Someone recently asked me, “How do you use spirituality and energy work in therapy?” I replied, “It’s creative metaphors, symbols, and guided experiences that happen to speak the subconscious core language: emotion and belief.”
When I say this, I’m pointing to how the brain and nervous system really work, especially after trauma. Your subconscious doesn’t think in facts or logic like your conscious mind; it processes feelings, sensations, memories, and meaning. Trauma is often stored as tension in the body, images, or strong emotions rather than as a clear story. By using metaphors, symbols, and guided experiences, therapy speaks this “language,” helping old patterns and emotions to be safely revisited, understood, and released. This allows your mind and body to respond differently, creating lasting change in how you feel and react.
Why “Talk Therapy” Alone Isn’t Enough
Most of us naturally try to understand our experiences through language, logic, and reasoning — it’s how our conscious mind makes sense of the world. But trauma doesn’t live in the story; it’s stored in the body, emotions, and subconscious memory. It shapes the nervous system, keeping survival responses active long after the danger has passed.
This is why insight or talk therapy alone can help you understand what happened, but often does not change how your body and brain respond. Effective healing works with the emotional and subconscious “language” of trauma — through metaphors, imagery, guided experiences, and body‑based regulation — helping your nervous system feel safer, memories to be integrated differently, and emotional patterns to shift in a lasting way.
The Neuroscience of Trauma: Brain Structures at Work
– The Amygdala: Threat Detection and Hyper‑Responsivity
The amygdala acts as the brain’s alarm system, quickly scanning for danger and producing emotional responses like fear and anxiety. After trauma, this part of the brain often becomes hyperactive, primed to detect threats even when the environment is safe. That’s why reminders — even small ones — can provoke intense emotional reactions. Trauma doesn’t just reside in memory; it embeds in the brain’s threat circuitry.
– The Hippocampus: Memory, Context, and Coherence
The hippocampus helps us form explicit, chronological memories — “this happened then that happened.” But during trauma, stress hormones like cortisol interfere with its function. Instead of being stored as a coherent story, traumatic experiences often remain in fragmented sensory and emotional pieces — images, sensations, body states — that constantly replay without clear context.
– Prefrontal Cortex: Logic and Regulation Under Pressure
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the rational part of the brain: planning, reasoning, emotional regulation, impulse control. Under threat, the PFC’s ability to calm the amygdala and organise memory gets diminished. This is why in moments of high stress it often feels impossible to “think your way out” of an emotional reaction — the wiring is simply not optimally engaged.
The Language of the Subconscious: Emotion, Belief, and Sensation
The limbic nervous system handles emotion and memory; while the autonomic system regulates automatic bodily functions.
When we speak of the “subconscious mind’s core language — emotion and belief,” we are talking about the primary way the brain organises meaning at a nonverbal level. Metaphors, symbols, imagery, sensation and guided emotional states interface with the limbic and autonomic systems; they can reshape implicit memory and neural connectivity. These are the channels through which deep regulation and re‑anchoring of the nervous system happen.
Clinical Hypnotherapy and Rapid Transformational Therapy® (RTT®):
Through hypnosis, you are guided into a safe, relaxed state where the subconscious mind can be accessed more easily. RTT® works by identifying the root cause of emotional patterns, exploring the beliefs and emotions formed at that time, and gently supporting the nervous system to respond differently. By working at the level of sensory memory, memories can be revisited and safely reframed, reducing emotional intensity and supporting healthier integration. This facilitates meaningful, lasting change in emotional responses, self‑beliefs, and overall wellbeing — helping past experiences feel less controlling and more manageable.
The Nervous System and Safety: Regulating Before Rewriting
Healing trauma is not about erasing memory — it’s about transforming how the nervous system responds to memory. When safety is established in the body, when the amygdala learns through experience that the present moment is not a threat, the hippocampus and PFC can begin to re‑contextualise those memories as past instead of present.
Trauma, Integration, and Change at the Root
Your conscious understanding, your insight, your intelligence — these are tools. But to crate change at the root, the work must touch the emotional and somatic architecture of the brain. That doesn’t mean abandoning logic — it means anchoring logic in the lived, felt experience of safety, emotion, and regulated nervous system states. That’s what allows deep change to happen — the nervous system learns safety, the body learns regulation, and the memory circuits reorganise from within.
References for Further Reading
- van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.
- LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life.
- Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation.
- Schore, A. N. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy.
- Brewin, C. R., Dalgleish, T., & Joseph, S. (1996). A dual representation theory of posttraumatic stress disorder. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8888651/. Key takeaway: PTSD occurs because traumatic memories are stored in two ways: one conscious and narrative, the other sensory and automatic. Symptoms like flashbacks arise when sensory memories dominate and aren’t properly integrated.
- Nader, K. et al. (2000). Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval, Nature, https://www.nature.com/articles/35021052. Key takeaway: Memories are not fixed; recalling them temporarily makes them malleable, allowing them to be altered or weakened before they are stored again.
- Ehlers & Clark (2000). Trauma and meaning, Behaviour Research and Therapy, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10761279/. Key takeaway: PTSD is maintained by the way trauma is interpreted and how the brain avoids processing it, not just by the traumatic event itself.