10 Steps To Heal Childhood Trauma

meditation mindfulness neurofeedback emdr body work things like yoga all of those are an integral and essential part of healing childhood trauma and they're very effective but today i'm going to share with you a 10-step process that is essential you must do this work to completely heal your childhood trauma now i say that because what is trauma it's an emotional event well the process is part of my the emotional mastery method that i've developed because we must shift where we are emotionally in part because modern neuroscience now shows we become what we feel not what we think i'm gonna say it again we become what we feel and not what we think i know that goes against everything you've learned everything most the information that is out there unless you're a junkie like me and you're you're always looking for what the newest information is there's still most processes are teaching you to deal with your thoughts well every thought originates from an emotion so to help you update your information get you into the present day as to how all of this works and what science is discovering i'm going to offer you two books to check out the first one is by ian mcgillcrest it's called the master and it's emissary if you're a junkie who likes scientific proof and studies this is for you he's gone through the last 20 or 40 years of neuroscience compiled all the studies and you know delivered the summation of what all those studies show now for those of you who are unsure about this emotion thing while mcgill chris touches on that as well lisa feldman barrett is the expert in that she is currently in the top one percent of all scientists cited for their work in any discipline all across the world that's how profound her work on emotions has been now when you read how emotions are made you're going to see that we become our childhood we become the emotions we experience in childhood and they just carry through with us now this is important for a couple of reasons because of how trauma works most people think trauma is just the big stuff like you know severe you know emotional and physical experiences it's not it's also what many people would call little trauma i personally don't i define trauma as any life experience that creates a negative emotional event and now when you read lisa feldman's spirit book you'll see why i've picked that definition because each emotional experience creates a massive chemical reaction in our body where brain and body becomes addicted to it we repeat it the rest of our life and that's why it's essential we need a 10-step emotional process to heal our childhood trauma the other modalities while they're great there's a gap in their process it doesn't touch this and that's why we need to include it okay so there's kind of there's ten steps to it but kind of a bonus step and the first one is we need the prelim work to all of this is we need to discover what i call and have discovered something called the worst day cycle again this is based on all my research on emotions and how they work how all of us live our lives is stuck in this worst day cycle and it shows how our childhood trauma the little traumas the big trunk any emotional event is still running our adult life we are still all of us are still stuck in our childhood trauma now i've i'm created two free options for you to help you with this one you can find on my website www.kennyweiss.net if you go to the resources section you'll see i have several downloads one of them is called how to heal from codependence giving the pain back that's it the outline of the 10 steps and so you don't need to take notes it's all there for you just go and download it everything you need is right there okay now the other thing i created was because this emotional mastery process is so essential to you healing all trauma in your life i give away the first master class in of all my master classes it's called your journey to emotional mastery in there you'll get the feelings wheel you get everything you need to do the first three steps of of the trauma work the healing work that i'm about to lay out for you now at the end of this video i'm going to give you for those that want the full process want to go all the way i have two more options for you i'll talk about those at the end of this video but let's get into the process step number one we need to get a feelings wheel and we need to track our feelings now that's in the free master class that can be found at www.thegreatnessu.com all right so you're going to get that feelings wheel you're going to print it off and you're going to keep it with you and i suggest you for the it it's a 30 day process but you're going to want to track your feelings one to five times a day obviously the more the better and what you're going to do is you're going to look at that feelings wheel and ask yourself what am i feeling now for most of you you're going to start off on the inner circle very simple feelings good bad things like that as you gain emotional mastery and emotional granularity is as dr feldman calls it you're going to get to the outer circle you're going to get more specific and in tune with your emotions and this is critical because this will help you identify all of us don't have one worst day cycle like one traumatic event we have countless countless events and i'm gonna prove that to you in these first three steps so you track your feelings uh for 30 days but just do it for a couple of days and the way you do it is you ask yourself what am i feeling start with that after a couple of days of doing that and getting used to discovering what you're feeling step number two is ask yourself where in my body do i feel this now you're gonna see certain feelings reside in different parts of your body this is why bodywork like yoga is helpful because we store trauma in our body and so