> Seems like it's more beneficial to acknowledge the bad stuff than to encourage positive thinking.Psychologists are sure it is. You should get all your traumatic experience and deal with it. You'd better learn how to remember these things without panic attacks or whatever. And the methods they use is replaying the traumatic memories multiple times while controlling the emotional state. The controlled emotional state sticks to the memories and replaces the one that was remembered before.
Well, that's the theory at least. I tried it and it kinda work but not perfectly, it may require some recurrent sessions over time if the effect fades. Though if you practice it a lot, it becomes a habit, an automatic response to traumatic memories, so any memory replay reduces the strength of the memory.
It is like a positive thinking (you get your negative reaction to the memories and replace it with a positive one... well, maybe just less negative), but it is definitely not burying unprocessed memories deep inside your mind.
> the children who drew pictures of the injuries and catastrophe, later showed fewer symptoms of stress and anxiety
I believe it is easier for kids, they are more focused on "here and now", and just replaying a memory in a safe environment has much stronger therapeutic effect than for adults. It is easier for adults to ignore the present safety and to dive deep into their past memories with all the associated emotions, so replaying memories can easily make them worse by intensifying remembered emotions.
Adults have crystallized worldviews, which were probably shaped by their traumatic memories, and it shapes their automatic emotional response, and makes matters worse, harder to change. Children are more fluid, they have more plasticity.