Why Affirmations Don’t Work For Trauma — And What Does

Learn introductory techniques to healing stored trauma, from really listening to your emotions to introductory ways to release grief and anger/rage. Also learn movement and integration, giving the body permission to release stored trauma, so affirmations and meditations can be more powerful.

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Transcript

Welcome to my 3 Secrets to Releasing and Healing Trauma.

This is an intro trauma course.

There is so much about trauma that we could talk about,

But I want to start sharing out this information on trauma because it is so under,

Undertaught and so misunderstood out there with everything that I see on YouTube and there's so much great information but there's also a lot of misinformation in trauma and I decided that having friends,

Family,

Myself being in the mental health community that this information needs to get out there and so I'm slowly starting to start teaching courses and offering up group settings where women can join and also one-on-ones but a lot of what I do and what I love to do is teach and so a big reason why a lot of this came about is I would see people out there saying oh your mindset,

Your mindset,

All you have to do is affirm it away or you know there's a big law of attraction movement which is amazing and there's a lot that you can do with law of attraction but the underlying premise here is that you cannot just affirm things away.

You cannot just use the law of attraction to affirm them away.

You can temporarily but when there's trauma involved,

Let me preface this with trauma,

When there's deep trauma or C PTSD,

Complex post-traumatic stress disorder,

You're really sort of kind of putting a temporary band-aid on it and you're not going deep enough to really heal the trauma so there's like a step that has to go backwards.

It's almost like you have to what I call like in my practice and with my clients,

You have to like complete the stress cycle in your body and then do the affirmations because you can affirm it away,

Affirm it away and then really what's happening is your brain is saying I don't believe you and I have this trauma that you haven't dealt with and I feel worse because I'm not getting any better and I'm affirming it away daily and everybody says I should feel better and I want to still stay in bed so there's this miscommunication there and so much that is not shared beyond that and so I'm going to get into some of that and and we'll get into more of that so you can understand that it's not your fault if you're trying to do affirmations,

