3 Things We Must Accept Before We Can Heal

In this episode, John delves deeply into the concept of acceptance as a crucial step in healing from trauma. He explains how acceptance frees up energy, outlines its role in better understanding and contextualizing traumatic experiences, and advocates for recognizing the ongoing manifestations of trauma in daily life. The episode touches on three areas of acceptance: accepting the reality of what happened, accepting the present-day consequences, and accepting the hidden brokenness that others may not see. John emphasizes the importance of community support and announces plans to create a community focused on healing from trauma.

00:00 Introduction to Trauma and Healing
00:59 Understanding Acceptance
04:47 Accepting What Happened
07:47 Accepting Present Realities
14:12 The Hidden Brokenness
20:44 Building a Supportive Community
22:59 Conclusion and Next Steps

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Transcript

Three things we must accept before trauma can heal

[00:00:00] Welcome to today's video. I'll be continuing my ongoing conversation with you about trauma, what it is, how we can heal from it, how we can live better, fuller, freer lives. And that freedom is really important. That's really what we're after in so many ways. That's what the so what after healing is, is different types of freedom.

That are indispensable. There's really no price you can put on that.

But the path to that freedom goes through some difficult places. Some places that we have a hard time understanding. Vital steps along the way will often baffle your mind. Not just Your mind that's based in survival and survival mechanisms, and it's very caught up in, you know, the trauma of the past, but also just a normal human mind can sometimes have a very hard time with the seemingly backward concepts.

The seemingly backward steps that actually propel us toward healing. Today, I [00:01:00] want to talk about one of the most difficult of those steps, I am talking about acceptance which is, it's actually a series of steps and it's actually more of a, you can think of it as a step, or you can think of it as like an instrument in the orchestra of what produces healing.

But this would be a very foundational instrument. We're not really going to get anywhere without this one. So it makes sense to talk about this first. 

Early in my journey. When I first started encountering the word acceptance kind of just pissed me off because I, and many other people, probably you, to some extent, have been

somehow taught to believe that acceptance means tolerance and tolerance means sort of willfully going along with something when all acceptance really means is I accept. that something exists in reality, and I am not going to expend effort in trying to resist that truth. So, for instance, if [00:02:00] it's raining today, and I go, Ugh, it's raining.

What I've just done is resist the fact that it's raining today. Acceptance is, Oh, it's raining. And I'm not going to expend any effort trying to resist that fact or somehow shake my fist at the sky, hoping that that is going to stop the rain, accepting the things you don't control.

The things you can't just wave a magic wand at and make them go away. As much as we, we really believe that we can, we expend so much energy in resisting reality. And when you realize how much of your day is spent in simply resisting reality, you realize the first benefit of acceptance before we get into exactly what we're accepting.

One of the key benefits that you get from it is this freeing up of your energy. All of a sudden you're not wasting tons and tons of energy all day, every day, trying to, you know, like old man shakes fist at plane flying overhead. We're not wasting all of our [00:03:00] energy. It's wonderful to get that back. But at first it kind of feels like you're dying when you give up that fight against what's real.

Because when we accept our brains are trying to tell us that if we were to not resist reality, we are basically creating that reality. And we can only believe that if we have not yet accepted reality, right? So it's this iterative process where we resist reality, which allows us the delusion of thinking we could somehow change what's already real

or what we can't control, which deepens the lack of acceptance on and on and on. And the weather is a great example because probably no one has ever taught you how mentally unhealthy it is to complain about the weather and have big complex, you know, dramatic emotions about the weather, things that you can't control, things that happen every single year.

Right.

So how much more are we just hemorrhaging energy and our essential life [00:04:00] force when we are in a state of resistance to elements of our trauma, right? This is a much bigger issue. And when you realize how big. Of an issue. This isn't how much it's holding you back. You'll get a glimpse into, ah, this is what's available to me.

If I can get my head around this acceptance stuff.

So the first big thing we want to accept, and I've got three things, right? There's obviously many, a panoply of things we can learn to accept today. I just want to focus on three, three big ones. They're fairly gnarly, but they will really help you understand. And eventually once you do understand to remember the essential components of.

Your trauma, right? Cause trauma isn't one thing. As you've heard me say before, trauma is a few different things. There are various pillars you could say.

