The 4 Commitments For A Successful PTSD Relationship | PTSD TV Relationships

Hey everyone, welcome to PTSD TV. Today is Thursday, it is Halloween, and today we are talking about PTSD relationships. And the title of the episode today is The 4 Commitments for Successful PTSD Relationships. So today's episode of PTSD TV is sponsored by Broken to Unbreakable, which is my PTSD and CPTSD recovery program. And for those of you who don't know me, my name is Keeleen. I had CPTSD for more than 15 years and now no longer do, which is why now I'm able to be a recovery coach and help people all over the world through the Broken to Unbreakable program recover from their own PTSD and CPTSD. And this lovely man to my right here is Brad Schipke.

I am lucky enough to be Kayleen's significant other, and I was there through every step of her recovery journey. I also went through my own as well, and I'm excited as always for this program today. And a very happy Halloween to everybody out there who still celebrates.

So maybe no one, maybe no one, but if you're dressed up, that's cool too. Today I'm dressed up as the person I was yesterday. Yeah, that's why I'm—

It's scary.

Isn't it scary? Um, so today we're talking about 4 commitments for a successful PTSD relationship. Now this is one of my favorite episodes just because I'm a sucker for love. Relationships are really, really important, and I think it's like 70% of PTSD relationships fail. So, you know, we want to help. We want to help that number. We were obviously in a PTSD relationship And, and by golly, was it one of the most challenging things that we've, we've ever been through, right? Um, so today we're talking about the 4 commitments.

Mm-hmm, the 4 commitments you need to make for your PTSD relationship and the 4 commitments that we had to make to make our relationship work. And these were the 4 things that we really did ourselves. We sat down, we're like, okay, what are the things that we needed to commit to and what are the things that we needed to you know, do again and again and again and again, aka we had to commit over the long term. And we came up with these 4 things. So do you want to rattle off the 4 things, or you just want to go through one by one?

I think we'll go through one by one. We'll keep you hanging here.

Keep you hanging till the end.

So number 1 is the commitment to yourself. This is a really important commitment. Now, when it comes to a PTSD relationship, 80% of the healing happens at the individual level. So this is One of the biggest commitments when it comes to committing to, you know, healing yourself, committing to to being there for yourself, things like that. So the commitment to yourself in all areas is really, really, really important, especially in your relationship. You have to commit to yourself. You have to commit to your own healing journey, to your own well-being, to to have a successful relationship and to have a successful recovery journey.

Yeah, because everything in your life depends on what's going on in here inside your brain.

In your brain.

In your brain. Everything that Everything that all the problems that you're facing in your life right now are directly correlated to what's going on in your head, and that includes your relationship problems. But everything is tied to you, and you are the core, and you are the center of everything. You know, the problem isn't out there. The problem is like you're experiencing all these things inside of here. So that healing journey, that internal healing journey, is the very first commitment that you need to make to your loved ones too. And like this was something that I actually said to Kayleen too. I was like, hey, I'm 100% committed to healing myself, to making myself the best, because I knew that I wasn't bringing my best self to the table, right?

And you have to bring your best self to the table. You do. I mean, you're— when you're talking about a relationship, you know, it's, it's a place you go to give, not to get, right? And I can't give anything. I can't bring anything to the table if I'm not whole myself, if I'm not healed myself, if I'm not working on myself. There's nothing for me to give. There's no help for me to give, right?

Right.

Um, so it's really, really important, right? There's that expression, you can't pour from an empty cup, and this— that definitely applies Here, right? You have to bring your best self to the table in order for any sort of relationship to flourish and survive.

Yeah, and we were kind of like talking about this yesterday, about— not on the episode, afterwards— how you like— like what made me think of this was like you said you go to a relationship to give more than you can get, and if you don't have that internal love for yourself or you don't have that internal pain healed inside of you, you can't give anything, right?

Right.

Yeah, right. So instead of looking for all the external things of why things aren't going right, you have to look inside and be like, what are the things I need to fix in here? Because you can be happy in any situation.

That's right. And that's something that we talked about yesterday too, finding the silver lining. That's something we did last night.

What?

You remember we did it last night? We were driving in the rain. Oh, I don't know what it was about windshield wipers, something, something really silly, but, but we, we brought it back up again. Um, so it came full circle. But so we use it every We do. We use it every day. The commitment to yourself is really important. And we actually— I want to share a little story. I had someone reach out to me just, just yesterday, I think it was, via email, one of our podcast listeners. And, and he reached out to me and he is really kind of mastering this commitment to yourself thing. And he listens to the podcast, he consumes all the content, and he, he told me a list of things that he was doing, you know, from the actions that we give on the podcast. So he was listening to all the podcasts and taking action on these things. And he was taking consistent action. And he wants to work with me, he wants to coach, he wants to join the Broken to Unbreakable program. But he's already made progress just by doing the things that we recommend doing, we tell you to take action on, on the podcast. He's already, his mindset has already started to shift, right? That's one of the pillars that we talked about. He's already making progress 'cause he's mastered this commitment to himself. His mindset on the recovery journey has changed, right? So you go from feeling, you know, like hopeless and like, I won't be able to do this, to committing to yourself. He's made his own recovery plan, right? And now he's gonna bring Broken to Unbreakable and my coaching into that recovery plan.

