I understood the compassion behind that stance. But in over 40 years of practice, and more than 85,000 therapy sessions, that’s simply not been my experience. Every patient I’ve seen recover from complex PTSD and dissociative identity disorder has done so because they were brave enough to return to the unfinished traumas and horrors they’d been carrying since the original wounding. Their return wasn’t to relive them for their own sake — but to finally finish them.

The Mind Like the Stomach

My healing theory, which grew out of decades of clinical work, rests on five stages: Remember, Feel, Express, Release, Reframe. I call it the FRITZ, in tribute to Fritz Perls, the legendary psychotherapist who spent much of his career helping patients resolve what he called “unfinished business.”

Like Perls, I believe people come into treatment because they haven’t completed — haven’t digested — the traumatic material. And what hasn’t been digested repeats on you, the way undigested food does. The difference is that the stomach can only do this for 10 or 12 hours. The mind can do it for 80 years, or more.

This is why returning to those unfinished scenes matters so much. It allows a person to finally, appropriately, process what happened, how they felt at the time, how it has shaped them since, and what they can do now to put it away and find meaning in it. This is the work I describe in my most recent book, The Guided Imagery Cure, which features guided imagery as one technique for helping survivors gain closure on trauma and grief that has tormented them since the event itself.

One Story

A woman in her mid-50s came to see me for marital issues, chronic low-grade depression, and a drinking problem she’d never named as such. As therapy progressed, she uncovered repressed memories of being molested by her grandfather at age six — during visits meant to be the safest place in her world, with her maternal grandparents. She’d blocked out the memory of him coming to the attic where she slept. Once those memories surfaced, she needed to tell me every piece of that story before she could begin to heal.

That unfinished business led her to more: a date rape at 21 by a man later imprisoned for other sexual assaults. She needed to tell that story in full, and then we went further, using guided imagery in which I spoke his part, giving her the chance to hear him take responsibility for what he’d done. In the middle of that imagery, she opened her eyes and said to me, simply, “I want him to apologize to me.” Once she heard it, she was able to put that, too, away.

From there came other threads: being bullied by former friends in middle school, being left behind as an adult when she moved across the country to marry a fiancé who changed his mind, and years spent under a difficult and abusive boss. Every one of these unfinished stories needed to be processed one more time before she could finally live in the here and now.

Some stories only needed to be told out loud. Others required her to write letters she would never send. One required guided imagery. What they all had in common was the need to go back to what remained unfinished, and to actively finish it using the five steps of the FRITZ: remembering it, feeling it, expressing it, releasing it, and reframing it into something she could carry differently.

The results weren’t incidental. Her depression lifted completely. Soon after, she stopped drinking — and she remains sober to this day. She returns to treatment only when something new and difficult arises in life, such as the death of her stepson to a drug overdose. Aside from that, she is a healthy, grateful woman, recovered because of the work she did with what had gone undigested for decades.

Why This Matters

I understand the impulse to protect people from having to face their trauma twice. It comes from a caring place. But in my experience, protecting someone from revisiting the unfinished isn’t the same as protecting them from suffering — it often prolongs it. The trauma doesn’t stay quietly in the past simply because we decline to look at it. It repeats, in symptoms, in relationships, in the body, in the bottle.

It’s our job as clinicians to help our patients go back to what hasn’t been appropriately digested — carefully, with skill, and with a clear structure for doing so — so they can finally process what happened, how it felt, how it shaped them, and what meaning they can now make of it. That’s how unfinished business becomes finished. That’s how survivors of complex trauma stop carrying the past as though it was still happening and start living in the here and now.

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Dr. Christopher Cortman has facilitated over 80,000 hours of psychotherapy during his distinguished career spanning more than four decades. A Florida Licensed Psychologist since 1985, he maintains a thriving private practice while specializing in emotional trauma and anxiety disorders. He’s appeared nationwide on talk radio and television. The acclaimed author of four previous books, his new book, The Guided Imagery Cure: The Best Proven Methods for Quickly Resolving and Healing Trauma, describes a profoundly impactful tool for addressing trauma, grief, and more. Learn more at srqshrink.com.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

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