3 Steps to Overcome Trauma

There's a space in our lives that is about a mile wide between where we are now and where we want to go and I call that space, the gap. And I think about this trauma healing journey all the time and this is where people get the most stuck. They envision a life over here on the other side of that mile, but where they're standing at today, they start this thought process and rumination that it's impossible to go from where they are to where they want to go.

And so, in this episode, in this conversation, I'm gonna teach you guys three things that I believe are incredibly important for you. If you want to be able to close the gap and to get to where you want to go in your life in this trauma healing journey.

1. DON’T LIE TO YOURSELF

This is probably the number one thing that I would tell anyone is that you just cannot lie to yourself in this journey. And lying to yourself is super, super fucking dangerous, because what happens is when we start to lie to ourselves, we start to believe our own narrative.

1. SET SOME GOALS

I know you hear goal setting all the time. And so, I'm gonna get really clear on this, and it's really about setting three to five major life affirming goals that you want to move towards because you need to have a direction.

1. BIOLOGICAL EXPERIENCE

When you start to understand these three elements, you're gonna be able to move further and closer to that goal faster. And so, when you look at all of this in a very simplified structure, it's kind of like the three legs or the three pillars of a stool, right? If you have two legs on a stool, it will fall over but with three you have support and you're able to kind of create this framework in which you can move forward. You have stability, right? And that's the thing that's often missing for people who come through traumatic experiences, lack of stability.

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And so, I'm gonna go back through those three things in depth right now with you. First and foremost, don't lie to yourself.

This is the easy one, but also the most difficult one natively the most important thing that you can do as a human being is be okay with the reflection in the mirror, you cannot lie to yourself. You can try, you can attempt to, you can do everything in your power to pretend that your truth is not your truth, but it's fucking coming for you, whether you like it or not, it's going to show up and it's going to manifest lying leads to stress, to anxiety, to depression, it leads to these biological and biochemical responses in our bodies. It interrupts our dopamine. It increases cortisol. It messes with your serotonin and it puts you in this weird place where you're on edge all the time.

One of my favorite quotes of anyone ever in the history of my life that I've ever heard is Jordan Peterson said, if you wanna find out what you need to change in your life, go and sit on the edge of your bed for 10 minutes in silence and you are not going to like what you find out. And I think that's so true and it's really important that you can get to that place in your life, where you can acknowledge the things that you do not like about yourself, so that you can create a framework for moving through them. This isn't about beating yourself up so, let's be very clear about this. If you're hearing this and you're like, well, I know there's 87 things I don't like about myself. Okay. That’s a part of the human experience. I've never in once in my fucking life, met anyone who loved every aspect about themselves, who wasn't full of shit. Period. I've never met this person, they don't exist.

And so, for myself, I'll sit and I'll go through this and I'll think about my life, my relationships, my body, my friendships, my businesses, the way that I coach, the way that I do this podcast, the way I write books and I'll go, what don't I like about this? Where is the fundamental flaw that I'm overlooking that is keeping me from actually having the thing that I want to have, because if you don't have massive and radical honesty with yourself, you're not going to be able to close that gap. Period. You're just not because you're always gonna go to war with yourself.

You're always gonna second guess yourself. You're always going to bend and placate and chameleon to other people because you're lying to yourself and trying to convince yourself that the narrative that you are not creating is actually the narrative that is true of who you are.

People get stuck in that all the fucking time where they're like, okay, I think that I'm going to try this variation of who I am, but for someone else and that is a lie. Now trying variations of who you are, because that's what you want is a part of the iterative process. Like it's the inevitability of growth that you're gonna try some shit. But if you are lying to yourself about what you want, who you want to be, how you want to show up, the kind of relationship you want to have, the food that you're putting in your body, the entertainment you're putting into your ears and into your brain and your eyes. If you're lying to yourself about your friends and your community and you're just in this place all the time where you do not have radical honesty with yourself, you're fucking screwed. And I know that's a hard thing to say and hear, but it's true. I go look at my life and I can pinpoint like with almost clockwork, fucking swiss time piece precision every single time that inevitable downfall is about to occur in my life. And that always begins at first domino is pushed over because I bend, I placate, I chameleon myself or I lie about who it is that I am in that moment and I don't address my wants, my needs, my interests, my boundaries, and my values. And I can go play it out time and time and time again, in dating, in relationships, in career, in money, in body, in nutrition, in the entertainment I put into my head, I can go and point all of the times that everything got fucked up to that, that one lie, that one lie to myself. You know, people go, you know, well, it's a white lies it's not that big of a deal, it is actually that big of a deal, it is because if you lie about the little things, you're gonna lie about the big things.

