overcoming trauma Archives - Amazing Health Advances

How to Find Yourself Again After Trauma

The AHA! Team — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 08:24:02 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #471) and blog, I talk to holistic psychologist and best-selling author Nicole LePera about finding your authentic self after trauma, identifying and unlearning harmful habits, and so much more! In her first book, How to Do the Work, Dr. Nicole offered readers a revolutionary, holistic framework for self-healing. Now, in How to Meet Your Self, she shares an interactive workbook designed to help every reader uncover their Authentic Self. By objectively and compassionately observing the physical, mental, and emotional patterns that fill our days and create our current selves, we can more clearly see what we do not wish to carry into the future. Why is this important? As Nicole points out, we all fall into conditioned habits and patterns—products of our past—that lead to cycles of pain, “stuckness,” and self-destruction. But we also have the innate ability to awaken to and change the behaviors and habits that no longer serve us, allowing us to step into the highest versions of ourselves, which is why Nicole wrote How to Meet Your Self: to help the reader radically transform their inner and outer world. We all struggle and we all have unique healing journeys. This is a universal aspect of the human experience. No matter who we are or where we come from, we cannot escape the fact that our past experiences color our present realities. For many of us, these patterns go unnoticed; we live our lives unaware of how these habits shape our thinking and actions. How to Meet Your Self, Nicole helps us become more aware and conscious of how the past is affecting our present and gives us practical tips and tools to change and heal the mind, brain and body. Awareness is the first step. When we see these aspects of our lives as habits and not intrinsic parts of ourselves, we can work on changing these patterns in our lives and reconnecting with our authentic self—that deep inner knowing of ourselves. We can’t heal what we are not aware of. But this change doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and effort to do the work. As mentioned above, awareness is just the first step, which then allows us to start our healing journey and discover our true, authentic selves. This change is often hard and difficult, and other things will come to the surface, which is why it takes consistent daily effort to shift our thinking and habits, especially if we have been living a certain way for decades. Learning habits and patterns often begins in childhood. Indeed, childhood is a very vulnerable period in our lives; we are growing, developing and learning how to see ourselves and the world around us. Unfortunately, the adults in the room are often dealing with their own trauma and issues, which can affect how they relate to us as children. This, in turn, can affect how we function as adults through the habits and patterns we learn—soon, a negative, generational cycle can be set up. Thankfully, it is never too late to heal. The brain is neuroplastic, which means that it can change. This is why it is so important that we learn how to connect with and trust ourselves—to reach that authentic self. We need to put on our own oxygen mask first by working through our past and what we need to heal before it starts impacting our wellbeing and our relationships. We need to learn how to embrace, process and reconceptualize what we go through, not push it down, or we may start to resent putting other people’s needs before our own. We need to learn how to process our experiences and feelings, not feel ashamed that we have emotions like frustration, anger and so on. When we do this, we are better able to connect with ourselves and the people in our lives on a deeper level, instead of using boundaries to put up walls around ourselves and keep people out. It is not selfish to work on ourselves and take the time to heal and connect with our authentic self. Rather, doing so promotes interdependence: the ability to truly thrive and connect with others in meaningful ways. This kind of autonomy is not the freedom to do whatever we want without consequences; it is the recognition that we are part of a larger whole, and that we as individuals do not have to do it all by ourselves. Our relationship with ourselves is the foundation of any relationship we will have. For more on finding your authentic self, listen to my podcast with Nicole (episode #471) and check out her amazing work. Podcast Highlights 1:54 Nicole’s amazing work 4:19 Social media & therapy 6:28 Nicole’s new book How to Meet Your Self 8:00 How the past affects our present 10:14 Why it takes time to change past patterns & habits 14:00 The power of the conscious mind 19:33 Getting out of “auto-pilot mode” 26:10 Learning habits starts in childhood 35:17 Healing religious trauma 36:28 How healing ourselves helps us connect with others 41:50 Why we need to allow ourselves to acknowledge our emotions 45:00 What our need for boundaries tells us about ourselves 50:00 Autonomy versus selfishness This podcast and blog are for educational purposes only and are not intended as medical advice. We always encourage each person to make the decision that seems best for their situation with the guidance of a medical professional. To read the original article click here.

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One of the Best Mental Health Lessons from Ted Lasso