it's helping us identify this is also where illness and disease come from it stores in our body the cells break down and and so we're improving our health by learning this okay so once we've done those first two steps we're gonna ask ourselves what's my first memory of having this feeling now for most people especially if you're new into the trauma healing aspect you're going to have a memory of this feeling say it was sadness somewhere in the last one to five years maybe it was a divorce maybe you lost a job a fight with a friend something like that that's great write it down now ask yourself what's my next memory maybe you know somewhere in the previous five years something will pop up keep going through that process categorizing you know that same feeling and this is what's going to bring you into reality that even those moments when your perfectly imperfect parents just rolled their eyes at six years old now you know why you get so frustrated when somebody doesn't return a text message you're reliving that trauma from childhood what you thought didn't matter what you thought was innocuous and just silly stuff and and none of it has an effect on you all of these events and this is what lisa feldman's book and everything shows we learn emotions in childhood and they get brought forward that's why studies show 98 of our adult life we're not present i know we all think we're making decisions in this moment we're acting out of all the information in the moment but that's not even how our brain works our brain takes in information and it categorizes and makes predictions and assumptions all based on our past experience what that means is we're categorizing it based on what we know it doesn't mean we're seeing it accurately it means our brain goes oh i know this it must be this my prediction is this is what's going on and so what is that prediction based on it's based on our previous life events what our emotions were experiencing as an adult they're all back in childhood every single one you now you can see why i say every single person on this planet is in their worst day cycle we're just reliving the pain from the past our childhood trauma big trauma little trauma all of it that's all we are basically and i'll try to say this politely but we're just one big trauma being that's it okay but do you see the value in tracking your feelings you know what are they where my body what's my first memory and tracking it down now you can see you have proof you're in reality that it's actually your feelings driving your life not your thoughts that you're repeating the exact same trauma that you never healed in childhood and that's why mindfulness doesn't teach you this neural feedback doesn't teach you this although neural feed like i i've done all of these modalities so please do not hear me as disparaging them they are all part of the process we need the skills that they teach us but they don't provide us this and that's why it's so essential yoga and none of them get to the root cause which is an emotional experience they help us lighten that emotional reaction or mood or things like that they calm the brain down they have tremendous benefits but they don't deal with the direct subconscious implementation of emotional experiences in our brain and that's why i've developed this emotional mastery method because we need this skill all right so now you see how your childhood is running your life how you're reliving your childhood trauma exactly what you need to work on and need to heal and the obvious next question is okay great kenny well what do i do about it now how do i heal it well let's move into you know the next six day steps which will give you the begins you know give you that healing process the first step step number four in this 10 step process is to ask yourself what are my mantras now what do i mean by that well think about it when those emotions come up there's something you say to ourselves and so remember thought comes from an emotion so you have an experience and then a thought comes and you've developed this mantra like for me um my dad had to always be right i couldn't argue with him and so when you know we a discussion be happen and i'd want to stand up for myself that feeling would hit me of you know i'm gonna be you know rejected like all of all of those you know discounted ignored um invisible abandoned all those feelings hit and my thought became what's the point it's not going to listen anyway that's my internal mantra see there's a a phrase this is why many people think our thoughts drive us but it started from that emotional event and so we had the emotional event we created a thought to try and navigate it well that thought is the mantra so what is it for you i have clients that you know when they push up against anything that's scary you know one client he's like what that f it's a swear word you know everybody has something it just doesn't matter who cares nobody listens to me all of these different things we say and and again it started from that emotional moment so we need to write down what those mantras are now step five is now that we are in truth we have stopped suppressing we have stopped repressing we've stopped condoning and minimizing our big and little trauma from childhood we have to do what we never did grieve we because in those moments especially as a child we were in survival mode we were quickly making calculations of wait this doesn't work mom dad ignore me all these different things i can't be sad about that because what i mean after all boys don't cry don't be a tattletale think of all the mantra messages we were sent that it's not okay to be sad toughen up come on now don't i want to make sure i'm clear on this i'm not belittling parents i'm not advocating you know this everyone gets a trophy model is parenting that's not what any of this is it's just a natural outcome