E111 The Truth About Healing Trauma | Trauma Healing Coach
In this episode, it's another dive into my book Think Unbroken Understanding and Overcoming Childhood Trauma. As you may know, one of the things that I wanted to do is take the audiobook recording of my number one best-selling book and give it to you guys for free. You can buy the book if you want on Amazon, or you can also download it for free, go to https://book.thinkunbroken.com/
See show notes: https://www.thinkunbrokenpodcast.com/e111-the-truth-about-healing-trauma-trauma-healing-coach/#show-notes
In this episode, it's another dive into my book Think Unbroken Understanding and Overcoming Childhood Trauma. As you may know, one of the things that I wanted to do is take the audiobook recording of my number one best-selling book and give it to you guys for free. You can buy the book if you want on Amazon, or you can also download it for free, go to book.thinkunbroken.com
So each week, I'm going to give you as an episode of the podcast a chapter of the book that was super meaningful that will create massive value in your life on your healing journey. So over the coming weeks and months, I'm going to release episodes that are actually from the audiobook. Just get focus, listen, come prepared, come ready to learn, and I'm going to do my best to bring massive value to your life and your trauma healing journey.
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The Truth. I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it. Maya Angelou. When I first adopted, the six principles of healing trauma, which would eventually become a part of the Think Unbroken mindset, I had no idea what I was doing. What I discovered is that I was creating accountability, routine, community, and habits all of which were lacking in my life at the time.
Accountability didn't feel real to me when I would hear about accountability groups and coaches, I thought they were bullshit, but that's because I'll act in my own life. I was never accountable to anyone, and if I let anyone down, including myself, I made an excuse, it was never my fault. Does it sound familiar? Because I was never at fault, I wasn't responsible for the outcome of my actions.
Here is a list of things that were not my fault; getting drunk, seven nights a week, lying to my friends, gaining weight, being a bad friend, brother, and partner, cheating in school, getting into fights, stealing my grandma's car, braking in the houses, the Seahawks passing the ball. Okay, that wasn't really my fault, but you get the point.
When I had no rules, I had no control over my life, adopting accountability meant that I had to develop a set of concrete rules and habits to guide me and to stay the course when things got hard. Adopting rules and guidelines was the first step and catalyst to creating the life that I wanted to have. I needed accountability in all aspects of my life. I needed to hold myself to a new standard, especially, when the work got hard, it would have been easier to give up than to keep going. You need to spend some time thinking about what it means to be accountable to yourself and to the people around you. Figure out what it means and how it feels when you let yourself down, sit with the emotions that come up when you have put yourself in a position to fill it is these feelings and emotions that you are going to use to fuel change.
Understanding is not about beating yourself up or shitting on yourself for making mistakes, that's not accountability, that's playing the victim. Understanding the emotions and feelings that come with letting ourselves down is the fuel to invoke the change that is needed.
It's like eating a triple cheeseburger with fries and a milkshake, you can only do that so many times before your gut explodes, you know, that eating a triple cheeseburger with fries and a milkshake, makes you feel bad. But do you know why you eat it? When faced with decisions, we often find ourselves on a loop of self-punishment, because it feels natural to treat ourselves poorly. Treating yourself poorly is choosing the cheeseburger, whereas treating yourself with care, and compassion is finding a healthier alternative. It would be nice if we could automatically force our brains and bodies to do what is healthy for us. It's not that you can't have a cheeseburger sometimes, but do you know why you want it?
The impact of trauma is making decisions without understanding why, even if deep down we know we shouldn't. I think it's fair to say it's not so simple to pinpoint why we do what we do, and that is why you must take agency.
Agency is a thing or person that acts to produce a particular result, choice, in essence, is an action thus action is how you have agency. Accountability is understanding that you have the agency to choose to not eat that food because you want to feel good. It is the choices that we make that dictate the path that we take.
Now, you may be saying yourself. I already know that what I'm doing is bad. Yeah, no shit! We both know that, instead, can you choose to say to yourself? I understand that I have done something that is not in alignment with my values and the direction that I want my life to go.
Instead of beating myself up and continuing to feel bad about what I have done. I will instead remember this feeling and the next time I will work harder to make sure that I don't let myself down again. When I feel I am stuck or trapped and have an old thought process, I will look at these moments as an opportunity to repeat one of my mantras, though trauma, maybe my foundation, is not my future.
