psychic circuitry. With patience and care, watch your triggers lose their edge and your true self re-emerge.
