If you’ve been watching videos and interviews or attending my workshops, you have probably heard mention of The Completion Process. But you may not have a solid idea about exactly what it is and what it is for. If this is the case, this video is for you.
Simply put, The Completion Process is a process which helps you to resolve and heal from trauma. If we distill it down to its essence, The Completion Process is a process where you deliberately use a trigger to go back to an unresolved trauma that is at the root of that trigger, so as to consciously re-experience it, reverse the process of dissociation and fragmentation, resolve the distress that is still unresolved, and gain massive awareness about yourself that can then translate to positive changes in your daily life. But wait a minute here if you feel like this doesn’t apply to you, because most people have no idea that they have experienced trauma. And yet the reality is, all people have experienced some kind of trauma.
So, we need to take a fresh, new look at trauma. First of all, what is trauma? A simple definition of trauma is distress without resolve. What should stick out to you about this definition of trauma is that this could mean anything from an infant being weaned to chronic experiences where you end up feeling like your worth to others is only about the quality of your performance all the way to a veteran watching comrades being blown up by landmines at war to complex sex abuse and trafficking. Trauma is something that happens in all demographics, across all societal classes, to people of any age, race, class, religion or sex. There are so many types of trauma that a person can experience.
Everyone has experienced distress in their lifetime that is unresolved. Everyone has made adaptations to their personality as a result of experiencing trauma. And everyone’s current, adult life was influenced by the traumas they experienced in childhood. And it is in fact these events that lie at the root of the vast majority of the problems we face and things we struggle with in our adult lives. I’m going to say this again because it’s so important to understand. The root of the various issues you are facing in your adult life (things you have no idea have anything to do with past traumas that you have experienced) is trauma.
Here is a very small list of what can be caused by unresolved trauma. Stuckness, sexual issues, indecisiveness, addictions, financial blockages, loneliness, lack of purpose, fear of failure, the feeling of not being good enough, social anxieties, numbness, chronic stress and overwhelm, shame and guilt, patterns of self-sabotage, mental illnesses, anxiety, powerlessness, control issues, physical health ailments, identity crisis, perfectionism, codependency, fear of intimacy, burnout, trouble setting boundaries, eating disorders, all kinds of relationship problems in any type of relationship, PTSD, chronic dissatisfaction in life and so much more.
Trauma changes the course of our lives. When a trauma happens, we experience distress. We make that painful thing that we have experienced mean something. And that in turn alters the way we think, the choices we make and the things we do. People are often totally unaware of just how much the traumas they have experienced influenced the course of their lives.
Now, let’s go a little deeper. As I mentioned in the beginning of this video, The Completion Process uses a trigger as a doorway to resolving the trauma that is linked to it. A trigger is anything that causes you to recall or bring to the surface any element of a traumatic memory from your past. It can be a word, a tone of voice, a smell, a sensation, a face, a place, or any situation or thing. You might not consciously know what is causing you to suddenly feel sick, hurt, anxious, or uneasy, but your subconscious mind knows.
In this way, a trigger is a reminder of a previous trauma and it is a signal to address the issue. Despite the fact that triggers are often very unpleasant, triggers are not actually negative. Rather, they are an invitation for you to resolve what is unresolved within you. They are an invitation to re-integrate fractured parts of yourself back into your being. And become whole again.
When memory surfaces as the result of a trigger, it doesn’t necessarily come back all at once in one, neat and coherent chunk. This is because memory is often stored in a fragmented way. The sights associated with a memory can be stored separately from the sounds associated with a memory or the feelings associated with a memory. What this means is, a trigger may cause only the feeling associated with a memory to surface. When this happens, a person is experiencing memory recall, but only the felt aspect of memory recall. For example, imagine that a woman is at a mall and she walks through an aisle where she suddenly smells the same cologne that the man who molested her when she was young wore during the assault. She might not even consciously realize that she has smelled the smell or that it reminds her specifically of this experience. She might suddenly feel a sense of doom, her heart might start pounding. She might feel totally isolated regardless of there being so many other people in the room. And she might feel a panic attack coming on. Because she has not consciously put two and two together, the experience she is having doesn’t make sense in the context of her environment. The smell of the deodorant was a trigger and we may now say that she is triggered.
The Completion Process can, in general, be divided into steps. However, it is meant to flow as one continuous process.
