5 KEY Shifts from Trauma to Healing

In this episode, John takes viewers through five key shifts essential for healing from PTSD: moving from survival mode to seeking what you truly want, transitioning from rule-based to values-based living, fostering hope rather than relying solely on prediction, surrendering control to embrace internal motivation, and transitioning from resistance to acceptance. John emphasizes the importance of self-acceptance and inner peace in overcoming trauma and living an authentic life. He also touches on practical steps to aid in this transformation process.

00:00 Introduction and Personal Journey
00:18 Five Key Shifts in Healing from PTSD
00:39 Understanding the A/B Dichotomy
02:29 From Rule-Based to Values-Based Living
05:45 Shifting from Prediction to Hope
09:18 Control vs. Surrender
11:02 Resistance to Acceptance
12:26 Bonus Shifts: Self-Acceptance and Inner Peace
15:08 Conclusion and Call to Action

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Transcript

Five Shifts from Trauma to Healing

[00:00:00] Welcome back to my channel. My name is John. I love to talk about trauma, what it is, how it works, and how we can heal from it. Basically, I had crippling PTSD. I'm still working through it, but my healing has been stunning. I've made amazing progress and I'm here to share with you as much as I can about how I did that and how I help clients do that. Now,

in today's video, I'd like to take you through five key shifts that will happen as you move from totally embroiled in structures of survival, you know, stuck in all the Hallmark characteristics of what it's like to live with PTSD

and what happens as you shift more into healing. Practically speaking, .

These are five things that have to happen as a part of any healing journey.

One of the hallmarks of living with PTSD is that everything that greets you in life Presents as some sort of a or B choice in which a and B both suck. And you just have to pick the lesser of two evils.

Now there's a reason why this happens. This is, , at the end of a long tail of a lot of processes, mainly

survival strategies that are compelling on the [00:01:00] surface, but are deeply flawed, both logically and.

And tend to just keep us stuck rather than help us actually move forward. And so what will happen is a problem will crop up and then your survival brain will do all these calculations, do all this fuzzy math hand you two option a or B, and you've got to pick one and it better be the right one, or at least it better not be the wrong one.

And it's life or death, right? You know, the drill, this could be how to pay a bill. What you should wear today or some legitimately seeming, large decision, like where to go to school or should I end this relationship or, and even in things where it seems like there's a yes, no black or white dichotomy between your decisions.

There is always a choice C and choice C tends to be some version of. What do I want? Because the trick with the A B dichotomy

is that you are being presented ways to avoid harm rather than ways to move toward what you actually want. And option C isn't really one point on the horizon. Like let's say A is right there and choice B is we're going to head that direction. Choice C [00:02:00] isn't one certain direction. It's like. Basically saying, no, no, I have 360 degrees of options here, and I can take literally any direction I want.

Very rarely is any of this a life or death situation. And it causes you to ask this radical question. What do I want? Not just what am I afraid of? Not what am I trying to avoid, but what do I really want? And

of course, this is a difficult question to ask. Learning to answer this question with authenticity, and less so in fear, is A big part of the healing journey. So this leads me to my second point, the second shift that will happen as you move from being mired in PTSD or unhealed trauma,

moving toward healing is a movement from a rule based system of living, a boundary based system of System of living to a values based system of living

rule based systems aren't inherently bad They serve a purpose specifically when we are trying to parent a child Hasn't developed enough to be able to operate on values. So let's say Billy is playing [00:03:00] with his firetruck And Joey wants to play with it too. But Billy's like, and you know, punches him.

Well, Billy hasn't had the chance to develop virtue yet. So it's not that he's doing the wrong thing. It's that he hasn't, he hasn't grown up enough. He hasn't had experiences to realize like, Oh, sharing is actually a mutually beneficial thing that I can connect with on a personal level. This is. I can share my fire truck with Joey in a way that actually increases my experience of life that doesn't take away from it.

But while Billy's three, we might need to make a rule that like, Hey man, you got to share your toys. You can't be a jerk to the other kids. And if you do, there's going to be a punishment, but the process of parenting or the process of Billy going through his psychological development means he will hopefully move from that rule and punishment.

And threat based way of living to a value based way of living. This is the essence of maturity. What happens for people who have trauma, this happens on, think of this as two different manifestations of this one. We [00:04:00] literally, because of trauma, don't get the opportunity to grow. Because growth requires freedom and growth requires nurturing and growth requires space, safe space.

And oftentimes, if you are an adult who's now dealing with the ramifications of childhood trauma, you by definition didn't have those things. People weren't keeping you safe or they were actively harming you. So your psychological development was hampered in a number of ways. And one of these ways is often that we don't get to move from the rule based systems to value based systems.

 This is why one of the hallmarks of PTSD is a complete lack of self trust and a reliance on rules. And just tell me how to tell me what to do and tell me how to do it. We start to live like we're robots looking for software to run on rather than human beings who are

like walking miracles, you know, vessels of this ineffable life force that's somehow here and moving through us and beating our heart for us.

