How To Self-Cure PTSD (No Bullsh*t Guide)

Hey everybody, Brad Schipke here. And in this video, I'm going to be walking you through the only 2 things that you need in order to fully recover from any trauma or traumas in your life or PTSD. And that might sound like a bold claim, and it is, but really what I'm teaching is the fundamentals that are present in every single successful therapy modality, technique, whatever it is that you're— that actually works and actually helps people contains both of these things. And how I discovered this was one, going through it in my own life and Recovering from my own traumas and my own PTSD and helping hundreds of other people recover. But also, I just spent the time to boil it all down. I went through all the successful modalities and therapies and techniques out there, and I thought for a really long time to boil it down to the first principles of what was really happening, the essence of how somebody healed trauma. And it came down to these 2 things. And these, once you know them, will absolutely change your life, change your recovery, and really— Hopefully unlock a lot of barriers that are preventing you from making progress. So the first one here is a release of emotions, right? So the first piece is that you need to be in touch with your emotions. All of those repressed, all those suppressed emotions need to be released in a safe way. And later in this video, I'm actually going to walk you through the actual steps on how to do this. And the same thing here, I'm going to give you the actual action steps. It's not just, just going to be theory. I don't believe in teaching theory without teaching action. So I'm gonna walk you through those steps as well. But the first piece here is a release of emotions, and that's the emotional side. And the second essential piece here is a change of belief, right? So this is kind of the yin and yang. So you have the emotional side of recovery, and then you have the rational, the logical side of recovery. And many people in many modalities can get stuck on one or the other, but both of these are required. Like, there are certain Therapies and techniques and tools that focus solely on releasing emotions or crying or expressing the emotions, but they don't do any of the logical shifting of the, the core underlying beliefs that are causing those emotions and the actions and the reactions and all of the destruction. So, and there's other ones that only focus on the belief, but that only takes people so far because they get stuck and their emotions end up getting triggered and ruining them. Ruining their lives and spiraling them out of control anyway. So you need both of these. Now let me walk you through the actual action steps for each of these. Like I said, I'm going to walk you through 3 steps on how to actually release emotions safely because there is a right way and a wrong way to release emotions. The wrong way would be you are just sitting down and getting consumed by your emotions and triggering yourself. And believe it or not, I actually had a client who went to an inpatient program where one of the strategies that the, uh, whatever the facilitators had the clients do was intentionally triggering them so that they could manage their emotions. Now, I don't know about you, but that— I would, I would file that one in a way in, in an unsafe and not a really good way to actually release your emotions. So we're not going to be triggering, triggering you In these scenarios, you are going to be 100% in control of the releasing of the emotions. You are allowing the emotions to be expressed. The emotions are not controlling you, right? So it's really changing the whole perspective on, you know, how you perceive your emotions, because that can be a scary thing. I know when, you know, I went through my own recovery, I was terrified of feeling my emotions. I was, you know, like— They would pop up and they would ruin my life. I'd be anxious over everything. I'd stumble over my words. You know, I had, you know, I had many clients have panic attacks or nightmares. So like the emotions, emotional part of trauma and PTSD is a very challenging thing to face, but it's very important. So the first step here, the first thing that you want to master or find when releasing your emotions Is a safe spot. And you might think like that's a pretty simple step. Why do you even need to say, okay, find a safe spot to feel your emotions? But it's an essential piece. There are a lot of people out there that don't have a safe spot or they don't have a place where they can truly and honestly express what they're feeling 100%. And that's important. You need to be able to express the emotion 100% honestly in the way that your body needs to express it. Because a big part of recovery is also allowing your body to feel what it needs to feel without stopping it in any way, shape, or form. And if you are not in a safe space where you can feel those emotions, you know, if there's somebody in the room next door or, you know, you, whatever it is, somebody could walk in on you. It's like you're not going to be fully safe and not going to be able to fully access and release those emotions. So that's the first, that's the first step there is to find a safe spot. Now for me, The best times for me were when I had the house to myself, you know, so if I needed to cry or release emotions, like, I could do that. Or what was more— a more consistent strategy for me was actually every morning I would wake up and I would drive to— I would probably wake up around 4:45 or 4:50 in the morning, and I would drive to this empty parking lot. It was actually a marina on the water. I'd drive to this parking lot and it was very peaceful. Atmosphere and nobody was there. And since it was early in