And for me, one of the really difficult things, I'll talk to you about how I was able to kind of work through this. When I was a kid, I watched my mother lie, all of the time. We would go to restaurants and she would lie. We would go to the store and she would lie. We'd go to church and she would lie. And I just started like picking up on it. I became easily and I would even argue even to this day, I'm the greatest liar of all time, because I just watched and I emulated and I mimicked and I modeled and I mastered the same thing I tell you guys to do about the positive things in life I was doing in this scope over here. And that led to this place of just massive depression, massive anxiety, I could not stand myself because I was always lying and I had no idea who I was.

One of the biggest parts about building myself into who I am today, came with getting clarity on my values one of them, and really arguably the number one being honesty. And anyone who knows me knows that I'm gonna be fucking honest, even if it sucks, like, and it sucks a lot, like it sucks a lot. When you have to be honest and you know that there is a ramification and a downside to your honesty, but that's human nature. If you want to live in your truth, you have to recognize that there are going to be, there's gonna be collateral damage in your truth, and that's not intentional. And I don't think most people and I'm certainly not gonna classify myself in that I don't, or I will classify myself in this, I don't ever intentionally attempt to hurt people's feelings through my truth. It is just a fucking byproduct of collisions of values. I've seen that in dating relationship, sex, food, nutrition, coworkers, employees, team members, business, so on and so forth.

So first and foremost, the most important thing is you just have the massive, massive, massive clarity about who you are, know thyself and do not lie to thyself. You know, I think about the 10 commandments a lot, I'm not religious as you know, but I do know the 10 commandments growing up in a religious household. I mean, really, I think growing up in America, it's probably hard not to know them. And what I will tell you about the 10 commandments is thou shalt not lie, should be amended to thou shall not lie to thy self because like it's really, really, really, really, really easy to lie to other people. And it's fucking devastating to lie to yourself because you have to go look in that mirror.

And so, if it's time for a change in your life, you want to close that gap. You look in a mile away from where you are today. You close that gap by first and foremost, stop fucking lying to yourself, just stop. And when you stop lying to yourself by proxy, you will stop lying to other people. It is like, it goes hand in hand in hand. I wish I could lay out to you what it was like for me to transform my life around being a massively dishonest person to being a radically, unbelievably, honest person and the chasm that happened in the entirety of my experience when I made that decision. And look, it's a struggle still, like, I will never sit here and be like, oh yeah, I'm perfect and I never fucking lie about anything ever, but I do my best to catch it a second I do. And especially to myself, like if I have a moment, it could be in anything. And I'm like, oh, should I feel like I'm lying to myself then the very thing that I'm going to do is I'm gonna go look in the mirror, I'm gonna get really, really real with myself.

So that's number one. So, number one, if you want to close the gap, you're a mile away from where you want to go in your life. And today you're standing here at day one, first things first is don't lie to yourself.

Number two is you have to set some goals.

I've had goals workshops, I've had goals experts on this show, I've talked to people on the podcast, like you name 'em, who has said goals, goals, goals, goals, goals. But one of the things that I want you to think about is how you can balance just a small handful of goals at a time without effectively sacrificing the other aspects of your life that are important because I've never been able to balance more than a handful of things at once without something falling to the ground. Right. I mean, you can look at masterful jugglers, eventually they're gonna drop the balls or the chainsaws are the bowling balls like, what are the fuck they're juggling. That's because we can only, as human beings really keep so many things floating at once. And so, what you can think about is can I get to three to five core pillar goals in my life that are going to help set me up for success?

