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I Tried 6 Therapies to Heal Childhood Trauma — THIS Was the Game Changer · Harder Than Life

• 0:01
  Now at Lowe's, faster quotes start at the Lowe's Pro Desk. Got a material list handwritten on a sticky note or saved us a photo? Perfect. Bring it to us and get a quote in minutes. And if you don't see what you need on the shelf, we'll help you get it. You can access thousands of products beyond what's available in-store or on Lowe's.com, right from the Lowe's Pro Desk. Build quotes faster and source the materials you need to keep your jobs moving. Just like that at Lowe's.
• 0:30
  If you ever thought therapy was for weak people, this episode is specifically for you. You're not broken. You're a system of parts that did their jobs. And some of them don't know that the war is over. What are you white knuckling through right now that you've convinced yourself you don't need help with?
• 0:47
  What would your life look like if you actually dealt with the issues? Healing is not linear. It is layered, and sometimes you go backwards before you go forward. I refuse to let the little boy who survived all of that to keep running a grown man's life. I'm making it cool to heal. I'm making it acceptable to say I needed help, and I went and got it. I'm making it normal for the toughest people in the room to be the ones doing the deepest work.
• 1:16
  Healing is gangster.
• 1:45
  I wandered around for years thinking I had it all figured out. I didn't know a damn thing. And the person who paid the biggest price for that was me. This isn't a highlight reel. This is a full account. Every modality, every layer, every door that opened into something harder and more freeing than the one before. If you ever thought therapy was for weak people,
• 2:13
  This episode is specifically for you. And if you've been white knuckling through life the same way I did, heck the same way I am right now, I need you to hear what's possible and what's in store for you. Welcome to the Heart of Life Podcast. Welcome to the Thursday solo episode, just you and me, where I just bare my soul. I give it to you.
• 2:39
  Down and dirty. Today, we're gonna be breaking down all the healing modalities that I've done. All the dirty, what I've learned. Because if you're not healing, what are you doing? Number one. Number two is, if you are healing and you haven't used one of these modalities, please message me. Because my childhood trauma was tough. You read the book, Heart of the Life. You heard about it, the beatings, the drownings.
• 3:06
  Character assassinations, the never good enough, the starvation. One thing after another. I looked down when I just said that for those of you that are watching on YouTube. So I want to talk about, I can't tell you what I did without going backwards, the breaking point. So I got married to my college sweetheart. And I was armored up. And those of you that really know me.
• 3:37
  you know, that I went to jail. I went to jail for selling drugs and she stayed by me. We were dating and we were only dating for a couple of months and I got sentenced to do a year in jail. And at the time, I didn't know, you know, what was in store for me. So I...
• 3:57
  Worked with her. I said to my girlfriend at the time, I said, hey, listen, I'm going to go away. I don't expect you to wait for me. You can go. She's like, I'll wait. And she came and visited me. I think it was twice a week in jail. It was just disgusting. I got out in four months for overcrowding or whatever the hell it was. I shouldn't have been there. I was just a dumb kid in college trying to fit in.
• 4:23
  And wrong place, wrong time. I did it. No, there's no offense about it. I did it. I was selling drugs. So I'm not trying to sit here and save the victim. But anyways, back to I dated this woman. She was kind. She was attractive. She was smart. And I just wouldn't let her in. I was armored up. Big, tough guy. And all I knew is that I enjoyed being around her. Uh...
• 4:50
  It felt like something I had been missing, that unconditional love. But I knew from the very beginning something was off. I just didn't know what. During the time when we were having troubles, she said, you need to go to therapy. And just at this time, this was mid 2000s, 2000s,
• 5:11
  three, four, five, so to speak. So 20 years ago or so, it wasn't cool to go to therapy. So I didn't know what the heck was off. So I went into this therapist and I hit it. And it's just, at that time, men didn't do it. And I remember walking in, a guy didn't take insurance. He was referred by a friend. He could actually prescribe drugs. So this dude was deep. So I walk into his house, I sit and he just stares at me.
• 5:40
  He doesn't say a word. And this goes on. It's a lot like Good Will Hunting when he met with his final therapist. It was a complete standoff. And then I would finally speak and then he would pounce on it. And I would analyze him. Here I was afraid of being vulnerable and being seen and going to a therapist to try to heal being vulnerable and being seen. And man,
• 6:06
  I gotta tell you, $250 an episode, it actually, an episode, a session, and I literally did get something out of it. So my first progression into therapy was talk therapy, which is most of ours. And it started literally with me going to this strange man's house, giving him $250, and for half of the session, sitting there staring at each other and basically just doing a standoff.