So the first area of acceptance is around what happened. This, this can mean accepting. Okay. So and so treated me this way as a child, but oftentimes the acceptance takes on the flavor [00:05:00] of appreciating a fuller context around what happened. For instance. I remembered most of the traumatic events of my life, but I, I remembered them in a warped context of, you know, as like a nine year old somehow being responsible or normalizing the events that were going on.

A big part of my acceptance was to say, Oh, the time that this or that egregious thing happened, that was not okay. For, for somebody to do that to a child, that was incredibly not okay. That was outright abusive. That's outright neglect

that is negligent to a criminal level, right? To, to realize the full context around what happened, that it wasn't normal. It was abusive. It was wrong. And if it was the result of somebody's direct actions or say the, the. The actions of a caretaker, parent, authority figure, teacher, clergy, coach, these people bear the responsibility for what [00:06:00] happened. So, there are levels to accepting what happened to you. And one of the initial ones is simply accepting, okay, this thing happened. Maybe I don't want to think about it. , maybe I wish it didn't happen to me. Maybe I've tried to just Build a brick wall between me and, and the events of the past and try to just pretend that they don't exist.

I definitely did all those things, but accepting like, listen, this happened, it really had a negative impact on the way my mind works. Even if I don't fully comprehend, and even if I'm kind of scared at the scale of what these events kicked off in my life, I accept. That they're there. And I recognize that accepting what's there doesn't actually make it what it is.

It's already there in acceptance. I'm simply greeting this big thorny issue. I'm greeting the dysfunction inside of my mind. And as you'll see with everything we can apply acceptance to, it [00:07:00] takes you from a position of true helplessness and puts you on the path. The starting point toward a position of power it takes you out of disadvantageous ways of relating to your inner world and sets you on the path of advantageous ways.

There are ways to relate to all this stuff that will empower you and give you the advantage. You, your true self, the part of you that we're trying to unlock more and more so that it can be free to express itself.

Right? And that's why at the end of the day, your trauma isn't a problem. It's your relationship to what happened to the things that have arisen because of it and to the number of misconceptions and areas of confusion that get kicked off because of our wider misunderstanding about trauma. We'll get into these things now.

So the second area of acceptance is accepting what's here today because of what happened back in 1970, whatever, 80, whatever, 90, whatever last week. Because there's a [00:08:00] difference between the events that caused such overwhelm that it literally broke our minds.

And these various pieces of the mind decided we can't work together, right? In order to stay safe, certain elements of the psyche have to stay separate.

For instance, if you go into the jungle and then a tiger attacks you and somehow you survive, your brain will mark off the area of the jungle and say, we're not allowed to go there. The part of us that has the freedom to walk there is now cut off. Right. And obviously that's a very simple metaphor for these aspects of who I am are not allowed to be here, or they're only allowed under certain circumstances, right?

These are the, these are essentially how these divisions get created. And I won't get too far into the weeds, but basically what's here because of it, we have things like survival mechanisms, right? We have. We are overly sensitive to certain stimuli in the environment that other people are totally fine with.

Something can [00:09:00] happen at work, you know, maybe the boss is mad. And for other people, it's like, oh, geez, Gary's really got to stick up his butt. But for you, it's like, oh my god, I feel sick to my stomach, I'm sweating, my heart's pounding. Clearly, this is having a bigger effect on you. People who experience trauma, and Have a lot of structures in their mind as a result of it that are constantly there working overtime, trying to keep them safe.

This is a huge weight of pressure and often a sense of responsibility and sole responsibility and feeling cut off from other resources that normal people quote unquote have access to.

Right, accepting that life feels incredibly difficult and other people aren't experiencing this, accepting that there's a lot of confused thinking, there are various forms of shut down and overwhelm. And. Security overrides where your brain can throw a switch and all of a sudden your cognitive tools just kind of go out the [00:10:00] window and you're operating in this survival mode accepting the physical manifestations Of your unhealed trauma those headaches Muscle cramps, stomach aches, the phantom pains, right?

The chronic pain, the, that back issue that there's no car accident that happened. There's no like other people, they have pains and aches and there's a reason they're like, Oh yeah, I hurt myself playing football when I was younger. Or That this or that happened, like you have injuries, you have serious physical complications that have no seeming origin, right?

Accepting that, that these are present and understanding that they are simply, one of the ways that unhealed trauma expresses itself.