This phrase is significant because it reminds me that the past does not dictate my future. I take responsibility for every action and decision in my life and make no excuses, regardless of the outcome. When you feel trapped or stuck, use my mantra to bring some clarity and understanding back to yourself, if that doesn't help, then take a deeper dive and ask yourself, the following questions;
- How do I feel when I don't come through for myself?
- How do I feel when I disappoint myself?
- How would I prefer to feel?
- What can I do to make sure that I am my own hero?
Think about a recent time that you let yourself down, and I'm not talking about not getting out of bed on the first alarm, I'm talking about a recent time that you were not satisfied with your actions or the outcome of a scenario based on the choices that you made. What did that look like? What did it feel like? Now imagine what that moment could have been like if you hold yourself accountable to a higher standard. The truth is that if you're going to succeed in life and if you want to tap into the person that you are and live your dreams to their full realization, then you have to be accountable to yourself.
Here is a list of what accountability means;
- Honoring the things, you say you are going to do.
- Showing up for yourself.
- Finishing what you start.
- Staying the course
- This isn't a one-time gig.
- Not blaming others.
- Not making excuses.
- Owning your successes and failures.
As you progress through this book, there will be writing prompts titled “Becoming Unbroken.”
I have created these as endpoints for two chapters and also as places for you to reflect on the information you have read. These prompts are opportunities for you to be honest with yourself while perhaps gaining a closer, more intimate and vulnerable, understanding of who you are.
Do not skip these parts of the book, the words that you will write as a result of self-reflection are as important as the words that you are reading. I also suggest that you take your time in reading this book, chapter by chapter, and then reading it again before answering the questions, you can access all of the prompts and other resources tools, graphics, photos, and bonuses at www.thinkunbroken.com/booktools
As we head into the tools section, I'm actually going to do something a little bit different here and interrupt the flow of the normal book reading methodology. And the reason that I'm doing that is that I think it's really important to not only touch base on the impact of what these writing tools can be for you but also to share my experience with them before we get started. And when I originally wrote this book and I sat down and I was flattening on the bits and pieces of the Think Unbroken Academy that I felt translated the best into this book format. What I wanted to do was pull in these exercises.
The reason is because I firmly believe that at the baseline of understanding, how we change our lives, we have to understand how we got to where we are. One of the things about being impacted so greatly from trauma is that we often find ourselves dissociated.
Now, I will talk about the impact of trauma later in the book, but high-level it kind of means like we don't have our brain and body connected. Part of the reason why these exercises exist is so that we can begin the reframing of that and put ourselves in a situation in which we can understand why we are where we are at in our lives. And this is meant to be done without judgment, but instead with the understanding that the deeper, we are willing to go and understanding who we are, the more that we will be able to create change in our own lives.
And so as we head into these exercises, please go and download the tools, print them out, if you don't have a printer, find a piece of paper or a journal and go through an answer, these questions as the book goes because having this baseline is going to be so foundationally, important to what's next I don't want you to miss out on it.
I think far too often we get our hands on books like this or exercises and we don't do the following through. I want you to understand that the follow-through is as important here as anything else that you will do, and I built this book to be that way for the purpose of you challenging yourself.
If you are unwilling to step into this, then I want you to stop reading right now because what's down the road is only going to get more intrinsically difficult, because you need to be willing to step into understanding, exactly who you are to create change.
And so, I challenge you. Go, grab a piece of paper and a pen, or go to ThinkUnbroken.com/booktools, print off these exercises, do not skip ahead, this is very important. Do not skip ahead, but keep along with the book, and as you are in those exercises, ask yourself these questions and answer them with honesty. Not with judgment, not with shame or guilt, because in reality, we only know what, we know up until now.
And so, in order for us to keep growing and changing, we take that information, we're going to distill it down, we're going to reverse engineer it, and then we are going to move forward into what is next.
Becoming Unbroken, The Truth where in your life can you hold yourself accountable?
Write about three areas in your life where you can be more accountable and the steps that you can take to hold yourself accountable.
For example, I can better hold myself accountable and reaching goals by creating a deadline for things that I must get done. Having a timeline will force me to take action so I don't let myself down.
Take a few minutes and write the three areas of your life in which you can hold yourself, more accountable.
And then continue.
For now, hit pause.
And I'll see you in the next chapter.
Michael Unbroken
Coach
Michael is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, speaker, coach, and advocate for adult survivors of childhood trauma.
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