• 6:37
  But it gave me the awareness and the language and it put up a mirror of what was going on. I knew that something wasn't right in my life. But all that he tried, all the psychotherapy, all the psychoanalysts, everything he did, he could not break through my armor. I ended up switching therapists because I didn't like him. Plus, I didn't.
• 7:04
  You know, surprise, surprise, the first marriage ended badly because I didn't want to look at myself. I was convinced it was her fault. I was still being the victim and pointing the fingers at everybody else. So that marriage ended. So I'm good. I don't need to heal.
• 7:20
  And I got into another relationship and another relationship and another relationship. And then I got married again. And I was like, man, there's something off with me. I just have to figure this out. So I found a pretty good therapist that did take insurance. And we dug in. We dug in for years. And I always thought, well, therapists are there.
• 7:42
  to get you to keep reoccurring, keep coming back. And I didn't think they were actually there to heal you, at least that's what they say. And when I was going with this guy, we actually did make some progress, but I wouldn't open up fully. So then came a day where this new therapist who I'd been to for years at this point,
• 8:03
  Maybe five, maybe eight, maybe 10. I'm not sure how long it was. I still see him every once in a while. He's retired. He'll only see me. It's a pretty interesting story. I just do a check-in once in a while just to make sure that I'm reading things correctly. But there reached a time where he looked at me and said, Kelly, you're stuck.
• 8:22
  I can't work with you. You can keep coming to me, but we're stuck and I can't unstick you. So he said, come to me or don't come to me, but this is as far as we're going to go, which I thought was like, at the time was abandonment, but it was the kindest thing he could have ever done for me. So my talk therapy pretty much all ended there.
• 8:45
  And then the pandemic hit and the whole world came crashing down. And I had read about hypnotherapy. And I, at this point I'm like, what is this woo woo stuff? And it shouldn't be this hard, but I reached back out to my talk therapist and I said, what do you know about this hypnotherapy? He said, Kelly, if, if you like it, try it because it was, you're stuck and something's got to undo you. So,
• 9:16
  Most of you know about talk therapy, so I'm not going to go deep into that. But let's talk deep about hypnotherapy. I met this lady during the pandemic, as a matter of fact. So we did this stuff over Zoom. And she did this deep breathing. So she'd get me into a beta state.
• 9:37
  you know, you're alpha, beta. And she would get me down into a calm state and then she would start talking to my subconscious. And the whole time I'm thinking, this ain't working. Every time the session ended, I felt a little bit lighter.
• 9:55
  So your conscious mind literally is protecting that subconscious. But deep down in your subconscious, it holds all the truth, all the fears, man. It's the trauma and the fear. And if you're being held back, it is because deep down in your subconscious, there is something that is unhealed. So this lady, and what I liked about her, she said 15 sessions. I am not here to have you come see me for years and years and years and years. 15 sessions is all.
• 10:25
  After about 12 sessions, we did a couple of modalities where she had me imagine I was holding onto this rope and my arm got tired. And it was signifying me holding the emotional baggage that I was holding into my subconscious. And then once I let go, it released a lot. Then another session where we sat down, my mother and my stepfather, little Kelly, who they were traumatizing, and then big Kelly, who I was at that point. And we had an imaginary conversation under hypnosis.
• 10:56
  And that healed a lot. At the end of our 15 sessions, I extended, I think, five more, and then we kind of hit a wall, and she's like, you know, how do you feel? And I was like, I feel better, but I feel like we've run our course.
• 11:12
  So I got introduced to an emotional intelligence coach. And this was all during the pandemic. So I had a lot of time on my hands like most of us did. And I just had declared war on myself. So I wanted to heal. I wanted to feel better. And I was convinced it's like working out. You can work really, really hard and get results quickly. Boy, was I wrong. So talk therapy, hypnotherapy, third thing, emotional coaching.
• 11:42
  I sat with the emotions. Really what we're talking about here, Heart of Life Nation, is really emotions. Emotion creates the life that you're living. So it's really the emotional intelligence coaching was the gap that I was trying to bridge that gap between the feeling and functioning. So when I met with this person,
• 12:03
  It happened to be during the time that my ex-wife and my ex-girlfriend were made up those bogus stories and had me in legal issues that I proved that it wasn't me. And one emphatically read about it in the Heart of Life book again. I'm not going to go into that, but she helped me.
• 12:25
  realize that people only come into a situation from their level of emotional healing. And you've heard me say over a thousand times, hurt people hurt people. Well, these two ladies were hurt and they absolutely came at me and it was their only way of survival. So she taught me that
• 12:44
  Assume positive intent. And it was just a dialogue that we would talk about and she would help me reframe. The emotional intelligence coaching was, otherwise known as EQ by the way, not IQ, EQ. And what she taught me was to reframe things.