If you've done everything,

If you've read every book,

If you've had counseling for two three years,

If you've you know tried everything and you're still feeling like stuck or that feeling like it's it's kind of like this low level of depression that women are smiling through and they're faking it and they don't feel good so I just want to share that that's that's not your fault so let me go on to the next slide so just a little bit about me when I was seven my parents divorced and it was very traumatic and my whole world was upside down and I was told I was going to go into foster home I may never see my siblings again and it was then that I vowed that I was going to read every book and bring my parents back together so that was a huge responsibility for a seven-year-old and I think the first book that I read was if life is a bowl of cherries why am I in the pits and I thought this is going to help me and I'm going to feel better and it was written by a counselor and a psychologist and I'm like I only feel worse I don't feel better and this is a psychologist teaching this and I'm like this is not working so I went on a journey to learn about human nature and study everything I could I think I read every single book out there you name it I've probably read it or studied it and so this has been you know over 25 plus 30 years in the making of just learning going to school and and of course you know that big responsibility on me my parents didn't get back together they stayed divorced for a long time well eventually they did but that was more of a whole nother story which I won't go down that that path but but I I really wanted to understand the human psyche and why do people fight why do they why is it you know why why aren't we loving each other so this journey kind of started when I was a little girl and how I came to trauma work is I I was teaching suicidal students in a college and nobody was helping them and they would sit and I'd see one start to tap after I was telling her she's failing and I'm like instantly I knew that was trauma and so I decided to go four years ago and start getting my counseling degree in addition to that my undergrad my counseling I'm going to be applying for my PhD because I want this information to get out there I devoured every self-help book invested a ton of money in my training and I really learned a lot and and at the end of my semester with these students that were on safety plans who had trauma and everybody my peers told me you should be failing these students and I'm like they just need someone who cares and I spent a year with them and at the end of it they were healing they were overcoming their traumas they were some of my best students and I was so blessed I didn't even expect it but I was winning mission impossible awards at the college and I'm like I need to get this out there I need to go to school and I need to help people because so many people are forgotten so today I want to show you how to break free from emotional pain and subconscious blocks so you can finally achieve success in love life and business without endless self-help books that you're reading that don't work endless years of therapy that don't work or hustling for your love hustling for money and it just never feels enough like it's it's a hustle in life right we're always feeling like we're hustling and the biggest thing for me was I was stuck for a long time and I believed a lot of the limiting beliefs and I didn't know until I went through school and until I did the work myself and really diving into what it was that made me meet my childhood schemas which were my childhood limiting beliefs I started to look at everything and I learned that I was like doing it all wrong and beating myself up over it and the biggest change which I didn't believe what was going to come but it did it did and now I'm living my dream life and I I remember four years ago where I'm like am I ever going to come out of this am I ever going to come out of this and now looking back I'm like I did it I did it I somehow did this so I'm speaking to personal experience as well this is not just fluff information out there so it's it's real if you feel like you're here today and you have suffered trauma and you're hurting and you're in pain and you have that low level depression or high level depression anxiety you can't get out of bed or some days you're just this is overwhelming and you're smiling through it I'm telling you you can heal it so let me go on to the next slide really quick let's talk about what trauma is I'm not going to you know I'm not going to go in massively deep on trauma because we don't have a lot of time because this is an intro to trauma but trauma is not just the painful event itself it's usually around a painful event it's the lasting impact it leaves on your mind body and nervous system and the big thing that I want you to really understand about this is that it's the nervous system so your nervous system is everything and I like to use the analogy that you and I and here is a really big if you can really grasp this concept this is one of the secrets I'm teaching that you already know but you forget your body is more than like a trillion dollar trillions trillions and trillions trillion dollar beautiful machine and you can do so much more with it that you don't even realize and you have your brain because I study a lot of neurology and I teach on neurology your brain and your heart when you're in like alignment and centered and when you do this work you are unstoppable and we forget that as women because we buy into the lies and we don't have the self-compassion because we don't understand that it's not our fault it's not our fault that our brain our prefrontal cortex is shut down from trauma that's why sometimes when you try to speak about something that happened or you speak to speak about the loved one that harmed you or betrayed you your prefrontal cortex shuts down so while while you can't speak about it because it's hard to speak