like parents need to set boundaries they need to say no they need to do all these things that's all healthy what i am describing is most of us haven't been taught how to put those boundaries in place for a child in a way that doesn't shame them and therefore that's what creates this trauma it's a lack of information it's a lack of of knowledge we've never taught how to be an effective parent without using shame and that's what creates these injurious moments and the inability to navigate them and then our parents grew up in an era where you just didn't talk about emotions in previous like no one's ever we as a society and this is part of how emotions get made society is is an integral part society has sent the message emotions are bad thought matters i'm all intellect i don't let my emotions take me over well as we now know the best intellect comes from the deepest the person who's most deeply connected emotionally it comes from an emotional place not intellect is not separate intellect as you'll discover by reading those books intellect is built on top of emotion not the other way around it is an intellect that that deals with emotion it's emotion that creates the intellect so the weaker we are emotionally the more defective or dysfunctional or the more we'll struggle intellectually okay so we have to grieve all the pain we never got to grieve and this means setting time aside to cry and i know for a lot of men that's just not easy and those messages from childhood those mantras are very strong and even for many women nowadays women are being told they have to be men they can't cry we're taking away that empathy from women and demanding that they shut down just like men have been so this is a difficult process for both sides crying was obviously is an incredibly therapeutic process and we need to stop the shame about you know experiencing that i know for me when i was going through this process i scheduled it every day i would come home and i'd schedule 30 minutes to deal with the pain from the past i'd pull up these memories i'd work through this process and i'd grieve it and i'd whale for about 30 minutes i learned that's as long as i can go because at a certain point i would turn into victimhood and um help learn to helplessness i'd collapse and so i'd give myself 30 minutes to deal with the pain and then i put it on the shelf and go back to life you're going to have to find what that time limit is for you as well all right step number six is empathy and this is a dual empathy it's not only empathy for ourselves it's empathy for our parents caregivers teachers coaches brothers sisters whatever events that you discover that are keeping your worst day cycle going and your childhood trauma going it's all these different events with people it's cultural events it's personal events and the first thing is to recognize all of us in these situations did the best we could as i said as a society we've never taught emotional mastery we've never taught that it's okay to deal with emotions so every person is just doing the best they can you cannot be blamed for doing something you weren't even aware of like all the people who you know downplay emotions and say intellect is better they didn't know that they're wrong that the best way to be intellectual and the best way to succeed is to have emotional mastery the answer is in the opposite well they're not to blame for that the best information at the time told them this they're just operating from that that isn't something to shame them about and it's the same for you you did the best you could as a child your parents in most cases it's my personal belief that almost all parents love and adore their child the ones that don't the ones that don't want the best for their child that's because of how they were treated as a child it's that is not an innate characteristic unless you're born with a defect it is our innate position and and temperament to love and take care of others but if we don't do that it's because of childhood trauma in almost all cases and so that's the empathy that we have is we did the best we could with where we were at the time no one ever taught us so neither our parents or caregivers or whoever it was or even the culture that taught us these false messages are to blame everyone's doing the best they can with the information that they have at the time all right step seven while it's great to have empathy empathy can look just like trauma and just like being a victim it's it's getting i've got to be nice to you again what about me well that's why step seven we have to hold them accountable and how do we do that well now we get into remember trauma gets stored in the body it's a physical experience the chemical reaction that happens that's why yoga and body modalities have to be a part of our recovery journey because we need to release and change those chemicals and so to hold them accountable we're going to do a physical there are a couple physical processes this is the first and this is wherever it is you store that emotional trauma in your body i want you to reach in as though you're just grabbing that pain and that trauma those words the mantras the actions the look in their eyes the pain you felt in that moment the shame they dumped in you whatever it was grab it pull it out and give it back to him what i learned to say was that and and here's the key it has to be coupled with empathy for both and what i would always say is dad i love you i'm really sad that the world didn't know this and your parents didn't know this my dad was beat to death as a kid that used to be normal parenting and you'll still hear people you know i watch tv shows and people are talking about getting whipped with a hose and they're like yeah but my parents weren't abusive they were just teaching me a lesson there's the minimization and condoning of abuse and so that