• 13:05
  from their perspective, they were fighting for survival. So assuming positive intent is they were fighting for their life. Somehow I represented evil to them. And the only thing they knew how to do was fight fire with fire. Hurt people hurt people, so they came after me. That small, silly little reframe helped me
• 13:31
  see where they were coming from and understand that they were just scared little girls lashing out at me, which allowed me to separate it from being personal and actually come back stronger and tougher and harder and win.
• 13:48
  So that we only did, I think it was three months. It was quick and easy, but man, it was powerful. And at this point, I was taking in podcasts, reading like crazy, because remember during the pandemic, this is March, April, May of 2020, when the whole country was shut down, when the whole world was shut down. I had nothing but time on my hands. And I was at this point pretty much hooked. And we had discussed...
• 14:17
  EMDR therapy and I got introduced to an EMDR therapist. So again, we've done talk therapy, hypnotherapy, emotional intelligence coaching, and now
• 14:31
  I start this EMDR therapy. And again, what I like about the EMDR is they're like, this is not a self-perpetuating prophecy. This isn't a forever thing. So EMDR therapy, I did it over Zoom again, and it would do this eye movement desensitization and reprogramming. So basically you're assigning logic to an emotional situation. And it's hard to assign logic
• 15:00
  to an illogical situation, case in point. The one where I got really hung up on is, and I'll be very vulnerable to you guys, is when my mother beat me on my eighth or ninth birthday. And how can you assign logic to the person who's supposed to care for you, protect you, and love you, beat you to the point you're about, that you feel like you're going to die?
• 15:25
  And through this eye movement desensitization of repro reprogramming or reprocessing, I was able to say, you know, she was making me tough in a very tough world. We know right now, this is a very tough world to maneuver. Everywhere you look, it looks like everybody's winning. Everybody's so happy.
• 15:45
  It seems like the government is corrupt. It seems like we're always got to be in a war. I mean, everywhere you look, you can see negativity. So I was able to, after two really tough, really hard sessions, say that beating that had held me back, that made me feel like I wasn't good enough, I wasn't lovable, I was basically a piece of shit.
• 16:09
  Now at Lowe's, faster quotes start at the Lowe's Pro Desk. Got a material list handwritten on a sticky note or saved as a photo? Perfect. Bring it to us and get a quote in minutes. And if you don't see what you need on the shelf, we'll help you get it. You can access thousands of products beyond what's available in-store or on Lowe's.com right from the Lowe's Pro Desk. Build quotes faster and source the materials you need to keep your jobs moving. Just like that at Lowe's.
• 16:40
  was to toughen me up in a tough, tough world. And it did. And I appreciated it. It still sticks with me, but that helped me tremendous. So trauma lives in your body, deep down. The EMDR goes where words can't, and allows you to bring them up. And once you shine a light on that trauma, healing occurs.
• 17:08
  So that's modality number four. While I was doing this, again, all of these things I did not really seek out. They just kind of appeared. I've said to you guys a million times, what's meant for you will find you. This is the whole surrendering thing. And I'm doing this a lot right now. The fifth healing modality I did is I tried some plant medicine. Okay.
• 17:32
  I went into a, what they call a journey with a big group of people and a moderator, a shaman, so to speak. And we did an intention. We sat in circle and group in a ceremony. And then each person took plant medicine. And then you worked through trauma.
• 17:53
  I did it twice and it allowed me to understand the difference between sex, love, intimacy, and my worthiness. They're very different things. So basically when you take a plant medicine, depending on what you do, but I did a very light version, not ayahuasca, something very light, 5-MeO or whatever.
• 18:16
  something like that. Mushrooms, think mushrooms, even an ecstasy or what do they call that? Molly, but controlled and from a shaman. So, and then you work with your peers
• 18:33
  Basically, the medicine pulls down your conscience. It gets right to the subconscious. So basically, you can't lie. It's like a truth serum. And it allows you to process it. And then once you're done with the ceremony, we do two days of ceremony, healing occurs. And you tend to release all these toxins. So this was wild, man.
• 18:59
  If you have a chance to do this, make sure it's a reputable person that they've done this for years and they've studied it. But I couldn't go down certain doors for some reason. And they opened up, like smashed open for me to analyze and finally get out of the way.
• 19:23
  The sixth thing I'm doing right now is IFS, Internal Family Systems, parts work. I had to pause because it's kicking my butt. This is the one that's crushing it all right now though. I'm gonna butch this one, but I'm gonna do my best. And I'm sharing this with you because I wouldn't recommend diving into the later ones first. I would start kind of in the order that I went, but you need to do something. So IFS.
