PTSD MYTH #6: "Healing Takes a lot of time"

This is the magic formula for healing PTSD or CPTSD. Hey everyone, Kayleen here, and welcome to PTSD TV. Today is a continuation of our myth marathon, and this episode of PTSD TV is sponsored by Broken to Unbreakable, which is my PTSD and CPTSD recovery program. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Kayleen. I'm a PTSD and CPTSD recovery coach. I recovered from my own CPTSD after 15 years of suffering with it, and now I help people all over the world overcome their own PTSD and CPTSD through the Broken to Unbreakable program. And this lovely man to my left here is Brad Schipke.

Uh, I was there for every step of Kayleen's recovery journey. I also went through my own recovery journey, and I'm very much looking forward to this episode because it's a really big myth that stops a lot of people.

Yeah, this is, uh, this is a big one. They are all big ones. We picked the biggest myths that we see in the PTSD community. So today's myth is Healing takes a lot of time. Have you ever heard this myth before in your own recovery journey?

Uh, yeah, yeah. Either healing takes a lot of time, it's gonna take a lot of work, or it's not even possible, which was actually more of what it was. But it's kind of a belief. I think it's a kind of an un— maybe not unspoken belief, unspoken myth, um, but one that you catch yourself saying or believing in your head. At least this was— this is what it was for me. It was like I believed it more in my head more than saying it. Like, I didn't say it that often, but it definitely was something that I was like, oh, this is going to take forever for me to work through, or maybe I never will. And there was just a lot of doubt around healing and a lot of uncertainty about if it's even possible.

Right. So more so like if it is even possible, It's gonna take forever. Forever.

Yeah, forever. The rest of my life. Because it feels like you are.

It definitely— and it can feel like that, especially when you're like hurting day after day and you're like trying so hard and you don't really know what you're doing and what you're doing wrong and what you're doing right. You don't really have like a roadmap.

Yeah.

And I know for me this definitely came into play because in the same way, like, okay, if healing's even possible, it's gonna take— it's gonna take forever. Essentially, I'll be healing forever because I don't know that when I was like at rock bottom, I didn't fully believe that I could actually heal. heal. And, and, you know, you can actually heal, and that's, that's a myth that we covered already. But I think for a lot of people, what they hear in the PTSD community is, you know, I've been in therapy for X decades, right, for 3 decades, and, you know, therapy is really helpful and it's been great, um, but I still struggle with flashbacks and nightmares, and it's just I, I know how to manage it better. And so I think that's where you see this myth probably come into play most. most, and where I see it come into play most, is, you know, I, you know, yeah, I've been in, I've been in therapy, or I've been healing, or I've been whatever for a couple of decades. And basically, it has to be this all-out consistent process for 30, 40, 50 years, or the rest of your life.

Right, right. Or you have to work on your coping skills. And then after a while, your brain will rewire after years and years and years, and things will just gradually and gradually and gradually, gradually get a little bit better at a time. And that is definitely part of it. I think that's kind of where this myth is halfway true too, right? Is because if you do do coping skills, if you do constantly shift your mindset to something else, it does change it over time. And that's definitely a good portion of it. But this kind of brings us to our first point that we wanted to cover is that your mind has amazing abilities once it has the right The right tool for the job, right? So most of the time people are using the wrong tool, whether it's the wrong therapy. Like in a previous episode we talked about, or I talked about like dream therapy, right? Like we got— we read this book about dream therapy for PTSD, and this guy was working with people for like 30 years and still didn't recover. And if you're using dream therapy, maybe that works for some people, but man, if you're working for somebody for 30 years, you're, you're I would hope you'd figure out you're using the wrong tool, you're doing something wrong, or try a different approach or something. So if you feel like you're, you're just like, it's taking such a long time, or you've been at this for years and years and years and years and things, you know, maybe have gotten marginally better, but not— you haven't fully recovered, it probably means you're not using the right tool in the right way.

Yeah. And I think we can just kind of outright say like healing doesn't have to take decades.

No.