about you can't recall it because your brain goes into survival mode so it is really hard to talk about it so that's one thing that that women don't know your brain takes over so a lot of what you're going through is not your fault so trauma as we know affects everything complex trauma can affect your past your present and your future so that's where it's difficult where you think about one thing today and it it brings us a overwhelming feeling and it affects all your past memories as well so that's another thing that can happen so when something overwhelming happens like abuse a betrayal a loss neglect or sudden change your system is just overloaded and it struggles to process what happened instead of fully resolving the stress response that got stuck in your body and it leaves behind patterns and they're really deep they're deep grooves in in your body and again I'm going to reiterate so much that it's not your fault it's not your fault the trauma that happened to you it's not your fault the way your body's reacting to it it's a safety mechanism so in many in many forms your body is protecting you and so you kind of get stuck though you shouldn't be in it too long you can be stuck in hypervigilant emotional numbness you can have you know days where you can't get out of bed you can have and I'm just going to say it you know suicidal ideation it's a mental health crisis because people do not know how to deal with their trauma and again you know smiling through it so a little bit more about trauma it is very very very personal so when I work with people it's not like a one-size-fits-all so that's the other thing they see out there oh buy this do that do that join my you know mindset course and you know you're going to make millions or you're going to overcome your you know no it doesn't work like that the biggest thing I'm going to tell you and you probably don't want to hear this is it takes a lot of time it takes time attention commitment and you got to do the work so if you're somebody that does want to heal trauma and like dive in and get in the trenches and like get in there and heal that it is not it is not a one-size-fits-all it's a very personal journey kind of like your blood work so like I'll give an example like if I'm working with somebody we do like a doctor takes your blood work I look at all kinds of assessments and then we come up with like a plan so if you are working with somebody or multiple people I would be happy to give you pointers for the people that you work with like your therapist because a lot of the therapists that I work with and coach and talk with don't understand this themselves and so they're just doing psychotherapy and for trauma work it will help a little because you're talking about it but you need to dive in a little deeper psychotherapy just isn't enough talk therapy isn't enough so it's very personal you need like a blueprint of what your trauma is so you can see oh okay this modality this method EMDR would be great I should couple that with DBT which is or cognitive behavior therapy I need to do some somatic releases so it's kind of like it's very personalized and so you need a prescription for your trauma that's personalized as well and that takes someone who knows what they're doing it lives in the body trauma can show up as a lot of different things anxiety depression chronic stress physical tension health issues is huge women you know we suffer from heart attacks a lot we suffer from cancers you name it a lot of that is huge correlation to unheal trauma and your body changes when you heal your physical appearance I know when I healed myself I just I looked younger I looked like more vivacious I smile more I mean the world is just lit up and I'm lit up but I'm lighting it up from the inside whereas before I wasn't so it's it gets stuck a big thing with trauma is safety safety is everything so many people who have suffered multiple traumas they don't feel safe and so it shows up as overly protective of themselves hyper vigilant fear-based everything is fear-based which blocks everything so that's another part of the blocks is this fear-based thinking because the fear and the anger and the rage all of that those are incredibly beautiful emotions anger there is absolutely nothing wrong with it until it is misguided misused and stuffed so in our culture we stuff it we're taught to push it down push it down and watch your body one thing I want you to do today after you after we leave is feel in your body what happens when you're anger it when you're feeling angry are you stuffing it are you like staying in it to feel the anger we're taught to stuff it so safety is huge you need to learn how to be in a safe place safe in your nervous system safe physically and safe mentally and that that's work it can heal trauma can heal with the right support and the coping tools and safe processing here's the key safe processing you don't just go right into trauma okay so if you're working with a practitioner or a clinician or a counselor again I can help you with that to to give them new tips to give to them I would not overwrite their program because they I'm not saying they don't know what they're doing I'm just saying if you're not with a trauma-informed counselor or someone that you're working with you might have just a few tools in your toolbox to say to them hey you know can we stabilize first so one thing I do is before we even do trauma work there's three or four series of just getting stabilized because you can't do the trauma healing until you're stabilized because you're just you're just spinning your wheels so stabilization is is number one if you're going to try to go the path of trying to heal it so that's really important okay so just a really quick I'm going to try to watch the time here because it's already 125 language and communication blocks are a big one of trauma so like blocks like the prefrontal cortex literally cannot process and so you remain blocked so people are like I don't understand there's just