 Incidentally, when we accept things like confused thinking, right, this helps us shut down the survival mechanisms that want to piggyback on top of that because survival mechanisms, they don't just come at you one at a [00:11:00] time. They're like, a champion boxer, they hit you in combination, right? If you, if you're headed towards something that your brain thinks, Oh, that could be dangerous.

Let's throw some confusion. Okay, great. Now she will be confused and then she'll say, Oh, I'm so confused. How do I fix this? Boom. Your survival mechanism comes in with another Oh, funny. You asked, here's how you fix it. This other survival mechanism, right? So these things work In concert with one another.

And this is, this can be very true of the physical manifestations because generally speaking, pain or yeah, physical issues, they make it harder for us to interact with the world, go out and achieve things to show up and to express our true self. They make it harder to move around, right? If there's danger.

In your exterior world, there is a logical reason for your body to become more and more incapacitated and how that could actually be keeping you safe. So by [00:12:00] accepting what's here as a result of your trauma, You can begin to understand more deeply, ah, this is all connected and that itself, it isn't necessarily going to cause healing, but it can give you a powerful perspective.

Again, it's, it's a shift in perspective that can take you from simply being a victim to the way your mind works as a grown up, , child of trauma, 

Or as anybody who has a severe mental illness 

and when we catch our perception of all these things being flawed, when we catch ourselves interpreting events,

taking things that happen and going, Oh, what does this mean? And how do I fix that to start to notice it? Okay. And before you can resolve these things, you have to notice it and stop fighting it. None of these things will get better. By deepening the inner conflict. 

These are mechanisms that we need to hit the off switch on. We want to reduce that weight of [00:13:00] pressure. We want to reduce the confused thinking we want to reduce the physical manifestations 

and when we realize that by trying to fight those things and solve them, we're actually propelling all of them into one another. There's a synergistic effect, which means that there's a reverse synergistic effect when you stop participating and you start accepting more and more , the temperature on these things can start to come down.

They may not go away entirely. I still deal with some of these things in my own healing journey, you know, many years in, and having had extremely significant levels of healing and progress.

But when you accept what's present today as a result of what happened and the way your mind has responded to it, namely, In order to keep you safe, you can accept the dysfunction and the discord and also begin to accept the deeper truth. And this is maybe getting off into another level of all this, that these things are all here to keep you safe, safe from [00:14:00] what?

Things that are largely errors in your perception

or your interpretation or are based in reactivity that has more to do with what happened way back when than it does with what's here today.

The third thing that I think it would be extremely helpful for you to accept as soon as you can. Is to accept the brokenness that others cannot see. Now you could say, well, John, this is, you're basically asking me to accept everything you just talked about. Yes. I guess here, what I'm asking you to accept is that once you start to see these things, one of the biggest impediments to seeing these things and continuing to see them for what they are is the fact that Other people and big swaths of the rest of the world cannot or will not see them with you.

This healing can be a very lonely road because society does not understand trauma and how it works. Clearly, [00:15:00] this is why we are experiencing so many different levels of dysfunction, every aspect of our society.

But there are elements of our society that are actively profiting off of our lack of understanding of trauma. You know, just going back to all the physical manifestations of trauma. There are people who are profiting off of selling you solutions, you know, creams and potions and the various products to help you distract away from the pain or basically selling you like, Oh, take these herbs for your whatever, when the herbs aren't going to do anything.

Because your lack of herbs is not the real core issue. Your core issue is, is a massive shutdown in your emotional regulation, which is being felt in psychological and physiological And this isn't woo woo to say that your unfelt emotions can be expressed physically in the body because every emotion has a [00:16:00] physical component. You know, try getting really, really angry without, without, Your heart rate increasing without your fists balling up, without your shoulders, hunching up, every emotion has a physiological component.

And when we repeatedly fail or refuse to feel our emotions and process them in their normal way, metabolize them, so to speak, those psychological and physiological elements of those Emotions remain unresolved.

There are many great things about our society, be it the, whether you think of it as, you know, Western society or modern society or America, North American society, we're really, really good at a lot of amazing things. And we have a lot of big strengths because of. How our culture views the world teaches us to address the problems we encounter, but there are along with those things, some major blind spots and we have huge blind spots around mental illness And [00:17:00] an even bigger blind spot around trauma and the massive role it plays in,

in how personalities are created and recreated every day.