Here is an overview of the steps:
1.When you experience a trigger, you are going to turn your attention inward and place all of your attention on that feeling, with unconditional presence. Essentially, you will be doing a practice of Emotional Experiencing.
2. You are going to invite the memory attached to the trigger to surface.
3. You are going to choose with your free will to re-experience the memory (in 1st person perspective if possible), opening up to the full sensory experience of it with curiosity and accepting what happened exactly as it was, without changing anything. And you are going to validate the feeling/experience contained within that memory.
4. The process is going to switch from an active witnessing experience to an active visualization process and you are going to bring your adult self into the memory. You can choose to either experience this from the perspective of your adult self, or the perspective of your child-self within the scene. Or, you may choose to switch back and forth.
5.The adult is going to provide some resolve for the child regarding the traumatic experience within this memory. One of the most important aspects of this, is for the adult self to validate the child self’s emotions and experience.
6. Once some relief is felt, you are going to speed up the healing process by calling back any other potential aspects of yourself that may have fractured off from you in this traumatic experience.
7.You are then going to meet the child's/children’s (plural) needs within the scene of the memory. This step is designed to bring resolve to the distress being experienced within the memory.
8. Once you have met the child’s needs, you are going to give child the choice to stay within the now altered memory, making sure that the child’s reason for wanting to stay is actually in alignment with resolve for the child. Or you are going to take the child to your Safe Haven.
9. If the child chose to go to the Safe Haven, you are going to bring child to the Safe Haven and deactivate the memory.
10. You are then going to create purification and healing for the child (or children) to create clearing and distance from the past.
11. You are then going to meet the child's needs and create more resolve for the traumatic experience they are now out of and away from, but this time, within the context of the Safe Haven.
12. Once the child is in that state of improvement, you are going to provide the option for the child to stay in the Safe Haven, or to merge with you in the here and now. Either option is perfectly fine. And given the answer, you are going to do whatever brings about a sense of completion regarding the experience.
From that experience of completion regarding the resolve of that traumatic experience, you are going to return to conscious perspective in the here and now, just like you would if you were coming out of a meditation.
And based off of what you experienced and became aware of, you are going to decide upon how to practically and tangibly implement that resolve or improvement in your day-to-day life in the here and now. The Completion Process leads you to the unresolved experience so that you can consciously create that resolve. When we resolve distress, rather than cope with it, we are able to weave the negative experience into the fabric of who we are in a way that it benefits us. We are no longer plagued by painful negative emotion about it. We are able to live in the present moment, without it feeling like we keep getting dragged back to the painful memory of an experience. Essentially, what happened in the past no longer controls the way you feel or behave in the present. This doesn’t mean that we feel good about it or thankful it happened. Rather, it will no longer feel like a “live wound” that hurts when pressed or that you are still struggling with. Instead, it will feel like an inactive scar.
One thing to be aware of is that The Completion Process is not a trite mental exercise. It is a very, very deep healing process. And it changes your life. In the hours, days, weeks, and months that follow, it will cause you to make different choices, do different things, attract different people and not have the same reactions you had before. Healing is very different from pain relief. The vast majority of people find their way to spirituality and self-help through pain. This means they are in a state of distress. When people are in pain/distress they want two things, they want to heal (which is actual resolution for the problem itself) and they want immediate relief from the pain. But these two things can often be like two roads diverging in opposing directions. You are familiar with anesthetics, otherwise known as painkillers such as Novocain or Morphine. The benefits of anesthetics go without saying. But there is a downside to them if they are used in the wrong situations or the wrong ways. Pain exists for a reason. Pain is always the indication that something needs to be paid attention to, done or changed so a person can come back into alignment with wellbeing. For example, the pain of touching a hot stove is calling you to remove your hand. If you could not feel the pain, you would leave your hand on the stove and burn it completely. The Completion Process is not designed to just make things feel better. It is designed to create radical healing change. And that process does not always feel good.
Let me give you an example, so that you know what I mean. Let’s imagine that a woman decides to start using The Completion Process. The reality is that in her childhood, she lived in a dysfunctional home where she was treated like a doll rather than a child. Let’s imagine that her mother dressed her in whatever she wanted her to wear, only met her needs when she decided it was ok to have those needs, expected her to have the interests she wanted her to have, refused to recognize any boundaries and ignored her completely when she behaved anything less than sweet. This little girl had to abandon her sense of self to conform to her mother. She learned that this was the way to stay safe and have any chance at getting her needs met. Now fast forward. This woman, having adapted to her trauma, has chosen a life for herself that is a direct byproduct of those adaptations. The husband she chose. The life focus she chose. The friends she has. The way she dresses. Where she lives.