And I personally have written down just five goals, because I think that anything beyond five for me is not attainable. At least not right now, maybe if I clear some other things off my plate, maybe if I kind of change up my life a little bit but right now there are five goals. And in fact, I'll share them with you because I want you to kind of see the structure and the framework that I think about the world.

So, if you're watching on the YouTube channel, you can see there's an outline here on my iPad five goals. I write 'em in the iPad. They're flagged, I look at it every single day. Number one is I want to build the largest mental actually, before I say this, I don't deviate goals in my life based on any specific pocket that they might fit in. And so, I don't separate business or life or relationships or body or nutrition or whatever those things might be into their own pockets, where they each have goals, because I've actually really, really, really gotten a massive amount of clarity that for me, that does not work. And so, I think that even the goals, workshop that I've created and that we've done a few years now is going to get refined when we head into 2023 ‘cause I recognize like it just doesn't fucking work. I mean, it does to an extent, but again, something is sacrificed. And so, I just said five goals, that's it. This is all I want five goals; can I move towards them? And these are what they look like, it's business, life relation, everything kind of goes in together.

Number one - build the largest mental health community for trauma survivors in Think Unbroken Academy. I just did a live video in there where I was talking about the future of what it is that I'm gonna build over there. So, if you're not in Think Unbroken Academy, there's a lot, a lot, a lot of free stuff in there, that all you have to do is show up and you're gonna get massive value from, and if you support this show and you love it, there's actually a community only for Think Unbroken Podcast. And I think it'd be absolutely incredible if you came and joined us.

Number two - be in the best physical, mental, and emotional shape of my life. You can see those could all be individualized, but I threw 'em all together because I think that it just really makes sense. And so, one of the things I don't think I've actually said this on this show, but I have been doing 75 hard and I'm on day 71, we are almost done. I'll talk about it after, but you know, physical, massively, massively important mentally, you know, going deeper with my coach, having deeper conversations emotionally, I'm hitting my journal more, I'm writing more, I'm creating more. And so, number two, be in the best physical, mental, and emotional shape of my life.

Number three - build sustainable lifelong generational changing wealth through service.

Number four - remove the fear of success in my life. I wrote number four as a goal because I realized there were a couple of areas in my life where I felt like I was reaching the ceiling and to go to the next level is a new level of success. And so, I have to face that fear as we go. I'll keep you in tune in that as we go.

Number five - being the kind of relationships with people that make my life better without having to sacrifice who I am and with fully stepping into intimacy, love, connection, fulfillment, kindness, happiness, joy, love, and friendship.

So, those are my five goals.

Now, as you can see, I could break those down easily into a bazillion goals, into all the little things, but that's just not what makes sense. And then as we kind of look at rounding this off here. And I will tell you this, I am not a scientist, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a neuroscientist, I'm not anything other than a guy who just has self-studied his way into attempting to have mastery over my own physiology.

You are having a biological experience. You have got to understand this. I have spoken with Dr. Caroline leaf, Jud Brewer, I mean the list goes on and on and on. There are so many people, I can’t even think of them all right now. Anna Lembke, Paul Gil Martin, I mean just these amazing human beings and they all say the same thing. The human brain is built for one purpose, its survival, your brain and nature is always trying to kill you. And so, you have to figure out a way to survive this shit. Like people will be like, oh yeah, nature is not really trying to kill you. It's like, yeah, you ever watch that show alone because I'm pretty sure bear will fucking eat you if you're even remotely close to its cubs. Right. And nature, go eat random mushrooms in the wild you're dead. Right. Go drink water, that hasn't been purified that's downstream from where an animal had just taken a shit. You're gonna get sick. Like nature's trying to kill you and your brain is built about survival, right? And so, when you look at this and you understand that part of survival is growth, the biological responses that we have to the stimulus in our life create literal chemical responses in our body.