was a normal thing my dad didn't finish his dinner he was taken outside and beaten with a belt that's what they did so that leaves a child horrifically shamed and damaged well my dad didn't know you could heal that the culture didn't teach him that so i pull it on like that i'm so sad that the world and your parents did this to you but i'm not carrying this for you anymore this is your responsibility now i didn't say this to him personally this is a in a sense a individual even spiritual act that we do of extracting the pain and going no more no i'm done this is yours i refuse to carry it anymore i talk about a confrontation i had with my father where i did it directly to his face where i gave him his pain back i held him accountable but that's i won't get into that right now but it's essential that we take the pain out of us now this is a lifelong process i go for walks and i get what i call shame burps where i get a flashback memory an emotion right my body tenses because i remember something where i acted inappropriately or bad choices and consequences from my life and i'm like oh but i recognize all of those choices and all of that was learned behavior it's what we do that's what you'll learn about the worst day cycle is because of the trauma we go through in childhood we then as adults choose to do it to ourselves i know that doesn't seem right but if you choose to invest in learning about the worst day cycle you'll learn how that works now if you want to learn about it that's another thing on my website www.kennyweiss.net i have a five part series where i give away not the full process that's in my book but five articles and uh there's even a special menu item says worst day cycle you can start learning how the worst day cycle works i'll be honest with you it's tough to digest because it places it definitively shows us how to get into truth and take personal responsibility and that's a tough process because our culture which helps create emotions has placed that responsibility on others you can't talk to me this way like everyone else is to blame and none of that's true lisa feldman barrett's book proves that it's the opposite okay so we give that pain back to them mom dad i won't carry this for you whenever it comes up in our life we give it back to him now we move into the next physical act of removing and healing the childhood trauma and this is anger work the first step in this is to write a letter this isn't something you mail in some cases it might be a good idea i would suggest you work with a professional like myself and get insight as to whether it's appropriate to send this letter off but barring that my suggestion is that you start with all of these different events and the key here isn't to get bogged down in the details of the story just the basics of what happened but the key is the emotion keep that feelings wheel with you and then talk about the hurt and damage that you experienced as a result of their perfect imperfections and their choices and the effect it had on you and here's the key really rage rage about it and for me i found the best way for me to rage is to swear you blankety blank selfish blah blah you didn't care you like i just like the mo the things you would never say and you'd feel tremendous guilt if they ever knew you even thought or felt this stuff that's the point right there that guilt we feel over thinking and feeling this way about our parents that's the result of the childhood trauma placed into us right there we are making the choice that i will die in the subservience of your emotions your mood as long as you're okay i will sacrifice myself so if anyone feels any anyone listening feels any sense of hesitation or guilt or fear about writing or thinking even feeling this way about your parents that is a definitive sign you went through massive childhood trauma your reality was so stripped and reconstructed that your existence is about keeping them happy now culture does that too you know um spirituality is all about you know mother and father are never wrong which that's that's not helpful they're human we all make mistakes and so there are a lot of messages that keep this shame alive and that's what we're dealing with there's another really important point to this anger work is do you see what happened as a child because we were so young and defenseless and because our survival depended on our caregivers we couldn't fight back we couldn't defend ourselves and ultimately what is anger stop no it's defense it's the person who comes to do us physical emotional i can't say the word or the the services will ban me but sex harm um this is our defense but see as a child we weren't allowed to defend ourselves and this is why anger work is so important we need to learn how to defend ourselves we we've learned to suppress that and this is a leading cause if you look at stress and illness and disease the leading cause in almost every illness and disease is the inability to say no it's the stuffing that we learned as a child and we've continued through the worst day cycle all of our life and it just we literally eat ourselves from the inside out that's how cancer works especially okay so it's critical that we learn to express this anger now a second way to get physical with it is find a punching bag punch your steering wheel i used to take a golf club to my bed some people take a baseball bat obviously not a person but find an appropriate way to release the anger and the rage some of my clients i've suggested they go to a rage house those can be fun taking the baseball bat to windows and plates and just let it bring that letter with you and just let it rip but again we need to rid the body of these feelings all right step number nine now we get into the reclaiming of the authentic self what was there what was born into us before the big and little traumas happen to us that