BRAIN SURGEON On How To HEAL From TRAUMA | Dr. Rahul Jandial 276

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

0:10I firmly believe that taking charge of your mindset allows you to be in the driver's seat of your life and unlock your potential. And that's why I'm thrilled to share that my new book is out right now. It's called The Greatness Mindset. In it, you'll learn how to build a plan for greatness through powerful exercises and toolkits designed to propel your life forward. This is the book that I wish I had 20 years ago. It's everything I've learned in the last decade with the research and the science to help you unlock your mind. Make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash 2023mindset to pick up your copy of my book, The Greatness Mindset, today.

0:50The brain has the ability to heal from trauma then, physical and emotional trauma. Because I feel like the emotional hidden trauma can be more painful and harder to recover for some. the psychological, emotional trauma, than the physical trauma. You can see it and you can treat the physical trauma in a sense, but the emotional, psychological, hidden traumas, I feel like, are invisible and people don't think they need to treat it because they don't see a broken arm and say, I need to go to the doctor because my bone is sticking out. Let me put a splint on it and heal it up. We're not trained that way.

1:25There is no easy answer. There's therapeutic trauma, resetting a bone after it's broken, the pain of a cancer surgery, but then you know that your cancer has been cut out. Like, that's good pain. Right. And we're just talking about physical trauma. Yes. Then there's emotional trauma if people are attacked that's also intimately connected to emotional trauma, right? So people who don't have memory after certain injuries or operations, they never have PTSD because they don't remember it. So the emotional context and memories related to trauma, be it emotional, physical, or a combination requires memory.

2:04That's cool, right? I like to think about like, just as a concept, I don't have a solution for, I don't, hey, don't do these three things. You'll be better. Sort of not my approach. Cause when people did that with me, I was like, how do you know what I'm going through, man? You look at me, you think everything's good. Are you sure? Are you sure I wasn't attacked last night? Are you sure I didn't find out that my patient didn't do well last night? Are you sure I didn't find out a loved one was diagnosed with something? You know, like, I just don't want to put people in boxes. In fact, I want people to know that they are new every day.

2:32I'm not even the same version of myself I was before the last few years. How can I be understood as a group of people, a man or a surgeon? You know, I just want people to think of each other as individuals and dynamic. That said, I never judge people's trauma to be better or worse. Everybody's going to have a traumatic event in their life. It's unavoidable. It's partly because we put ourselves out there. It's partly because the way we approach the world is to be completely adaptive. If we're rigid, then there's less chances for trauma, but that's a life less well-lived. So when you put yourself out there, traumatic experiences are unavoidable.

3:11That said. But what I hear you say is that if we don't have the memory of the traumatic event, we don't have PTSD. We don't have trauma. We don't have a trauma tail. That's the concept that I want people to walk away and say, memory is important. And memory is the thing that determines whether the event remains traumatic in your heart. Whether it's painful still. So let's get into that. So we just need to heal the memory of the trauma. That's exactly where I'm taking it. Memories are not files in a cabinet. There are some regions, if we remove them, you would lose memory. But memory's not only there.

3:46It relies on pulling from memories of smell to new... Like, for example, smell is very interesting. It's one of the five senses that we can't tamp down with our thinking. So the perfume or cologne, smell and memory are intimately intertwined. And so you're pulling from all different parts of the brain. Again, memory is a certain electrical flow in the brain. It's malleable. It's moldable. Just because you have a certain memory today doesn't mean that that experience, good or bad, will remain good or bad. Our positive vibe right now can be made negative. of our negative vibe right now can be made positive as we look back at our day-to-day.

4:25Really? So when you see memory that way, then you say, okay, wait a second. I was attacked or I was hurt or something really traumatized me. And when I think of it, when I smell that smell, when I see that color, I'm traumatized again. I clench up. I have stress, fear, anxiety. The emotional context to a memory is what you can change. You don't want dementia. You don't want to delete the memory because that's a different problem. Yeah. You don't want to block it. But what you want to do is change the emotional context attached to that memory. What happens if we, you hear this from people a lot who might have been traumatized as kids, where they kind of block the memory and then they remember it.

5:04When it resurfaces, it's still raw. It's very raw, but they've stuffed it, they've blocked it, they've numbed it. Driven it to addiction. Yeah, exactly. So emotional context of memory for adults in the right setting with the right person, you can actually work through the trauma of the memory and the experience by going to certain therapists who help you get better with that. To process the memory. Yeah, just to take the emotional pain, right, the emotional trauma and dampen that so you can say, and just bring examples from my world, I was diagnosed with cancer. That's a traumatic event. My patients, You see them over time through different ways.

5:46When they say, you know, I was diagnosed with cancer and I did this, their face is different describing it later than it was immediately after receiving the diagnosis. That's a real life example, right? It doesn't have to be all the stuff, you know, related to violence and all that. The traumatic experience of a cancer diagnosis and how patients cope with that immediately. And then you see them months later, years later, because I'd be a mess, right? I'd be like, okay, this is... I wouldn't be able to cope. But they, surprisingly, not some of them, most of them cope. They get dressed, they come in for their three-month scans, which to me would be a traumatic experience every time.

6:25Is this guy going to tell me it's back or it's bigger? I mean, think about, like, nothing in your mail or email. I got to go in for this news again. But somehow they cope. And that's where in Life on a Knife's Edge, I learned so much from them that it's possible to cope with traumatic experiences. I'm not saying you as an individual can. I'm not saying I can. When you look at a group of cancer patients, and most of them cope, live, move on from very traumatic emotional experiences, as well as physical experience of cancer pain and cancer surgery, right? That's the lesson I want everybody to go through in their mind when they're dealing with their own challenge.

7:04Wow.

7:18Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple podcast right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on Apple podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

8:08Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.