March 15, 2024 • 49 mins
If you’ve had an experience that overwhelmed your ability to cope, or when you’ve been in an environment where you were regularly unable to cope, you’ve experienced psychological trauma. In this episode, we share seven principles for living well with our wounds and speeding our journeys toward healing and recovery. Trauma is common. Depending on...
The post How to Live Well After Trauma (Ep. 13) appeared first on The Morpheus Clinic for Hypnosis.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
I would argue that the very fact that
you're doing those things at all is actually
proof that a, you're alive and b, you're
trying to heal. People think they need motivation
to drink less, to stop smoking, to exercise
more. They don't need motivation.
But we are often projecting ourselves into an
unknown future.
(00:20):
Welcome to How to be an Adult. This
is a podcast created by the practitioners at
the Morpheus Clinic For Hypnosis
in Toronto, Canada. It's for people just like
you who've inadvertently become adults and don't know
what to do about it. I'm Luke Chao.
And I'm Pascal Langdell. Now this is the
trail guide to life that your parents never
gave you when you reached the age of
(00:41):
majority.
And we share our ideas and our principles
and our approaches
in an effort to democratize
self love, self care, self compassion.
In this episode, we're gonna do our best
to work out how to best live with
a trauma history.
When you've been wounded by other people or
the world and then you have to live
(01:03):
with the pain that one lives with after
trauma, there are a few responses that people
go to.
And
one response is to just kind of take
it out on others.
So your boss yells at you, you yell
at your wife, your wife yells at the
kid, the kid yells at the cat.
Another response
is to kind of just hold the pain
(01:23):
on the inside
and not perpetuate your suffering upon other people.
But there is a better alternative
to that.
And here we'll seek to unravel
how one might
try to recover from the wounds that have
been inflicted upon them
and achieve or at least try to achieve
(01:45):
something called post
traumatic growth.
I was watching a,
a series by a clinician on trauma recently,
and
he stated that reasonable efforts to come to
a conclusion as to who suffers from trauma
reached levels of around 75%.
So, 75% of the population
has experienced some form of trauma in their
(02:06):
past. And I would suggest that perhaps after
COVID, that's actually gone up. It It depends
on the threshold you choose for trauma. Mhmm.
So I I do agree. COVID kind of
put us in this collective trauma
of living in a pandemic and suddenly being
scared of our friends,
being scared of ourselves if we visit our
grandparents.
You could also make the argument that the
school system traumatizes its people you could make
(02:28):
the argument that living under capitalism traumatizes its
people
it depends on the threshold you pick yeah
I am someone who will not seek to
gatekeep trauma to to me if you self
assess that you've been through trauma. That to
me is good enough.
I'll share with our listeners that I actually
have a diagnosis of complex PTSD
so, PTSD traditionally defined is it's kind of
(02:51):
like a stab wound to the gut there
are clearly defined incidents that give you trauma
like a natural disaster
complex trauma is more like the death of
a 1,000 cuts
where one might grow up believing that he
or she is not being traumatized
simply because there is no stab wound to
the gut to find
(03:12):
but the symptoms are similar to if you've
gotten that stab wound to the gut Hyper
vigilance, for example, a negative self image.
So, so much of what I share today
is first what I've experienced personally
and then what I've shared with my clients
so that I can kind of draw these
conclusions about how human beings
(03:33):
can do our version of licking our wounds
and trying to recover after we've been wounded
by the world. One of the aspects that's
differs between CPTSD and PTSD,
particularly if it happens
in your youth, in your formative developmental years,
you learn strategies to deal with the 1,000
cuts.
And you survive. And it's quite possible to
(03:54):
reach adulthood and think, well,
that's it. I
these are the rules by which I can
live because they worked. But the challenge is
that what works during the period of a
1000 cuts
may not work when you're trying to be
an adult in the world and you start
to have relationships and responsibilities.
And those same tools don't necessarily
apply. You're no longer working to an accurate
(04:17):
map. Well, we can understand that the rescue
dog or the rescue cat
might have been adapted to an abusive environment.
So cowering all the time, you know, jumping
at loud noises. They're adapted to an abusive
environment. But once we take the animal and
put them in a loving home where they
can see for themselves
that it's safe, they can venture out, they
(04:39):
can make noise, and they don't have to
cower. Well then the animal adapts to
its new environment.
Now we human beings are also capable of
adapting to our adult environments.
So I have 7 concise points just like
colors of the rainbow. We can look at
the finer grain details and come up with
more, but at least at this point in
(04:59):
my career in my life. I've ascertained
7 main points I want to make for
how to cope with trauma and the first
one is to remember
that trauma doesn't mean
that you're broken
like a shattered iPhone screen.
It means you're wounded.
It comes from the Greek word for wound
and it's a wounded psyche of course. It's
(05:20):
not a wounded body.
But the word wound implies
is that
you're not at fault
and also that the wound can heal
and that's very different from a paradigm of
brokenness
where perhaps it's your fault you're broken
and Perhaps you're irreparable
(05:41):
So the first main point I absolutely want
to make is that if we recall what
trauma means,
it's a wounded psyche
and wounds heal. Wounds do heal.
You might have to apply ample dollops of
self love and self care
to help your emotional wounds heal.
But if we keep our mind on healing
(06:02):
then we don't have our minds on the
erroneous idea that life could just simply break
without
later healing. I would even suggest that
it's inevitable that you you will attempt to
heal your psyche. That that drive to
heal is in is inevitable as life itself,
in fact. So, in some ways, the
(06:22):
some of the maladaptive choices that you might
be making are an effort still to heal.
It's just that they don't really work for
you. Yes. And so, you can't look at
the evidence of your behavior and coruscate yourself
for them. Say, I shouldn't be doing this,
I shouldn't be doing that, it's proof that
I'm broken.
Quite contrary to that, I would argue that
the very fact you're doing those things at
(06:43):
all is actually proof that a, you're alive
and b, you're trying to heal. It's just
that you've not been given the right guidance
to figure out how. Exactly.
It's like you're asked to climb the mountain
on your own and you know you can
do it But without a guide and having
to find your own way it is a
lot harder and sometimes you might make a
misstep
(07:03):
compared to if in psychotherapy, for example, or
in our work or just listening to this
podcast you have some guidance
in how to climb the the mountain of
trauma recovery
this point about being wounded and not broken
which makes healing inevitable
it falls from the fact that we are
only correctly categorized
(07:25):
as life.
So the living animal
who had been wounded physically or emotionally
given enough care can be expected to heal
and then be happy and healthy again right
but the stuffed animal who's wounded cannot heal
We could go in and sew it up
and
fix it, but
let's make this distinction between life versus objects
(07:49):
where life will heal. Life will adapt. Life
will find a way, whether we're talking about
a tree with its branches and roots, or
whether we're talking about the wolf going back
to her den, licking her wounds or the
human being trying to figure out how are
they gonna climb this mountain of trauma recovery?
This aliveness is worth underscoring because the rules
(08:09):
for how we treat life are very different
from the rules for how we treat things
where things could be broken. Things require us
to, like, tinker with them until they're fixed.
Life just requires nourishment.
Life has to have its needs met and
then healing
follows inevitably.
For us human beings, our needs include well
(08:29):
everything Maslow identified
so
love esteem
respect
on top of the physical needs like safety
and food and air and water.
As adults,
we have to fulfill our own needs.
So self love and self esteem and self
respect
might have to do in a world where
others might not give you enough love and
(08:50):
esteem and respect, but it
it fulfills the need it's not just love
from another that's valid
your self love is valid it just wasn't
under scored enough when you were a child
which is probably why you're listening to this
podcast
and I'm here to tell you that your
self love comes from a human being who
has a heart, who knows you very, very,
(09:11):
very well,
and who's gonna be with you for the
rest of your life. What you have with
yourself is a, in sickness and in health,
till death do you part thing. Even when
you feel half alive,
You're completely alive if you perceive yourself as
a 100% alive You're perceiving the whole thing
when people feel half alive. That's because they're
(09:32):
not looking at their entirety.
So the second point is to take guardianship
of your own body which is
similar to that phrase which is you are
life under your own care. Your mind and
a body under your own care.
Absolutely.
Because if you forget this fact then you're
completely abandoned
some of the time.
(09:53):
Right? So you're trying to fall asleep at
night if you don't count yourself as life
That's yours to care for if you've not
adopted yourself in the way I'm advising
often than you hope with your own darkest
thoughts
But if you've kind of adopted yourself in
a way so that you're guaranteeing you're always
going to be there to love you and
care for you and you're never going to
betray or abandon yourself
Then every night you go to bed with
(10:14):
someone you love. I think in in some
ways, it's
and we've we've said this before. It's the
panacea. It seems to be the foundational and
core axiom, if you like, that you have
fundamental intrinsic worth and you are life in
your own care. Yeah. Which many other decisions
automatically proceed from. So, to give you an
example, if something triggers a memory for example,
(10:35):
or triggers a feeling, and this feeling is
a historical echo of something that is not
present, is not real, and is not in
the here and now,
then if you're treating yourself
not as a friend would, if you're treating
yourself bad, you're mistreating yourself, you would criticize
yourself from those feelings. You would adopt them
as being true and valid and not give
yourself the grace, should we say,
(10:56):
to even be able to inquire about what
that emotion is, where it's come from. Yep.
To even begin to learn about yourself you
have to start off with a certain level
of self love that says it's worth learning,
it's worth taking that time and taking a
a step back to be able to observe
what's going on with compassion.
And what you're talking about is someone who's
(11:17):
still kind of adapted to their childhood environment,
like the rescue dog who's not yet been
adopted.
This is why I'm asking our listeners
to adopt themselves in a way to be
the guarantors of their own lovability and worthiness
and respectability
being consistently recognized.