So a big part of your healing journey is going to be discovering not only what do I really want, but also what do I really value. Not [00:05:00] what is society telling me to want and value, not what are my parents telling me, not what is fear telling me to want and value, which fear is always going to tell you to value safety above everything else.

But we know that that's no way to really live life. That's not life. That is hide inside the coffin and close the lid. Cause that's the best way to stay safe, right?

So as you move from a rule based way of living, which is really a fear based way of living, you'll be able to live a life that's more about expressing who you really are and expressing who you really are. Isn't so much finding out who you are and then expressing that it's having the freedom to engage that process.

That is authentic living is the process of slowly over time finding out by having freedom to play and learn and be creative and try stuff just because for no reason.

And this gets to another key shift, which is shifting from prediction to hope or from prediction. To the freedom to fail. Living with trauma will slowly erode your hope in lots of areas. And this is partly why we [00:06:00] end up relying on rules rather than our values.

And, and here, when I talk about hope, I'm talking about an eminently practical type of hope, not clinging to some, belief in some thing that's never going to happen, but I'm clinging it to because of hope, like that's not actually hope. That's kind of, that's forlorn hope. That's somewhat delusional.

I'm talking about a reasonable expectation of good.

We are all born with this. Children have hope, right? They wake up each day. Going straight at the things they want, because they still have hope. They still have a reasonable expectation that their desires will take them toward good things. Ooh, I want to play with the truck. I'm going to play with the truck.

Had fun time playing with the truck. There's a simplicity to that, which is why children are often much happier than adults.

And a lot of healing from trauma is undoing all the mess that's, that's, that's, you know, Taking over our mind and our bodies and allowing ourselves to live out of that simple

impulsiveness where impulsiveness isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's actually the unrestricted expression of authentic desire , whereas the we often have a negative. connotation [00:07:00] around the word impulse, when really what we mean is compulsion, which is feeling I have to do a thing even though I don't want to.

Hope allows us the freedom to try things, and if they fail, to keep trying and to learn. Hope is the space in which we progress. Hope is an indispensable substrate in any of the stuff that makes human beings special,

that causes our life to bear fruit No matter what's going on around us.

And when we lose hope, we often end up relying on prediction instead. We're trying to control outcomes. We're trying to make sure that we never fail because in our minds, the price for failure is sky high, and we have to avoid that at all costs.

So you end up. Instead of trying to make an educated guess about the things you do in life, you'll rely on prediction. I have to know exactly how it's going to go or else I'm not going to do it. I have to know exactly how I'm going to succeed at thing a before I even set one foot down that path. So for instance, .

One way, you know, that you're relying a lot on prediction is that you have a lot of impulses to try things, but your brain is shutting it [00:08:00] down because you can't see the entire path between, Oh, I'd like to take a jujitsu class, but I don't see how I would get from there to having a black belt. So

uh, and when you can leave prediction aside, then you can follow an impulse that says, Hey, I want to try X, Y, and Z because I'm a living being who has curiosity. I want to see what's over that hill for no good reason. All the way to, Hey, I have this deeply held value that I'm connecting with. And I want to do X, Y, and Z because of what I value and what I truly desire.

And what happens after that is what happens after that, whether I succeed or fail, that's not really the point. The point is living in alignment with my values. And the trick of it all, of course, is that once you're free to fail, you're free to progress. Once you're free to fail, you're free to succeed.

This is how you will eventually be able to start, engage with, and finish or progress with things that you're currently not willing to even set foot toward. This could be starting a business, putting yourself out there in the realm of dating or romance,

traveling to the place you've been dreaming of going to,

trying again at something that, you know, [00:09:00] you failed at a lot. And that's really in your head and you're really, really afraid of failing again. Like if let's say you have a hundred pounds to lose, you know, that can really be in your head. If you can let go of the need to predict the outcome, you can start to engage with this path on its terms, take the successes and the failures learn from both iterate and take the next step.

And this gets us to the next shift, which is from control to surrender, realizing that so much of our Issues that cause things like, let's say being very overweight. I've worked with a lot of people when it comes to, you know, losing massive weight people with weight issues tend to be emotional leaders and they tend to have very little motivation to work out very little access to their motivation. And they can regain that motivation, not by looking for it on the outside, but by freeing it up on the inside, noticing where their brain is stomping it out.

And allowing themselves to begin to express it. And once you nurture that space, like a garden, you allow the seedlings to grow, eventually it can become self propagating and all of a sudden you have this motivation that wasn't there [00:10:00] before it was there, you were just stomping it out. You just didn't see how,

so instead of trying to control motivation, trying to find it somewhere, hunt it down, chase it, you're surrendering to the motivation that's already inside of you. And then trying to nurture

what's already there. to allow it to grow, right? These are all passive traits, but they're ultimately far more powerful than the ways that we actively try to hunt down good things in the exterior.