Right? And we'll just kind of COVID that right off, right off the bat. You know, your mind does have amazing abilities. And if you've ever seen some of my trainings, you'll, you'll hear me talk about basically why, why you get traumatized, right? So you see, you go through something traumatic and your brain is essentially supposed to do something with it. It's supposed to do— we'll call it the right thing, which means like process it properly so it doesn't affect you long term. Um, but in an effort to protect you, your brain actually stores it incorrectly. And your brain does that again in an effort to protect you. And so all that's happening there in a single instant is it's basically just taking you down the wrong path. But it does have the tools and capabilities to take you down the right path. It just kind of made the wrong choice because there was so much stimulus, there was so much information happening.

Mm-hmm.

And so when you give your brain the right tools, it can heal incredibly quickly. I mean, like, literally we're talking about for some people, again, depending on what you've been through, days, weeks, like that quickly.

Yeah.

Doesn't even have to be years, definitely doesn't have to be decades. You're talking about days, weeks. And so something that we like to talk about, and if you saw the miniseries I recently did, um, you'll have heard me talk about it. Actually, you'll have seen me do a demonstration on this in the miniseries. But, you know, using the wrong tool for the, for the wrong job won't get it done. And so the example that we use is You know, are you trying to hammer in a nail with a paperclip? You know, are you using— and we'll just, we'll pick on dream therapy, but you know, again, it might work for some people and that's great, but we'll pick on this for, for the sake of argument here. And are you using that kind of therapy— that would be your paperclip— to try to hammer in a nail? And have you been, you know, just consistently taking action? And you just, you maybe you work daily, maybe you work weekly, but maybe you work a few times a day and you try to, you you know, you really try hard and you really work on your coping skills, but if you're trying to hammer in a nail with a paperclip, it really— like, you can put all the might that you have in the world, you can be so consistent, you can be hitting that day after day, moment after moment, and you won't be able to hammer in that nail because you have the wrong tool. Now, on the contrary, once you have the right tool in your hand, If you hit that nail with the hammer, it's going to take you very little effort comparatively because you have the right tool. So once your brain has the right tool for the job, things can happen extremely, extremely quickly.

Yeah. And then there's 3 elements of actually, um, using the hammer, the right tool, which is consistent, deliberate action.

And these are the— this is the magic formula for healing PTSD or CPTSD.

Yeah, as a whole. So the first one is you have to be consistent with it. And Kayleen again showed a very good example of this in her miniseries. But if you only hit a nail once, it's not going to— you're not going to hammer it in all the way unless you're like, I guess, super, super strong or super accurate, which could happen. But you have to be consistent at hitting those nails in, or you might have a bunch of nails. Maybe you've gone through a lot of different things or you have a lot of different beliefs that you need to work on or a lot of different things that you went through. That you need to consistently knock down. And if you're not deliberate, you're gonna be missing the nail, right? If you're not deliberate, if you're not focused on what you're doing. And then the last one is action. If you're not taking action, then you're just gonna be sitting there and be like, trying to get somebody else to hammer in the nail when you're the only one that can hammer the nail in. So that's something that we see a lot in a lot of people. And most people, they heal one layer, so they swing the hammer once. Right? They heal one layer of their PTSD, or maybe they get like halfway through healing one layer, and then they stop. They stop being consistent. They stop working forward. And that's where a lot of people get stuck with their— like where they feel like they've plateaued or something, is that they, you know, they work and maybe they feel better for like a week or a month. You know, some people feel better for like a year, but they didn't— they weren't consistent with healing themselves, so they never got to the root of it and they never healed the root of it. And if you're not consistent, you're not going to heal Everything, and you're you're gonna get to that point where you're plateaued, or you know maybe you've been feeling better and then you just get like smacked with it. You know whether it's a a week, a month, whatever. The second thing most people aren't focused when they're healing and expect other people to do the work for them. So you have to be when you're actually going through the healing process, you have to be focused on it. You have to be the person who like you have to be the one. You're the one at the end of the day that's going to be doing the work. No one else can do this for you. Literally, it's everything that you're experiencing is inside your own mind. You're the only person responsible. You're the only person who can find their way out of that maze. Imagine yourself in this really dark maze, right? And maybe you can talk to us on the outside, but you have to actually go through the maze and figure your way out of there. And then action, a lot of people expect they go to a therapist, And they're like, oh, I'm going to therapy. This is what I'm supposed to do. And the therapist is supposed to heal me. But really, they're just another facilitator to help guide you out of there. But if you're not focused, if you're not taking action, and if you're not doing things outside of therapy to help yourself heal, it's going to be short-lived. Or you're going to be 100% dependent on this therapist to take any steps forward in your recovery, which is honestly a dangerous place to be because— It takes all the power out of your hands. So you have to be consistent. You have to be deliberate. You have to be focused on it. And you have to take action. And action is the most important thing.