If 8,000,000,000 people on the planet did this
(11:39):
for themselves, the world will be much better
off. It's not gonna, like, take someone else's
self esteem if you esteem yourself and, you
know, everyone's doing the self esteem thing correctly.
Just like if everyone sleeps well at night,
the world's gonna be better off if, you
know, everyone has love in their hearts.
The world will be better off.
(12:00):
But one of the aspects that I often
see about life in your own care is
that
even that can seem like a huge mountain.
Mhmm. And
I think it's important to state even at
this point that even the smallest incremental step
that is
based on a value of self care is
huge. Even if it's something as small as,
(12:23):
you know, drinking a glass of water, that
to the outside might be, well, I could
drink water all the time, what's the problem
with that? You know, to to to some
people even
the smaller steps are huge and should be
honored and respected as if it was somebody
that had just scaled Everest, you know. It's
not it's not a small negligent thing to
be able to make that step sometimes.
(12:44):
Because you're then abiding by the paradigm, then
your life that's under your care if you
refuse to drink a glass of water just
because you're feeling miserable you're not abiding by
the paradigm
that your life that's under your care And
every mountain is climbed
one foothold at a time. Literally, everyone who's
ever scaled Mount Everest
did it one little step at a time
(13:06):
and it would have been difficult it was
sometimes life threatening
but
This is what the professionals do that this
is what those who reach the peak do
they take it one little step at a
time
they stay on the slope
and then eventually they're at the peak. So
what so what I'm advocating for here is
(13:27):
within that statement, there's a sense of boldness
and a sense of forthrightness that sometimes isn't
felt, particularly in the early stages.
And that to me, one of the things
I'd like to underline is that if your
sense of self worth has been educated into
such a degree that you find it difficult
to treat yourself as life under your own
care, to have compassion for yourself, I mean
really difficult.
(13:47):
Then any step that you take should be
celebrated, not a subject for shame or again
being pointed out saying, yeah, you're broken because
this is all you can do. Everybody else
seems to be able to do it but
you can't. Yeah. You find it difficult. Yeah.
And that becomes again another avenue for that
old voice of the worst voices that ever
spoke to you, you know, to come back
in. And so I I wanted
(14:08):
to to to point out that even those
first steps
in some ways should should garner respect
and awards
because
they are even if they may appear small,
they are still big to you. And that's
really only you get to be the arbiter
and the moral moral authority on the kind
of steps that are possible for you at
any given time. And so if it's a
(14:29):
small step, for other people it could be
there's people that you and I know that
find it difficult to get out of bed,
you know.
I've been there. Yeah, exactly. So you know,
that just getting out of bed could be
a huge deal and as soon as you've
done that, so you've made the choice.
Today I'm gonna get out of bed because
I am a life under my own care
and I have work. The moment you made
that one first decision
(14:50):
then it shows you have a choice. It
It shows that you have agency. It shows
that you are able to make a positive
choice and redirect your thoughts to a positive
behavior. And if you know you can do
it once then you can do it twice.
And then eventually these steps become bigger and
bigger and can be exponential. And because of
this we can say that sometimes we can
see quite rapid change
(15:11):
as a result. Because it's not necessarily, you
know, 10 years of therapy
that's that that is required, but it's this
reinforcement of the steps based on a foundation
of self worth. Many people I think who
are lying in bed
not doing anything and again I've been there.
I've been there more than once in my
life.
It's because they're waiting for a feeling
(15:33):
that
they can go out of bed and nothing
bad will happen and they can handle life
before they do it, and that's the wrong
order of things. What you're advocating for is
to take the action
one way or another and expect that the
feelings follow from actions.
Again, I've been there. This way works.
In fact, with any difficult enough endeavor,
(15:55):
you don't
wanna just wait passively
for the right feeling to come along before
you do the thing. Whether it's getting out
of bed when you have depression or whether
it's writing the great American novel or whether
it's recording your first album.
Just starting to take the actions
produces
the feelings which follow after the actions. It
(16:17):
would be the wrong order of things to
wait for the right feelings to strike if
you're already depressed and Mhmm. So what we're
talking about,
so far as self care and moving into
those physical needs, so drinking water, exercise. But
what is the correct or the most beneficial
attitude to your body? A body that's been
traumatized. So that ties into our third point,
(16:39):
which is that we have to fulfill all
of our physical needs.
Now I have to tell a lot of
people to take a deep breath because they're
not even fulfilling the basic physical need of
breathing deeply enough. Now I know where this
comes from. It comes with a feeling that
it's not safe to take a breath. I
know that's the feeling
but when you take the small action of
(17:01):
asking your body for a deeper breath and
you take deeper breath and you see no
bad thing happens there's no like velociraptor around
the corner ready to eat you
then
you can breathe deeply. Your body gets that
need fulfilled and your body also gets through
the mind body link the signal that it's
safe to breathe.
Now for someone who's dealing with post traumatic
(17:22):
stress it's a very helpful signal
to give your body that it's safe to
breathe, it's safe to breathe deeply, and therefore
it's safe to relax. It's safe to even
let your guards down at least a little
bit and then see if it's safe to
let your guards down a little bit further.
It's not too basic to talk about drinking
some water, taking a deep enough breath,
(17:44):
given how many people fail to fulfill even
these most basic of needs that a human
being has.
Other physical needs that often people neglect because
they're going through some stuff
are the need for sleep, which is an
entitlement. It's not a nice to have when
you finally get around to it
or the need to eat good enough food
(18:05):
where you know Feeling miserable is no excuse
to feed yourself junk that you wouldn't give
to anyone you love
So the action of eating fruits and vegetables
Underscores
that you're adopting a new paradigm where you
are indeed life That's under your care and
you've indeed adopted yourself and you would hold
(18:26):
yourself to the same standards you would hold
yourself to
if you were responsible for a cat, a
dog, maybe even a house plant. The house
plant gets enough water
not too much but enough water rather than
a bottle of wine.
Yeah. And and
there's an aspect of that which is like
a dog for instance. You take a dog
for a walk, you would exercise the dog.
(18:47):
The dog needs exercise. So that again,
you could
be consistent if you do that for a
dog that you would do that for yourself.
The same with medical care or water, food,
you know, it's it's this There there wasn't
that I I remember reading, I can't remember
where where it was now, about how they
did a sort of a survey
of how much money and how much attention
(19:07):
were paid towards pets compared to the owners
on themselves. And it was like a huge
difference. It's like more money and more attention
was being paid towards their own pets than
was being paid to themselves,
which is
really quite inconsistent,
you know, at the very is one way
of putting it. People think they need motivation
to drink less to stop smoking to exercise
(19:31):
more
they don't need motivation
to fulfill these basic needs for their pet
cat or dog.
The missing piece of the puzzle for how
we treat ourselves is love.
So knowing you've got to walk the dog
is not enough. You've got to know that
and love the dog too and then you're
walking the dog. So knowing what you have
(19:52):
to eat or how to exercise and use
the machines at the gym isn't enough unless
you have that piece of the puzzle which
is self love. And and even if it's
not a question of getting a gym membership
and working
out how to use the machines.
If you're approaching exercise
from the point of view which is not
that I wanna get necessarily buff and and
(20:13):
and you know,
and sculpted, but that it's important to exercise
because I spend most of my time at
a desk. It's important to exercise
because it's good for my mental health just
as it's to equal to say it's good
that I sleep
because when I'm tired
that negative voice gets louder and I find
it harder to to turn the volume down.
(20:34):
I believe more of the dark imaginings when
I'm tired. And I have less I have
less energy that I can bring to preparing
good food. There's some sort of key aspects
that even in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs
perhaps there's
sort of sleep might be right up there
at the top. And that's under recognized that
sleep is a physical need, but it is
a physical need.
Even if you don't get these kinds of
(20:55):
outcomes, right? So even if your inner critic
is still strong, though, you've
slept well.
That's not a failure. Mhmm.
Because sleep in itself
is
intrinsically
valuable. Mhmm. As long as you can raise
the question of should I treat myself well
or poorly today?
The answer is treat yourself as human life
(21:18):
that is under your care.
And one thought you can add to that
is that generally speaking you don't regret it.
It's I can't I can't think of a
time that you regret treating yourself
well with compassion
and with a sense of self worth. Independently
of the outcomes. Yes. Exactly. Exactly.
So among our basic needs
(21:39):
is to have a safe person to physically
share ourselves with. Mhmm. And I'm gonna count
animals as people for the purposes of this
discussion because for all intents and purposes they
are. They have hearts, they have emotions,
they see us and they're they're there for
us and they don't judge
us. So when we're touch starved,
(22:01):
right,
it's almost like we're dehydrated
or we're malnourished.
It will be harder
to love yourself. It will be harder
to fulfill your obligations to society
if you're touch starved.
Like when my cat died, I've talked about
this in prior episodes,
(22:22):
when my cat died I had a very
hard time sleeping for for for quite some
time.
The presence of that animal fulfilled
my need to receive touch,
to have my physical
presence
recognized
as worthy or valid
enough to to cuddle up next to.
(22:43):
And I sort of see this crisis in
our society where especially young men. Right? Unless
you have a cat or a dog,
you might have nobody
to do that with, to to cuddle with,
to to have your physical presence validated so
of course you feel empty in your heart
of course it's like you're malnourished
when you have a trauma history it is
(23:04):
harder to date or to I guess be
recognized as normal.
Well, if you're if you're with,
75% of others then you are normal.
You're not the exception.
Yeah, but that's under recognized until we say
it on a podcast like this that you're
definitely not the only person in the city
(23:24):
that you're in who is touch starved and
who just wishes they could find someone else
even if you just, like, met
your needs or you don't even have to
have sex.