We also have a fear of anything we don't understand in our culture big time. So our fear of what we don't understand has kept us from wanting to learn about trauma because it scares us. Why? Because we can't control it into submission. You can't outwork it. Our culture values work. Okay. And productivity and achievement, and you cannot achieve your way out of trauma.

You can't fix it with a pill, right? We are all about fixes. And when we have problems that we can't fix, or we can't just pound them into submission through brute force, it's terrifying to us because it makes us feel powerless. If our extreme power is not enough, then that should scare the shit out of us, right?

But clearly there are lots of things in the world that Do not require brute force to help them resolve [00:18:00] themselves. And this is especially true of any problem that would fall into the category of illness or brokenness or woundedness. These things do not require brute force. They require passive tools, right?

Nurturing, healing rest. These are all passive actions, but the fact that they're passive does not mean that they're worthless compared to active methods. These things just have a different role and in their role, they are indispensable. You cannot replace them with active methods and they are extremely powerful.

I would argue more powerful than a lot of our active methods. So our society brings a lot of black and white thinking that you're either good or you're bad. And that a lot of that has to do with your productivity. And guess what? Guess what's really going to suffer in the life and mind of somebody with severe unhealed trauma.

Yeah. Your productivity is gonna really suffer.

And if you are able to keep up with the, the productivity levels that [00:19:00] society has convinced you to expect from yourself or that other people have been taught to expect of you, then, you know, the fact that you have to run at 10, 000 RPMs to, to get that to happen. Where other people are running at 800, 700, 750 means you're going to burn out faster and harder, and it's going to be harder for you to recover once that happens.

So

once you accept that society isn't going to understand your brokenness, it's not going to really largely be a help to you. In fact, most of what you're going to find in the public discourse, whether it's social media or talking to friends or family, you're just going to have more and more. Ideas spewed at you that are reflective of the mindsets that have been keeping you stuck already.

 Like I said before, the process of healing is largely a process of dismantling, letting go, stepping away from Processes and systems and cycles [00:20:00] that are not benefiting us.

And once you start to let go, you'll start to notice how much other people are clinging on and you'll have to accept that.

 The rest of the world, it's just really not equipped to understand trauma or what it is , and certainly not equipped to help you process and begin to learn a different way of relating to these things. Like I said, so that you can be in an advantageous position relative to them so you can heal.

So you can lessen the divides inside of you so you can quiet the voices that are telling you to continue to pound yourself into the ground in order to solve all these problems that are largely just the product of a traumatized mind trying to stay safe.

And because most people you encounter won't get it, that makes it really valuable to have To have community with people who do get it. It's very, it's the easiest thing in the world to want to keep yourself safe in this process from everybody. Once you realize [00:21:00] how few people understand it, but this actually makes it more important to connect with other people.

This is a really essential part of healing and it's incredibly powerful when you can be with other people who do get it. And who, when you say, gee, I, I don't understand why I just have such a hard time with X, Y, and Z for them to go. No, that's we understand why you have a hard time. You're not alone. It's not just you.

What happened to you only happened to you. But the way we humans respond to traumatic events, even though each of those events was kind of its own snowflake type thing, cannot quite be replicated.

Once those initial. Events happen, the way we proceed from there, there is a lot that we share in that. And so once you realize that, Oh yeah, the events that traumatize me might be very different than the events that traumatize that person, but we can walk together in community.

And learn so much from one another [00:22:00] because the things that we're learning to let go of, the thought patterns, the reactivity the errors in perception, the resistance that we feel towards so much of what exists inside of us and around us, that, ah, we can all share learning to let these things go.

You know, I've run a number of communities largely based And, you know, helping people with emotional eating, weight loss, these types of things that I've taken a big interest in throughout my life,

but I've never run a community specifically about healing from trauma or severe mental illness.

And I think it's something that I've been wanting to do for a long time. And I think I'm going to like this week, start to put something together. So if that's something you'd be interested in, you can email me, john at oaks, weightloss. com. Oh, a K E S weightloss. com J O H N. Yeah. Just let me know that you're interested.

I'll tell you once we get it started, it'll probably be fairly chill and experimental at first. So yeah, email me if you're interested in joining any sort of community like that.

If you found this [00:23:00] helpful today, I hope you'll share it with someone else who needs it. I hope you'll of course subscribe. 

If you have any questions or areas of interest that you'd like me to talk about in future videos, please let me know . Thanks. And we'll talk to you soon.