Inner Relationship Focusing & Healing Emotional Trauma

Have you ever felt like you’re carrying around a heavy backpack full of emotional pain? IRF can help you unpack that backpack and heal emotional wounds caused by your past. IRF can help you identify what triggers your emotional trauma. And once you understand your triggers, you can develop strategies for coping with them in a helpful way.

Emotional trauma can lead to a great deal of self-criticism and self-blame. IRF helps you develop a more compassionate relationship with yourself. By developing this inner relationship, you can shift from self-criticism and self-blame to self-acceptance and self-compassion.

On this page, we have a number of resources to help you heal the wounds of the past that are holding you back.

“It is very important and life-changing to be aware that negative beliefs and self-perceptions come from trauma. They come from parts of us that are trying to make sense of what happened. This is one of the ways trauma overshadows the present — in our sense of who and what we are.”


— Ann Weiser Cornell

Courses to Help With Emotional Trauma

A Free Course to Help You Feel Better About Yourself

Transform Your Relationship to Your Inner Critic

Get our free, short video course and discover a gentle process to begin to heal old wounds and shift how you show up when your inner critic comes calling.

Inner Critics can show up as a result of past trauma. Sign up for our free e-course and get helpful ways to start feeling better about yourself.

Healing Trauma Course

Healing Trauma: Moving Beyond the Hurt of the Past

6-Module On-Demand Course + Online Community

A course to help you gently transform painful cycles like: overreacting to present events because they trigger past hurts, repeating painful patterns in your relationships, or sometimes feeling like a small, hurt child is living your life. Join us to experience how self-compassion can release past hurts so you can live more fully.

$247.00

For Healing Professionals
Beyond Trauma:
Helping Your Clients Cultivate Inner Presence

3-Module Interactive Video Course + Community

Learn powerful and practical ways to help your therapy clients heal from trauma by supporting the client in cultivating the strong inner self, Self-in-Presence.

$147.00
Path to Lasting Change

Your Path to Lasting Change

9 – 18 week Live, Online Inner Relationship Focusing Training Program

Are you looking for a long-term solution that really works to bring greater happiness, clarity, and freedom from suffering? With our in-depth training program, you’ll come away with a self-directed process to support you in any part of your life: your relationships, your career, your community, and beyond.

$947.00$1,997.00

Payment Plans and Scholarship Opportunities Available

Articles, Tips, and Videos About Trauma

Tips to help with Healing Emotional Trauma

Here's the good news: Healing is still possible. Whenever you receive what you would have needed back then, healing can happen.

What is the effect of childhood emotional wounds on your life today?

When your past trauma is causing you pain, a simple acknowledgment can help you move back into inner presence again.

Click here to read Ann’s Tip.

When we can be with what we feel instead of being caught up iin the feelings, the part of us that has the feelings now has company

If you’re triggered by what people say, and you know it’s from your past, what do you do?

So you’re aware you’re being triggered… you’re upset, feel disrespected, or you’re angry or full of shame… and you know that the emotional force of it is from the past. What now?

Click here to read Ann’s Tip.

Working with repressed trauma and missing memories

Working with repressed trauma and missing memories

You can experience shifts in how your body carries your past, even if you do not remember what happened.

Click here to read Ann’s Tip.

"There is a feeling of feeling inferior or feeling less... and there is a part that knows this comes from childhood..."

Focusing Tip #854 – Emotional Wounds of Childhood – “I compare myself negatively to other people”

What if you know that your painful feelings now are connected to the past? Read on…

Click here to read Ann’s Tip

"Those very difficult emotions continue to haunt me, and I feel stuck between finding temporary comfort and being re-traumatized."

Focusing Tip #845 – Past Trauma – “I get overwhelmed by strong emotions from trauma.”

What if you get overwhelmed by strong emotions that come from trauma? Read on…

Click here to read Ann’s Tip.

"If I sense something is unsafe or that I can’t trust it, is my body telling me something I should pay attention to?"

Focusing Tip #852 – Past Trauma and Triggers – “Can I trust the inner message that something can’t be trusted?”

Can you believe the messages you’re receiving from inside? Read on…

Click here to read Ann’s Tip.

Can the Focusing process re-traumatize me? Or my clients?

Focusing Tip #798 – “Can the Focusing process re-traumatize me?”

What is happening if you bring attention to a painful feeling and it feels worse? Read on…

Click here to read Ann’s Tip

Focusing Tip Abusive Stepmother

Focusing Tip #755 – “I can’t accept this emotionally abusive part of me.”

Do you have an emotionally abusive part in you that you don’t want to accept? Read on…

Click here to read Ann’s Tip.

childhood abuse

Focusing Tip #593 – If you were traumatized by someone, why doesn’t the hurt and anger heal when that person starts treating you better?

Wondering why it’s hard to heal, even when someone who abused you is now treating you better? Read on…

Click here to read Ann’s Tip.