That need is valid. I mean, sex is
kind of like an option for a lot
of people,
but to kind of be hugged
or held
or to have, like, a cat mash their
(23:46):
belly into your face because that's what they
do that
physical validation of your actual presence in this
material world made of atoms and molecules seems
to make a difference and especially for those
with a trauma history. Yeah. Yeah. The 4th
point that I want to make is that
we're not just rational beings,
(24:07):
we're also moral beings
and in the prior episode we talked about
why we need to account for morality
even in this world where the m word
seems quaint and outdated
now a lot of the problems that I
see in my clients are problems of demoralization.
If they're connected with a moral center, they're
(24:28):
willing to say no, thank you
to other people's bad ideas.
Right?
If they're connected with their moral center, then,
of course, they treat themselves as a living
human being that they're responsible for. If they're
connected with their moral center then the long
dark nights become easier to bear
if you're disconnected with your moral center
(24:51):
other people's bad ideas
might end up being weighed equally
to
good ideas in your mind.
So someone else's cruelty
you might actually take as valid
if you're out of touch with your moral
center.
So And and I think part part of
the challenge there is that
(25:11):
if you have CPTSD because
your developmental period has been traumatized or traumatizing,
is that as a child you don't have
the experience or the wisdom to have a
developed, we say, moral center. You look to
your peers, you look to your parents and
your peers
to say, well, what is it that I
should guide myself with?
(25:31):
And if your parents are saying, for instance,
you're you're having an emotion and your parents
are gaslighting you Mhmm. Then you're being told
that you shouldn't trust your emotions, for example.
And that's you could say well,
as an adult you have to observe your
emotions, see them as signals and trust them
as good signals of something. Mhmm. Don't have
to see this, treat them like lenses that
you need to see the world through. But
(25:52):
still this is this is an example of
how
trauma can put you in a situation where
you have to make your morals. You have
to figure out what they are because
you weren't told them at all, and you
were actually instructed in a very different moral
that was about somebody else's
needs and desires
and and proclivities, if you like, and not
honoring yours.
(26:13):
I'm gonna make an interesting argument Mhmm. That
human beings are not the only moral animals.
I'm going to make the argument that the
animals who we can kind of
interact with in a friendly way or play
within a friendly way
have a kind of instinctive morality that we
human beings as mammals can kind of tap
(26:33):
into
2. So, for example,
let's say that I'm,
respectfully
playing with a cat and the cat's got
its claws right.
The cats morality
doesn't permit
them to extend their claws for me,
who is respectfully
playing with the cat and honoring their boundaries.
(26:55):
But then if I'm just a total jerk
and then I like grab the cat in
a way they don't like, the claws come
out.
Now we human beings,
we don't use claws, we don't use teeth
to set boundaries.
We're supposed to use our words.
Words like no, words like not a chance,
(27:17):
and even words like go away
and its ruder variations.
Often, if we're not permitted
to use these kinds of words
or if we have this kind of false
morality that we're good if we say yes
and we're bad if we say no,
then that's one of the ways we become
out of touch with our moral centers. I
mean cats should have their claws
(27:40):
not because they're gonna scratch you,
but because on a longer timeline they're gonna
come across some jerk who needs to be
told off.
Guess one of the points we're trying to
make here is you don't have to become
a moral philosopher
in order to get in touch with your
moral center. Trauma kind of disconnects you with
your moral center.
So if you kind of feel your feelings
(28:01):
again
and recognize that sometimes the parents are wrong,
sometimes the authorities are wrong,
and you feel your feelings including anger,
then
you don't have to become a moral philosopher.
You're connected with something much
deeper than what you might read in a
book.
So
so now we're coming to point 5 which
(28:22):
is believing in your own senses. Mhmm. That's
something which
is
surprisingly
difficult for many of us. In the sense
that we are often projecting ourselves into an
unknown future or we're coruscating ourselves or feeling
an echo and judging the world according to
something that's passed and gone. Mhmm. An exam
(28:42):
again, I'll bring up the example again of
echoes
of emotional triggered emotions that put you your
body back into a state that it was.
Because of course the the limbic system has
no idea about time. As far as the
limbic system is concerned,
you're back there. You're not
it doesn't have a perception of time the
way the cortex does, right? But what that
(29:03):
can mean is that you feel that, you
believe that to be the truth about now.
You feel it to be the truth. You
feel it to be the truth now. Whereas
that's a signal, it's not 2020 vision. And
so, a lot of the things about grounding
for example, are trying to pull you back
into the present, into the here and now.
And that means
guiding yourself with the evidence of your eyes
(29:24):
and your ears and over what is accurate
over what is under your control. I think
that's probably one more that I'd add. Mhmm.
The incredible thing is
for for a cat to be able to
bring down like a moth or like a
wild bird for example. The cats got to
be very much
in its senses.
(29:44):
It's not imagining what it's going to do
in the future when it finally catches a
bird. It's not remembering the last 5 birds
it's caught.
We human beings we have the capacity
to be in our senses.
We also have the capacity to ignore our
senses
and either flash back to the past or
imagine ourselves at some point in the future
I think part of the reason so many
(30:05):
of us neglect the evidence of our senses
is that we're gaslit.
We're young.
George Orwell, of course, wrote the very insightful
book 1980 4. Mhmm. And one of the
lines just from memory is the first and
final command of the party is to disbelieve
the evidence of your own eyes.
And that's, of course, an authoritarian
(30:26):
control tactic.
There are many households
that have employed
this authoritarian
control tactic.
And then one doesn't believe the evidence
of their senses.
They don't believe what they see, what they
hear, what they experience. They don't believe that
any of it is valid.
So where do they go to instead?
(30:48):
Past or future, memory or imagination
and this episode of course is about living
well with trauma
so
it's especially
when you've experienced
trauma and then your experiences have been ignored
or denied.
That's where your sensory perception becomes undermined.
(31:11):
You start questioning, can I believe my own
eyes?
Is that authority figure right? Did it really
not happen?
And our listeners, if you're listening this far
into the episode, you've probably gone down spirals
like that
that lead to no satisfying
conclusions.
I can tell you the lifeline out of
that spiral is to be very well grounded
in your senses.
(31:32):
So so to see what you see and
believe it and feel what you feel and
believe and hear what you hear and believe
it. So grounding as you mentioned Pascal that
you're basically grounding yourself again in the here
and the now.
It's true that senses are imperfect
as a guide to reality but your senses
are a whole lot better as a guide
(31:52):
to reality than either childhood memories
or the imagination
of
potential features, most of which don't actually materialize
before you.
Another way
out of having been gaslit
is to recognize who knows what. Because if
you were present
for whatever is claimed
and the other person was not, if you
(32:14):
saw with your eyes and they're just speculating,
you're the person with knowledge. You're the person
with empirical knowledge.
So it doesn't matter if the other person's
older than you or it doesn't matter if
that person has a position of authority over
you. It's important to recognize
who knows what and
when it comes to matters pertaining to you
(32:35):
specifically as an individual,
you are definitely the person who knows the
most.
So any time someone says to you you're
crazy, you're making stuff up, these are very
overt forms of gaslighting of course but those
kinds of statements if taken seriously
would take you out of this concrete reality
(32:57):
we exist in
and into potentially endless spirals inside your own
head.
The 6th point I want to make about
how we live well despite trauma
is to immerse ourselves in
physically
immersive experiences
or sensations.
So for example taking a hot bath is
(33:19):
going to help
and It's because it brings you into the
here and the now you're not remembering the
bath you took 2 weeks ago or feeling
that the bath what a cold bath or
a cold shower
Whatever floats your
boat if it gives you sensory stimulation
Then
it brings you to the here and the
now
(33:40):
The situation you want to avoid is lying
in bed with your eyes closed,
thinking of things and ruminating and imagining possibilities
and thinking could've, should've, would've. And getting yourself
into a healthy situation.
So, you're talking about doing things that engage
you and take you out of
the negative rumination for example? Yes. So, holding
(34:02):
an acoustic guitar Mhmm. Fingering a chord and
even just strumming the chord.
Now you're connecting
your body
and the motion
with a sound you hear through a different
sense. Mhmm. Something as simple as that. I'm
assuming the guitar's in tune by the way.
(34:23):
Something as simple as that
asserts that you're not just subject to the
world.
You're a subject in this world.
You're supposed to act upon the world to
make it a little bit better even if
you're just moving sound waves
through this instrument. And to to a degree
it doesn't really matter what that is. It's
just that that first step of doing almost
(34:43):
anything
is likely to put you on track to
getting you out of your head so much.
Yes. And those who don't have so so
much of a trauma history,
they might not have to go out of
their own way to give themselves this kind
of antidote
to ground themselves, right? If you're thinking
about having to ground yourself over and over
(35:05):
and over again you might have a trauma
history.
I just wanna say that, you know, for
those of you who are listening, you have
no idea what I'm talking about.
It's probably because you don't have too much
of a trauma history. So you can be
in the here and the now
and it doesn't take much great effort
and you don't really flash back to past
memories or ruminate about the past and you
also don't really try to figure out the
(35:26):
infinite branching paths that could go forward in
time and you could actually, like, enjoy a
sunny day. Mhmm. Our goal with this episode
is to get our listeners as close to
that idea as possible.
Yeah.
I want to account
for experiences that go beyond just
physically grabbing
yourself in the world. I want to account
(35:48):
for transcendent
experiences
like really good music,
good storytelling,
even if the storytelling is through a screen
and speakers as it often is in this
modern world.
Time spent in beautiful natural scenes,
walking through an art gallery.
When
you are
(36:09):
witnessing
something that goes beyond
just your pain
or just one individual's pain
when you're witnessing something that kind of speaks
to a transcendent human experience
this is another way beyond just the physical
and the sensory
to be in the here and the now
so when you're watching a movie you're not
(36:30):
really doing anything you're not creating in this
world as I've advocated for But watching a
really good movie,
here's what's happening.
