E204: Healing Medical Trauma | Trauma Healing Podcast

Hey! What’s up, my friends! I hope that you are doing well. Today, I want to talk to you about this recovery I'm going through. So you've been following me online, you probably are aware that I have had surgery, it is now in the midst of recovery, and I'm feeling better, I'm feeling mobile, which is nice and you'll notice this episode sounds different I'm using my earbuds and I'm walking back and forth in my living room because the doctor said, you need to walk back and forth in your living room.

So I was thinking about what I want to talk about today and I wanted to talk about medical trauma and the impact on the way that we treat and care for our body. When I think about medical trauma, I don't necessarily only think about, you know, you went to the doctor, you had a bad experience with Dr. which of course that count so, let's not misconstrue that, but I think about like many of the events in the experience of our lives of those individual things that leaders up to this moment. I think about how we even care for ourselves, when it comes to our Medical Care with our body, our health, our mind, and how we have learned behavior around the experiences of the past.

And I was thinking about this, so I just have this surgery, I've known since October that I had to have it and I was putting it off, not in a way that was misinformed, not in a way where I wasn't paying attention but I had to put it off because of moving, a finishing the book of a lot of different things happening in my life and I thought to myself, alright, well now's the time and it really was just a timing issue and I was thinking about this a lot that hasn't always been the case. For a very long time, most of my teens and 20s and even in my mid-30s up to my mid-30s, I would put off going to the doctor, go to the emergency room or urgent care, if I was sick, if I needed stitches, if I just didn't feel good, if I was injured and I was thinking about like where the hell this comes from? And it dawned on me, it's got to come from our condition. In the same way, the way many of us have spoken ourselves comes from our parents, the way we care for ourselves comes from our parents or caregivers, or whoever did or did not take care of us. And it was mapping this back, of course, if you've listened to the show, you know, that for years old, my mother, she cut off my right index finger, right? My understanding of this, and the medical records were expunged so I tried to get them but they apparently, after 15 years of records, they throw them all out. So, by the time I have reached out to the hospital where I had my surgeries done, they said we don't have records anymore, I haven't been able to locate them so if you happen to know a way to do this, somebody, please message me at michael@thinkunbroken.com. So anyway, I was thinking about those and all the surgeries that I had on this finger, the skin grafts, the stitches, the discolorations, the whole night is pretty gnarly, right?

Well, when I was seven, I remember I rolled off the bunk bed, smashed my neck into the bottom bunk, probably at 5’6 foot fault I would guess thinking about how bunk beds used to be and for three days I cried everywhere I went everything that we do, and I remember, I was in the grocery store with my mom, in the cart couldn't move my neck, totally frozen, complete utter pain, and she refuse, for 3 days, to take me to the doctor. And it was thinking about when I was 11 and I was playing basketball and flip-flops, I rolled my ankle and totally get them in my foot and asked my mom and my grandma to take me to the hospital for four days nothing and it wasn't until finally a nurse at school called my mom and said, hey, you need to come, get your son he's hurt and took me to the hospital turns out torn, ligament had to have surgery, I was in a cast for months, right? Then I was thinking about my high school senior year, I hurt my knee, partial tear my MCL along with a partial tear in my patella and multiple exploded versus acts, which are like the fluid cushions of your knee, which I didn't know this. And so I get injured, I look down my knee is the size of a basketball, like it's gigantic. I'm not even exacerbating right now like, my knee was huge. I being 18 years old at the time, my grandmother comes and picks me up from where I was at and she's like, oh, we got to take you to the emergency room, I couldn't do it. I could not bring myself to go and sometimes she's like, we need to take emergency room and I said, no.

And this was the beginning of multiple experiences in my life that have led up to now and which I said no to taking care of my physical body, my mental body, my emotional body, right?

