Recently, I discussed the three reasons it’s important to help any of your trauma-holding parts who are stuck in trauma time become oriented to the present. That is, it’s important to help those parts understand that they are no longer living in that traumatic childhood; things are different now. Today, I’m going to talk about one tool for helping your parts understand that they are in 2025 and not many years ago.
What is this tool? A timeline! The timeline is a chance to get as creative as you’d like. You can put a pictures of your milestones on it, for example. Or if some of your parts are artistic, they might draw some of the milestones. Perhaps you could make a manga timeline. Or if music is your thing, perhaps you make a timeline with songs you love from those years to help anchor events.
One very important point of this timeline is that you are not going to focus on traumatic events. What you want to do is create a timeline of major milestones in your life, such as graduating from high school, moving away from your caretakers, meeting your partner, and so on. So on your timeline, you might start it with your the date of your birth. But then add milestones that matter to your system. If you remember having a wonderful summer in 4th grade because you got to go to a summer camp, put that on there. You want to fill this timeline with “breadcrumbs” that help your parts see how the body got from childhood to where you are now. If you always wanted a dog or cat as a child but weren’t allowed to have one but you have one now as an adult, putting the date on your timeline of when you brought your pet home can be an important piece of evidence that you definitely aren’t back in 2010 now! A picture of you standing by your first car may blow away the young eight year old inside you who thinks it’s 2006. That might grab their attention and then help them follow the other surprising pieces of evidence on your timeline that show it’s 2025.
This makes a great system project because many parts may have an interest in contributing to the timeline. So it can also be a tool for encouraging more communication and cooperation.
As trauma-holding parts are beginning to understand that it’s 2025, they may have times of confusion, when they wonder if they imagined that or that even though they know you told them it’s 2025, they still feel like they are 13 in 2012. The timeline is a great tool for helping them to re-trace your story to see how the body got to 2025 even though they were stuck in 2012 for many years. It may mean you don’t have to review the facts and the evidence verbally with some of those parts as much, because they have the timeline as a reference they can check for themselves.