The filmmakers
reached deeply into their humanity
to
look at some aspect of that humanity
which you share too.
And then through their craft, they've brought forth
(36:51):
into this world an expression
of their collective humanity
so that now you can recognize your own
pain as part of a shared human experience
and not just individual to you Or maybe
you'll recognize your anger to be part of
a shared human experience
and not a problem with you individually.
(37:11):
Or maybe it opens up the possibility for
joy which has been kept hidden from you
or that you've hidden from yourself. Yes.
The kind of catharsis
that follows from witnessing tragedy,
right? It's not just for the ancient Greeks.
They were human beings like us.
You know,
dark films,
(37:33):
so called depressing films, even films that are
not that joyful, not that happy
have a lot of use in this world
because now you know when you witness such
things
that your pain is not just yours And
other people are suffering too and you are
not alone. Does,
the idea of transcendence or transcending experiences
(37:54):
go beyond
the human? So would you say or
would be going even further into, for instance,
extending your
sense of self
in respect to the truly transcendent.
So gazing up at the stars Yeah. Or
Going to the Grand Canyon.
Massive churches with vaulted ceilings designed Right. To
(38:15):
create that sensation.
Yes. And I I don't really have like
the vocab. I'm not really like an aesthetic
philosopher So I don't really have the vocabulary
to talk about those kinds of experiences But
all I think is a good word
Now, an interesting thing I've noticed among some
of my clients with a fear of heights
is that what they're actually experiencing
(38:35):
is uncontained
awe.
And once we describe their fear of heights
as a sense of awe that they're capable
of containing,
then they don't feel so overwhelmed.
Then they feel like their feet can be
on the ground and they're not gonna be
overwhelmed
and like jump into the Grand Canyon or
(38:56):
something as one often imagines.
So yeah I think that we should make
room for a sense of awe
And I also think that a human mind
can in a way contain it even if
we can't comprehend it.
In many aspects, those things that do create
awe
are things that are
(39:17):
extraordinary
in their
presence outside the human sense of time and
space,
but are constrained enough that we can perceive
them. So if you look up a trees
for example,
the trees
are present. It's not empty space. It's describing
it's actually
limiting space.
(39:37):
But the multiplicity of light, the leaves, these
are all constraints, but they're constraints enough that
implicate
something which is transcendent.
The same with the church roof
or a mosque roof, they're very vaulted. They're
vaulted because
if it was the open sky and you
couldn't see anything obstructing the sky, it'd just
be the sky. It'd be unfathomable. You wouldn't
(39:58):
feel that sense at all necessarily.
Mhmm. But you bring a roof in and
suddenly you sense the great feeling of space
and Right. Once you look up. If you
look at stars for example,
you don't get necessarily the same feeling when
you're looking at a big blue sky. I
mean, you could do, don't get me wrong.
But the stars actually create a canopy that
brings in, constrains the sense of the incredible
(40:21):
depths of space and time and distance
that is implied by the stars. And that's
why that sense of awe. I think I've
seen studies where awe is considered again one
of those things that
can really bring you out of your rumination
on negative self. If that makes sense. Any
experience that is more interesting
(40:43):
when your attention's out there
compared to lying in bed with what you
think is the most interesting thing you could
think of is gonna help you. And another
experience that kind of you would have to
immerse yourself into to get the most out
of
is trauma therapy.
So EMDR for example.
(41:03):
And, you know, I'm not actually a trauma
therapist. Most of what I know about trauma
comes from personal experience,
which is why I think I can kind
of
describe the experience from the inside.
But I have gone through trauma therapy
and the experience of immersing
yourself in your feelings while there's a lifeline,
namely your therapist, to pull you out if
(41:25):
they have to. That can be helpful
within those parameters.
So 0.7 is pretty succinct. Keep away from
harms.
Yes. So many of us
gravitate
to alcohol
to drugs
to careless sex
to careless spending
as a trauma response
(41:47):
because it makes us feel
at least okay if not good it makes
us feel okay
temporarily
So that's why we have to make the
7th point
that because you have a trauma history you
might not respond to stress the way that
someone with a better upbringing does.
You might gravitate
to these kinds of coping mechanisms.
(42:08):
We want you
to use one of the other coping mechanisms
that we've been talking about, so you're not
wasting your time by going out to the
countryside,
finding a hill and looking up at the
stars for 12 hours until the sun comes
up. You now have our professional encouragement and
validation
to do precisely
that.
The point is
(42:29):
to stay away
from these kinds of temporary
band aid fixes that I know you've been
trying
and
to try something different
and social media is another one of those
mindlessly
engaging activities that makes you feel okay but
not actually good. But this is this is
(42:50):
interesting in the sense that, well, we've always
stated that almost
all behavior including maladaptive behavior, including for instance
drink or smoking, whatever it is, is still
an attempt to heal it, it's just maladaptive.
What you're trying to do is trying to
heal yourself from that pain. You're trying to
avoid it, you're trying to to overwhelm it,
you're trying to
get your mind off it, take a break
(43:11):
from it.
The urge if you like is not wrong
because there's a side of you which is
trying to take care of yourself. It's just
that
you're going in a direction that ultimately creates
harm.
And one of the thoughts that brings me
to is that the repercussions of doing something
which does you harm is sort of often
quite deferred,
(43:31):
right? So,
you can get a drinking habit and it
might be years until it really actually affects
your life to the degree that it's it's
appalling, you know. It is possible we could
get there. But at first it's not that,
right? So it's not not only that it's
a
short term solution, it's one where
the cost is somewhat deferred.
(43:51):
And what are you deferring the cost for?
What are you doing it for? And part
of that is is because there is immense
discomfort
somewhere.
It's the the wound if you like, is
being felt
in one way or another. And I think
that part of recovering from trauma and actually
growing from trauma is learning
how to sit and be okay with those
(44:14):
sensations and be the adult to yourself.
Allowing yourself
the time to not just go knee jerk
reaction must escape. Yeah. And instead
have an approach which is what how can
I treat myself well? Bearing in mind I
feel this bad. Bearing in mind that this
makes me wanna run for the hills. Bear
in mind this makes me want to to
hit myself over the head so that I
(44:35):
don't have to think or feel this way.
It can be awful but coming to understand
that you have the ability to sit with
those
emotions
without the repercussion of some
some diversion
or some,
yeah.
Just doing that is a is a is
an extraordinary act. One of the points we
made at the beginning Mhmm. Is
(45:02):
So if you have a kid
and they're plainly upset,
are you gonna give them a cigarette?
Are you gonna give them some whiskey?
Are you gonna advise them to go spend
their allowance on stuff they don't need?
Probably you're gonna do just what you said.
Sit with them.
(45:23):
Be with them.
Help them recognize that things are still gonna
be okay, though they feel all of this
awful feeling.
Now we can teach a child how to
do that.
So I have complete faith in you as
an adult that you can learn how to
do that, too.
And let's also account under this point for
(45:43):
people who are harmful because of the ideas
or the worldview that they espouse
These so called toxic people
with toxic ideologies
that don't even recognize you're a living human
being with an independence of thought and morality,
for example.
Keep them away from yourself
just like you keep them away from anyone
(46:04):
else you love. Mhmm. Or at least if
they're around,
recognize in your own head and heart how
completely wrong they can be. Because sometimes the
other person is the jerk, and it's not
automatically you even if your trauma response says
it's automatically you. And and this goes back
to the evidence of your eyes and ears.
If you
do teach yourself to go with what you
(46:25):
can perceive
in the here and now, that you will
pick out the psychopaths, you'll pick out the
narcissists,
you'll pick out the dark triads.
And
instead of continuing the belief that somehow you
wouldn't be able to tell that and you
must be wrong and that this other person
must be right,
you can develop a skill in being able
to identify who is not good to be
(46:46):
around. It comes with being connected with your
moral center too.
Because the dark triad personality,
you know, are famously immoral.
Mhmm. And often charming and engaging and many
things. Which just puts salt in the wounds
and, you know, it kicks someone when they're
down.
So when you're connected with your moral center
(47:07):
and then you're believing the evidence of your
senses,
it's so much easier Yeah. To to pick
out these so called toxic personalities.
And then you get to say, nope. No.
Thank you.
Exactly. As an expression of your morality.
So those are our 7 main pointers
for how to climb the mountain of trauma
recovery
(47:28):
so that you don't have to feel like
you're doing it on your own or that
you're only left with
the scarce tools that your childhood gave to
you.
If you've already stumbled across these methods on
your own, you know you're not crazy, you
know you're not alone
and at least we hope to have underscored
that you are doing the right things.
(47:50):
Our intent with this of course is to
foster post traumatic growth which is a phenomenon
that's becoming increasingly recognized where it's not just
post traumatic stress that people experience,
there is a response called post traumatic growth.
And even though it's kind of a new
field of study,
I believe that when you're fulfilling all your
(48:13):
needs,
the physical needs, the social needs, the love
needs
that's where,
like rehabilitating the rescue dog,
you have a good chance of post traumatic
growth.
Thank you again for listening and all the
way to the end.
Pascal and I are available for hire through
the Morpheus Clinic For Hypnosis in Toronto, Canada.
(48:34):
We do free consultations and treatment plans for
our private clients. And recently we've also started
doing
free shared hypnosis sessions
twice a month.
So you don't even have to pay us
anything
to come into our space
and listen to more of this way of
thinking please take us up on that offer
(48:56):
and please tell your friends too don't be
put off too much by the h word
that's
just a
way to listen closely
so that we can act as practical philosophers
and think on your behalf
and help you adopt these ideas as your
own. And if you like these ideas and
(49:16):
you want to hear more, then please click
subscribe at Morpheus Hypnosis on YouTube. Of course,
wherever you get your podcast, Spotify, Apple Podcasts,
carrier pigeon, whatever, will be there.