When you understand that, then you can start to take control of your life. The episode I did with Dr. Caroline Leaf is arguably, I'll say two things. One the most, really in-depth conversation I've ever had about the separation between the brain and the mind. And number two, one of the most perplexing conversations I've ever had about the brain and the mind. And so, I would highly recommend that you go listen to that conversation multiple times so that you can get a better understanding about what is really happening in your brain. And if you're facing this thing in your life where you're struggling, you're addicted to your phone, to sex, to pour into drugs, to alcohol, to music, to video games, to BMX bikes, to driving fast in your car, whatever it is, go read Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke like it's absolutely phenomenal. And there's a book that I highly recommend by Dr. Jud brewer about anxiety. If you're struggling with that, go read that book, guys, I cannot stress this enough. If you want to close this gap, if you want to get from where you are, to where it is that you want to go, you want to close in that mile, you want to be on the other side as this happy, healthy, healed, fulfilled, powerful fucking human being who is unbroken, you've got to come into this understanding that there is work to be done and that there's understandings to be had. I wish there was a magic like I fucking do. I wish I could give you everything that I've studied for the last decade plus every single penny I've ever invested all the time, all the experts, all the research. I mean, you know, some of these people I've had on this show, I've researched them for 40 hours, 50 hours, one person, I researched them probably a hundred hours on the lead up to the conversation. And it's like, and I still don't know all the goal. But you have to be willing to invest in yourself in that way to learn, to understand, to grow, to change, to transform like this is, I think about auto bots, this is gonna be super nerdy, I think about autobots, right? They're the robots that transform into fighting machines, right? They turn from a truck or a car or whatever into something that battles like you are a transformer like this might be the direction of the company, right? As we change, Think Unbroken, you're a transformer, you are transforming your life. And if you want to transform your life, you've got to effectively run a program that's going to allow you to turn from a car to a warrior. And if you wanna run this program, you're going to have to get an alignment with these things.

You're gonna have to have this understanding about what it means to truly take control over your life. And so, I have a list of hundreds of different elements of what I think it actually means to become unbroken, that's why we have courses, that's why I have coaching, that's why we do all this, but these are the three you start here, start with this, I promise you, your fucking life will be different.

Number one, closing this out today, my friends do not lie to yourself. Number two, set three to five realistic goals about the life that you want to have that are attainable that you can make happen today, that you can start taking action toward us today, knowing that on a long enough timeline, you can have everything that you want.

Number three, understand that you need to educate yourself about neurology, about the brain, about the central nervous system, about the complexity of this fucking machine that you're walking in all day in, but have no idea about how it works.

Think about this I'll end here; you're having a biological experience. Your body is a machine. Your brain is the machine. Your mind is the software. Look at what happens in your life when you want to get a car. You have to study; you have to take a test, somebody has to approve it, you have to go put your eyes on that little thing, that 97 people before you put their eyes on and ultimately if you don't follow through on the education and the practice, and then the execution, you don't get a fucking driving license, but in life, in this physical body, because our school systems have fucking felt us in ways that I don't even want to get into right now, the thing that happens is you don't know what to do with this thing. And I didn't either, it was through this information that I've been able to figure it out.

And so, if you want to get this figured out, if you want to go down this path of ultimately becoming unbroken, you've gotta go play the game and figure out the fucking machine and study and execute and pass the test that are along the way for you to ultimately let go of the past, to heal and to become the hero of your own story.

And this is not rocket science guys. I'm telling you right now. And I know I hate hearing when people say this shit, but I just have to say it, look, if I can do it, you guys can too. If the thousands of people we've coached over the years can do it. You can too, but you've gotta decide. You have to make a fucking decision today.

All right, my friends, that's my rant today. That's how I feel today. You got me in a fired-up mood, cuz I'm super, super excited about so many things that are happening and my energy, my state is just at another level.

If you have not joined Think Unbroken Academy, please come and join.

Think Unbroken Academy, just go to thinkunbrokenacademy.com

And Until Next Time.

My friends, Be Unbroken.

I'll see you.