And a lot of our survival mechanisms are based in trying to control outside events so that they can't hurt us.

And One indispensable aspect of healing is not having to do that anymore. Not having to control outside events because you're actually far safer in surrender than you are in your attempts at control because those were always delusional. They were always destined to failure because you're a mortal. We are one person, right?

In a very big world. You have absolutely no say over 99. 9 percent of the things that come your way in life.

And when you surrender to that, when you fully accept how little you control, that puts you in alignment with reality, which [00:11:00] actually puts you in a very advantageous position.

The last shift that I'll talk about today, which is moving from resistance to acceptance. As I've said before on this channel, when I first heard that word acceptance, it really made me mad because I thought people were saying, give up, basically accept that, you're in this quicksand and you're going to die and there's nothing you can do, man.

The truth of acceptance is so far from that. It took me a long time to realize that, no, Acceptance doesn't mean I'm preferring. reality to be the way it is. Acceptance doesn't mean that I'm never going to be able to change , or improve. Acceptance means I'm no longer currently at war with reality as it is right now because I want it to be different.

Acceptance means living life on its terms. Acceptance means I'm not going to fight what's here today. I'm not going to fight the pain using quicksand. That's a great example, because the trick with quicksand is the more you fight it, the more it sucks you down. And the less you fight it, the easier it is to eventually work your way out.

And that's what moving from resistance to acceptance [00:12:00] allows you to do. If you are. Dealing with PTSD, your mind is stuck in a lot of negative feedback loops, which means the more you put the foot on the gas pedal, it doesn't matter what direction you think you're driving. You're just gassing up a bunch of negative feedback loops.

You're making life worse the harder you try. So stop trying so hard. Start to accept what's actually happening, which is noticing a lot of the negative feedback loops and learn over time to opt out of them.

And this gets me to a bonus shift, which is moving from obsession with self improvement

and trying to fix the problem that we are toward being more powerfully self accepting and self loving.

Our culture really teaches us to relate to personal improvement through identifying the problems that are inside of you and fixing them. And over time, this can really cement this idea that you are a problem and that you need fixing, or that there's a piece of you that's a problem and that And so what we end up doing Is trying to fix the problem by saying, okay, well, here's the part of me. That's good. [00:13:00] And that wants to fix the problem. And here's the part of me that doesn't, that wants the problem is creating the problem. And so I've got to subdue the problem maker with the fixer, right? The good has to defeat the evil.

And what you really need to understand is that. You know, when a bone breaks, there isn't a good part and a bad part and , if somehow our brains trick us into thinking that one part of the break is good and one part is bad and we must, you know, Win this inner war between the good part and the bad part of the brokenness.

Then all we're going to do is have more brokenness and we're going to proliferate the conflict. We're going to just, I guess this would be the second bonus moving from this concept of inner war toward inner peace, toward putting down our arms. Not that inner peace in the sense of like, everything's going to feel like a still pond all of a sudden, but choosing peace.

Realizing, oh, I value my inner peace more than I value trying to win some kind of war against myself.

I can notice that, Hey, there's a, a war going on inside of me. There are pieces of me that are absolutely at war with one another. And I can accept that. And even if I don't know [00:14:00] exactly how to heal the divide yet, simply by accepting it and. Participating in it less, even if there are parts of me that I can't, I don't know how to shut down yet.

If I lay down my arms, and it's me versus this thing. Well, there's 50 percent less fighting. And that means that there's 50 percent less war just by me

being willing to be the bigger person, so to speak.

And remember that with all of these shifts, when you get to that precipice and you're like, okay, I think I'm going to try this, you know, this new way of relating to myself and to reality, voice in your head is going to say, if you do that, you will die. And you will probably feel a visceral kind of fear around that.

And if you stay really, really present and just take one little baby step in the direction of freedom, you will notice I didn't die. And the more you stay connected to that voice, Remember that don't be at war with the voice. The voice is there trying to keep you safe in a weird way. And the more you stay present to it, the easier it's going to be for that thing, that psychological entity behind that voice, that survival mechanism to see that a lot of what it thinks is real about life and how we stay [00:15:00] safe is false.

And so there's this chicken and egg relationship to healing. Does the shift cause the healing or does the healing cause the shift, right? It's both.

I hope this is helpful. If this resonated with you in any way, I'd love to hear from you in the comments, as well as if you have any questions or ideas for future videos.

If you got any value, I'd really appreciate a like, subscribe, share. That stuff's really important, especially for a new channel.

And if you're interested in working with me directly, Be it through one to one coaching or in one of my groups,

feel free to reach out. You can email me at john oakes, coaching at gmail. com. That's O A K E S.

Thanks. And I'll talk to you next time.