In this raw and impactful episode, we delve into the challenging journey of healing from toxic parents and childhood abuse. Learn powerful strategies for overcoming trauma, including meditation techniques to rewire your brain... See show notes at: https://www.thinkunbrokenpodcast.com/healing-from-toxic-parents-powerful-strategies-for-trauma-recovery/
In this raw and impactful episode, we delve into the challenging journey of healing from toxic parents and childhood abuse. Learn powerful strategies for overcoming trauma, including meditation techniques to rewire your brain, mindset practices to reframe negative self-talk, and how to handle parents who deny or minimize abuse. We explore the controversial topic of when to consider limiting contact with toxic family members, offering personal insights and practical tools for setting boundaries and reclaiming your life. Whether you're on your own healing path or supporting a loved one, this episode provides valuable guidance on breaking cycles of toxicity and moving forward with resilience.
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Hey, what's up Unbroken Nation? So last night I put a little call out on Instagram to ask some questions and I wanted to be able to be of service for you guys and answer any questions that you may have. So I got a bunch and this will be the first one that I want to answer and I want to preface this first and foremost with saying thank you. Some of the questions that you guys asked are pretty intensive questions and I want to dive in and I want to give my honest thoughts and opinions because a lot of the things That you have dealt with. I've also dealt with myself. The things that you're trying to figure out, I have actually figured out, some I haven't. Ultimately, this is only my opinion. Let's be very clear right now. I am not diagnosing anyone. This is not a therapy session. I am not doing anything other than telling you how I kind of address things and my work with think unbroken and the process that I do and have experienced in my own life. So please take this for what it is. If you are in any time of mental, physical, emotional danger, please get help. Call 911. Check out thinkunbroken.com/resources for some other resources and contact information for mental health care and advisory. I am not that let's keep that very clear. I am a mindset coach. I am a practitioner of change and growth and health, and I'm not a therapist. I can't give you any prescriptions and I sure as hell can't save your life. So please, if you're in danger, find someone who can.
The first question, I'm gonna read this off my computer here cause it's pretty long. Do you think it's possible to heal from a toxic parent through meditation and mindset work? And I'm going to parlay this with another question. What do you do when your parents deny that you are abused and sweep it under the rug? First and foremost, my parents were about as toxic of human beings as you could possibly imagine. My mother was a drug addict and alcoholic. I mentioned it before. She cut my finger off, I've never met my father. My stepfather was hyper abusive, like worst case scenario across the board. So I'm very familiar with this. Do I think it's possible to heal from a toxic parent relationship? I do. I really do. I have come to this place where I no longer am upset about the things in my past. I'm no longer triggered about the behaviors that my parents exhibited, the impact that I felt from them is pretty much non existent. Now that's not to say from time to time I won't have a moment where I get swept up in emotion because certainly I get angry about things. I'll have a fleeting thought that pops into my head and I'll be pissed off for 10 minutes or something like that. But, ultimately, I've put the tools in place to help me be able to mitigate that happening. And when it does happen, more importantly, I've put myself in a scenario that I have the tools to address it. So, I think about this meditation is really important because it's the baseline of rewiring the brain. From my experience, meditation was one of the most important things that I've done in my healing journey. I found that just giving myself the space to exist, to process, to exhibit thoughts within my own self has helped me reframe, right? I think meditation like this, it's a rewiring of the brain. So, when we think about what happens. When we are in the core of being triggered or upset from someone who's toxic, right? It overtakes us, we get flushed our adrenals kick in our parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems are all out of whack, but meditation helps us come back to center. Meditation helps us find calm, helps us find peace, and puts us back in a position where we're able to breathe, to rest, to digest, to think, to make calm, cognitive thoughts, right? It's the same way that we breathe. Ah, taking breath is meditation, ultimately. And people always say I don't know how to meditate. It's very simple, meditation is about just calming your nervous system for me as a trauma survivor, meditation about calming my nervous system, getting my brain and my body connected again, right? Deep breaths, slow breaths, focusing on that. And I've even read research recently which I want to find more out about before I make a declaration on, but actually doing meditation for 15 to 30 minutes a day can reverse the impact of PTSD. Now, I don't know if that's true. I don't know, I need to do more research. This is just fairly new information, but that makes sense to me. One of the things I've done for probably the last seven years is meditate almost every single day. Do it very