So, it's thinking about this place where this comes from want you to think about this, when it comes to medical trauma and again, it's not only just trauma that happens because of surgeries, or because you went to the emergency room or from doctors, it's the things that happened leading up to right now. And what I want you to ask yourself, are the experiences of your past informing you in a way today where you are not taking care of your body in the way that you need to because of trauma around medical things that happen to you in your youth?

See, this isn't only just mental, right?

Even though, I know Think Unbroken is a mental health podcast, it's also physical, right? This whole thing, because here's the truth. You have to be willing to take care of your body. And so, as I rewind and I look at being younger and emergency room visits that I should have gone to, if I had cut my finger open or broken a bone, I remember I broke my hand at one point and then go to the doctor for two weeks. I knew it was broken, it was swollen, like it was killing me. And now I do my due diligence. Now I'm older, 36 heading into 37 and I ask myself, what do I need to do? Well, I know I'm injured and I need to have the surgery. Well, it's not life-threatening, I can deal with it, I can manage it, I can get to the point, which I can actually remove myself from life for a few days to have it and to recover, which is obviously the most important part.

Let's get it on the books. I need blood work, four times a year, why?

Two reasons; one, I have an autoimmune disease that I need to take care of hopefully nothing that will kill me but you never know so it's really important, make sure that I watch it.

Two, I want to make sure I'm keeping myself in the best condition that I can.

I consider myself to be a high performer, what I mean by that is I go hard all the time. Like, I'm an athlete is just that I'm playing on a different bill.

So I need to go and get my blood work done, I need to have my heart checked, I didn't have my brain scan, right? I mean, but like, I think about this quite frequently and ultimately, the thing that I want you to think about is, are you taking care of yourself today to be the best version of you, to be a leader, to take care of your family, your community, your church, your friends, your business, your partner, your kids, right? Are you taking care of yourself? Or is the narrative in your head telling you what it used to tell me; going to the doctor is a more painful experience than what I'm dealing with.

You see that's the embedding that it comes from you. This idea that you shouldn't take care of yourself and look and then here's the other part of that the really fucked-up part is the money conversation. You go, oh, I can't afford to go to the doctor, I got bills, you can't afford to not go to the doctor of course, you're going to have bills, it's the way it works fine. Don't let that stop you because I promise you that hundred-dollar test that you're putting off and what I get it, let me tell you this. I worked in insurance for six years, I know how this works. The doctors and hospitals must be willing to make payment arrangements with you, it's law, they have to. So even that hundred-dollar test on I'm dead serious if you're listening right now like I'm fucking broke that hundred-dollar test, you can set up payment arrangements for, it might be seven dollars a month for 15 months, whatever that number is. Stop, putting your health secondary. You can't sit here and listen to this podcast, read the book, come to the coaching, do all the things about Think Unbroken and not take care of your physical body, especially medically. Yes, you probably have, if you're like me, you may have some trauma, you need to work through. You may have to go and sit down with your therapist or your coach, you may have to grab your journal, you may have to even meditate before you walked in the office, you may have to get fired up. You know, real talk, of getting ready to go back for surgery, I got my earbuds in, I'm meditating, and I'm putting myself in a state that sets me up for success in the surgery. You can ask the doctor ruin me back there, I was smiling and cracking jokes with them because here's why I wasn't gonna let that surgery stop me, even though I was scared, I wasn't gonna like the cost of the surgery stop me, even though I was scared, I wasn't going to let the room stop me even though scare, why? Because I knew my having the surgery I was going to set myself up for success in the future.

So, I'm in the midst of healing, it's going to be a few more days. You may notice a little list be today because when I had the surgery and they took the like the thing they put down your esophagus actually, when they put that down my throat and it pulled her now, I bit my lip so hard like I was just gushing blood in some bullets knots or the lip is still sore, not heal to yet either, but I'm taking care of it, I'm doing the thing that I need to do. So don't be stuck right now. Figure out what you need to do. If your body is hurting, you cannot perform. Step 1, your body is hurting, you cannot perform. If you are full of inflammation, if you're full of sugar, you're over-caffeinated, you're not sleeping you can't perform and a lot of that stuff comes because we're trying to run hide from and push down the physical pain.