the morning, I was able to get in, you know, 1 to 2 hours of like deep processing work by myself, and it gave me a very safe spot to actually feel my emotions, right? So that's the first step there on how to actually train the muscle and the skill of releasing emotions, because it is a skill. It takes time. You're not just naturally born. I mean, people have different strengths. Like, you might have You might be stronger at releasing your emotions than, you know, the logical side of it. But for every single person, they have had to develop this skill to one degree or another. So that's the first step there. The second one is to become aware of emotions in your body. So I'll just write aware of emotions. In your body. So this is something I want you to do right now. I just want you to scan your body right now, and I want you to identify where there's tension. Should be pretty easy, right? But a good kind of technique to help you with this is to take a few deep breaths. So if you just deep it, breathe deeply, expand your lungs as far as, as far as they can go, hold it in for a few seconds and let it go just to relax your body a little bit. And then you want to use a technique called the body scan, which is just mentally putting your attention on every body part of your body, scanning your body for the tension, and then trying to consciously release that tension when you come up to it. Now obviously not all the tension will be released when you do this, but much of it will. And kind of the top surface level, the surface level tension will be released, which will then show you where The kind of chronic tension or the chronic stress is being held. So you can just quickly scan your body. It, you know, can take a few seconds and then relax your body, take a few deep breaths, and then there should be some tension in your body. And that is where emotion is being stored in your body. And a great way, a great tip, and a great thing to kind of think about releasing emotions is that your body is the doorway to your emotions. Right? So the tension that you hold in your body is tension that you're holding in your mind, and vice versa, right? So it can be hard if you're just sitting there and you're not really in touch with your emotions like I was. Like, I didn't really know my emotions. It can be hard to actually pin down and articulate what you're feeling. But I found that if you start with your body, it's so much easier to identify the emotion, and it's so much easier to work with the emotion. When you identify it in your body. Now, for me, you probably have already identified where emotion is being held in your body. But for me, a lot of it was held in my, my heart. So my heart always felt like somebody was just like squeezing it and I could feel it beating out of my chest. I had a lot of heart palpitations in my entire— not only that, but my entire chest was just extremely, extremely tight. So for me, That's where the majority of my emotions were held. And I find that that to be a very common place for people as well. So that's the second piece is you just need to become aware of where the emotion is, right? Third step is to release emotions by relaxing your body. So I'm going to just write down release and relax. And really it is as simple as that is that You want to find a safe spot, you want to become aware of the emotions, and you want to release and relax the emotions. And that might sound too simplistic, but it really is— like I said before, everybody has different skill levels when it comes to releasing and accessing their emotions, but it is a skill. Keyword is skill, right? And skills are something that you develop over time. You don't just— you're not just a master at the piano when you sit down and play once. Right, that's unreasonable. It'd be totally unreasonable for you to sit down at the piano for the first time and expect yourself to play Mozart, right? So the same thing is with releasing emotions. Like, the first time you sit down to feel your emotions, especially if you've been pushing them away your entire life, whether that's, you know, years or decades, you can't expect to be in touch and be able to release your emotions on demand the first time that you do it. But What you will notice is that when you identify where the emotion is being held in your body and you start to relax wherever that emotion is, you'll start to feel that emotion move inside of your body, which is weird. Like, this is a really weird phenomenon, but once you, once you become aware of it, you're gonna be like, wow, that's so true. Brad was 100% right when he said this. So when I started to work with the emotions that were in my chest. I would relax them and I would consciously in my mind, I would tell myself, just allow yourself to feel what you need to feel. So that was the self-talk that was in my head. Those were the thoughts I was having. I was just telling myself to relax, to allow my body to express itself in the way that it needed to express itself. And a big part of this is just getting out of your own way. So what happened was I started to relax. I started telling myself that, and I could start to feel the tension or the emotion in my body move around. And this is where it got weird. And I found that when I relaxed it, I could feel the emotion coming to the surface and almost moving up into my throat. But then I also felt this automatic response that pushed the emotion back down. So it was like I had this emotional force that was in me that wanted to come out and be released. But then I had an equal and opposite force, probably stronger force, an instinctive, whether it's instinctive or whether it was trained, force, opposite force, pushing it back down. And what I had to do was learn how to release that downward