So before we go any further, let me talk a little bit about a distinction with the emotions that may come up around a traumatic event. So some of these emotions we can think of as hardwired responses to going through an event. You don't have to think about them to have the emotion. So let me give you an example. If we had a tiger that ran in behind me while we were doing this video, I don't have to think, my goodness, there's a tiger here.
I might get eaten. And if I did, I would be tiger chow. I have a fight or flight or freeze response. I'm ready to run into the next room. I don't have to think about that. If I come back tomorrow, I may be thinking, you know, there was a tiger in that room. I could get eaten. That room is really dangerous. Then I'm still gonna have a fear response, but it's coming from my thoughts.
With the first type, those emotions that we don't even need to think about, what we wanna do to process those is to just let the person sit with them. Now for the ones that are coming more from our thoughts, what we need to do is to change the thoughts and the emotions will shift. Now why is this important? Because if something is coming from the thoughts, no amount of sitting with the emotion is gonna make a shift. But if it's more of that biological response, it may not be coming from the beliefs themselves.
So when we think about a trauma example, it is helpful to think about what if these emotions may have been biological, normal, physiologically based kinds of emotions from the event itself. It might be fear at a life threat. It could be disgust from the gory details of what happened to someone. It could be anger at having someone take something away from you. It could be sadness at a loss. What you wanna do is help the person get to those emotions, sit with them, and then they will run their course, just like a soda pop.
Right? Shake it up, take the lid off. It's gonna make a little bit of a mess, spill up a little bit, but eventually it's gonna run out of energy if you're not continuing to feed it.