Lifespan Integration Therapy: Helping the Selves Integrate

Triggers and Flashbacks: Why Trauma Still Affect Us

You're buying vegetables when a small child next to you starts crying. The child's parent loses it; they yell using threatening and shaming language. Your breathing quickens. You desperately want to run away as your mind is flooded with terrifying memories of your parent raging at you. What you just experienced is called a flashback, and it's an all too familiar experience for anyone who’s survived abuse and trauma.

If you think about it, the child and parent's situation has nothing to do with you, yet your brain decides you’re in danger. The only way your brain knows how to cope with this trigger is to resort to survival mode by making your body fight back, run away, freeze, or fawn.

The thing is, you're not a child anymore and you know that, but when your brain is in survival mode, it’s difficult to understand what’s going on or deal with it. Flashbacks and triggers occur because the brain interprets a situation as a re-enactment of a traumatic situation that you’ve already lived through.

Traumatic memories are made when an experience is too overwhelming for the brain to process. In overwhelm mode, the experience is stored as an unprocessed memory. That unprocessed memory has all the emotions, sensations, and the beliefs that we formed about ourselves and the world etched into the brain on neural pathways.

If we encounter triggers out in the world, our brain recalls the unprocessed memory and responds as if we’re that traumatized self reliving the traumatic experience all over again, except we’re not, but it doesn’t know that. The only way to change the trigger and subsequent responses is to rewire the brain by integrating the unprocessed memory. That's where Lifespan Integration can help.

How Lifespan Integration Works

When you feel triggered, it’s the traumatized self who wants to protect the current you from danger. The problem is those reactions aren’t based on current knowledge or experience; they’re coming from a past version who is stuck in a traumatic memory.

The goal of Lifespan Integration is to heal that stuck past self so that it doesn’t affect your present.

We’ll use our current example: you want to stop feeling panicked around angry parents in supermarkets. In the first phase of L.I., your therapist will ask you to think of the first time you had this kind of panic attack.

Once you’ve identified a memory, your therapist will have you imagine the memory as vividly as possible. They’ll talk you through remembering how you and, if relevant, the people around you behaved during that memory. Your therapist will also guide you to imagine yourself at that time, the situation, and how you felt.

You’ll be prompted to protect your younger, traumatized self in whatever way feels right. You could imagine removing your traumatized self from your family home with the help of five armed police officers, while you curse out your angry parent who is tied to a chair. There is no right or wrong way here.

Throughout the process, your therapist will check in with you to get a sense of how you’re doing and where you’re at. It’s important to remember that everyone’s experience is different and valid. During this process, your memory or feelings might change about the situation.

The goal of this phase is to help you release stuck emotions and integrate the traumatized self by protecting it.

In the second phase of Lifespan Integration, once you feel satisfied with how you protected your traumatized self and resolved the situation, your therapist will guide you and your traumatized self to a safe space. In that space, the traumatized self is shown memories from your shared lifespan that proves you as the older self has moved on and is capable of protecting both of you.

From this, your traumatized self gains an understanding that it no longer needs to protect you by reacting in ways that aren’t working i.e. panicking at the sight of an angry parent. Your therapist will have you repeat both phases up to eight times to fully integrate the memory and traumatized self. At some point in the process, your traumatized self will integrate, and the trauma will be completely resolved.

The History of Lifespan Integration

Lifespan Integration therapy was created in 2003 by therapist Peggy Pace to help adult victims of childhood abuse heal traumatic responses. According to Pace ‘…clients have reported that they feel better about life, are more self-accepting, and are better able to enjoy their intimate relationships.'

If you’re interested in learning more about therapist Peggy Pace and Lifespan Integration, check out L.I.’s here. Therapist Pace has also written a book.