pressure of the emotion to allow myself to feel the emotions naturally. Now, to feel the emotions naturally, that can mean an assortment of things. It can mean crying. It can mean allowing yourself to literally shake. Sometimes your body needs to move or shake. Sometimes it's like making weird sounds or screaming or whatever it is. It's important to allow yourself to naturally express those emotions. Now, I'm gonna put this— there's a caveat, right? So this is, this is one element of 2, right? So you're also, you're going to want to stick around to learn this so that you don't get lost in the chaos of emotions. But it's important. I need to fully express and explain how to go through emotions. And release those emotions before going through this framework. But I just wanted to remind you that this is just one of 2 pieces of a whole. So, you know, there's some people out there who's like, oh, that won't work. Like, you just sitting down and you crying won't work. It's like, yes, it'll work to a degree, but you need the other piece as well. So those are the 3 steps there. Now let's jump into the 4 steps. And this really is going to absolutely change your life because What we're going to do is we're going to apply this framework. We're going to take everything that I taught you so far, far about releasing emotions, and apply it to this new belief-changing framework that I'm going to walk you through. And if you take these 2 pieces, combine them together, and you do this on a regular basis, you will have one of the most powerful, the most fundamental processing tools to help heal any trauma, right? And later on in the video, I'll walk you through other tools that will be used. And this is just one tool that will be in your toolbox. I'm not saying that this will heal 100% of your problems 100% of the time, but this can— this will heal many of your problems. Many, many, many of your problems. And so it's one of the foundational tools for processing. So let's dive into this right now. And one thing I want to go through first is something that we call the belief table framework, right? So I want to walk you through a simple visual, a framework on how you can visualize how beliefs are built so that you can then know how to break them, right? So how this works is I want you to imagine that this is a table, right? And This is a tabletop. Hopefully you can see it without the glare. And the tabletop here represents a belief that you hold consciously or unconsciously. That says belief. I don't know if you guys can see that. So the tabletop there represents the belief, and this belief can be created consciously or unconsciously. It can be created from your experiences and unconscious thought patterns and things like that. But basically you have this belief, which is really just a thought. So it could be like, I'm broken, right? So if you've gone through many traumas in your life or a singular trauma that has been extended and the problems have rippled out throughout your life for many years or decades, you then start to come up with different reasons or references that support this belief. So these reasons or references can be interpretations of events or actual events. That to you in your mind prove this belief is 100% correct. So if we're going along with the example of, you know, the belief that I'm broken, one of the references that you have for that negative belief could be, I have anxiety all the time. I keep getting panic attacks. I went to my, you know, my mom's birthday party and, you know, I didn't talk to anybody. And I'm always feeling this way. Another one could be like, I'm having nightmares all the time. Whatever they are, you start stacking all these legs that support the tabletop, which is your belief. So you have all of these references that support— that are basically supporting evidence of why you believe this belief. And the kicker is that most of these references and the belief, most of the time you're not even aware that you believe it. You're not even aware of all the beliefs That are destroying and dictating your life. And really everything stems from your beliefs. So you have beliefs which then influence your actions that give you certain results in your life, right? So what you believe is what you act on. So all of the actions that you take are based on the beliefs that you hold. So if you want to change your actions, if you want to change your emotional state, You have to change your beliefs on a logical level. And this is a purely— this is a largely logical process, a largely logical framework. Even if you just look at how, you know, philosophers have talked about logic, this is the basic premise, obviously in a simpler form. But you have your argument, your main argument, which is your belief, and then all of the supporting reasons that prove to you that that belief is true. So what I want to do is I want to teach you how to actually identify your beliefs, how to break all those references, break the legs of the table, build a new tabletop, and then build more, more new legs underneath the new positive tabletop there. So the first thing here is you want to list your negative belief. So, so list negative belief. Or identify it, right? So this is also a really great practice to do in a journal. So just taking these steps, if you want to take notes of these steps or take a screenshot of these, probably better if you just wrote them down and then go through them in a notebook or on your computer, on the notes on your phone. It's a great way to actually go through this framework and start breaking those foundational beliefs that were formed by traumas, right? And Francine Shapiro, who's the founder of— founder and creator of EMDR, which is eye movement and desensitization, whatever, reprocessing