AHA Publisher — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 08:00:02 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #348) and blog, I talk about the importance of compassion and forgiveness, and how these qualities impact our wellbeing. I recently started watching a popular show on Apple TV called Ted Lasso. Some of you may have heard about it, and some of you may have even watched it already! For those who don’t know what the show is about, here is a brief description: (Spoiler Alert) Jason Sudeikis plays Ted Lasso, an American football coach who is hired by a football club in England (and by “football” here I mean what we call soccer). He knows little about soccer but takes the job anyway. We find out early on that Hannah Wadingham, who plays a character named Rebecca, is the owner of the soccer club. Rebecca recently got divorced from her husband, and they used to own the club together. Her former husband is a very prideful man who cheated on her and treated her badly. She ended up winning complete ownership of the club through the divorce settlement, and she wanted to hire an inexperienced coach so that she could ruin the reputation of the club and hurt her former husband Rupert (played by Anthony Head). Apparently, the club was one of the things her ex-husband loved, and she was trying to ruin it to hurt him the way he hurt her. The character of Ted Lasso comes across as an all-around loveable and nice person. He truly wants to understand those around him, and he works hard trying to get to know people. From the very first episode, he starts to bring Rebecca homemade cookies, which she loves. There’s not a day that goes by that he does not do this small act of kindness. Rebecca, however, is so focused on her revenge that she disregards the people that she has in her life in the present, including Ted. She has an assistant named Higgins (played by Jeremy Swift) who she constantly puts down, who himself is facing a moral dilemma because he wants to work for her but does not feel good about helping her destroy the club. Her best friend Flo, played by Ellie Taylor, has a daughter who Rebecca has lost contact with over the years, even though she is her godmother. In the show, we witness an exchange between them when Flo tells Rebecca that her daughter misses her godmother and can’t understand why she isn’t in her life anymore. Meanwhile, Rebecca, in her mission to ruin the club, hires paparazzi to take photos of Lasso with Keely (played by Juno Temple), the girlfriend of one of the club’s star players, to make it look as if they were romantically involved. This would have severely hurt both Keely and Ted’s reputations and affected the morale of the whole team. Thankfully, in this particular episode, Keely manages to stop the story from being published. Yet Rebecca still tries to do this even though Ted and Keely had been so kind to her. While watching this all play out, I noticed a connection between how much pain Rebecca was in from the trauma that she experienced from her divorce AND how much pain it was causing her and the people in her life as she held onto her anger and tried to get back at Rupert. Of course, I believe that Rebecca’s anger is valid, and that the character of her ex-husband is an awful person who used and mistreated her. Her experiences are very real, and affected her mental and physical wellbeing. Our experiences are wired into the brain by the mind, which, in turn, can affect how we feel and our overall health. However, Rebecca felt that the only solution to her pain was to hurt Rupert in a similar way, and that this was also causing her pain. Rebecca was constantly worrying about her plan for revenge, which made her overlook the incredible people who were still in her life. For example, when Keely found out that Rebecca hired the paparazzi, she was extremely hurt because of the friendship they had developed, and she felt like Rebecca had broken her trust. Likewise, Rebecca’s assistant Higgins ended up quitting because he was suffering emotional trauma from the way that Rebecca treated him and did not like being a part of her plan to ruin the reputation of the soccer club. A defining moment in Rebecca’s life occurred in episode 9 of season 1, where she found out her ex-husband was having a child with his new fiancé. This was one of the hardest things to watch because you can clearly see Rebecca’s deep feelings of pain and grief. It was clear that she had always wanted a child while she had been married Rupert, and he had made her put it off. Now, she has lost her opportunity to become a mother, and this news broke her. Her response to the whole situation was still incredible. She could have shut down and gotten more bitter, and tried even harder to get revenge on her husband. But instead, there was a shift in her mindset—she chose to change the way she reacted to what was happening to her and hope <-?? her experiences played out in her brain, body and life. Rebecca decided to confess to Ted about how she organized the paparazzi and how she only hired Ted to ruin the reputation of the club. She admitted everything, and reached out to the people in her life when she was in a place of extreme brokenness. Ted responded with so much forgiveness and compassion that it completely shocked Rebecca. She fully expected anger and hate from him because those were the emotions she experienced from her ex-husband, and those were the emotions that had dominated her mind because of the grief and trauma of her ugly divorce. But this anger and desire for revenge had only made her brokenness worse. Rebecca realized she was not able to ever fully heal as long as she stayed in this dark mental place. When she experienced Ted’s compassion, she suddenly felt free from the pain she was experiencing—it didn’t just go away, but she did realize that it didn’t have to dominate her life. There was another way to live! You could literally see this change in her facial expressions and her whole body, as if a huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders. It’s as if she was finally able to let go of the toxic anger that was breaking her down because someone she respected accepted and loved her, despite everything that had happened. This is such a crucial scene in the show because it shows how extremely important it is to surround yourself with people who will love and accept you, especially in the moments when you feel broken. It also shows that you never know how you will impact someone if you show love and compassion and have grace—you could literally end up transforming a life! At the end of the day, all human beings need compassion and understanding. We are all struggling, and we are all a little bit broken. Sometimes our brokenness causes us to do things that may hurt other people in our life. But true healing comes when we can seek out help and receive love—when we feel safe enough to admit where we made a mistake, and can see how we are all connected and how our actions impact others. We all need all the help we can get as humans in an ever-evolving, hugely complex world, including large doses of gentleness, kindness, and compassion for each other as well as ourselves. We need a new narrative, one where we listen to each other’s narratives and problem-solve through them together. As I discussed in a recent blog and podcast, the brain functions best with a flexible, dynamic balance between specialized, locally segregated activity, and more generalized global integration. Too much segregation and excessive integration can lead to suboptimal functioning. What does all this science mean? Research has shown that training yourself to be more kind and compassionate to both yourself and others can increase your positive emotions, sense of social connectedness and pro-social behaviors, while decreasing your negative feelings, stress and social biases, all of which improve your brain integration, balance and health. This is also why forgiveness and grace are so important. Research shows that the details of a transgression, which can hold us in a viselike grip, are more susceptible to being reconceptualized and even forgotten when we forgive. Unforgiveness keeps the toxic thought tree strong and powerful in your brain, which impedes your healing because it’s still “connected to the source.” This is due to the law of entanglement in quantum physics, which keeps everything in a relationship— toxic or otherwise—entangled, affecting each component. When we forgive, we actually grow a part of our brain called the anterior superior temporal sulcus (aSTS); the more we grow this area, the easier it will become to manage the pain of a trauma or toxic experience. To read the original article click here.

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