So, we look forward to, doing this again
in another few weeks or so. See you
then.
I would argue that the very fact that
you're doing those things at all is actually
proof that a, you're alive and b, you're
trying to heal. People think they need motivation
to drink less, to stop smoking, to exercise
more. They don't need motivation.
But we are often projecting ourselves into an
unknown future.
(00:20):
Welcome to How to be an Adult. This
is a podcast created by the practitioners at
the Morpheus Clinic For Hypnosis
in Toronto, Canada. It's for people just like
you who've inadvertently become adults and don't know
what to do about it. I'm Luke Chao.
And I'm Pascal Langdell. Now this is the
trail guide to life that your parents never
gave you when you reached the age of
(00:41):
majority.
And we share our ideas and our principles
and our approaches
in an effort to democratize
self love, self care, self compassion.
In this episode, we're gonna do our best
to work out how to best live with
a trauma history.
When you've been wounded by other people or
the world and then you have to live
(01:03):
with the pain that one lives with after
trauma, there are a few responses that people
go to.
And
one response is to just kind of take
it out on others.
So your boss yells at you, you yell
at your wife, your wife yells at the
kid, the kid yells at the cat.
Another response
is to kind of just hold the pain
(01:23):
on the inside
and not perpetuate your suffering upon other people.
But there is a better alternative
to that.
And here we'll seek to unravel
how one might
try to recover from the wounds that have
been inflicted upon them
and achieve or at least try to achieve
(01:45):
something called post
traumatic growth.
I was watching a,
a series by a clinician on trauma recently,
and
he stated that reasonable efforts to come to
a conclusion as to who suffers from trauma
reached levels of around 75%.
So, 75% of the population
has experienced some form of trauma in their
(02:06):
past. And I would suggest that perhaps after
COVID, that's actually gone up. It It depends
on the threshold you choose for trauma. Mhmm.
So I I do agree. COVID kind of
put us in this collective trauma
of living in a pandemic and suddenly being
scared of our friends,
being scared of ourselves if we visit our
grandparents.
You could also make the argument that the
school system traumatizes its people you could make
(02:28):
the argument that living under capitalism traumatizes its
people
it depends on the threshold you pick yeah
I am someone who will not seek to
gatekeep trauma to to me if you self
assess that you've been through trauma. That to
me is good enough.
I'll share with our listeners that I actually
have a diagnosis of complex PTSD
so, PTSD traditionally defined is it's kind of
(02:51):
like a stab wound to the gut there
are clearly defined incidents that give you trauma
like a natural disaster
complex trauma is more like the death of
a 1,000 cuts
where one might grow up believing that he
or she is not being traumatized
simply because there is no stab wound to
the gut to find
(03:12):
but the symptoms are similar to if you've
gotten that stab wound to the gut Hyper
vigilance, for example, a negative self image.
So, so much of what I share today
is first what I've experienced personally
and then what I've shared with my clients
so that I can kind of draw these
conclusions about how human beings
(03:33):
can do our version of licking our wounds
and trying to recover after we've been wounded
by the world. One of the aspects that's
differs between CPTSD and PTSD,
particularly if it happens
in your youth, in your formative developmental years,
you learn strategies to deal with the 1,000
cuts.
And you survive. And it's quite possible to
(03:54):
reach adulthood and think, well,
that's it. I
these are the rules by which I can
live because they worked. But the challenge is
that what works during the period of a
1000 cuts
may not work when you're trying to be
an adult in the world and you start
to have relationships and responsibilities.
And those same tools don't necessarily
apply. You're no longer working to an accurate
(04:17):
map. Well, we can understand that the rescue
dog or the rescue cat
might have been adapted to an abusive environment.
So cowering all the time, you know, jumping
at loud noises. They're adapted to an abusive
environment. But once we take the animal and
put them in a loving home where they
can see for themselves
that it's safe, they can venture out, they
(04:39):
can make noise, and they don't have to
cower. Well then the animal adapts to
its new environment.
Now we human beings are also capable of
adapting to our adult environments.
So I have 7 concise points just like
colors of the rainbow. We can look at
the finer grain details and come up with
more, but at least at this point in
(04:59):
my career in my life. I've ascertained
7 main points I want to make for
how to cope with trauma and the first
one is to remember
that trauma doesn't mean
that you're broken
like a shattered iPhone screen.
It means you're wounded.
It comes from the Greek word for wound
and it's a wounded psyche of course. It's
(05:20):
not a wounded body.
But the word wound implies
is that
you're not at fault
and also that the wound can heal
and that's very different from a paradigm of
brokenness
where perhaps it's your fault you're broken
and Perhaps you're irreparable
(05:41):
So the first main point I absolutely want
to make is that if we recall what
trauma means,
it's a wounded psyche
and wounds heal. Wounds do heal.
You might have to apply ample dollops of
self love and self care
to help your emotional wounds heal.
But if we keep our mind on healing
(06:02):
then we don't have our minds on the
erroneous idea that life could just simply break
without
later healing. I would even suggest that
it's inevitable that you you will attempt to
heal your psyche. That that drive to
heal is in is inevitable as life itself,
in fact. So, in some ways, the
(06:22):
some of the maladaptive choices that you might
be making are an effort still to heal.
It's just that they don't really work for
you. Yes. And so, you can't look at
the evidence of your behavior and coruscate yourself
for them. Say, I shouldn't be doing this,
I shouldn't be doing that, it's proof that
I'm broken.
Quite contrary to that, I would argue that
the very fact you're doing those things at
(06:43):
all is actually proof that a, you're alive
and b, you're trying to heal. It's just
that you've not been given the right guidance
to figure out how. Exactly.
It's like you're asked to climb the mountain
on your own and you know you can
do it But without a guide and having
to find your own way it is a
lot harder and sometimes you might make a
misstep
(07:03):
compared to if in psychotherapy, for example, or
in our work or just listening to this
podcast you have some guidance
in how to climb the the mountain of
trauma recovery
this point about being wounded and not broken
which makes healing inevitable
it falls from the fact that we are
only correctly categorized
(07:25):
as life.
So the living animal
who had been wounded physically or emotionally
given enough care can be expected to heal
and then be happy and healthy again right
but the stuffed animal who's wounded cannot heal
We could go in and sew it up
and
fix it, but
let's make this distinction between life versus objects
(07:49):
where life will heal. Life will adapt. Life
will find a way, whether we're talking about
a tree with its branches and roots, or
whether we're talking about the wolf going back
to her den, licking her wounds or the
human being trying to figure out how are
they gonna climb this mountain of trauma recovery?
This aliveness is worth underscoring because the rules
(08:09):
for how we treat life are very different
from the rules for how we treat things
where things could be broken. Things require us
to, like, tinker with them until they're fixed.
Life just requires nourishment.
Life has to have its needs met and
then healing
follows inevitably.
For us human beings, our needs include well
(08:29):
everything Maslow identified
so
love esteem
respect
on top of the physical needs like safety
and food and air and water.
As adults,
we have to fulfill our own needs.
So self love and self esteem and self
respect
might have to do in a world where
others might not give you enough love and
(08:50):
esteem and respect, but it
it fulfills the need it's not just love
from another that's valid
your self love is valid it just wasn't
under scored enough when you were a child
which is probably why you're listening to this
podcast
and I'm here to tell you that your
self love comes from a human being who
has a heart, who knows you very, very,
(09:11):
very well,
and who's gonna be with you for the
rest of your life. What you have with
yourself is a, in sickness and in health,
till death do you part thing. Even when
you feel half alive,
You're completely alive if you perceive yourself as
a 100% alive You're perceiving the whole thing
when people feel half alive. That's because they're
(09:32):
not looking at their entirety.
So the second point is to take guardianship
of your own body which is
similar to that phrase which is you are
life under your own care. Your mind and
a body under your own care.
Absolutely.
Because if you forget this fact then you're
completely abandoned
some of the time.
(09:53):
Right? So you're trying to fall asleep at
night if you don't count yourself as life
That's yours to care for if you've not
adopted yourself in the way I'm advising
often than you hope with your own darkest
thoughts
But if you've kind of adopted yourself in
a way so that you're guaranteeing you're always
going to be there to love you and
care for you and you're never going to
betray or abandon yourself
Then every night you go to bed with
(10:14):
someone you love. I think in in some
ways, it's
and we've we've said this before. It's the
panacea. It seems to be the foundational and
core axiom, if you like, that you have
fundamental intrinsic worth and you are life in
your own care. Yeah. Which many other decisions
automatically proceed from. So, to give you an
example, if something triggers a memory for example,
(10:35):
or triggers a feeling, and this feeling is
a historical echo of something that is not
present, is not real, and is not in
the here and now,
then if you're treating yourself
not as a friend would, if you're treating
yourself bad, you're mistreating yourself, you would criticize
yourself from those feelings. You would adopt them
as being true and valid and not give
yourself the grace, should we say,
(10:56):
to even be able to inquire about what
that emotion is, where it's come from. Yep.
To even begin to learn about yourself you
have to start off with a certain level
of self love that says it's worth learning,
it's worth taking that time and taking a
a step back to be able to observe
what's going on with compassion.
And what you're talking about is someone who's
(11:17):
still kind of adapted to their childhood environment,
like the rescue dog who's not yet been
adopted.
This is why I'm asking our listeners
to adopt themselves in a way to be
the guarantors of their own lovability and worthiness
and respectability
being consistently recognized.
If 8,000,000,000 people on the planet did this
(11:39):
for themselves, the world will be much better
off. It's not gonna, like, take someone else's
self esteem if you esteem yourself and, you
know, everyone's doing the self esteem thing correctly.