like this block I just I've been trying for years to like overcome this and I I just don't know what it is and and that's a classic response to trauma because it's like they can't communicate it number one and if they try it's hard and and and when they do they can't pinpoint what the block is but they know personally there is like a block or they're just like stuck not making progress a lot of that is just the brain the brain gets stuck so I do some work with like neurology and neurofeedback and we do see that there are patterns in the brain that are just stuck and they're just cycling through and cycling through and cycling through and you got to get out of that block and it's not complicated it just takes work so the big point here is don't beat yourself up have self-compassion that when something happens to you that is painful or abuse or very traumatic or even just a small trauma there's baby traumas big traumas little traumas it's not your fault the way your brain works so but it is it is a good thing to do to to dive into what it is work with somebody but don't do it alone so really good to know that your brain's kind of protecting you and part of being blocked is a defense mechanism for protection but but here's the thing you should not stay in it long term because the long-term effects of staying in it can turn into chronic can turn into post-traumatic stress disorder so the longer you wait to get help the more detrimental the trauma becomes so waiting for it to go away or waiting for it to heal itself yes the body is very in tune to healing itself and it does but if you're so used to like blocking it stuffing it down you know not coping with it not dealing with it it gets it stays stuck and most people don't have the tools the resources or the means to understand how to do that so I have a little more here and I'm not going to have time to talk about partner betrayal trauma or loved one betrayal trauma but there are in addition to traumas there can be a car accident which is traumatic there can be you know a physical or a sexual assault which is traumatic there can be a robbery which is traumatic there can be multiple things that happen to us and most people have some form of trauma that they've endured in their life if you've lived long enough there's childhood abuse trauma there's all kinds of trauma in my research and I just presented at the Colorado Counseling Association this was my presentation it was on partner betrayal trauma and loved one trauma one of the biggest things with that different type of trauma is that that one is really detrimental because it was someone that you trusted and loved so it's like it could be a mother or a father you know that abused you loved one trauma or partner betrayal trauma it's very intense because it's someone that you trusted and and loved right and they're you know harming you and the effects from that actually change the brain and I have a presentation that I did on this and resources that I'm happy I'm happy to for those of you that attended I'm going to send that out to you it's like a 30 page resource on all of this information that I was teaching at this Colorado Counseling Association that's a big one so a big one to look out for is loved one or a partner betrayal trauma a spouse it doesn't have to be infidelity it could be you know they just ignored you your whole marriage or they they left you abandon you you know it's a multitude of complex trauma that happens but the reality is the pain of that is it's more detrimental because it was somebody that you loved and trusted and put your life into and it has lasting effects and I have some statistics I'll try to share with you if we have time but I'll send the resources out with the statistics and it's just staggering to see if this is you if this is your profile what it's done to your brain because it changed it changes the brain in essence and that's what my presentation was about and I was trying to get it out to people at this the counseling conference for counselors get this information out there to say if you're working with women who have suffered from loved one or partner betrayal trauma make sure that you understand that this is a different type of type of trauma this is a trauma that has changed their brain and and they it's going to take a lot of time and work and understanding to work that through and help them understand that it's not their fault their brain is is going through this change and their their brain has been changed now again I'm not I don't want to say that for everybody you know I don't want people saying well it's not everybody it does that and that's true your temperament your disposition you know the way you were raised there's multiple variables that affect that some people are like yeah he betrayed me no big deal that can happen too but if you're one of the people where it really affected you and you got trauma you you may have PTSD from it and in our diagnostic manual a lot of people will say well unless you've witnessed a murder or you you you know were threatened to be harmed or killed you know you don't have PTSD and that's not true that's another fallacy out there it is PTSD and they're starting to recognize that in the counseling community for couples because when somebody is counseling a couple who's going through this and it's actively happening but the couple's still together they need to understand that either the woman or the man because both can experience this are are going through PTSD most likely okay so that's really important to know um so um obviously you all are here for a reason you want to learn about trauma and I just want to ask the questions you know I rhetorically um think to yourself you know are you feeling like you're too broken to ever heal again or to ever feel normal again like that's a scary thought when you go through trauma you're carrying shame and guilt for things that were never your fault and you think they're your fault and you have a lot of shame and guilt you know living