When Disturbing News Images Won’t Leave Your Mind
How to Calm Your Brain and Shift the Memory
Watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/E2mUlLN6xeo
Violent news stories stick with us. Recently, the names Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska have been linked with extremely distressing images that many people can’t stop replaying in their minds. If that’s you, you’re not broken—and you’re not alone.
What you may be experiencing is a form of secondary trauma, sometimes called vicarious trauma or secondary traumatic stress. This happens when exposure to another person’s trauma—whether through the news, social media, or even helping someone directly—creates real symptoms in your body and mind.
Your brain is doing exactly what it’s designed to do. It’s keeping the danger front and center, in case you need that information to survive. But here’s the catch: in everyday life, most of us aren’t in those kinds of life-or-death situations. What we need is a way to take the sting out of those images so they don’t disrupt our peace of mind—while still remembering the facts.
I’m Jennie Hays, a licensed paramedic since 2001, and now I help entrepreneurs and everyday people move past the trauma that keeps them stuck. In this blog, I’ll share one calming exercise plus three powerful memory-shifting techniques to help you feel more in control.
Why Do Traumatic Images Linger in the Mind?
When you see something shocking, your brain doesn’t file it away like a normal memory. Instead, it leaves it “open,” like a flashing warning light. This is why certain intrusive images replay over and over, dragging intense emotions with them.
Your nervous system thinks keeping them front-and-center is the safest option—even though it’s exhausting. Over time, this can look like hypervigilance (being constantly on edge), emotional overwhelm, or even compassion fatigue if you’re repeatedly exposed to distressing news or the pain of others.
The good news? Your brain can be guided to file those memories differently. That’s what the four techniques below are designed to do.
Technique 1: Calm Your Nervous System with Eye Convergence
When your nervous system is in fight-or-flight, your body feels hijacked: racing heart, tight chest, sweaty palms, spinning thoughts. Trying to work on a traumatic memory from that state will only make you feel worse. That’s why we start with calming first.
The eye convergence exercise helps regulate your vagus nerve—the body’s “brake pedal” for overwhelm.
How to do it:
Hold your finger in front of your nose and cross your eyes to look at it. Count slowly to seven.
Extend your arm fully and focus on your finger at arm’s length. Count to seven again.
Repeat this in-and-out movement for about two minutes.
If you’re in public, no one has to know what you’re doing. Simply shift your gaze from your nose to a point far away, like past your computer screen or out a window.
Why it works: By moving your eyes this way, you’re literally massaging the vagus nerve. This signals your body to lower heart rate and blood pressure, pulling you out of panic mode. It’s a simple but powerful way to interrupt the cycle of secondary traumatic stress before it escalates.
Technique 2: Change the Format of the Memory
Once you’re calmer, the next step is to change how the disturbing image is “coded” in your brain. This comes from neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), which studies how our brains store and recall experiences.
Try this step-by-step:
Bring the image to mind. Notice: is it a still photo or a video?
Switch it. If it’s a video, freeze it into a still. If it’s a still, play it like a short clip.
Now check: is it in full color or black-and-white? Flip it to the opposite.
Play with size: make it fill the entire wall, then shrink it down to a postage stamp. Notice which feels easier on your body.
Finally, try moving the image. Place it behind you—or imagine storing it far away in an enormous warehouse filled with shelves.
Why this works: Your brain is flexible. Each of these tweaks softens the emotional punch and gives you more control. You’re not erasing the memory—you’re teaching your brain to store it in a way that doesn’t overwhelm you. This is one way to begin coping with secondary trauma on your own.
Technique 3: Notice Where You Feel It in Your Body
This one leans on principles from Brainspotting, a method I use with my clients every day. If your distress is below a 4 out of 10, you can try it on your own.
Here’s the process:
Bring the troubling image to mind.
Scan your body. Where do you feel it? Your throat? Chest? Gut?
Get curious about that sensation. Ask:
Does it have a color?
A shape?
A texture (smooth, rough, sharp)?
A weight (heavy, light, neutral)?
Is it moving or still?
Then just notice. Don’t analyze or try to fix it—simply pay attention.
Why this works: Most traumatic memories get “stuck” because the body never finished processing them. By gently noticing the physical sensations, you allow your nervous system to reconnect with your brain and begin completing the memory. This often reduces the intensity of intrusive images and lowers that sense of hypervigilance that comes with secondary trauma.
Technique 4: Rewrite the Disturbing Details
Every time you recall a memory, your brain edits it slightly. Normally this happens unconsciously, but you can do it intentionally to weaken the fear response.