When she starts using The Completion Process, not only does she have to really see the reality of what was not ok about her childhood, and feel that pain deeply in her being, it isn’t like she is going to come out of the process and feel amazing towards the life she is living. Imagine that she chose to marry a man who, just like her mother, expects her to be a doll, nothing more than what he wants and expects her to be, it is unlikely that she will come out of The Completion Process and suddenly feel better in her particular marriage. It is more likely that she suddenly isn’t ok with the things she used to act like she was ok with. She will want change in her marriage. And how will her husband react to that? There is a real potential that he will react badly to that. And so, marital conflict will ensue. She has after all presented herself as one thing, only to begin changing into someone else, maybe someone he would not have wanted to marry in the first place. So, this means potentially even a divorce. When she is going through a process like that as a result of healing, it doesn’t feel good. It may feel necessary. But necessary things don’t always feel “good”. It will be an improvement, but it sure may not feel like that when you are in the middle of it. Because of this, it can sometimes feel like The Completion Process makes things worse in order to make them better. A person should not do The Completion Process if they are unwilling to making real, tangible changes to their life based on whatever their individual process reveals.
Another thing to be aware of is that people are often blindsided when they expect their families to be “on board” with their healing, only to find their own family opposing their healing. Families tend to be VERY resistant to The Completion Process as well as to me, as the creator of this process. And this is why… Family Systems are held together by patterns of interaction. These patterns of interaction keep them intact the way they are. And family systems are VERY resistant to change. What The Completion Process does, is to change these patterns. For example, imagine that a family has a pattern of the specific narrative “we are super close”. But then, a person goes through The Completion Process and faces the reality that no one in the family line has any emotional closeness at all. They get together on holidays, where they take group photos and give each other opportunities and resources, but no one really knows anyone else on a deeper, emotional level. When they try to bring up the idea that no one in the family is actually close, and suggest changing things to have deeper emotional connection, many members of the family (if not all) are likely to fight the idea and try to keep things the way they are; as well as to ardently defend that the way it is, is right and the new idea is wrong and bad. Or for example, imagine that a pattern a person has is doing what gets them approval in their family. They may do The Completion Process and realize they are totally without passion regarding what they are doing for a living and that they can’t keep living for the approval of others, no matter the other costs to themselves. They may quit their job, thereby breaking the pattern of behaving in a way to please the family rather than themselves. And this, is likely to trigger a full family system crisis. Certain family members are likely to see themselves as victims and treat that person as their villain. Some may make threats of withdrawal of support. Others are likely to blame The Completion Process itself for messing with the person’s mind. Others will start sending you slander about me. When you change, it forces any system that you are a part of to change too, most especially social systems, like families and friend groups etc. You can very easily find yourself in the position of the scapegoat when you are changing yourself, changing the way you interact with others and especially when you are trying to enroll any other people into a change. This doesn’t mean “don’t do it”. It means, be very smart about it and don’t simply expect a positive, supportive reaction. If you do get a supportive reaction and a willingness to change along with you, consider yourself part of the real blessed rarity.
When you can't resolve and integrate the experiences you have been through in your life, through no fault of your own, part of you remains frozen in time, effecting your entire life. And you deserve to live a life that is free from this effect. And so, I have created the Completion Process, so that you have a tool to bring about this healing so you can experience not only internal peace, but also fulfillment. If you are interested in learning more about this process as well as how to do it and if you are interested in trying it out for yourself, you have some options.
The first option is to do it through the E-course. I designed this e-course to really hold your hand and lead you through all the knowledge and different exercises as well as doing the process itself. If you like this option, you can find The Completion Process Course on my website at: tealswan.com
The second option is to be led through the process by a certified practitioner of the process. For years, I have been training people around the world to facilitate this process and having someone to do this with you, may feel like the support you need. If you like this option, you can visit: thecompletionprocess.com
And the third option is to read the book I wrote about it. This book is quite literally titled: The Completion Process. You can find it anywhere books are sold.
The Completion Process has transformed my own life. It has transformed the lives of millions of people around the world. And it can completely transform your life for the better.
