HEALING TRAUMA [#17712]

I use a therapy for my clients who are dealing with fears, in which the client imagines what happened to him in the past, and he images his child self going through the experience and imagining his present adult self to go back into the past to help him. I find this therapy very effective for many people who want to overcome their fears and traumas. But I am wondering: Why don’t the mussar sefarim discuss this? I’ve seen the Rav’s derasha of Teves – Overcoming Fear and Trauma about imagining the trauma again and repairing it, and it sounded very similar to the therapy I use, except that it adds on the “emunah” element. I am wondering what the source for the Rav’s approach in dealing with trauma is, and also I want to know if the one with the trauma needs to think about emunah specifically, or if it’s enough just to remember the event and say to himself, “I’m okay now”.

The way to fix anything from the past is through teshuvah, which means to “return”, and Chazal said that a baal teshuvah is when one is faced with the same challenge in the very same place or time that he was tempted in. Meaning, one needs to either actually return to that very scary situation, or he returns to there in his soul. That is why teshuvah erases the sin retroactively, as if the person never did it – because he returns to that very situation, to that very time [and he can ‘alter’ the situation/time through the current experience in his soul].
Whenever a person fixes an issue with any method that doesn’t involve emunah, it can only fix the external level of the nefesh habehaimis area of the soul. Any repair that involves emunah through is drawing on the “light of the infinite” (ohr EinSof), which extends all the way down to the lowest point of the nefesh habehaimis.