Jordan Peterson Shares How To HEAL From Emotional Trauma | Lewis Howes

It sounds familiar to me and it seems to me that when I connect with people, a lot of things from the past, past memories, past pains,

trauma

s, are coming to the fore for a lot of people with the chaos of now, how do they do it? We begin to

heal

the memories of the past, the

trauma

s of the past, so that they do not continue to hurt us in the present. Well, the first thing I would say is that sometimes there is a crisis that well-meaning mental

heal

th professionals rush into. I come in to discuss the trauma, well it's still happening, it's a very bad idea.

People are usually traumatized because something really horrible happened and thinking about it in the moment only makes it worse. It's not that no one has a solution. This is how you should understand this. Do you know someone. I just shot your son. School, this is how you should understand this thing that will make everything better. It's like no, it won't if you have old baggage that often comes up if you're arguing with someone, right? How do you know what it is like? This is partly why people don't like to have a dispute within a relationship because it's a thread and you pull on that thread and my goodness, well we had another rule, don't agree with something you don't agree with. agree with oh, like we will, if we decide that you and I are going to do this, we don't go back and say well, I didn't really mean that, we can't play revisionism with our history.

So if you don't agree, don't agree, fight, object or keep quiet because you see what happens with couples: there's a little fight and then one says to the other yes, but you did this and then that person says that Yeah. I know I did that, but that was because you did this and each this gets bigger until what's on the table is why the hell we should stay together and every fight becomes why the hell we should stay together, so that It's another What you want to do is fight about this, not about everything in the past, not about everything, okay, you were flirting, I think you were flirting more than you should, so I go away and think, well, okay, maybe I. it was okay um well so we need to have a discussion about why and maybe we can resolve that but mostly all we need to do is figure out how to prevent that from happening again okay so let's look at it couple again.

Do you want me to do it? I'm the flirt, let's say, what do you want me to do? Well, you have to find out. It's like no, I'm stupid like you. We are equally stupid. I need to know what. would satisfy you and you need to figure out what would satisfy you, so I know, and that's also extremely helpful, let you set your conditions of satisfaction, make them explicit, let the other person know, yeah, you can't read someone's mind, yeah , we. We're really bad at that, we're bad at reading our own minds, yeah, so if I have a fight with Tammy, let's just say sometimes I remember to say, okay, what do you want me to do now?

What I can do? do what should I say and say you know and you think well you shouldn't let the other person put words in your mouth well it's fair you know I'm not acting I'm not asking for something false I'm saying I wish this didn't happen. Can you see a way out? Is there anything I can do to increase the likelihood that that's the route we can take? You know, sometimes that works, but the other person has to tell you what they will find. Satisfying you mentioned that you brought up sexual shame and it triggered something in me about past shames that people tend to hold on to.

I think I might have mentioned this to you the last time we spoke. I'm not sure if you know. but I was sexually abused when I was five by a man I didn't know and for 25 years I kept the secret the shame uh and if anyone ever knew about this then they would never be loved you know this well because you feel permanently tainted yeah I would , you would know, I wouldn't have any friends, no girl would find me attractive, my parents would disown me, you know, I went down the rabbit hole, these stories of, you know, I'm the only one who has this.

It has never happened to me. I never saw any examples of this happening on the right and about eight years ago I started to really heal that and started sharing that shame in many different therapeutic experiences that allowed me to begin the healing process. I'm curious from your perspective. With all the work you've done, what's the best approach for someone to really heal their shame, whether it's sexual abuse or trauma, or just anything, whether small or big, or any kind of shame that they have? may have, how does someone do it? Release shame in a healthy way so that it doesn't make you prisoners of these past emotions that are holding you back.

Well, you hinted at a few things when you just described what happened to you. You said well, first of all. I know I thought I was the only person this had happened to. It's like no, it's a universal human experience to one degree or another. Now you know, I'm not saying that everyone has been sexually abused and I'm certainly not saying that some people are. They haven't been sexually abused to such an extreme degree that it's unimaginable that others you know turn out relatively well, but it's still within the realm of normative human experience that sex goes wrong in some way, at least you regret something what happened. what you've done or something that was done to you, so putting it in the moment where you're the only person who's had something happen that's really not good, because it takes you away from even yourself, you have no idea what to do with that. that and that's why sometimes that's why people find it so relieving to have their illness diagnosed it's like this is known there's a category other people have had this experience maybe there's a way through it so knowing that you're not the only one a person like that can be very helpful um update it's like how were you how old five okay well one thing you have to realize when you're 25 and you were abused when you were five is that you're not five anymore, TRUE?

