We may know that a painful event is over and be able to describe it calmly. Yet our body can still react as if danger is present—with a racing heart, a tight chest, or a sudden wave of fear.
That gap between what we understand and how we feel can be part of the lingering effects of trauma. “You’ve got to get the unconscious on the same page with the conscious. If you can’t see it in front of you, there’s nothing you can do,” clinical psychologist Jessica D. Russo told The Epoch Times.
On an episode of Vital Signs, Russo discussed several ways people can explore difficult experiences, including talk therapy, focusing, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and neuro-emotional technique (NET). She also described everyday practices that can help people pay attention to their thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations.
Talk Therapy: Listening Beneath the Words
Yet effective therapy is not only about putting experience into words. It is about hearing what moves underneath those words: hesitation, contradiction, sudden shifts in emotion, the places where the story stalls.
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“When you’re hearing the story, you’re hearing how they tell the story. You can listen for blocks right there and conflict,” Russo said.
She compared the body to a young child carrying pain it does not yet have language for. Fear, grief, and memory can remain stored there—sometimes because a person never felt safe enough to speak about them, sometimes because the words simply never arrived.
Focusing: Making Contact With the Felt Sense
Developed by philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin, focusing teaches people to notice the “felt sense”—a vague but meaningful bodily awareness of something not yet fully articulated. Tension in the throat, a heaviness in the chest, “butterflies” in the stomach: these are not random. They are signals.
Russo often begins by inviting people to become still and ask a simple question: “What wants my attention now?” The answer may arrive as a sensation, an image, a word, or a memory.
The task is not to analyze or fix it immediately, but to stay with it curiously and without judgment. Over time, patient attention can produce a shift. Something that felt stuck begins to move. The person feels, for the first time in a long while, that they have been heard—by themselves.
EMDR: Reprocessing Distressing Memories
EMDR uses bilateral stimulation—typically guided eye movements—to help the brain reprocess traumatic memories that have remained “stuck.”
One theory links the technique to the rapid eye movements during sleep, when the brain naturally processes experience and reduces its emotional charge. Another points to the limits of working memory—holding a painful memory while performing a second task dilutes its intensity.
The memory does not vanish. What changes is its emotional charge. A person can begin to recognize, “This was terrifying. It is no longer happening.”
NET: From Emotional Blockage to Flow
Neuro-emotional technique (NET) approaches the same territory from a different angle, drawing in part on traditional Chinese medicine. Unresolved emotions can stagnate in the body. Fear, for instance, is traditionally associated with the kidneys and with a freeze response—feeling immobilized, unable to fight or flee.
NET works to identify what is activated and blocked, then helps restore movement and connection between the emotional experience and the body.
Russo extends the idea beyond the therapy room: “We are constantly in interaction—with ourselves, with others, with our environment. When that natural flow is interrupted, parts of us go offline.”
Tools for Everyday Reconnection
Because therapy happens only periodically and in the therapist’s presence, Russo suggests simple practices that help people notice and release emotional blocks between sessions.
1. Meditation: Creating Calm and Connection
Meditation ranks among the most accessible tools for calming the nervous system. No appointment, equipment, or cost required. Even a few minutes a day can activate the body’s calming response, Russo said.
“It’s easily accessible; you don’t have to go anywhere, you don’t have to pay anything—it’s free.”
Relief can arrive quickly. After only a few minutes, people often feel calmer, more grounded, and more connected to themselves. “There’s this feeling that everything is okay,” she said.
2. Visualization: Finding Some Distance
People naturally process experience through imagery—an asset that can turn against us in trauma, anxiety, or depression. “We are hardwired to focus on the negative,” she said.
Distressing thoughts and images pull us under. Visualization shifts attention and creates distance. Russo encourages vivid, embodied sensory imagery. Guided versions are widely available in apps and online.
The practice need not be elaborate. Sitting at home, someone might simply focus on a spot on the wall for five or 10 minutes and let the mind settle. The aim of meditation and other mind-body practices is not to escape but to create enough distance to observe difficult experiences without being consumed by them.
“The main thing is—and this is true for anything, not just meditation—you want distance,” she said. She likens trauma, deep depression, and emotional overwhelm to drowning. Immersed in distress, it is hard to see a way out. Even a small measure of psychological distance restores perspective and a sense of control.
“I always say: ‘Distance, not drowning,’” she noted.
Meditation is one route to that distance; movement, journaling, and other mind-body practices work too. They help people reconnect with their thoughts, emotions, and bodies.
Distance opens a state of relaxed awareness: noticing thoughts, emotions, and sensations without judgment, shame, or criticism.
3. Movement: Returning Attention to the Present
Distance does not always require stillness. Physical movement can reconnect people with themselves and restore a sense of embodiment.
“If they want to go to the gym, if they want to take a walk outside—whatever they want to do physically—I encourage that,” Russo said.
One approach she recommends is walking meditation. With your eyes open, focus on a word such as “calm” or simply notice the surroundings. When thoughts arise, acknowledge them and gently release them, returning attention to breath, footsteps, or the present environment.
Mindfulness is not about erasing difficult thoughts but relating to them differently so they no longer consume us—imagining a thought floating downstream, drifting in a current, or brushing past like a breeze.
Movement creates distance from distress while reconnecting us to the body and the moment.
4. Nutrition: Supporting General Health
Nutrition can play an important role in nervous system regulation, particularly for people experiencing anxiety, trauma, or emotional distress. Russo highlighted healthy fatty acids, found in foods such as fatty fish, nuts, seeds, olive oil, and avocados. “Good fatty acids are really important,” she said, while cautioning that some fatty fish contain higher levels of mercury.
“They put them on fatty acids, and they were completely calm and focused,” she said.
Magnesium can help relax muscles and release physical tension. “When you experience anxiety or trauma, you’re very, very tense,” she said. “And if you’re really tense, things aren’t going to be moving like they should, in every way.”
Vitamin D also supports overall well-being, while vitamin B12 is particularly important for people following a vegan diet. “Vegans need to be really careful about this because you can’t really get a good quality B12 on a vegan diet,” she said. Adequate B12 may be especially important for mood and cognitive function, making supplementation or reliable dietary sources worth considering for those at risk of deficiency.
As with any nutritional approach, individual needs, health history, and circumstances matter, Russo said.
Healing Changes the Past’s Hold on the Present
The goal of trauma healing is not to erase the past, but to change how a person experiences it—and how they experience themselves in relation to it. Trauma can leave people feeling isolated, powerless, and unsafe, carrying beliefs such as “I have no power. I’m unsafe. I’m in danger.”
Healing begins when a person feels safe enough to turn inward, recognize what they have been carrying, and gradually put words to experiences that once felt overwhelming. A therapist can help create that space through presence, compassion, understanding, and safety.
As those experiences are processed, the beliefs shaped by trauma can begin to change. Instead of feeling trapped in the past, a person may eventually reach a different understanding: “I’m safe. This happened, but I came through it. I’m okay.”
The past does not disappear. However, its hold on us can change. What once signaled danger may no longer control the present, allowing a person to move from fear and powerlessness toward safety, connection, and a renewed sense of self.