Just like if everyone sleeps well at night,
the world's gonna be better off if, you
know, everyone has love in their hearts.
The world will be better off.
(12:00):
But one of the aspects that I often
see about life in your own care is
that
even that can seem like a huge mountain.
Mhmm. And
I think it's important to state even at
this point that even the smallest incremental step
that is
based on a value of self care is
huge. Even if it's something as small as,
(12:23):
you know, drinking a glass of water, that
to the outside might be, well, I could
drink water all the time, what's the problem
with that? You know, to to to some
people even
the smaller steps are huge and should be
honored and respected as if it was somebody
that had just scaled Everest, you know. It's
not it's not a small negligent thing to
be able to make that step sometimes.
(12:44):
Because you're then abiding by the paradigm, then
your life that's under your care if you
refuse to drink a glass of water just
because you're feeling miserable you're not abiding by
the paradigm
that your life that's under your care And
every mountain is climbed
one foothold at a time. Literally, everyone who's
ever scaled Mount Everest
did it one little step at a time
(13:06):
and it would have been difficult it was
sometimes life threatening
but
This is what the professionals do that this
is what those who reach the peak do
they take it one little step at a
time
they stay on the slope
and then eventually they're at the peak. So
what so what I'm advocating for here is
(13:27):
within that statement, there's a sense of boldness
and a sense of forthrightness that sometimes isn't
felt, particularly in the early stages.
And that to me, one of the things
I'd like to underline is that if your
sense of self worth has been educated into
such a degree that you find it difficult
to treat yourself as life under your own
care, to have compassion for yourself, I mean
really difficult.
(13:47):
Then any step that you take should be
celebrated, not a subject for shame or again
being pointed out saying, yeah, you're broken because
this is all you can do. Everybody else
seems to be able to do it but
you can't. Yeah. You find it difficult. Yeah.
And that becomes again another avenue for that
old voice of the worst voices that ever
spoke to you, you know, to come back
in. And so I I wanted
(14:08):
to to to point out that even those
first steps
in some ways should should garner respect
and awards
because
they are even if they may appear small,
they are still big to you. And that's
really only you get to be the arbiter
and the moral moral authority on the kind
of steps that are possible for you at
any given time. And so if it's a
(14:29):
small step, for other people it could be
there's people that you and I know that
find it difficult to get out of bed,
you know.
I've been there. Yeah, exactly. So you know,
that just getting out of bed could be
a huge deal and as soon as you've
done that, so you've made the choice.
Today I'm gonna get out of bed because
I am a life under my own care
and I have work. The moment you made
that one first decision
(14:50):
then it shows you have a choice. It
It shows that you have agency. It shows
that you are able to make a positive
choice and redirect your thoughts to a positive
behavior. And if you know you can do
it once then you can do it twice.
And then eventually these steps become bigger and
bigger and can be exponential. And because of
this we can say that sometimes we can
see quite rapid change
(15:11):
as a result. Because it's not necessarily, you
know, 10 years of therapy
that's that that is required, but it's this
reinforcement of the steps based on a foundation
of self worth. Many people I think who
are lying in bed
not doing anything and again I've been there.
I've been there more than once in my
life.
It's because they're waiting for a feeling
(15:33):
that
they can go out of bed and nothing
bad will happen and they can handle life
before they do it, and that's the wrong
order of things. What you're advocating for is
to take the action
one way or another and expect that the
feelings follow from actions.
Again, I've been there. This way works.
In fact, with any difficult enough endeavor,
(15:55):
you don't
wanna just wait passively
for the right feeling to come along before
you do the thing. Whether it's getting out
of bed when you have depression or whether
it's writing the great American novel or whether
it's recording your first album.
Just starting to take the actions
produces
the feelings which follow after the actions. It
(16:17):
would be the wrong order of things to
wait for the right feelings to strike if
you're already depressed and Mhmm. So what we're
talking about,
so far as self care and moving into
those physical needs, so drinking water, exercise. But
what is the correct or the most beneficial
attitude to your body? A body that's been
traumatized. So that ties into our third point,
(16:39):
which is that we have to fulfill all
of our physical needs.
Now I have to tell a lot of
people to take a deep breath because they're
not even fulfilling the basic physical need of
breathing deeply enough. Now I know where this
comes from. It comes with a feeling that
it's not safe to take a breath. I
know that's the feeling
but when you take the small action of
(17:01):
asking your body for a deeper breath and
you take deeper breath and you see no
bad thing happens there's no like velociraptor around
the corner ready to eat you
then
you can breathe deeply. Your body gets that
need fulfilled and your body also gets through
the mind body link the signal that it's
safe to breathe.
Now for someone who's dealing with post traumatic
(17:22):
stress it's a very helpful signal
to give your body that it's safe to
breathe, it's safe to breathe deeply, and therefore
it's safe to relax. It's safe to even
let your guards down at least a little
bit and then see if it's safe to
let your guards down a little bit further.
It's not too basic to talk about drinking
some water, taking a deep enough breath,
(17:44):
given how many people fail to fulfill even
these most basic of needs that a human
being has.
Other physical needs that often people neglect because
they're going through some stuff
are the need for sleep, which is an
entitlement. It's not a nice to have when
you finally get around to it
or the need to eat good enough food
(18:05):
where you know Feeling miserable is no excuse
to feed yourself junk that you wouldn't give
to anyone you love
So the action of eating fruits and vegetables
Underscores
that you're adopting a new paradigm where you
are indeed life That's under your care and
you've indeed adopted yourself and you would hold
(18:26):
yourself to the same standards you would hold
yourself to
if you were responsible for a cat, a
dog, maybe even a house plant. The house
plant gets enough water
not too much but enough water rather than
a bottle of wine.
Yeah. And and
there's an aspect of that which is like
a dog for instance. You take a dog
for a walk, you would exercise the dog.
(18:47):
The dog needs exercise. So that again,
you could
be consistent if you do that for a
dog that you would do that for yourself.
The same with medical care or water, food,
you know, it's it's this There there wasn't
that I I remember reading, I can't remember
where where it was now, about how they
did a sort of a survey
of how much money and how much attention
(19:07):
were paid towards pets compared to the owners
on themselves. And it was like a huge
difference. It's like more money and more attention
was being paid towards their own pets than
was being paid to themselves,
which is
really quite inconsistent,
you know, at the very is one way
of putting it. People think they need motivation
to drink less to stop smoking to exercise
(19:31):
more
they don't need motivation
to fulfill these basic needs for their pet
cat or dog.
The missing piece of the puzzle for how
we treat ourselves is love.
So knowing you've got to walk the dog
is not enough. You've got to know that
and love the dog too and then you're
walking the dog. So knowing what you have
(19:52):
to eat or how to exercise and use
the machines at the gym isn't enough unless
you have that piece of the puzzle which
is self love. And and even if it's
not a question of getting a gym membership
and working
out how to use the machines.
If you're approaching exercise
from the point of view which is not
that I wanna get necessarily buff and and
(20:13):
and you know,
and sculpted, but that it's important to exercise
because I spend most of my time at
a desk. It's important to exercise
because it's good for my mental health just
as it's to equal to say it's good
that I sleep
because when I'm tired
that negative voice gets louder and I find
it harder to to turn the volume down.
(20:34):
I believe more of the dark imaginings when
I'm tired. And I have less I have
less energy that I can bring to preparing
good food. There's some sort of key aspects
that even in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs
perhaps there's
sort of sleep might be right up there
at the top. And that's under recognized that
sleep is a physical need, but it is
a physical need.
Even if you don't get these kinds of
(20:55):
outcomes, right? So even if your inner critic
is still strong, though, you've
slept well.
That's not a failure. Mhmm.
Because sleep in itself
is
intrinsically
valuable. Mhmm. As long as you can raise
the question of should I treat myself well
or poorly today?
The answer is treat yourself as human life
(21:18):
that is under your care.
And one thought you can add to that
is that generally speaking you don't regret it.
It's I can't I can't think of a
time that you regret treating yourself
well with compassion
and with a sense of self worth. Independently
of the outcomes. Yes. Exactly. Exactly.
So among our basic needs
(21:39):
is to have a safe person to physically
share ourselves with. Mhmm. And I'm gonna count
animals as people for the purposes of this
discussion because for all intents and purposes they
are. They have hearts, they have emotions,
they see us and they're they're there for
us and they don't judge
us. So when we're touch starved,
(22:01):
right,
it's almost like we're dehydrated
or we're malnourished.
It will be harder
to love yourself. It will be harder
to fulfill your obligations to society
if you're touch starved.
Like when my cat died, I've talked about
this in prior episodes,
(22:22):
when my cat died I had a very
hard time sleeping for for for quite some
time.
The presence of that animal fulfilled
my need to receive touch,
to have my physical
presence
recognized
as worthy or valid
enough to to cuddle up next to.
(22:43):
And I sort of see this crisis in
our society where especially young men. Right? Unless
you have a cat or a dog,
you might have nobody
to do that with, to to cuddle with,
to to have your physical presence validated so
of course you feel empty in your heart
of course it's like you're malnourished
when you have a trauma history it is
(23:04):
harder to date or to I guess be
recognized as normal.
Well, if you're if you're with,
75% of others then you are normal.
You're not the exception.
Yeah, but that's under recognized until we say
it on a podcast like this that you're
definitely not the only person in the city
(23:24):
that you're in who is touch starved and
who just wishes they could find someone else
even if you just, like, met
your needs or you don't even have to
have sex.