• 19:50
  Basically, I walked in and there's different parts of you. They're called protectors, exilers, firefighters, and one other thing. But I had to focus on my protectors because that was the shell, the armor that I still had on myself. And for the first month or so, we worked on getting those protectors to stand down. And once they stood down, there was this manager
• 20:18
  that kind of held everything, held all of the exiled emotions. So as you're a kid, you have emotions that are forbidden to feel or not worth the feeling, so you just push them down, and the protectors build these other
• 20:33
  tough guys, so to speak, to protect you, to allow you to manage. This is usually manifest itself in, this is just the way I am. When you hear somebody goes, I just am stubborn, this is what I do. No, no, no. That's what the protectors have...
• 20:49
  have built for you to survive. And once you look at it like that and realize that's not really who you truly, who your true self is. And once you see it and start seeing your true self, you can't unsee it. So I'm kind of in the middle of things right now. The protectors are down. I have talked to all of my exiled parts, but they keep pulling up. And the one exile part that was, that had never been seen was anxiety. And, uh,
• 21:17
  There was never any point of being anxious because there was nobody to help you when I was a kid. There was nobody around. And if you're anxious, it didn't matter. This has manifested itself. If you've heard any of my podcasts previously saying, I used up all my fear. No, no, no, no. I took that fear and I just pushed it down. I exiled it.
• 21:37
  So what happens is you get these exiled parts, you bring them back, you show that it's safe, you witness them, and then once they see that they've been witnessed, they can dissipate. And you leave with just your true self. And you get to be that. If you guys, I'm getting a lot of messages from you guys, you guys have noticed that I'm much more calm, I'm much more myself is what people are calling it on these podcasts, it's because of this work I'm doing right now.
• 22:06
  So IFS is intense. Find you a good one. If you guys wanna know deeper into this, Asin Pernali as a few episodes ago, go look her up. This is, again, she just showed up on my podcast. I'm like, I gotta work with this lady and I'm working with her. And you're seeing me heal parts of me that I didn't know existed and go to the next level.
• 22:32
  The lesson here is you're not broken. You're a system of parts that did their jobs. And some of them don't know that the war is over. In my case, they kept me safe in a chaotic childhood. And I kept bringing that with me. The whole reframe that I've learned out of this is my childhood trauma was much worse than I made it out to be.
• 22:54
  I minimized it and that minimization cost everyone around me, but mostly me. And as I've opened up to that, this is where you're seeing the true authentic me. So minimization is not denial. It is a sophisticated survival tool. I thought everybody had childhood trauma and we do. Apparently mine was much worse. You cannot heal what you will not acknowledge at full size.
• 23:25
  The most dangerous person in the room is the one who doesn't know what they don't know. That was me. I was that person for years. Let me remind you guys, things can always get worse, but unless you change something, it will never get better. So if nothing changes, nothing's changed. Healing is not linear. It is layered and sometimes you go backwards before you go forward.
• 23:53
  Each one of these modalities reached something the last one couldn't. You don't have to do all of it. But you have to do something. Especially if you know that there's trauma. If something's holding you back. If you have a ceiling. If the same things keep repeating themselves. The first step.
• 24:12
  Talk therapy is likely covered by your insurance and available online. So try that. If you've done nothing, at least, please commit to that. Talk therapy, I think I'm not sponsored, I have no affiliation, but I think better help, you can get online, you can be anonymous and do it. My question to you is, what do you have to lose? You have so much to gain. So I always, I told you all about it, and I always give you guys the action steps. So take the first step this week, find a talk therapist.
• 24:39
  Like I said, insurance likely covers it. It starts there. Step two is stay curious when you hit a wall. A wall is not a dead end. It's a signal to go deeper or pivot and go a little bit differently. Step three, stop making minimization a virtue. Oh, it wasn't that bad. I grew up a good life. My parents loved me.
• 25:04
  That sentence keeps those wounds open and keeps you on life's hamster wheel. Finally, step four is give yourself permission to be a work in progress. Out loud, without shame. I want you to ask yourself one honest question. What are you white knuckling through right now that you've convinced yourself you don't need help with? What would your life look like if you actually dealt with the issues?
• 25:31
  What is staying silent actually costing you and everyone in your ecosystem? I did it. Every uncomfortable, inconvenient, expensive, ego-crushing layer of it. And I'm still doing it. Not because I'm weak, because I refuse to let the little boy who survived all of that to keep running a grown man's life.
• 25:58
  I'm making it cool to heal. I'm making it acceptable to say I needed help. And I went and got it. I'm making it normal for the toughest people in the room to be the ones doing the deepest work. Healing is gangster. This is Harder Than Life. See you next Thursday.
• 26:18
  Please rate and share this podcast. I'm active on all social platforms and love to hear from my Segal supporters. Each and every episode is sponsored by my company, National Technology Management, the easiest and best IT company to do business with, delivering peace of mind with technology every day, even simplifying cybersecurity. Visit TrustNTM.com for more info. Until next week, be harder than life.