Here’s how to try it:
Bring up the disturbing scene.
Ask yourself: What could I change about this image to make it less threatening?
Maybe you swap the attacker’s face with something absurd—like a cartoon character or a clown.
Maybe you rewrite the ending: the aggressor turns and walks away, or the victim speaks up powerfully.
Keep adjusting until the image feels less painful or even ridiculous.
Why this works: Your nervous system reacts to the way the memory is stored, not the event itself. By altering details in your imagination, you break the automatic emotional loop. The memory remains factual, but it no longer hijacks your body. This is a simple form of coping with media-induced trauma that puts you back in charge.
Final Thoughts: You’re Not Broken
If distressing news images are stuck in your mind, it doesn’t mean you’re weak or broken. It means your brain is working overtime to protect you. With the right tools, you can calm your nervous system, shift the way those memories appear, and take your power back.
And if your distress is higher than a 4 out of 10, please don’t push through alone. This is where having someone trained in these methods—like me—can guide you through safely and permanently.
You deserve to feel safe in your own mind again.
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Charlie Kirk, Karina Zawrutska. These are two names that unfortunately are now associated with very violent images. If you're sitting there replaying these images from the news over and over and over again in your mind, you're not alone. And if that's happening to you and it's interfering with your life right now, then this video is for you. Because here's the thing, you're not broken. Your brain's working exactly like it's supposed to, 100%. It's keeping the danger up front because it doesn't know if you're going to be in a position where you're going to be at risk. And so it wants to make sure that you see it and that you feel it and that you hear it. The problem, or I guess the advantage, is that most of us in our everyday life are never going to be in those situations. And so what we want to do is we want to get rid of the emotion, get rid of the piece that is disrupting our lives, and yet be able to hold on to the memory itself because there's power in knowledge. And this is knowledge we don't want to forget. We want to forget what it's making us feel. Hi, I'm Jenny Hayes and I've been a licensed paramedic since 2001 and now I help entrepreneurs who are in a situation where these traumas are keeping them stuck in their business. I can help you to do the same thing in your regular life. I'm going to help you move past the sticking point so that you can move forward and do what you need to do and be who you need to be without getting stuck in the mud. So today I'm going to throw you three really powerful techniques plus a calming exercise that you can try right now to shift your brain when you're storing all of these distressing images and things like that. Right? So let's do the calming strategy first because if you attempt these other issues or these other techniques and they can make you more anxious or upset, They shouldn't, as long as you follow my rules, but if you're not doing them the way I tell you to, I just want to make sure you have got tools at hand to bring yourself back down. Plus, these will also help if you don't try the others. This one can bring you out of the fight or flight, that panic, that feeling of overwhelm. Okay? I'm going to turn sideways because what we're going to do is a convergence. This was developed by David Grant. He's the therapist that came up with brain spotting, which if you don't know what that is, follow me. You will learn because I love it. But this actually, what it does is it gently massages the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is a huge nerve that goes all the way down through the middle of your body. And it's the one that's responsible for that overwhelm, that feeling of panic, that feeling of too much, it's just too much for my body. And what we're going to be doing basically is we're going to be lowering your blood pressure and your heart rate in a very, very safe manner. Okay, now caveat, if you have really low blood pressure, if you have a really low heart rate, or if you suffer from POTS, and if you don't know what it is, you probably don't have it, then you need to be extra cautious using this. I've never had anybody have any negative effects, but just putting that out there. So what you're going to do is you're going to put your finger on your nose and you're going to look at your finger. You're going to go cross-eyed. And you're going to count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Then you're going to reach your hand out as far as you can and stare at that finger. And do the same thing. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. And again, in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. five, six, seven, and then you'll go back out. And you're going to continue doing this for two minutes. It takes two full minutes of this exercise to shut everything down and bring you back to normal. Now, how do you do this when you're in front of people? Well, really easily. You look at your nose instead of your finger, and then you look past your computer screen, out on the road, just in the distance, because what you're doing literally with your eyes is this, and it's massaging that nerve, okay? You can think of it as hacking your eyes to calm your nervous system. Now, now that you have the calming method, let's talk about how to take some of these images and take the punch out of them, make them tolerable, okay? This one's a really interesting one. I'm going to scoot back a little bit so you can see my hands. This one is based on NLP, which is neurolinguistic programming. Sounds nefarious if you don't know what it is, but really it's just a way of understanding how our brain works so that we can utilize