simply, seven minutes in the morning, seven minutes at night. I found that's my sweet spot. Some people do 20 minutes, some people do an hour. Do whatever works for you. I think mindset, when you ask that question, do you think it's possible to heal from a toxic parent through meditation and mindset work? Ultimately, the damage that we've experienced from our parents, from toxic people in our environment as children sits with us, right? Think about a time that someone may have told you something that you know is not true about yourself, yet you've adapted that into your life. Suddenly. You think about yourself in a different way because of something someone said. When we put it in mindset practices, for instance, NLP, Neuro Linguistic Neuro, I'm have, cannot talk today. Neuro Linguistic Programming. We are flipping thoughts. We are changing the connection of our brain. So, if our brain is telling us right now, we're not good enough, we're not strong enough. We can't, we never will. Guess what? That's going to be true. So if a parent toxic, they go, you're never going to be a doctor because you're stupid. You're just like your mother. You're just like your father, whatever that thing is, we're going to believe that's true. So we'll never be a doctor. But through mindset practices, what we can do is start convincing ourself. You know what? Yeah, I can be a doctor. Yeah, I have the ability to do whatever I want. And every single day, much like meditation, you just start burying that into your head. Over and over again until it becomes true to you. Because we are the stories that we tell ourselves, so change the narrative. Will you ever heal? I think that's a question that's inherently up to you. You have to do the work. You have to step into it. One of the really special things that you can do is go find a therapist. Someone who specializes in family systems, who can help you digest things that have come up for you. Because while these practices may make sense right now. You may do them and then other things start to come up, right? Because one of the things about silence and being in the meditation is sometimes more things pop up and you need someone who can really help you dive into those things.
What do you do when your parents deny that you were abused and sweep it under the rug? This is a really important question because there are a lot of adults who right now experience this. I think one of the things that you have to do is remove yourself from the situation. And I know that this is going to get flak and some people are not going to subscribe to this idea and that's fine. You want to work out your relationships with your parents who don't support the fact that something bad happened to you, you are facing an uphill battle. When I was 16, I got a restraining order on my mother and I said, you're not allowed to be in my life anymore. Her toxicity was so intense and when I was molested, when I was young, I brought it up to her multiple times and she always said, this never happened to you. This is a lie. This didn't exist. When she cut my finger off and we had these conversations when I was in my teens, she would say, Oh, that never happened. But I'm like, yo, that doesn't look like a normal finger to me. Now, that's something that, for me, I had to make a choice on. And at 16, I got a restraining order put on her. And I think there may have been one my grandmother had put on her when I was like maybe 12. I don't remember that. And when I was 18, right after high school, right as I'm about to graduate, I told her, You're not allowed to be in my life anymore. Now, until the day she died, I think I maybe only saw her one more time. And it is one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. Hands down, no questions asked, one of the best decisions. Because, when I removed her, I was able to start the process of healing in a deeper way. Because I wasn't caught up in the story that she was telling about denial, about things not happening. When I was lucky in that when my mother divorced my stepfather, I really never had to see him again. And like I mentioned earlier, I've never met my father. If your parents are denying what happened to you, I think you have to take a really strong look at, what is the amount of support that they have in your life? Are they actually hindering you? Are they helping you? Is them denying this and being in contact with someone who hurt you or abused you affecting you? Again, this is a place where therapists can really help you dive in and understand this. I'm going to give you my tools. And for me, if you've done what you believe that you can do to separate yourself from something negative and the person who's telling you, this is made up, this isn't true, your story isn't being heard, you're not being felt, you're not being seen. There is no rule that says you have to keep a parent in your life. Look, and I know people are going to be pissed off about this. Do you, I'm telling you from my perspective, if I right now as a 34 year old man had a parent in my life who was denying me, my truth, my story, my honesty, I would take them out of my life. I would give them chances, right? Cause I believe inherently like we have to give people the opportunity to understand us, to go through the process. But I also think at the end of the day, if they're not, and they're refusing it, you're doing yourself a disservice by not removing them. So those are my thoughts on that question.
Coach
Michael is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, speaker, coach, and advocate for adult survivors of childhood trauma.
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