Your Personal Guide to Overcoming Hidden Trauma Patterns | Mel Robbins EP 508

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

0:11how do you think we heal trauma if we don't have the resources to go to therapy or do workshops or whatever it may be even if we do have resources we don't have the courage to put ourselves out there so the first thing is recognizing that you actually experience trauma I am a huge proponent, as so many people are, of widening the definition. Up until about five years ago, most of us thought that trauma just meant, okay, you were in active duty, or you were in a huge accident or incident that was highly traumatic, or you survived some sort of physical, sexual, whatever, abuse. Trauma is just about any kind of experience that you witness or you absorb that has your nervous system light up on edge and start warning you.

1:08So if you've ever had, like you could have a critical parent and you just brace for them. You could have a parent that drinks like crazy and you brace at five o 'clock because you know they're coming home. You could have been abandoned by a parent or have a parent that was mentally ill or have a parent that was so on your ass because they wanted you to be a pro football player. And so you were constantly on edge. It's when your nervous system fires up to a state of alert that now gets programmed into your body as a response. There's a reason why so many couples at five o 'clock at night start bickering.

1:47and it has to do with the fact that at five o 'clock is typically when a lot of parents 20 years ago were coming home from work and that's when the arguing would start and so what happens is as a kid you're now in a state where you're on edge I see you rocking in your chair wow that's crazy well I mean I just remember there's a lot of good things that usually happen to our childhood but we just seem to remember a lot of the bad stuff. And it's because it's - You know why, right? Your mind is wired in a way to prioritize the negative as a means to keep your ass safe. For protection. From not experiencing it.

2:25Correct. Which is why you got to work on your positive mindset because your mind defaults to negative. So you got to build up the programming to positive. This isn't just woo-woo. This is actually science. Well, let me explain what happens. So there's really interesting concept called ghosts in the nursery. And so trauma patterns get automated because they're not experienced in your brain. They're felt in your nervous system. And so it's why you can have a pattern from your past, but be completely unaware that it's running your life right now because it's stored not in your conscious thought, but in your nervous system.

2:59And you feel it in your body before it even gets into your head. And so there's this concept called ghosts in the nursery, which basically means there's all kinds of that goes on when you're little that you may or may not remember in your mind, but your body remembers it. So for example, if you had parents that were just stressed out and they come home and they've been busy and you're sitting there playing on the floor and there's, there's toys everywhere and mom or dad's reaction to a mess is to scream. That creates this kind of thing in your nervous system. Now you may not remember that episode that happened on May 17th, 1972, but your nervous system remembers what it's like.

3:41Fast forward, you're now 51 years old and you walk in the house and there's a mess everywhere. And even though you have said, I'm not going to bulldoze and yell at anybody, my body recognizes the situation. So what do you do? You repeat the pattern you saw. What I'm working on right now is a pattern that is encoded in my nervous system. When I get interrupted, I lose control of the response and I'm working so hard. And I'm clearly not mastering this yet. But the way that you do it is as you feel it rise up, you know, you can use the five second rule, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. You can use just take a quick breath.

4:26You can notice the pattern and you've got to create a pause between the emotion rising up and the reaction that gets automated. And for many people, the reaction, Lewis, is to run away. It's to leave the room. It's to avoid the confrontation. But if running away and avoiding conflict continues to create a pattern where you feel invisible and your boundaries are tromped on, that's a pattern. And, you know, here's the other thing about patterns. running away and being quiet might have saved you when you were little because if you were quiet and out of the room you didn't get hit you didn't get yelled at you were out of harm's way so when you were little it was a genius pattern because it protected you but the issue for adults is that again we walk around with the patterns that we created when we were eight years old in different situations and we are in now and now we are completely a robot to these patterns i think that the definition with boundaries that has helped me the most is understanding the boundaries are for me they're not for you and the single biggest mistake that we make in any relationship particularly romantic ones but also work related ones is we do not express what we need and the good news is any pattern can be replaced.

5:43Change isn't personal. It just feels personal. Change is just about identifying patterns and replacing them with new ones. That's it.

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6:53Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.