That need is valid. I mean, sex is
kind of like an option for a lot
of people,
but to kind of be hugged
or held
or to have, like, a cat mash their
(23:46):
belly into your face because that's what they
do that
physical validation of your actual presence in this
material world made of atoms and molecules seems
to make a difference and especially for those
with a trauma history. Yeah. Yeah. The 4th
point that I want to make is that
we're not just rational beings,
(24:07):
we're also moral beings
and in the prior episode we talked about
why we need to account for morality
even in this world where the m word
seems quaint and outdated
now a lot of the problems that I
see in my clients are problems of demoralization.
If they're connected with a moral center, they're
(24:28):
willing to say no, thank you
to other people's bad ideas.
Right?
If they're connected with their moral center, then,
of course, they treat themselves as a living
human being that they're responsible for. If they're
connected with their moral center then the long
dark nights become easier to bear
if you're disconnected with your moral center
(24:51):
other people's bad ideas
might end up being weighed equally
to
good ideas in your mind.
So someone else's cruelty
you might actually take as valid
if you're out of touch with your moral
center.
So And and I think part part of
the challenge there is that
(25:11):
if you have CPTSD because
your developmental period has been traumatized or traumatizing,
is that as a child you don't have
the experience or the wisdom to have a
developed, we say, moral center. You look to
your peers, you look to your parents and
your peers
to say, well, what is it that I
should guide myself with?
(25:31):
And if your parents are saying, for instance,
you're you're having an emotion and your parents
are gaslighting you Mhmm. Then you're being told
that you shouldn't trust your emotions, for example.
And that's you could say well,
as an adult you have to observe your
emotions, see them as signals and trust them
as good signals of something. Mhmm. Don't have
to see this, treat them like lenses that
you need to see the world through. But
(25:52):
still this is this is an example of
how
trauma can put you in a situation where
you have to make your morals. You have
to figure out what they are because
you weren't told them at all, and you
were actually instructed in a very different moral
that was about somebody else's
needs and desires
and and proclivities, if you like, and not
honoring yours.
(26:13):
I'm gonna make an interesting argument Mhmm. That
human beings are not the only moral animals.
I'm going to make the argument that the
animals who we can kind of
interact with in a friendly way or play
within a friendly way
have a kind of instinctive morality that we
human beings as mammals can kind of tap
(26:33):
into
2. So, for example,
let's say that I'm,
respectfully
playing with a cat and the cat's got
its claws right.
The cats morality
doesn't permit
them to extend their claws for me,
who is respectfully
playing with the cat and honoring their boundaries.
(26:55):
But then if I'm just a total jerk
and then I like grab the cat in
a way they don't like, the claws come
out.
Now we human beings,
we don't use claws, we don't use teeth
to set boundaries.
We're supposed to use our words.
Words like no, words like not a chance,
(27:17):
and even words like go away
and its ruder variations.
Often, if we're not permitted
to use these kinds of words
or if we have this kind of false
morality that we're good if we say yes
and we're bad if we say no,
then that's one of the ways we become
out of touch with our moral centers. I
mean cats should have their claws
(27:40):
not because they're gonna scratch you,
but because on a longer timeline they're gonna
come across some jerk who needs to be
told off.
Guess one of the points we're trying to
make here is you don't have to become
a moral philosopher
in order to get in touch with your
moral center. Trauma kind of disconnects you with
your moral center.
So if you kind of feel your feelings
(28:01):
again
and recognize that sometimes the parents are wrong,
sometimes the authorities are wrong,
and you feel your feelings including anger,
then
you don't have to become a moral philosopher.
You're connected with something much
deeper than what you might read in a
book.
So
so now we're coming to point 5 which
(28:22):
is believing in your own senses. Mhmm. That's
something which
is
surprisingly
difficult for many of us. In the sense
that we are often projecting ourselves into an
unknown future or we're coruscating ourselves or feeling
an echo and judging the world according to
something that's passed and gone. Mhmm. An exam
(28:42):
again, I'll bring up the example again of
echoes
of emotional triggered emotions that put you your
body back into a state that it was.
Because of course the the limbic system has
no idea about time. As far as the
limbic system is concerned,
you're back there. You're not
it doesn't have a perception of time the
way the cortex does, right? But what that
(29:03):
can mean is that you feel that, you
believe that to be the truth about now.
You feel it to be the truth. You
feel it to be the truth now. Whereas
that's a signal, it's not 2020 vision. And
so, a lot of the things about grounding
for example, are trying to pull you back
into the present, into the here and now.
And that means
guiding yourself with the evidence of your eyes
(29:24):
and your ears and over what is accurate
over what is under your control. I think
that's probably one more that I'd add. Mhmm.
The incredible thing is
for for a cat to be able to
bring down like a moth or like a
wild bird for example. The cats got to
be very much
in its senses.
(29:44):
It's not imagining what it's going to do
in the future when it finally catches a
bird. It's not remembering the last 5 birds
it's caught.
We human beings we have the capacity
to be in our senses.
We also have the capacity to ignore our
senses
and either flash back to the past or
imagine ourselves at some point in the future
I think part of the reason so many
(30:05):
of us neglect the evidence of our senses
is that we're gaslit.
We're young.
George Orwell, of course, wrote the very insightful
book 1980 4. Mhmm. And one of the
lines just from memory is the first and
final command of the party is to disbelieve
the evidence of your own eyes.
And that's, of course, an authoritarian
(30:26):
control tactic.
There are many households
that have employed
this authoritarian
control tactic.
And then one doesn't believe the evidence
of their senses.
They don't believe what they see, what they
hear, what they experience. They don't believe that
any of it is valid.
So where do they go to instead?
(30:48):
Past or future, memory or imagination
and this episode of course is about living
well with trauma
so
it's especially
when you've experienced
trauma and then your experiences have been ignored
or denied.
That's where your sensory perception becomes undermined.
(31:11):
You start questioning, can I believe my own
eyes?
Is that authority figure right? Did it really
not happen?
And our listeners, if you're listening this far
into the episode, you've probably gone down spirals
like that
that lead to no satisfying
conclusions.
I can tell you the lifeline out of
that spiral is to be very well grounded
in your senses.
(31:32):
So so to see what you see and
believe it and feel what you feel and
believe and hear what you hear and believe
it. So grounding as you mentioned Pascal that
you're basically grounding yourself again in the here
and the now.
It's true that senses are imperfect
as a guide to reality but your senses
are a whole lot better as a guide
(31:52):
to reality than either childhood memories
or the imagination
of
potential features, most of which don't actually materialize
before you.
Another way
out of having been gaslit
is to recognize who knows what. Because if
you were present
for whatever is claimed
and the other person was not, if you
(32:14):
saw with your eyes and they're just speculating,
you're the person with knowledge. You're the person
with empirical knowledge.
So it doesn't matter if the other person's
older than you or it doesn't matter if
that person has a position of authority over
you. It's important to recognize
who knows what and
when it comes to matters pertaining to you
(32:35):
specifically as an individual,
you are definitely the person who knows the
most.
So any time someone says to you you're
crazy, you're making stuff up, these are very
overt forms of gaslighting of course but those
kinds of statements if taken seriously
would take you out of this concrete reality
(32:57):
we exist in
and into potentially endless spirals inside your own
head.
The 6th point I want to make about
how we live well despite trauma
is to immerse ourselves in
physically
immersive experiences
or sensations.
So for example taking a hot bath is
(33:19):
going to help
and It's because it brings you into the
here and the now you're not remembering the
bath you took 2 weeks ago or feeling
that the bath what a cold bath or
a cold shower
Whatever floats your
boat if it gives you sensory stimulation
Then
it brings you to the here and the
now
(33:40):
The situation you want to avoid is lying
in bed with your eyes closed,
thinking of things and ruminating and imagining possibilities
and thinking could've, should've, would've. And getting yourself
into a healthy situation.
So, you're talking about doing things that engage
you and take you out of
the negative rumination for example? Yes. So, holding
(34:02):
an acoustic guitar Mhmm. Fingering a chord and
even just strumming the chord.
Now you're connecting
your body
and the motion
with a sound you hear through a different
sense. Mhmm. Something as simple as that. I'm
assuming the guitar's in tune by the way.
(34:23):
Something as simple as that
asserts that you're not just subject to the
world.
You're a subject in this world.
You're supposed to act upon the world to
make it a little bit better even if
you're just moving sound waves
through this instrument. And to to a degree
it doesn't really matter what that is. It's
just that that first step of doing almost
(34:43):
anything
is likely to put you on track to
getting you out of your head so much.
Yes. And those who don't have so so
much of a trauma history,
they might not have to go out of
their own way to give themselves this kind
of antidote
to ground themselves, right? If you're thinking
about having to ground yourself over and over
(35:05):
and over again you might have a trauma
history.
I just wanna say that, you know, for
those of you who are listening, you have
no idea what I'm talking about.
It's probably because you don't have too much
of a trauma history. So you can be
in the here and the now
and it doesn't take much great effort
and you don't really flash back to past
memories or ruminate about the past and you
also don't really try to figure out the
(35:26):
infinite branching paths that could go forward in
time and you could actually, like, enjoy a
sunny day. Mhmm. Our goal with this episode
is to get our listeners as close to
that idea as possible.
Yeah.
I want to account
for experiences that go beyond just
physically grabbing
yourself in the world. I want to account
(35:48):
for transcendent
experiences
like really good music,
good storytelling,
even if the storytelling is through a screen
and speakers as it often is in this
modern world.
Time spent in beautiful natural scenes,
walking through an art gallery.
When
you are
(36:09):
witnessing
something that goes beyond
just your pain
or just one individual's pain
when you're witnessing something that kind of speaks
to a transcendent human experience
this is another way beyond just the physical
and the sensory
to be in the here and the now
so when you're watching a movie you're not
(36:30):
really doing anything you're not creating in this
world as I've advocated for But watching a
really good movie,
here's what's happening.
The filmmakers
reached deeply into their humanity
to
look at some aspect of that humanity
which you share too.