With the right tools, because if you are using a paperclip, you can be consistent. You can be deliberate and you can take action and you can be the best at doing those things. But if you're using a paperclip to try to hammer in a nail, you won't be able to get there. Right. And that's why some people like work at this for decades and they're consistent and they're deliberate and they take all this action. But they're using a paperclip to do the job of a hammer. So, you need that consistent, deliberate action with the right tools. And once you have the right tools, you have this kind of magic formula. Things can happen so, so quickly.

Yeah. And this, we see people get stuck in this kind of, I'm not going to call it a doom loop. That's like the business terminology, but they get stuck in this loop. Actually, that's not a bad word. Doom loop of, um, Never taking responsibility. They're never ever being like, "I need to be the one who leads myself out of this. I'm the one who needs to do the work. I'm the one who needs to do the learning. I'm the one who needs to do the discovery inside my own mind." And since they don't take the power into their hands, you know, basically they throw their hands up and you know they they blame the world and be like, "You didn't heal me." They go to a therapist and the therapist maybe didn't help, and they're like, "You didn't help me," or like, "You didn't do this, and this is all your fault. This is all your fault, and this is all your fault." And they act like a victim, and they blame everybody else, and never take responsibility. for themselves in their lives. And then that's the perpetual identity that consumes them forever. And we see this every single day. Like, it's like, I just want to shake these people and be like, you need to do the work. You need to do the work. You need to do the work. Like, you're the one who's responsible. Like, you are the one. You are the way out. You are the path. You are the solution.

You have the power.

You have the power. It's all within you. It's not within somebody else. It's not within me. Like, I can't do it. I can't do it for you. I could if I would. I would if I could. Actually, no, I wouldn't, because then you would still be left in a hopeless place. But, ah, you know, Kaylee and I fell in love in a hopeless place.

So something that, you know, that we do, just for those of you who maybe just heard Brad use the word victim, you know, something we do in our coaching very deliberately is we are here to give you a hug and a kick in the butt. at the same time. And so sometimes we have to do things like that because we want you to be the best version of yourself. And we are not always going to be here to hold your hand, and we're going to be— we're going to be here to help you up as, as often as we can be, but we want everyone to be independent. We want the power in your hands, and we want you to be independent healers. So when Brad is saying victim, he's just talking about, um, a state of mind, right? And a mindset that doesn't take responsibility for your healing journey. So for those of you a little bit maybe sensitive about that word, that's what we mean when we say something like that on the podcast.