Whoever that happened to is no longer there, you are there, but you know you can be afraid of relationships, you can be afraid of all kinds of things, but a lot of it is that you feel like that residue of 5 years. -man, I tell a story about a client I had, she was abused by her older brother and she told me the story and I drew a picture in my head while she was, you know, I imagined her at five years old and this teenager corpulent. You know, taking advantage of her, but as she was telling the story I realized that her older brother was only a year two years older than her, while he was seven, okay, well, they weren't the victim of a tyrannical man. in some sense. she was two poorly supervised children now that doesn't mean what she did was right but she was still the 5 year old girl in the memory but she was 27 when she came to see me and so the first thing I did was simply point out that she is Like thinking about the seven-year-olds you know: to a 5-year-old, a seven-year-old is an adult, but to a seven-year-old and a 5-year-old they are clearly both children.

Well, that changed things a little. things, it made her feel less vulnerable in the moment, what your brain wants from you in relation to a traumatic memory is an indication that you are no longer vulnerable to the same problem, that's what memory is for, right? You remember something bad and you process it to change your interpretation or your behavior or the situation or anything that you can change so that it doesn't happen in the future and that, if you do it thoroughly, generally you will allow yourself to rest is so that you have the memory to protect you from happening again well, that's the purpose of memory in general you you you make sense of your past Behavior so you bet that the good things that happen to you can be duplicated and the bad things can be avoided is not To make an objective record of the world is to make a functional map of the world that you can apply to the future and part of yourself, how do we let it pass?

How do we disassociate something that happened a year ago? That didn't happen 10 or 20 years ago, but it seems to be triggering us. Oh, it's very, it's very difficult. Well, I would say you know one of the things you need to develop if you've had an experience like maybe you had. because I don't know the details you probably need a theory of malevolence you need an explanation it's like how could a person do so well you have to have what if the explanation isn't good they were just bad people they were just okay so you need a philosophy of evil you need a philosophy of evil you have to understand it so that you are no longer a victim of it because otherwise you can't put the event in a correct context, you know, and sometimes that means developing real philosophical sophistication and that can help because then you know that you can begin to separate malevolence from benevolence because perhaps now you are afraid of any intimate relationship because it has been contaminated with that and everything is confusing and confusing, etc.

You need to understand the person who did that at least to some degree so you can separate them from all the other people around you that you encounter in situations that might remind them of what you know and why you felt vulnerable because maybe you felt embarrassed. For all those things that you have to go through, what do you think you know when you are embarrassed when it happens what causes that what are the signs that cause what do you think when that happens all of that has to be dismantled? said in this Beyond Order book that you know if you have a memory from more than 18 months ago that still bothers you, right, it still has

emotional

resonance, write more than 18 months ago or earlier, yes, not more than 18 months ago or more , I have it, yes, otherwise It's not really in the past, right, it's still happening that whether you should delve into something or something traumatic that's currently happening is a completely different topic, but if it's an old memory and still bothers you, it means you have done it.

I didn't break that experience down enough to separate it from the emo emotion, so imagine that when something terrible happens to you and you don't understand it, then you could say well, if you don't understand something that's happening to you, how can it be terrible? Terrible means that you understand it and the answer is well, you understand things in stages and the first way to understand something terrible is to freeze in Terror or run, that is understanding, it is not conceptual, it is embodied and

emotional

, so the Terror of the event is the first category, okay, now the next question is how to get it out, how to get out of the terror, well, you realize that nothing really dangerous is happening, what if something really dangerous happened?

Then you craft your worldview to the point. where you are no longer vulnerable to that terrible thing and that is extremely difficult, so the memory of something terrible is still terrible until you process it with effort and break it down into a much more sophisticated map of the world and it is really difficult to do that.