Forward Movement Therapy

The Hebrew adverb קדימה (kadimah) means “forward” or “onward,” carrying a sense of active motion into the future (blog.selfarcheology.com, doitinhebrew.com). It embodies our thesis: healing comes in moving קדימה. There’s no erasing the past, but by advancing and rising above it, we honor struggle and claim agency.

Methods include: encouraging creative endeavors, gardening, solving puzzles, coloring or building models or Legos, organizing closets, anything that offers an end result sense of accomplishment. The therapist takes on the role of a sort of cheerleader; acknowledging the failed attempts but focusing more on the wins than the losses.

Cheerleaders lead the team to win like the therapist leads the patient or client to succeed.

Keeping a planner or journal improves executive functioning which is affected by trauma and in some people is disabled. A journal will be handed out to the patient or client to be shared without judgment.

Forward thinking also includes allowing the patient or client to dream about the future. Again, no judgment. Be mindful of not even judging silently since the patient or client will pick up on this intuitively or instinctively.

Allow them to set big and small goals, but focus on goals which can be accomplished in one day to create positive emotions and a sense of self.

Why Accomplishment Anchors Healing

Projects, hobbies, organizing—any accomplishment—activates positive neurochemistry and improves executive functioning. Loretta Breuning reminds us dopamine kicks in when we complete goals, rewiring the brain for reward instead of threat (innermammalinstitute.org). Puzzle‑solving and creative projects spark forward-thinking and break generational inertia.

Judith Herman’s third recovery stage emphasizes “advance to a new post-traumatic life”—not avoidance, but constructed progress (en.wikipedia.org). Alice Miller believed creativity itself could liberate: “artistic expression could be the great liberator of mankind” (amazon.com). Together, these scholars converge: moving forward heals.

Sigmund Freud considered totems as relics of survival—symbols erected to memorialize trauma and triumph. Here’s our adaptation: we don’t “forget,” but we build markers of progress—goals, trophies, creative artifacts—as totems honoring how far we’ve come. Kadimah becomes not just a word, but a lived practice: forward movement by action.

Putting It into Practice

• Set bite‑sized goals daily—organize a shelf, fix a bike, write a haiku. Celebrate the dopamine hit.

• Think ahead—project planning resets the mind into future orientation, countering rumination.

• Create totems—photos, journals, paintings—as external proof of overcoming.

• Embrace paleo‑brain training—a small step forward becomes a neurochemical reward cycle (pealim.com).

• Combine with trauma‑based therapy—Herman and Miller affirm that therapy + forward action = embodied healing.

Healing trauma isn’t about erasure, it’s about moving past trauma.

Evolutionary, psychodynamic, and psychoanalytic lines all converge: we acknowledge the past, but we don’t stay there. By taking action, goal planning, creative expression, accomplishment—we recalibrate our brain chemistry and our life story.

As we deepen psychology with trauma‑based therapies, we embrace evolutionary insights and psychoanalytic wisdom. Loretta Graziano Breuning, PhD—founder of the Inner Mammal Institute—draws from evolutionary psychology to explain how our “inner mammal” is hardwired for survival through brain chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin—mechanisms we can retrain for wellbeing rather than distress (chudgar.com, innermammalinstitute.org).

Building on this, Judith Lewis Herman—a Harvard psychiatrist—laid the groundwork for modern trauma therapy. Her landmark Trauma and Recovery introduced the three-stage model: establishing safety, processing traumatic memory, and resuming ordinary life (newyorker.com). Herman reframed trauma (including political and generational) as a public and relational issue, calling for survivors not just to “maintain safety,” but to move forward into a new life (newyorker.com).

Alice Miller, a pioneering psychoanalyst, emphasized that childhood trauma is stored in the body—what she called “poisonous pedagogy,” from her classic For Your Own Good (en.wikipedia.org). Miller taught that real healing requires release, remembrance—not forgetting—but compassion for the inner child.

The act of creating fosters healing only when there is a sense of accomplishment and reward. Sometimes creativity can cause angst and depression just as work that is unappreciated or unrewarded leaves the person feeling like there's no meaning to their actions or that they don't serve a purpose.

Our job as therapists is to make the patient or client believe that they matter, that they are worthy of love and acceptance, and that they can be a functioning member of society.