therapy, one of the best kind of modalities for processing trauma, said that there was between— each person had between 8 and 12 negative beliefs that needed to be broken in order to reach full recovery. Now, whether or not that is true or not for you is undetermined. It might be 4, it might be 15 or 16, but the point of me saying that is that there are a limited number of beliefs, a limited, not an unlimited, a limited number of beliefs that you need to break in order to reach full recovery. And I say that to give you hope because this isn't an infinite process. You go through this, and if you fully break these beliefs and you fully change them over to new beliefs, You don't have to do this an infinite number of times. You just do this a handful number— handful of times, and you will see a vastly vast improvement in your life. So the first one is to list the negative belief, and the second step here is to list and break references, right? So you want to list the belief, which is the tabletop here, and then you want to list and break the references, which are the legs. So all of the examples that I gave earlier about, you know, I have anxiety all day, or whatever the other thoughts that you have that to you prove that this belief is true. So basically just want to ask yourself, why do I believe that? Why do I believe that? Why do I believe that? So you start coming up with the reasons of why you believe this negative belief to be true. And I found that the most helpful beliefs are the ones— are the beliefs that you hold about yourself. Like, I'm broken, or I'm a failure, or I will never amount to anything, or I'm unlovable, or I'm unworthy. Those are the best beliefs to start working on. And you want to work in the priority of the belief that causes you the most distress. So you always want to be working and focusing on the belief that is causing the biggest problem in your life. So we always want to be working on the biggest thing. However, if that's too big for you to manage when you're first starting, start with something that's manageable and then refocus back up on that big belief. So you want to list your negative belief. 2, you want to list and break the references for that negative belief. And then number 3 is you want to list positive belief, which can just be the inverse of the negative. So if it's I'm broken, it could be I'm unbreakable, right? So what— how do you want to view yourself? What is the positive way that you want to view yourself that would vastly change your life? And then step 4 here is to stack and reinforce that belief with references, right? So I'm just gonna put stack And reinforce. So basically what you're doing in step 4 is you're saying, why is this new positive belief true? Right? So what are all the reasons that prove this positive belief, right? What are all the ways in my past, or what are all the things that I can reference to prove to myself that this positive belief is true? And we want to stack as many legs underneath that new positive belief as possible to make that belief completely unbreakable. So we want to stack and stack and stack and stack and stack. And a way that you can make this process more powerful, the stacking process, is to actually visualize those references, right? And just a side note here, references can also be from other people as well. So maybe you don't believe that, you know, you're unbreakable, but what you could do is you could reference other people, other people's journeys. And this is why it's important to look at success stories out there of people who are actually healing, actually getting better, or people throughout history. This is something I would do all the time. It's like I would look at people throughout history who have gone through incredibly difficult challenges, things that were way worse than the things that I went through. My favorite example is Viktor Frankl, who was a Holocaust survivor in Auschwitz. And the things that he went through and the people that— and the suffering that he witnessed and went through himself were way worse than anything that I have ever been through and will ever go through. Yet he was able to come out of that stronger, more resilient, more positive, and with lessons to share to the next generation. On how to actually be better. So one of my references was, if Viktor Frankl can go through the Holocaust and all of that suffering and come out a better person, what's stopping me? So you want to come up with as many references as you can, and this is where you want to get creative and really feel that this is true. You know, we're not trying to lie to ourselves here about this, this new belief. Like, it has to be believable. Like, and that might seem like a silly thing for me to say, but you need to actually believe this belief. Like, you need to actually in your heart believe that this is true. And you need to be honest because there might be different parts of you that don't believe it to be true. But when that happens, you want to ask yourself why. Why don't I believe this to be true? And how can I believe this to be true? And that might again sound too simplistic, but that's— those are the foundational pieces, the foundational pieces of work that you need to do to fully recover. Now, how do these 2 things fit together, right? So I talked about the emotions, the emotional side of healing, and I talked about the logical side of healing, and I gave you the steps on how to actually implement this into your life. And again, I would highly recommend you writing these down and doing this in a journal. And once you do it a few times in your journal, you'll soon be able to do it in your mind. So when you feel a negative emotion You can identify it, right, in your body, and then you can dig in, you can