Yeah, absolutely. And all of us have been a victim of, in that way, in our journeys. I've been in points in my own journey where I just blamed everybody. I was angry at everybody, including myself. And none of that is productive. And whenever we say blame, when I say blame as a victim, it's like, everybody else is at fault and I'm at fault. Everybody's. Wrong, you know, and then I'm wrong and then I end up hating myself. And that's why blame is never good, you know. You don't want to blame anybody, and you're somebody, you don't want to blame yourself, right? You want to take responsibility, you don't want to blame. Um, and it's kind of like this combo, like people don't like to talk about being a victim because it can be kind of a harsh thing. They don't like talking about taking like responsibility for their own lives because, you know, it can come as like a, like a little bit of a smack, you know. Like I certainly felt that way. I'm like, dang, like I'm, I'm blaming everybody and like You don't want to admit it. You don't want to admit that you're the solution but also the problem right now. And that's kind of a hard thing to do, but it's, it's kind of like a balance between like loving and accepting yourself and knowing that, you know, you're, you're like, you're, you're the problem but you're also the solution, but you're not to blame, right? Like not beating yourself up because that's another thing that's going to pull you backwards. Um, loving yourself but also taking full Responsibility and holding nothing back. And if you can, if you can do that properly, that's how you're going to make the farthest progress on your recovery is you know when you're able to take that full responsibility and and love yourself. And it's kind of like this this dynamic duo together moving forward. And most people get stuck in either or be like, oh, I'm taking all the responsibility, but then they blame themselves and they hate themselves, and that that doesn't get you anywhere. Or, you know, they love themselves and, you know, but they're not willing to like kind of go through the work and push through all the kind of the hardships to get to the other side.

So healing takes, you know, it doesn't have to take decades. It shouldn't take decades. No, but it does take a little bit of a different time period for everyone depending on how deliberate you are, how consistent you are, the right tools that you use, and what you've experienced, right? So it is a little bit dynamic in that regard. And so something that we try to challenge people to do is think about— and honestly, sometimes we see people do complete 180s in literally weeks. Sometimes it's 6 months, sometimes it's 8 months. It really depends on how much work you're putting in, how much time you're putting in, and if you're using the right tools. So I want you to think about right now, if healing took you— and now I don't think it would take this long if you really put your full effort into it. It really shouldn't take this long with the right tools, with the right action, with the right consistency, being deliberate. If it took you one full year working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, so like literally it was your full-time job for one full year, you didn't do anything else but work on your healing, would it be worth it to never have to work on it, to never have to deal with it again for the rest of your life? So when you heal, when you fully heal, what happens is all of that is properly stored so it never comes up again. There's no such thing. When you fully heal, there's no such thing as a relapse or backsliding or— what are some of the other words people use? I don't know. It doesn't go into remission or anything like that. You fully heal. Like, you fully heal the core issue and it never comes up again. So that issue never comes up again. So would that commitment of one full year, like 40 hours a week for one full year, be worth Freedom for the rest of your life. And again, it shouldn't take that long. And this is not something you, you have to do. You don't have to give up a full year of work or a full year of, of anything. You can do it in tandem with your, with your real life. And that's ultimately what we want you to do. But would it be worth it? I really want you to ask yourself, would it be worth taking that time for one full year, just kind of smushing it into one year to never have to deal with it again?

Yeah, most people don't want to take that time. They're not willing to put in the work, and it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. It is a lot on yourself. It takes a lot of time to do that, and most people aren't willing to go through and do the work, which is why most people have not been successful, because it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of commitment. It takes a lot of action to go through and heal.

And if you think about, like, if it takes you— we'll just say it takes you 100 hours, and you do that 100 hours in one year that it'll take you a year. If you do that 100 hours in, in one month, it'll take you one month. If you do that 100 hours over 10 years, it's gonna take you 10 years. And so you want to think about, really think about how much time are you spending on your recovery. And I know for a lot of people, they come to me and they, they want to coach together and, and all this stuff, but they're saying, you know, well, I, I go to see someone. And now with everything that's going on in the world, I, I'm not seeing someone, but I usually go to see someone about once a week or every other week. Think about that in hours. Let's say again, just for example purposes, it took you 100 hours to heal. You did 100 hours of therapy or of deep healing work or whatever it was, and then you were healed and you never had to deal with it again. If you're doing 40 minutes every other week, it's going to take an extremely long time, but it doesn't have to. And so basically, if you kind of smush that down again with the right tools, with the right consistent deliberate action, It's going to take you not so long. And you can make huge, giant strides on your recovery in very short periods of time.