you know the trauma robs us of who we are we're all adapting because of the trauma we're creating all these different mechanisms and personas that's what you learn in the worst day cycle and all of these things that we develop but it's not who we authentically are well the last two steps bring us towards that and begin that process and step nine i call the fetalization step and this what we're doing is we're working on the subconscious part of our brain to replace the emotional pain from the past we're also creating new neural pathways see when you fire an emotion long enough actually when you do anything repeatedly it creates a neural pathway all right so think of it this way think of a hill that just had three feet of powder overnight snow fall on it and you decide to go sledding and you walk up the hill and you get to the top and you decide to slide down all right you do that two or three times by the third time the snow is pressed down right and your pathway you step in the same spots well isn't that you see how that's just like the worst day cycle and so you go down that and this is why thought won't work nothing ever works because you've created a neural pathway that you're stuck in and so you're trying to steer that sled out it won't because now you're in walls well that's a neural pathway it's just been repeated over and over and what happens is is it develops something called myelin well when we repeat behaviors this is this insulative wrap that wraps around a circuit when we do something over and over it insulates it so it wires faster it or it operates faster better like tiger woods great athletes michael jordan they have fired a circuit so many times and there's so much myelin wrapped around it that they rarely miss that's the difference between them and luke longley if you know who he was but he doesn't have as much myelin on those circuits all right and so that's what we have to create you know the the the first eight steps in this process you're learning about the cycle and how you've created this neural pathway and this loop of how you're replaying your thoughts feelings and actions your childhood trauma in every area of your life your romantic decisions your business decisions everything all right well now that we've become aware of it we're gaining emotional mastery through tracking our feelings and all of that now we're creating new steps up the hill do you see that and so now that we've released some of that we get to the top of the hill and we're going to take a couple steps to the left and we're going to create a new neural pathway one that works for us not against us all right so how do we do that well that's a feeling process not a thinking process so what i did there were several things i did one i used to just sit and smile and like in many of my videos i look at i'm like god i look like a serial killer because i talk about this and i'm smiling all the time well that's because i learned smiling is one of the greatest ways to shift the way you feel and so even when i felt terrible i used to sit and watch tv and i just sit there smiling i remember i was doing neurofeedback and the technician he's like you sure smile a lot and i was like and i told him what i was working on you know i when i'm driving in the car i just sit i just smile i'm creating a new emotional chemical addiction inside my brain and body i would also ask myself what would it feel like if i never felt this sadness depression anger um being invisible abandoned whatever the hurt was if you were to take that thought and feeling away and i never experienced what would be left over well i'd feel light that's what most my clients say light like it's this unburdening of weight that they've been carrying all their life that's the emotional experience light powerful safe strong at ease calm confident like even just telling you about this process have you noticed like my whole body position move back because i'm always nervous when i do these things it's really awkward to talk to a lens not a person um and so just by describing a smile do you see i've leaned back my voice my tone is much deeper it's much slower it's more confident calm like that's the neural pathway man i just have to talk about it and i slide right into it i would sit i used i created vision boards not in the way most people think of vision boards of getting something but in vision boards of who do i want to become how do i want to experience life and so like i put pictures of vacation spots that i liked now what most people do and you'll learn this in in the free classes um they look at the picture as as though they're outside of it the key to a feeling is to put yourself inside the picture and so i remember there's this one with a couch and it's all glass doors that are open and the ocean's here and there are palm trees and you can see by the palm trees they're leaning because the wind off the ocean and so looking at the picture you see the back of the couch the fireplace and all of that well i would sit at my desk chair as though i was in the couch and i'd close my eyes and i'd feel what would it feel like to be sitting on that couch how would those cushions feel oh and then like just like this see i'm moving back as i'm in the couch crossing my leg and turning towards that breeze can i smell that ocean water like i'm there i'm creating the new neural pathway you do this with you know uh relationships anything you want in your life we have to create the feeling of who we want to become and who we really are that must be embedded into us and so picture what's the most powerful self-protective loving kind sexy whatever it is you want type of person you want to be what is it now you can use a person place or thing doesn't matter but because many people are hurting and they're like i can't even vision what that would be like then find something like those