And I want to say this, a lot of people ask me this and if you listen to the episode with Dr. Anna Lembke, she talked about addiction and trauma. You have to also be the advocate for your own health and be willing to tell doctors know and here is why and I won't say the doctor or the hospital or anything like that; what I was there on the bed getting ready to leave, I was offered fentanyl, which is one of the most highly addictive drugs on planet earth and it's killing people on the scales and rates that are almost not even measurable, it is the biggest street drug in the world right now, and when the doctor offered me that I looked at them I said not a fucking chance in hell and they were caught off guard by my response, but I have to advocate for myself and I know that pill and addiction runs in my family, I started doing drugs when I was 12 years old, I can pinpoint where that path leads me said, absolutely not, I'll stick with the ibuprofen and CBD. Now they did give me extra extra super duper strength and did that for a couple of days and now I'm off of it because look, here's the thing.

When you take control over your life, even in moments like that and look, doctors are looking out for your best interest, I swear, I'd be dead without a couple of doctors who saved my life, where the course of the last call it seven years I'd be dead for sure. When you are not taking control over your life and all elements somebody else will it would've been really easy for me to take that Fentanyl and be like, yep, thanks Doc, but I chose not to one, because I educate myself and two, because I have to be the arbiter for my health.

And so I want to challenge you to that too, you know, because you're anxious or depressed, or because you're sicker ill or because of whatever it is, does not necessarily mean that you have to go to exactly what Doctor says. Sometimes there are alternatives, sometimes, there are other things that you can do, there are other styles of medicines obviously, none of this is medical advice or legal advice, don't sue me because I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, am only share my experience, but you have to be the advocate for your health, because if you don't do it, nobody else is going to.

So figure out what you need to do around your medical trauma. Go to therapy, get a coach, read the books, educate yourself, getting your journal about it. Take care of your physical health, take care of your physical health because the mental health game does not work without the physical health game. I promise you, it doesn't because when I was sitting on the couch for the last three days, barely able to move, I couldn't do anything, nothing.

In fact, at one point when I got dressed it took me 15 minutes to get dressed, I did the dishes, it took me 30 minutes to do the dishes moving like a snail, right? So think about this, if you can't move your physical, how is your mind going to operate an efficiency? How you going to be a high performer you're not to take care of your body?

At the beginning of this episode, I mentioned new book, I've been working on is called Unbroken Men and I'm living that book to everybody for free pdf. You can get the PDF 100% for free. You can download it.

What you're going to need to do because the websites not up yet, because I've been recovering is you need to go and email me to michael@thinkunbroken.com and put unbroken men in the subject line and I will send you PDF copy of the book. And then if you want you can buy the paper back when it comes out in a couple of weeks, but we'll figure that out later.

So I wrote Unbroken Men because I recognized something really important like as men we need support, we need coaches and to my knowledge there's not a lot of us out here who are really doing it. So as we head into 2022, one of the big things out of you and my coaching practice, not necessarily the podcast, not necessarily the other things that we do but just from a coaching standpoint. I'm going to spend a lot more time with the men and we're going to come together and we're going to heal because it doesn't do a lot of good to have a lot of little hurt little boys running around and as someone who used to be a hurt little boy, at 26 years old, trust me, I can tell you being at almost 37 lives is very different.

So if you want to get a copy of Unbroken Men, just put unbroken men and the subject line, email me michael@thinkunbroken.com.

Of course, I want to say thank you so much for listening, my friends.

Sorry the audio quality is different today, but I gotta do what I gotta do here. That said, have an amazing day.

Please go to iTunes, hit that five-star leave a review.

Share this with somebody who needs this because I'm telling you whether it's on your Facebook or Instagram, you just screenshot this and share it somebody need to hear this today.

So I just want to say thank you so much for being here.

And Until Next Time.

My friends, Be Unbroken.

-I'll see ya.