Yeah, so I want people to think about you have a limited amount of deliberate, focused action that you need to put in to get to the other side. And the other thing about therapy is most people— you go to therapy, you chitchat for 5, 10, 15, sometimes longer, sometimes the whole session. I've gone to one person, I was like, Dang, when are we going to do some work? When are we going to do something? Like, I just drove like a half hour to get here. When are we going to do something? Um, I ended up going to somebody else, but it's, um, if you're not focused, deliberate, um, if you're not taking focused, deliberate action or consistent, deliberate action, even in therapy, like you could go for therapy through that 100 hours over a year and not see any, um, Progress. Another kind of way to think about it is like some people kind of get hung up on this when it comes to PTSD and CPTSD and all the labels, and we kind of talked about this before. But CPTSD being like multiple traumas, and PTSD isn't necessarily a single trauma. But let's for this example, let's say single trauma versus multiple traumas, right? And I'll remove the examples or the the labels from it right now. So like a person with a single trauma. Let's just assume like they built up one wall around themselves, right? So they have to basically break down this one wall in front of them in order to heal. Someone with CPTSD might have built up like 10 walls in front of them, right? So they have to knock down 10 walls. But the important thing about this is that there's a limited number of walls that you need to break through to get to the other side of full recovery. And this is kind of like— this is just another angle at looking at it. What most people do is they'll Maybe they'll knock down one wall and then be like, oh, I made it, I did it, I did it. And then they're like, oh my gosh, there's another wall. And they give up. Or they feel like they plateau or they feel like they don't get better and they stop taking that consistent action on healing. Or maybe they get through 9 walls and there's 1 wall left. They're like, oh my God, this is endless. There's no end to this. It's impossible. I can't do this. And a lot of people get stuck there and then they just kind of sit. right in front of that last wall and never take that final step forward. They just give up and they don't do it. But there's always a limited number of walls and it's painful. I mean, it was for us. I mean, we didn't know this going in. So it was painful for us. We're like, okay, we hit a wall. We're like, oh, this is it. This is it. We did it. We broke it down. This is the last wall. This is the last wall. And then bam, you get hit with another one. You're like, ah, no. And this was a really hard lesson for us to learn. It was like there, there is a limited number of walls that you need to break down. And when you hit— when you find that next wall, celebrate, because you left that old wall behind you and you took one more step forward. And you need to go through those walls to get to the other side.

So healing really doesn't have to take a lot of time. It really depends on how deliberate, consistent you are with your action and the right tools and what kind of tools that you're using. If you're using a paperclip to do the job of a hammer, it's going to take maybe forever if you get there. So what we want you to do is think about how this myth has come into play in your own life. Has this stopped you or slowed your progress before, thinking that, well, you know, if I, if I do, you know, go watch this training, if I do go to this retreat, if I do go see this therapist, like, it's a huge commitment, it's going to take me decades. And, and it's, it's hard to want to start a commitment that's going to take you decades, or that you really truly don't believe that you'll ever get there. So think about how this myth has stopped you in your own recovery journey, and if it's stopping you from taking action right now.

Yeah, this morph easily— or this myth easily morphs into PTSD is impossible to recover. Yeah, because you're like, oh, if it's going to take me 5, 10 years to heal this, oh, it's hopeless anyways. And maybe I won't do it. And then, okay, no, it is, it is actually just impossible. So it does kind of morph into that. So definitely be aware of where this myth is coming in because it, it can easily kind of transform into something worse that will cause you to get stuck.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Great.

Yeah.

Okay. So that's what we have for you for this myth. Do you have any final words, Brad?

I do not.

No final words.

Okay.

So, uh, thank you for joining us here for our myth marathon. We will be continuing our myth marathon. We have a few more myths left and we are excited to share them with you. So hope you're enjoying these. We want you to know we're here for you. We love you. We support you at the very highest level. And sometimes we're here to give you a hug and a kick in the butt at the very same time. So if you like the podcast, please feel free to share it, rate it, uh, do your thing with us. And thank you for joining us. And we hope to see you in the next episode.

Yeah, we'll see you then.

Bye-bye.

See ya.