with constant self-doubt always second-guessing yourself no confidence no belief in the world again some people say does God even love me have I been forgotten you know feeling unworthy of love success or even happiness like you'll never feel happy again you know one thing I hear a lot is I I hate waking up in the morning the minute I open my eyes it's this wave of sorrow and shame and guilt and depression and it's like oh waking up is hard is waking up hard you know are you smiling on the outside but you feel so sad alone and empty on the inside and like nothing has worked that's kind of like some of some deeper things that you should take a look at it if you feel that um a big one is you know just just this low-level depression and smiling through it that I hear from women a lot oh and it's good to take a look at that to heal it so what do you do you know what do you do where you talk about trauma or you go to these events you know people have shared like you know I've done this and I know I have trauma and I learned about it but nobody tells me what to do you know and it isn't again it's not a one size fits all type thing so you know here's a secret listen to your emotions and and this is not just oh I'm feeling crappy today you know if you're experiencing rage anger sadness these are little messengers they're saying hey I'm here we need to do something something different than what we've been doing you need to do something your anger is there as a messenger it's not there it's not a bad thing it's only a bad thing when you go and harm somebody or you ignore it so listen to your emotions and that really means when you're going through a two-year-old temper tantrum that feels like you're raging I call them a two-year-old temper tantrum when they just they're so angry and they want to you know when you're going through a tantrum stop and listen to that little voice that little I like to tell my clients to stop and listen to that little girl inside that's screaming at you and saying I'm in pain I'm in pain I'm in pain and you're ignoring me I'm in pain like listen to her and say what is it you need little girl hold her ask her what do you need are you thinking of this event that happened and you're bringing this into the current event you just want to be seen heard and loved okay listen to your emotions but that means stopping listening trying to understand the underlying message that your body's trying to tell you I like to use a little girl that's scared alone and afraid and try to close your eyes and really listen to what she's saying and then journal it um when ignored or masked with affirmations alone like I talked about this earlier you can't affirm this stuff away no matter how many times you try you can for a little while and you feel good for 20 minutes or an hour but eventually it will kind of creep back in until it's dealt with so until you work through that stress cycle so that means you got to get it out of your body one thing is somatic release you know hitting a getting a padded bat and hitting a big block over and over as you're recalling that event and you you really physically feel in your body chemicals coming up and coming out like your body gets warm or your stomach starts to hurt and as you're hitting you're you're like letting it run through the body and completing what I call the stress cycle you got to do that and then at the end you'll feel like oh I am so tired I feel run down I feel um exhausted and then you sleep because your body's like releasing that there's a class that I'm teaching which if you guys are interested you're welcome to join it's on somatic releasing and one thing I talk about is the polar bear thing where polar bears they shake like violently after they've been hit with something like a tranquilizer gun because that's not normal for them that's a very traumatic release a truck there's a that's a very traumatic event for them so after they're hit with that when they wake up or immediately after they're hit there's a moment where their body goes into shock and they shake violently and they're releasing trauma so animals know how to do this instinctually but we our bodies will release trauma but we we stifle it and stuff and so then it gets trapped so um another thing is to just shake your body like shake shake shake shake shake when you're raging shake shake shake when you're angry shake it out feel it but let your body shake because it gives it a physical release like the polar bear so um healing begins when you allow yourself to like listen and acknowledge those emotions then release them from your body kind of what I talked about so that's like those are a couple little intro techniques um but be careful don't be pulling up heavy stuff unless you're in a safe place a safe environment please do it with someone where you're in a community or you're with someone you can trust because you can re-traumatize yourself so it's not that you just go into your trauma and you start releasing it again stabilize stabilize first then work with somebody a group you know uh your counselor a psychiatrist a psychologist somebody who who is trauma-informed so um another secret to to safe rage release because a lot of rage is like underlying grief like you just had a massive loss or there's so many it's multi-layered but rage is anger but it's deeper anger and and a lot of underlying stuff is grief that was never dealt with so like there was a loss that you encountered and you didn't process it or you disassociated from it and that grief still wants to be processed and if you wait again part of the reason why you do not want to wait is it gets worse so you if you don't go through the grief cycle it turns into something else um and so find a safe place to release your stored anger scream in your car hit a pillow shake your body like i talked about um allow trembling and shaking or tears tears release and endorphins tears are so important if you cry and you cry and you cry and you keep crying and you've cried for a year