Letting It Go

You Freeze Energy to Protect Yourself

We need to face stress and learn to manage it in our lives in order to grow up and do our life’s work. But it isn’t easy and the resources you gather along the way may not be enough at any particular time. When you can’t use the stress you encounter to stimulate your own growth, that stress becomes toxic for you.

That’s when you split off parts of yourself and freeze your energy around them because they are too hard to manage. You do this when your experience of your world seems overwhelming. You aren’t alone. We all do it.

It does take courage to heed those signals. You froze your energy for a good reason—at least it seemed like a good reason at the time. You froze it to protect yourself from the pain of the stress you did not have the resources to manage and the pain that resulted from your helplessness. Now you may feel a deep sense of dread at the very idea of going into those deeply protected places where your monsters still hide.

Recovering Frozen Energy Can Be Easier Than You Imagine

As a long-time practitioner of psychotherapy, a large part of my job used to be to keep my clients safe while they explored those scary places. When I was just starting to use Logosynthesis in my practice a young woman was referred to me because she had recently revealed a history of sexual abuse to her school counselor. I estimated that her treatment would take about six months.

The abuse had occurred from the time she was five years old until she was eleven. A teenage uncle, part of a large, close, extended family, had been her babysitter and often forced her to engage in inappropriate sexual contact. When I asked why she had not told anyone about the abuse, she said she had kept it secret because telling would have destroyed the family.

I asked if she had an image of what the destroyed family would look like and she had a very vivid image of all the members of the family sitting around a holiday dinner table and shouting angrily at each other. The image was very distressing to her even now, sitting in my office as a 17-year-old high school senior.

In our very first session I asked her to say the Logosynthesis sentences using that image as a target. She reported that the image slowly dissolved and turned into dust, which she swept away. That session ended. A week later she felt much more peaceful and was doing better in school, which was the reason she had originally seen her school counselor.

The next week I asked if she wanted to work with a specific instance of abuse that she remembered vividly. We used the sentences again and that image crumbled to dust as well. We spent the next couple of sessions working on other relatively normal challenges faced by a 17-year-old and then I asked if she wanted to continue working with the sexual abuse problems.

She was thoughtful for a few minutes and then said that nothing she could think of had any emotional charge on it. “It all seems to have gone away.” I saw her for a total of 6 sessions in less than 2 months, only focused on the pain of the sexual abuse trauma for a few minutes—long enough to identify the vivid, painful images and the entire problem was resolved!!!

This was an extremely traumatic series of events that she was able to process without needing to re-experience the pain of releasing her frozen energy from all those years and reclaiming her life energy from her past.

Locating Your Frozen Energy is the Challenge

If you have deep, significant trauma from your past that is keeping your life energy stuck, by all means seek professional help to resolve it. For ordinary, everyday frozen energy that resulted from stress in managing your life, using Logosynthesis will require much less courage than you might imagine.

Before you can use the Logosynthesis sentences to reclaim your energy for use in your life now, you need to know where your energy is stuck or frozen. That is why I have not yet told you the exact process.

Once you know where your energy is stuck you will insert a word or phrase that describes your frozen energy into each of three sentences. That is the stuck energy that triggers your distress. We often call it your target. Once you zap your target, you release the energy you used to protect yourself long ago. You also release the energy that was stuck in the original situation, and reclaim it to use now.

What often happens is that before you do the process you feel strong emotions about something in your past every time you think of it. After you do the process the emotional intensity is greatly reduced or disappears completely. You don’t necessarily forget what happened, you just don’t react to it any longer.

Your biggest challenge in this entire process is discovering where your frozen energy is located. But your frozen energy leaves clues and you can easily follow the trail. You start by noticing what causes you distress in your everyday life.