Releasing the Grief Without Erasing the Memory: How Tapping Transforms Traumatic Experiences

I recently received this powerful testimonial from Pam that I wanted to share with you:

“Since reading the book by Roger Callahan and following along with you and Jessica’s free Tapping Solutions, the release I’ve experienced from the emotional attachment to old memories has been life-changing! One powerful example: One morning, I woke up to find my beloved husband had passed away in our bed from heart failure. For a long time, I couldn’t even think about that traumatic memory without bursting into tears. It haunted me constantly. Then I joined one of your tapping events to overcome trauma. After tapping with you, something shifted. Now, when that memory comes to me, I no longer feel the overwhelming need to cry. It’s such a profound relief to be able to think about it without being consumed by grief. Tapping has truly helped me heal and reclaim peace in a way I never imagined possible.”

Pam, thank you so much for sharing this deeply moving testimonial. First, I want to extend my heartfelt condolences for the loss of your husband. Finding him that morning is a profound trauma that many would struggle to process, and I’m touched that you’ve shared how Tapping has supported your healing journey.

What you’ve described is one of the most beautiful and misunderstood aspects of emotional healing — the ability to remember without being overwhelmed by the emotional charge. You still have the memory of your husband and that difficult morning, but you’re no longer consumed by the grief when you think about it. This is what true healing looks like, and I’m honored that Tapping played a role in your process.

The Memory Remains, But the Emotional Charge Shifts

What Pam describes — being able to recall a traumatic memory without being flooded by overwhelming emotion — is exactly what healthy emotional processing looks like. It’s not about forgetting or erasing our experiences, but about changing our relationship to them.

“Healing doesn’t mean you won’t remember; it means you can remember without being emotionally hijacked.”

When we experience trauma, our brain encodes both the factual memory (what happened) and the emotional response (how it felt) together. Every time we recall the event, both components get activated simultaneously. This is why, before healing, Pam couldn’t think about that morning without immediately being consumed by grief.

What Tapping uniquely offers is a way to separate these two components — to retain the meaningful memory while reducing the automatic emotional overwhelm that accompanies it.

How Trauma Gets “Stuck” in the Nervous System

To understand why Pam’s experience with Tapping was so transformative, we need to understand how trauma operates in our body and brain.

When we experience something deeply upsetting — like finding a loved one has passed away unexpectedly — our nervous system goes into an intense state of activation. This is a normal, protective response. Our brain flags this event as extremely important for our survival and creates powerful neural connections around it.

Under normal circumstances, our nervous system would gradually process this experience, allowing the intense emotional charge to dissipate naturally over time while preserving the factual memory. But when an experience is overwhelming, this natural processing can become interrupted.

The result? The memory remains “frozen” in time, with all its original emotional intensity intact. Years may pass, but whenever that memory is triggered, it feels as immediate and overwhelming as the day it happened — which is exactly what Pam described before her Tapping work.

This isn’t a sign of weakness or “not getting over it” — it’s a sign that the nervous system is still in a protective state around this memory, unable to complete its natural processing function.

The Emotion-Body Connection: Why Tapping Makes a Difference

Most approaches to emotional healing focus primarily on the mind — on changing thoughts, creating new meanings, or using willpower to “move forward.” While these cognitive approaches have value, they often miss a crucial component: emotions are experienced and processed through the body.

As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio famously discovered, emotions are essentially the brain’s interpretation of bodily sensations. When we recall a traumatic memory and feel grief, our body is experiencing real physiological changes — perhaps tightness in the chest, a lump in the throat, heaviness in the limbs.

This is where Tapping offers something unique. By physically stimulating acupressure points while mentally focusing on the difficult memory, you’re creating a powerful biological signal of safety that helps reprogram these mind-body connections.

The specific points used in Tapping directly influence the brain’s alarm system (particularly the amygdala), helping to calm the stress response while you’re mentally engaging with material that would normally trigger it. This creates what scientists call a “counterconditioning” effect — essentially teaching your brain and body that it’s possible to think about this memory without going into full emotional activation.

For Pam, this meant she could finally think about finding her husband that morning without her body automatically launching into the full grief response. The memory remains, but the automated emotional overwhelm has subsided.

The Emotion Separation Technique: Helping Memory Find Its Proper Place

What Pam experienced is something we can think of as the “Emotion Separation Technique” — the process of gently detaching overwhelming emotions from meaningful memories, allowing those memories to find their proper place in our life story without all the emotional charge.

This doesn’t mean becoming emotionally numb or distant. Rather, it means developing a healthier relationship with our emotions where they inform us without controlling us.

Here’s a Tapping sequence specifically designed for this separation process when dealing with grief or trauma memories:

After tapping through this sequence, take a deep breath and notice what shifts for you. For some people, like Pam, dramatic relief may come quickly. For others, it might take several rounds of tapping or exploring different aspects of the memory.

Beyond Grief: Why This Matters for All Difficult Emotions

While Pam’s story involves grief, this same principle applies to virtually any overwhelming emotion tied to memories — whether it’s shame about a past mistake, anger about an injustice, anxiety about a frightening experience, or guilt about something you wish you’d done differently.

In each case, the goal isn’t to erase the memory or pretend the experience didn’t matter. Rather, it’s about creating enough emotional space that you can engage with the memory on your terms, rather than feeling hijacked by automatic emotional responses.

This is particularly important because when emotions remain “stuck” in this overwhelming state, they don’t just affect how we feel about specific memories — they color our entire worldview and influence our daily choices in ways we may not even recognize.