And then through their craft, they've brought forth
(36:51):
into this world an expression
of their collective humanity
so that now you can recognize your own
pain as part of a shared human experience
and not just individual to you Or maybe
you'll recognize your anger to be part of
a shared human experience
and not a problem with you individually.
(37:11):
Or maybe it opens up the possibility for
joy which has been kept hidden from you
or that you've hidden from yourself. Yes.
The kind of catharsis
that follows from witnessing tragedy,
right? It's not just for the ancient Greeks.
They were human beings like us.
You know,
dark films,
(37:33):
so called depressing films, even films that are
not that joyful, not that happy
have a lot of use in this world
because now you know when you witness such
things
that your pain is not just yours And
other people are suffering too and you are
not alone. Does,
the idea of transcendence or transcending experiences
(37:54):
go beyond
the human? So would you say or
would be going even further into, for instance,
extending your
sense of self
in respect to the truly transcendent.
So gazing up at the stars Yeah. Or
Going to the Grand Canyon.
Massive churches with vaulted ceilings designed Right. To
(38:15):
create that sensation.
Yes. And I I don't really have like
the vocab. I'm not really like an aesthetic
philosopher So I don't really have the vocabulary
to talk about those kinds of experiences But
all I think is a good word
Now, an interesting thing I've noticed among some
of my clients with a fear of heights
is that what they're actually experiencing
(38:35):
is uncontained
awe.
And once we describe their fear of heights
as a sense of awe that they're capable
of containing,
then they don't feel so overwhelmed.
Then they feel like their feet can be
on the ground and they're not gonna be
overwhelmed
and like jump into the Grand Canyon or
(38:56):
something as one often imagines.
So yeah I think that we should make
room for a sense of awe
And I also think that a human mind
can in a way contain it even if
we can't comprehend it.
In many aspects, those things that do create
awe
are things that are
(39:17):
extraordinary
in their
presence outside the human sense of time and
space,
but are constrained enough that we can perceive
them. So if you look up a trees
for example,
the trees
are present. It's not empty space. It's describing
it's actually
limiting space.
(39:37):
But the multiplicity of light, the leaves, these
are all constraints, but they're constraints enough that
implicate
something which is transcendent.
The same with the church roof
or a mosque roof, they're very vaulted. They're
vaulted because
if it was the open sky and you
couldn't see anything obstructing the sky, it'd just
be the sky. It'd be unfathomable. You wouldn't
(39:58):
feel that sense at all necessarily.
Mhmm. But you bring a roof in and
suddenly you sense the great feeling of space
and Right. Once you look up. If you
look at stars for example,
you don't get necessarily the same feeling when
you're looking at a big blue sky. I
mean, you could do, don't get me wrong.
But the stars actually create a canopy that
brings in, constrains the sense of the incredible
(40:21):
depths of space and time and distance
that is implied by the stars. And that's
why that sense of awe. I think I've
seen studies where awe is considered again one
of those things that
can really bring you out of your rumination
on negative self. If that makes sense. Any
experience that is more interesting
(40:43):
when your attention's out there
compared to lying in bed with what you
think is the most interesting thing you could
think of is gonna help you. And another
experience that kind of you would have to
immerse yourself into to get the most out
of
is trauma therapy.
So EMDR for example.
(41:03):
And, you know, I'm not actually a trauma
therapist. Most of what I know about trauma
comes from personal experience,
which is why I think I can kind
of
describe the experience from the inside.
But I have gone through trauma therapy
and the experience of immersing
yourself in your feelings while there's a lifeline,
namely your therapist, to pull you out if
(41:25):
they have to. That can be helpful
within those parameters.
So 0.7 is pretty succinct. Keep away from
harms.
Yes. So many of us
gravitate
to alcohol
to drugs
to careless sex
to careless spending
as a trauma response
(41:47):
because it makes us feel
at least okay if not good it makes
us feel okay
temporarily
So that's why we have to make the
7th point
that because you have a trauma history you
might not respond to stress the way that
someone with a better upbringing does.
You might gravitate
to these kinds of coping mechanisms.
(42:08):
We want you
to use one of the other coping mechanisms
that we've been talking about, so you're not
wasting your time by going out to the
countryside,
finding a hill and looking up at the
stars for 12 hours until the sun comes
up. You now have our professional encouragement and
validation
to do precisely
that.
The point is
(42:29):
to stay away
from these kinds of temporary
band aid fixes that I know you've been
trying
and
to try something different
and social media is another one of those
mindlessly
engaging activities that makes you feel okay but
not actually good. But this is this is
(42:50):
interesting in the sense that, well, we've always
stated that almost
all behavior including maladaptive behavior, including for instance
drink or smoking, whatever it is, is still
an attempt to heal it, it's just maladaptive.
What you're trying to do is trying to
heal yourself from that pain. You're trying to
avoid it, you're trying to to overwhelm it,
you're trying to
get your mind off it, take a break
(43:11):
from it.
The urge if you like is not wrong
because there's a side of you which is
trying to take care of yourself. It's just
that
you're going in a direction that ultimately creates
harm.
And one of the thoughts that brings me
to is that the repercussions of doing something
which does you harm is sort of often
quite deferred,
(43:31):
right? So,
you can get a drinking habit and it
might be years until it really actually affects
your life to the degree that it's it's
appalling, you know. It is possible we could
get there. But at first it's not that,
right? So it's not not only that it's
a
short term solution, it's one where
the cost is somewhat deferred.
(43:51):
And what are you deferring the cost for?
What are you doing it for? And part
of that is is because there is immense
discomfort
somewhere.
It's the the wound if you like, is
being felt
in one way or another. And I think
that part of recovering from trauma and actually
growing from trauma is learning
how to sit and be okay with those
(44:14):
sensations and be the adult to yourself.
Allowing yourself
the time to not just go knee jerk
reaction must escape. Yeah. And instead
have an approach which is what how can
I treat myself well? Bearing in mind I
feel this bad. Bearing in mind that this
makes me wanna run for the hills. Bear
in mind this makes me want to to
hit myself over the head so that I
(44:35):
don't have to think or feel this way.
It can be awful but coming to understand
that you have the ability to sit with
those
emotions
without the repercussion of some
some diversion
or some,
yeah.
Just doing that is a is a is
an extraordinary act. One of the points we
made at the beginning Mhmm. Is
(45:02):
So if you have a kid
and they're plainly upset,
are you gonna give them a cigarette?
Are you gonna give them some whiskey?
Are you gonna advise them to go spend
their allowance on stuff they don't need?
Probably you're gonna do just what you said.
Sit with them.
(45:23):
Be with them.
Help them recognize that things are still gonna
be okay, though they feel all of this
awful feeling.
Now we can teach a child how to
do that.
So I have complete faith in you as
an adult that you can learn how to
do that, too.
And let's also account under this point for
(45:43):
people who are harmful because of the ideas
or the worldview that they espouse
These so called toxic people
with toxic ideologies
that don't even recognize you're a living human
being with an independence of thought and morality,
for example.
Keep them away from yourself
just like you keep them away from anyone
(46:04):
else you love. Mhmm. Or at least if
they're around,
recognize in your own head and heart how
completely wrong they can be. Because sometimes the
other person is the jerk, and it's not
automatically you even if your trauma response says
it's automatically you. And and this goes back
to the evidence of your eyes and ears.
If you
do teach yourself to go with what you
(46:25):
can perceive
in the here and now, that you will
pick out the psychopaths, you'll pick out the
narcissists,
you'll pick out the dark triads.
And
instead of continuing the belief that somehow you
wouldn't be able to tell that and you
must be wrong and that this other person
must be right,
you can develop a skill in being able
to identify who is not good to be
(46:46):
around. It comes with being connected with your
moral center too.
Because the dark triad personality,
you know, are famously immoral.
Mhmm. And often charming and engaging and many
things. Which just puts salt in the wounds
and, you know, it kicks someone when they're
down.
So when you're connected with your moral center
(47:07):
and then you're believing the evidence of your
senses,
it's so much easier Yeah. To to pick
out these so called toxic personalities.
And then you get to say, nope. No.
Thank you.
Exactly. As an expression of your morality.
So those are our 7 main pointers
for how to climb the mountain of trauma
recovery
(47:28):
so that you don't have to feel like
you're doing it on your own or that
you're only left with
the scarce tools that your childhood gave to
you.
If you've already stumbled across these methods on
your own, you know you're not crazy, you
know you're not alone
and at least we hope to have underscored
that you are doing the right things.
(47:50):
Our intent with this of course is to
foster post traumatic growth which is a phenomenon
that's becoming increasingly recognized where it's not just
post traumatic stress that people experience,
there is a response called post traumatic growth.
And even though it's kind of a new
field of study,
I believe that when you're fulfilling all your
(48:13):
needs,
the physical needs, the social needs, the love
needs
that's where,
like rehabilitating the rescue dog,
you have a good chance of post traumatic
growth.
Thank you again for listening and all the
way to the end.
Pascal and I are available for hire through
the Morpheus Clinic For Hypnosis in Toronto, Canada.
(48:34):
We do free consultations and treatment plans for
our private clients. And recently we've also started
doing
free shared hypnosis sessions
twice a month.
So you don't even have to pay us
anything
to come into our space
and listen to more of this way of
thinking please take us up on that offer
(48:56):
and please tell your friends too don't be
put off too much by the h word
that's
just a
way to listen closely
so that we can act as practical philosophers
and think on your behalf
and help you adopt these ideas as your
own. And if you like these ideas and
(49:16):
you want to hear more, then please click
subscribe at Morpheus Hypnosis on YouTube. Of course,
wherever you get your podcast, Spotify, Apple Podcasts,
carrier pigeon, whatever, will be there.
So, we look forward to, doing this again
in another few weeks or so. See you
then.
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