that to our advantage, right? So I want you to pull up an image, the thing that's bothering you right now. Pull that up in your mind. When you have it, continue on. If you need to pause, you can pause each one of these steps. Okay? Now that you have that image, is it a still or is it a video? Take your time to determine which one it is. Okay. Now that you know whether it's a still or a video, I want you to make it into the one that it's not. So if it's a still, make it a video. If it's a video, make it a still. And I want you to see how that feels in your body. Does that feel better or worse? If it feels better, keep it in that new format. If it feels worse, go back to the other one. Next, is it in color or black and white? Again, if it's in color, you're going to make it black and white. If it's black and white, you're going to make it color. Take your time, especially if you're new to this. It might take a minute, but you have the ability to do this. Okay? You're going to pretend you're seeing it on the screen, whether it's a color TV or a black and white TV. All right? Which one feels better? Let's make it that. So it's either a video in color or black and white or a photo in color or black and white. All right? Once you've got that, I want you to physically reach out and take the corners of it. It may be here, it could be bigger, it could be smaller. Reach out and in your mind physically take the corners of that image. And I want you to make it really, really, really, really big. And I want you to make it really, really, really, really, really small. And notice how that makes you feel. Which one feels better? Really big or really tiny? You're going to leave it whichever one it is. So, so far we should be making things better a little bit at each step. Now's when things get, we have to figure out which way to go with it. So there's a reason we call putting things behind us by that phrase. That's what we're going to try to do with this image. Whatever size you ended up with. Now it's really huge. You may want to try to crumple it up. See if it will allow you to do that. You'll know if you're not supposed to. And then just back up and undo it. Take that image, whatever size it is, and I want you to put it physically behind you and see if you can leave it there. It may be too fresh for you to leave it there. Usually what that means is that your brain and body are saying, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. We can't put this behind us because there's still a lesson here. There's still something we need out of it. It can't go behind us. That's okay because you can reach back and bring it back. I promise you, try this. I know it sounds kooky, but it really works. If you have to bring it back, if you can leave it there, leave it there, you should be done. Now when the subject comes up, it shouldn't feel so emotionally overwhelming, but you'll still be able to see it. If you couldn't leave it behind you, I want you to imagine that you're in a warehouse. Pretend like it is the biggest Amazon warehouse that's ever existed. The shelves go on for miles and miles and miles and miles. I want you to take that image and put it on the shelf, the furthest shelf that you can possibly put it on and leave it there. That should feel pretty good and it should feel like it's no longer pressing on. This is a series of tiny emotional shifts that are actually changing the way that we see it. And it's helping your brain to rewrite the way that it's storing the image to decrease the emotional impact. Okay, this is pretty darn powerful. It is also fairly temporary. My next two suggestions are much more permanent, but caveat, if your distress is higher than a 4 out of 10 on the scale, so the scale would be 0, It's not bothering you at all. You shouldn't even be doing this. You're just playing along because it's fun. To 10, you're in tears, you're stressed, you're thinking you really need help. If you are at a 4, which just means basically just below that middle of the road, if you're at a 4 or below, you can try these new techniques on your own. Otherwise, if you are above a 4, I don't care if it's a 4 and a half in your mind, or higher, you need someone with you to do these, okay? Use the other two techniques to get through and then think about having somebody like me help you with these other two, okay? These other two will change your picture forever, all right? We'll erase it, so the memory, you'll still be able to see it, but it's going to change the way it's stored. So the first one is one that's based on brain spotting. Okay, brain spotting is my bread and butter. I love it. Basically, we allow the body and the brain to communicate to complete memories. PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, is an error where the body doesn't The brain doesn't finish storing the memory. And again, it's to keep you safe. If I finish storing this memory, you're liable to put yourself in a situation where you're going to be in danger. Okay. What we're going to do is we're going to start moving some of that to where we're getting closer to finishing it. You may still need someone to help you walk the rest of the way through it. But this may be enough. So if your stress isn't higher than 4 out of 10, 1, 2, 3, 4, then try it. Okay? I want you to bring the image that's distressing you to mind. Okay? And I want you to figure out where you feel it in your body. Now, not everybody can do this. Some people do what's called dissociate. They turn off the emotion. If you can't do it here, it's okay. Come back. Just jump down to technique three. All right? If you can feel it in your body, I want you to start asking yourself some questions. These are going to feel silly, all right? What I do is based on play, but it's clinically proven. I want you to ask, does the sensation have a color? And with your first instinct, whatever pops into mind. It may not, but what's the color? Does it have a shape, a texture? Is