and you're like i don't think i'm ever going to stop crying i can fill buckets with my tears that's okay let your body that's how your body is releasing traumas pain grief all the emotions that you don't know how to express your body will help you like i said you have a trillion dollar plus it's way more than a trillion dollars machine that you at your disposal all you got to do is use it and and you can come come through this come out of it and come out better um so trembling is big i dancing and shaking and you know that that just like moving moving your body exercise is huge okay a lot of people don't like to exercise but exercise is a slow consistent way to also slowly like release pent-up emotions um and traumas too you'll discover that the rage isn't you it's something you took on so with release clarity and calm calm will follow um one big thing here's another little thing that you can do is if somebody really upsets you and makes you angry if you can one thing i like to do that's really um a great technique is like a kind of on the basis of narrative therapy you can take that event so let's say somebody says something to you and it's really triggering you can take that event and you're not ignoring it you journal what happened you journal the emotions coming up you journal what they said and then you feel the emotions like i told you so feel it feel it in your body feel what you're feeling feel what it's connected to because it's connected to a previous event a previous trauma you may not know but if you can connect it to where it came from that's where the childhood schema work works really well because you have limiting beliefs that you don't even know you're carrying some people know some people don't the majority of people i work with don't don't know they're like oh i didn't even know i i thought that way and now i know after doing the childhood schema assessment so if you can link it to something that happened to you so let's say you were abandoned and almost put in a foster home and every time your man doesn't come home until nine o'clock at night your husband you're you're reliving this i mean he's gonna abandon me he's gonna abandon me you may not understand that was linked to the threat of you being in put in a foster home and so maybe you do maybe maybe you're well versed in this this is this is an intricate world but but if you don't you keep reliving that pattern and then sabotaging every relationship you're into and what you don't what you don't also know that happens is you go into the same repeated relationships over and over and over and over again and women are like why do i keep picking these men that treat me horribly i just i don't understand i don't understand why do i stay in this relationship what it's all those patterns that were never worked through so really important i was going to say the narrative therapy when something happens to and i've got 15 minutes left so i'm going to talk fast to um reframe it and picture that person saying something that you wanted them to say to you and then feel the emotions this is powerful feel the emotions of what that would feel like and right away it's like a a stabilization technique so that's one way to do it and and and if you want more about this you're welcome to reach out to me and we can talk more um so the goal is to use all these techniques to get healed right to live your dream life we're here on this earth to love and love each other so what i what i'm passionate about is helping women overcome their trauma helping women learn about their trauma and helping women so they can live their dream life whatever that is to be financially stable to be in a dream relationship to go down the street and have women walk up to you and say oh my god you're so beautiful i want to look like you like that can happen and i i remember when i went through some stuff in the past i was like i never thought it could happen to me and it happens it's happening um i'm going to go through this really quick so secret three movement and integration is another technique a lot of techniques you can do you release your physical traumas through movement running jumping tensing releasing tensing releasing um somatic somatic healing is really huge but you got to do it the right way um this completes the stress cycle again completing the stress cycle and you may have 10 things that need the completion of the stress cycle um but it will leave you calmer and clearer and and it's like baby steps like it takes a while like six months to a year for some complex trauma to kind of work through you can do it a lot sooner but i like to give people like a realistic goal um so so give yourself a lot of grace affirmations and self-truth self-truths that's a tongue twister land more deeply after the body has let go so another reason why you don't want to wait to do this work is once you start doing it then you can affirm then you can have more self-truth and then you're living your best life right your affirmations are great but you got to do pre-work before you affirm i mean you can still do affirmations but it's kind of again like temporary um you know so my suggestion is do the work and then do your affirmations or affirm while you're doing the work so really what you can do is learn to release stuck trauma so you finally feel whole grounded and in control the ultimate goal is being happy living your best life running around and and i literally i'm living it like i jump up and down every day and say thank you god i feel more blessed than i've ever felt i'm living my dream life i'm happy and and i've had multiple traumas and i worked them through i've done the work um and i've been in a place where i didn't feel like i could but the longer you carry the belief that broken feeling the more it steals years of your peace and joy that could be yours now like it's it's not it's not complicated it's just you got to get with the right people

Reviews

Finally
Yes, affirmations are wonderful
But not always what you need.
TY