Finding the Balance: Honoring Memories While Releasing Suffering

One concern people sometimes express about this aspect of healing is the fear that releasing the intense emotional charge means they’re somehow dishonoring the importance of what happened or the person they lost.

I want to address this directly, because it’s such an important point. There’s a profound difference between healing grief and forgetting love.

“There’s a profound difference between healing grief and forgetting love.”

When Pam can now think about finding her husband without being overwhelmed by tears, it doesn’t mean she loved him any less or that the experience wasn’t significant. It means her nervous system has processed the trauma in a way that allows her to carry her husband’s memory with love rather than constant pain.

In fact, as the overwhelming grief subsides, many people find they can connect more deeply with the positive memories and meaning of their relationship. When you’re no longer emotionally hijacked by the trauma of loss, you gain access to the full spectrum of memories — including the beautiful, joyful ones that may have been overshadowed by pain.

The Tapping Advantage: Working With the Body, Not Against It

What makes Tapping particularly effective for this kind of emotional processing is that it works with your body’s natural healing mechanisms rather than trying to override them.

Most of us have been taught to manage difficult emotions through willpower, distraction, or pure mental effort — approaches that essentially try to fight against our body’s natural responses. This is why these approaches often don’t create lasting change, especially with deeply embedded emotional patterns.

Tapping takes a fundamentally different approach. By combining gentle physical stimulation of specific points with mindful awareness of your feelings, it helps shift your nervous system state while you’re focusing on the difficult material. This allows your body to complete its natural processing in a way that might have felt too overwhelming before.

It’s like the difference between trying to manually push a boulder uphill versus finding a way to work with gravity to move it where you want it to go. Tapping works with your body’s innate healing capacity rather than fighting against it.

Beyond the Initial Shifts: Deepening the Healing Process

For many people, like Pam, significant relief can come quite quickly with Tapping. These initial shifts are incredibly validating and provide much-needed relief. But it’s also worth noting that emotional healing often unfolds in layers, especially with complex grief or trauma.

If you’re working with your own overwhelming memories, here are some approaches to consider as you continue your healing journey:

1. Tap on Different Aspects of the Memory

If a traumatic memory has multiple components or “scenes,” you may need to tap on each aspect separately. For instance, with grief, you might tap on:

• The moment you received the news
• Specific images that haunt you
• Particular things that were said
• Regrets about things left unsaid
• The first holidays or anniversaries without them

2. Address Secondary Emotions

Often, our primary emotion (like grief) is accompanied by secondary emotions that can be equally powerful — guilt for moments of feeling okay, anger about being left alone, fear about the future, or shame about how we responded in the moment.

Each of these emotions may need its own tapping focus for complete healing.

3. Acknowledge Limiting Beliefs That Emerged

Traumatic experiences often implant limiting beliefs that continue to affect us. Common ones include:

• “I can’t survive without them”
• “I’ll never be happy again”
• “I could have prevented this if I’d done something different”
• “I don’t deserve to move forward with my life”

Tapping specifically on these beliefs can release their grip on your present and future.

4. Create Space for Positive Memories

As the overwhelming pain begins to subside, you can use Tapping to help strengthen your connection to positive memories that may have been overshadowed by the trauma. This isn’t about bypassing grief, but about reclaiming the fullness of your experience.

A Different Kind of Progress: From Suffering to Peace

One of the most beautiful aspects of Pam’s story is how it illustrates a different kind of healing than what our culture often promotes. Rather than a linear path from “broken” to “fixed,” Pam’s experience shows a transformation in her relationship with her experience.

The memory still exists. The love for her husband still exists. What’s changed is her nervous system’s response to the memory — allowing her to engage with it from a place of peace rather than overwhelm.

This is what true emotional freedom looks like. Not an absence of feeling, but the ability to feel without being controlled by those feelings. Not forgetting what matters, but remembering in a way that honors rather than overwhelms.

“True emotional freedom is not an absence of feeling, but the ability to feel without being controlled by those feelings.”

Pam, your willingness to share your journey provides hope and inspiration for others walking similar paths. What you’ve experienced — being able to think about that morning without being consumed by grief — is precisely what emotional healing is meant to look like.

For those reading who are still in the midst of overwhelming grief or trauma, please know that this kind of transformation is possible for you too. Your memories can find a gentler place in your heart and mind, where they inform rather than overwhelm, where they connect you to what matters rather than repeatedly traumatizing you.

Looking for more support with grief, trauma, or emotional healing?

• The Tapping Solution App – Contains multiple meditations designed specifically for grief, trauma, and emotional processing. Here are some I recommend:
  • Releasing Grief – A guided meditation to help work through the grief of losing a loved one.
  • 5 Day Transforming Trauma Series – This series, led by Trauma expert Dr. Arielle Schwartz, is designed to help you transform traumas and past hurts and reclaim peace and wholeness.
  • Releasing Hurt – Hurt can be one of the lingering feelings that accompanies challenging experiences and memories. This Tapping helps you to honor your feelings and experience, so you can release the hurt and reconnect with feelings of peace, kindness, and compassion.

Note: You can access these meditations by clicking the links above using your mobile device, or type the name of the meditation into The Tapping Solution App’s search function.

Have you experienced this kind of shift with Tapping — where memories remain but the overwhelming emotional charge has diminished? Or are you still working toward this kind of relief? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments below.

Until next time… Keep Tapping!
Nick Ortner