identify the belief, you can list the belief from the emotion. So you take the emotion as the trailhead, you identify the belief that is represented by that emotion, you break the references of that negative belief, you build a new positive belief, and then you stack and reinforce the, uh, the new belief, the references for the new belief, until that new belief is absolutely unbreakable. But how these 2 pieces come together is that when you're listing the negative belief and you're breaking the references, you also want to be releasing any emotions that come up. So when you're going through this process, it's not a purely logical process, right? You can do this purely logically, but you want to bring in the elements of releasing emotions at every single step of this belief-changing framework, right? So when you're listing the negative belief, sometimes emotions can come up. Like the first time that you really nail down this belief, like if you just for the first time acknowledge and acknowledge to yourself and fully accept that you have this belief whether you wanted it or not, that you, like, you actually believe that you are worthless, emotions can come up with you starting to accept that. You want to allow yourself to feel those emotions again from a safe spot. And you want to always be detached from the emotion when you're feeling it. This is another really important piece. When you're feeling the emotions, you want to view yourself from A third-person perspective. So a good way to do this when you're feeling emotions is to see your body. So if this is you, you basically want to be— imagine yourself kind of floating outside of yourself. So if this is you with like wings or something, looking in, and these are laser eyes, looking in at yourself, and you're detached from your body, you're detached from the emotions, and you're viewing things from a third-person perspective. So you, and you want to always be allowing yourself to feel the emotions. The emotions aren't controlling you, you are controlling the emotions. You can stop this process at any time, and that's the benefit of you starting from a safe space in a relaxed spot and you initiating the process. It's like you get to initiate it as much as you want or as little as you want. You get to release as much emotion or as little emotion as you want. It's up to you. It makes all of the difference in the world. And like, if you just think about getting triggered, right? That's, that's a moment in time where you are not controlling the emotional release. Like something is stimulating a trauma in your mind and causing you to feel these emotions. And you aren't choosing that and you're not in control of that. Now you're in control of your response, but the initial response of the emotions being triggered, you're not in control. And That's what people get scared of. But when you are the one who's initiating the process, you are in 100% control of this. So make sure you, you go through, you journal this out, you go through, you practice this, you start developing your skill on releasing emotions. And it's really important that you develop these skills independently outside of therapy, right? You know, I'm not a huge fan of therapy because there are There are a lot of flaws in therapy, and I'll do a future video on, on those flaws. And but one of the biggest flaws with therapy is that it puts you in a dependent state. Too many people go into a therapy office expecting the therapist to heal them 100%, or expecting that that one therapy session a week, that 45-minute or 50-minute therapy session, is enough, is enough time to actually heal from the years or decades of trauma that they've gone through. And that just simply isn't true. There's so many other factors to that. You always want to be, you always want to take responsibility for your life, for your recovery. And there really is no other way. Even when you're in the therapy office, you're the one who has to go inside your mind and do all this processing. So you need to develop these skills independently, outside of therapy, outside of everything else. You always want the power to be in your hands. And this is something where the power of this is that now that you have this, you can do as many therapy sessions as you want with yourself. The only limiting factor at this point right now is you and how much time that you put in. And that's the cool part, is that when you know these tools, you're not shackled to a therapist, you're not shackled to somebody else. And that's how we're able to get such amazing results for our clients, is that we unshackle them from the traditional methods of healing. You know, what you'll hear from everybody else is that you need a professional, you can't do this on your own. And all that does is it builds that That belief in that environment of dependence and hopelessness. Like, imagine if you tell someone, you can't do this on your own. You need me. You need a therapist. You need a professional. You need a doctor, whatever it is, in order to heal. What you're doing is you're breeding a sense and a belief of hopelessness in that person. What needs to happen is that you need to build yourself up and you need to start believing in yourself that you can do this because the truth is most of us Do not believe in ourselves in the way that we should. We are so much powerful and more capable than we believe that we are, right? Believe in yourself. Change those beliefs. Change the way you view yourself. Do this independently. Unshackle yourself from therapy. And at the end of the day, this is just one way to process trauma. If you want to learn more processing tool— tools like this, make sure to subscribe. I'm going to release many more in-depth videos like this, and I will see you later.