it moving or is it still? Does it have a weight to it? Is it heavy? Is it light? Does it just not have any noticeable weight at all? Once you analyze or identify all of those things, I just want you to be present with that sensation. Don't analyze it. Don't critique it. Just notice. Notice how it changes if it does. Notice if it's feeling stuck. Notice if thoughts come in your head, memories, things like that. What we're doing is we're connecting that brain and body by doing this. And we're allowing that memory to finalize. Okay. Like I said, if it feels like too much, do your emergence and get a professional to help you with this or go on to try number three. Okay. Number three. Now this one is a fun one. This is based very loosely on a technique called accelerated resolution therapy. If you're in New Hampshire, I know a great therapist that does this. There are people dotted all over. I have some techniques that I use that are influenced by it, but I don't do the technique because it must be done by a therapist. Okay. Having said all that, there are things you can do on your own. Like I said, there's things I can do with you that don't qualify as therapy with this. Once again, this is only... to be tried by people who are at a safe level of distress. So four or below. Okay. Otherwise you do need a professional. You need someone like me or a therapist that specializes in this. Okay. Every single time your brain recalls a memory, it self edits. The best example I have of this is that for many, many, many years, I thought that I, when I was like four or five, I lived across the street from a farm and that the guy there, his name was Red. I did get that one right. Had a motorcycle and my dad took me for a ride on the motorcycle. Every time I remembered it when I was younger, I would add a new piece to the memory. When I finally sat down with my dad at the age of 30 something and I told him what I remembered, He had to laugh because there was a farm. It wasn't across the street. There was no motorcycle. The best we could guess is that I had taken my bicycle, my little tricycle that was red, and had turned it into that. And I always went with my dad when I went there. And so maybe that's why he was riding the motorcycle with me. I don't know. But my brain had successfully edited every single time I recalled it to make it just a little bit more whatever to fit what I needed. This is your brain's job is to make things work to where it's going to keep you safe and healthy. There was something about that, probably the connection with my dad, that made me more safe than me going with him to some farm out in the country and riding my tricycle, right? So know that every time you recall a memory, you're changing it. Now, we can use this to our advantage. When we're thinking about that video of Charlie or of Irina, what if we could change that memory? to where what was causing the distress was less painful, maybe even absurd, right? Because the reality is that those things happened, but they happened in the past. They are no more in your brain than the dinosaur that you learned about in school is in your brain. And yet, if you were to ask where dinosaurs exist today, short of alligators and turtles, you know, that whole argument, a T-Rex, other than its bones or the stone from its bones, does not exist anywhere except in our minds. And yet, there's no dinosaur in my brain. I don't know about you. So Charlie and Irina are not in our brains. the memory of what happened is in our brains and we can edit that, right? So let me give you some examples of how this works. I heard a story of a young lady who had been SA, assaulted, by a large group of people. And it was a horrible memory for her. And with a professional, because that was much more than a four out of 10, She was able to change faces of the people into cockroaches playing La Cucaracha. And so it actually got absurd enough that when the memory would come into her brain, she would laugh. And this is something that was tearing her up. It's not that the essay went away. It's not that the attack all of a sudden became okay. It's that all of a sudden her body changed. was able to not respond to it. And yet, when she went to court, she was still able to recall every detail. So, this is where your imagination comes in and your ability again to play, even in the pain. What can you change the disturbing part of that memory to? I don't want to go into details here because I know things are so fresh, but what If you were rewriting the story, do you just rewrite it where he finishes the statement and gets up and leaves? Do you rewrite it where she turns around to the guy that attacked her and says, hey, stop, leave me alone, I'm getting up and leaving. It can be something as simple as that. It is about retraining your brain and it sounds like it shouldn't work, but it does. So I've gone a lot longer than I wanted to today, but I wanted to get you all three of these techniques. Remember, the vergence, the bonus technique can be used at any time, in any place, any moment that you're feeling overwhelmed, panicky, uncomfortable, unsafe. Of course, if you're actually unsafe, get safe. But if you're just feeling it and you know that it's just inside of Okay, try the virgins. Technique number one can be used by everybody. Techniques two and three, if your distress is less than a four out of ten, you can try it on yourself. I did. Actually, I do both of them on myself on a regular basis. And if it's higher than a four out of ten, then contact me. Contact a professional and say, hey, I want to look at... brain spotting or ART to see if this can help with this image that just keeps beating me up. And I don't want to have to live this way. I hope this has helped. Please ask me questions. How can I help you? That is my entire goal. And I hope you have an absolutely wonderful day. And I hope the craziness stops at some point. So yeah, let me know how I can be of service to you.