pictures when i saw them i was like oh that's me like back then i had no money i saw pictures of great suits and i was like oh yeah i want to wear that suit well now i'm wearing suits okay so in other words i i looked at who do i want to be without this pain i created visions around that and then i sat in the feeling and i created the emotional chemical reaction to create a new neural pathway and that's a big piece of me healing my childhood trauma even though i've done neurofeedback it's been brilliant emdr yoga mindfulness meditation i've done it all the most powerful change in me was this all right finally let's move to step number ten self-forgiveness we have to look at the part we played and mostly this isn't the part we played as a child we were defenseless there was nothing we could do but as an adult as if we decide to invest in learning how the worst day cycle works we'll see that yes we did not know this person was a narcissist or whatever it may be but the only reason we didn't know was because we hadn't been educated we hadn't been educated that our brain and body will seek to relive the childhood trauma from the past unless we heal it we are responsible for that we are responsible for gaining the knowledge skills and tools and so ultimately when someone can't forgive somebody else what it really means is they haven't forgiven themselves in part because they haven't learned how well my free class everything i'm offering for you shows you how to do that and this is also a meditative process of learning to love ourselves for being perfectly imperfect and so the new mantra when things pop up remember i talked about the shame birds and i have memories of things what i always say to myself is kenny you did the best you could with where you were at the time if you had known better you would have done better do you see how i'm forgiving myself i'm letting myself off the hook i'm not blaming myself i'm also holding myself responsible i'm saying if i knew better i would have done better i'm not playing the victim i'm not blaming i'm taking ownership of the part i played and then the next step is i'm really proud of you you keep working your tail off and when you run up against something the first thing you do is you go gather knowledge you work on it as a skill and you eventually turn it into a tool and man i'm so proud of you do you see that's the ownership piece the part i played forgiving myself that i just wasn't aware taking ownership that it's my job to become aware that if i didn't know this was going to happen then i need to take responsibility to go learn about it so that i don't repeat it if we're repeating relationships problems in our life it's not the problem the problem is not the problem problem is us we have not made the choice to go become an expert and gain the knowledge skills and tools nothing will change you won't miraculously attract somebody different until you heal yourself and you deal you get into truth and responsibility that we become what we feel not what we think and it's our job to shift that and this is the process to help you now i said to you i had two more options for you for those who really want to dig into this who are ready for the complete process my first suggestion is to pick up my book your journey to success this will walk you through the complete worst day cycle um and you can start gaining the knowledge so you can see how you're repeating this and this is the reason for everything in your life and you'll know where to start now after reading that and you're ready to do the work you're like i'm done i'm done playing the victim i'm done blaming i'm done making excuses i'm ready for responsibility and many to look i if you're not ready for that i don't shame you there are many times in my journey i wasn't ready to do the work either that's okay just get into truth that you're choosing it don't blame it on money as you still have your cable bill and your phone bill and all these other things and you get starbucks once a week there's the the amount of people that watch my stuff that can't afford any of this is so small but they're not willing to sacrifice something to heal well that's okay i get it you'd just rather have tv or whatever it may be over this well i don't know that that's something to be ashamed of but at least get into truth and take responsibility like that's recovery right there just going yeah i could find a way i could create a hustle or something to generate the money but i don't want to well that's recovery right there that's self-forgiveness that's self-compassion because you're taking ownership of the situation but if you're ready for it then my monthly subscription to the complete emotional mastery is the solution for you it's a series of nine master classes which walk you through the full process on how to heal from the worst day cycle and your childhood trauma i'm always adding new content new classes you can cancel anytime it's just 47 a month you can work as fast or as slow as you like it's up to you it's a very detailed process to walk you through healing your childhood trauma so there you go there's your 10 steps along with a lot of bonuses to help you to heal the childhood trauma from your past i hope this helps you and if you think it'll help others please share it with them have a great day

Channel: Kenny Weiss

Views: 22,424

Keywords: kenny weiss, your journey to success, kenny weiss narcissist, tempe life coach, emotional mastery coach, scottsdale life coach, life coach, codependency, kenny weiss youtube, life coaching, npd, mental health awareness, tempe arizona, kenny weiss life coach, trauma informed, codependence, worst day cycle, 10 steps, childhood trauma, 10 steps to heal childhood trauma, heal, heal childhood trauma

Id: VF5-3yyvFZw

Length: 39min 26sec (2366 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 21 2022