This content was created by Brad Schipke. This content was uploaded by Brad Schipke. This is a YouTube video titled "i faced my trauma the wrong way...it nearly cost me everything" (created 2024-09-21) featuring a monologue by Brad Schipke. He discusses common numbing behaviors (drugs, alcohol, pornography, exercise, etc.), argues that voluntarily facing past trauma is curative, warns against forced retraumatization in some therapeutic approaches, challenges the idea that people cannot process trauma without a professional, and encourages learning tools to heal independently. The clip concludes by pointing viewers to another video for foundational principles of trauma recovery.
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Drugs, alcohol, pornography, video games, or literally physically running yourself into the ground with exercise or work just to get away from the pain of your past and your trauma and your current symptoms. This is what most people do to deal with their symptoms, to deal with their pain, is that they have some sort of numbing agent, whether you want to call it positive or not. It could be medication. It could be literally physically exercising or running to get the endorphins so that you are no longer feeling the immediate pain of your symptoms. But all of these have the same problem. You are running away from the problem. And if you don't move towards the problem, if you don't acknowledge that this problem exists, your trauma, what has happened in your past, then all that will do is ensure that it persists and perpetuates for the rest of your life. And I don't just mean that— I'm not trying to scare anybody— but if you do not start looking at your past, if you don't start seeing the problem, acknowledging it honestly to yourself— because you don't have to go out and tell the world your story, you don't have to go out and tell other people what you went through or how it's affecting you or anything like that— but you do need to tell yourself. And one of the first principles of healing trauma and recovering from trauma is voluntarily facing your trauma, voluntarily facing that fear. And one quote that absolutely changed my life and changed my recovery was this: voluntarily facing that which scares you is curative. And that is one of the foundational principles. If you can just get this foundational principles for healing, that you must voluntarily, you must make the choice, the autonomous independent choice to face what scares you, your fears in your past. And when you do that voluntarily and willingly, it is curative. That fear will dissolve. It will disappear. And then this is true in every single modality that out there, that is out there that actually works and helps people heal. does this and has this one component. You are facing that fear. You are moving towards it willingly. You're not being forced there. You're not being shoved into the darkness of your past and forced to relive it and to be re-traumatized from it, because that's exactly what that would do, is it would re-traumatize you. Let's say you go to a therapist's office and they're like forcing you to look at all the darkest parts of your past and you are avoiding it and you're like, no, that's the last thing I wanna do, and you're panicking and somebody's pushing you into your past, forcing you to look at these dark parts of your mind, all that will do is retraumatize you. And that is the main fear that people have when looking at their past. They're afraid that they are going to get retraumatized. And the reason why they are scared is because, I mean, there's a lot of false negative beliefs. There's a lot of therapists out there that say, hey, if you do this on your own, if you try to face your past, if you try to process your past, on your own, you will get retraumatized. You need a professional. You need somebody who knows what they're doing to help you navigate through your mind. And all that does, and I'm not saying that all professionals are bad or that professional help cannot be helpful, right? It can be. It can be life-saving for some people. But when they say you can't do this on your own because you will traumatize yourself, that is just completely false. And the reason Why they say that is because they're scared. They're scared that you will retraumatize yourself, and what they should be doing is educating you on how to actually face your past so that you don't retraumatize yourself. So you have the tools, the resources, and the knowledge that will give you the confidence to look at your past so that you can process it, understand it, reinterpret it, release the emotions associated to that trauma so that you can heal independently outside of any therapist. Office, but that is not what is being done. But I'm telling you that this is what needs to be done because this is the most efficient way to go about healing your trauma by learning how to heal your trauma at the root, to learn these tools so that you don't need a therapist to heal you, so you can heal independently. So at the end of the day, you must progressively face these fears. You must willingly step into these fears, whatever that takes, and do it. in a way that is good for you. So if you want to learn how to do this, the foundational fundamental principles, check out this video right here. But I hope that this was helpful.