Yeah.

He's committed to himself. He's relying on himself. And that's what we're always talking about, right? We wanna put the power in your hands. So you have to, you know, take healing into your own hands. You know, go watch the webinar training and we'll, you know, we'll put the link below. And I say the link shamelessly because it's that good. You know, go watch the webinar training. Those are the pillars of recovery. And make yourself a healing plan. Make yourself a healing plan and commit to yourself first and foremost. It's so important.

Yeah, and this is someone who gets it, who listens and puts it into action. And he knows that the only thing that matters is action. And you can listen to us talk all day, you can put this on repeat for the rest of your life, and nothing will change. But until you take the action in your own life and you take what we're telling you and actually apply it— and that's what this guy's doing, and he's Crushing it, which is awesome.

We're so excited. Yeah. So commit to yourself, you know, commit to yourself. And I, and I just want to stress that one more time, that like, like, you know, we— I don't know how many podcasts that we have out, but we do so much content and we, we do so, so many podcasts and things like that. And we're at the end of every single episode, we give an action.

Mm-hmm.

And if you take action, you will see results. Recovery is action-based. That is just— it's just a pure fact. So, so please, please take action. Yeah, because you can see those changes too if you take action.

Yeah, absolutely. And if you want to go back and like listen to all of our podcasts or, um, see all the action items, sometimes we even like give you like the specific links and stuff. You can go back into the description of the podcast and go to all the links that we, we put into all the different podcasts. So, but make sure to take action is the goal.

Yeah, and if you're listening on live or YouTube and you want to listen on podcast on your phone, you can go to Google or you can go to the podcast app and you can search PTSD TV.

That's it. Yeah, simple. We're the first one on Google.

Easy peasy.

Easy peasy.

Easy peasy. So first commitment, commit to yourself. Second commitment, commit to your relationship. Now this has kind of another part to it because committing to your relationship, it, you know, is— I don't know, I feel like it's a It's like too broad of a— like, yeah, I'm committed to our relationship.

Well, what does commitment mean? I mean, that's what it comes down to, right?

Right. So, so, you know, to me, what a commitment to a relationship means is you're committed to not only to your partner, right, but you're committed to doing whatever it takes to make your relationship succeed, and you're committed to doing whatever it takes to understand your partner's point of view. So that, you know, to me, you know, relationships are— they're two-sided, right? There's, there's two people in a relationship, and so it's not just your feelings that matter. Everybody's Everybody's conversations, you know, matter. All of that matters. So the commitment to the relationship is, is, you know, a form of saying I'm committed to understanding you and loving you and obviously like being faithful to you and understanding your point of view and really doing my best to, to, to understand you, right? And to love you.

It is two-sided. If you— if like, if in our relationship I was 100% committed but Kayleen wasn't, it wouldn't have worked out. You know, if I was putting in all this work but nothing was changing on the other side— and change can happen very slowly, even when you are committed. It can happen a lot— I mean, like, it can happen a lot slower than you want it to, right? Like, wall after wall after wall after wall after wall. But that's why this commitment is so important. And commitment to me means, like, just taking all the other options off the table, you know? Like, I don't— I'm not even thinking about all these other things that could happen. It's like, I'm committed. This is the path. I'm committed to this path, and this is what I'm doing. I'm gonna make this work no matter what.

That's right.

That's what it means to me.

Yeah, that's—

I think it's a simple, simple concept.

Yeah, committed to getting that goal, to, to achieving that, that goal. And, and, um, and our third commitment here is commitment to lifelong growth. And this is really important too, right? Because, yeah, that, that's kind of where you're like setting the goals, right? You always want to be growing. You always want to be Trying to achieve new things and communicating that with each other, right? So when you're committing to your relationship, you're communicating to understanding each other. You know, kind of making sure that you're on the page day in and day out, and you know you're both committed to yourselves, to your relationship, and to lifelong growth. So to making the relationship better, to healing more, to understanding each other at a deeper level. So all of those things.

Yeah. No, yeah, I was just thinking.

I thought you.

I was thinking.

You sound like a dog.

No, I was laughing at my own thought, and it's really the commitment. lifelong growth, that pushed through everything. Like, you can forget all the other commitments and just commit to lifelong growth and growing no matter what on both sides of the relationship, and you will get there. And that's— that's— I was smiling because like, that's what it really is. And I was smiling again because I was thinking of all these people who are just looking for this one thing to get them like an overnight fix, right? This one thing, this one pill, this one therapy, this one something that's just gonna— they're gonna magically get better in like a day or a week or something. And that's like— That's not how it works. That's not what it's about. I mean, like, you can make amazing changes in weeks, but you have to be— you have to have this commitment to lifelong growth. Because the fact is, you could get a lot better in just a few weeks, but you know, what about your entire life? Do you want to just like— this is why some people get a little bit better and then they plateau and they never get beyond that point, is because they've, they've sat— they've, they've gotten satisfied at where they're at, the level that they're at right now, and they never keep pushing and learning and learning and expanding and keeping an open mind. And it's, it's really like you see these 2 different types of people all the time. One person is just like, I want this thing like right now, overnight. And then some people are like, you know, you guys are like telling people that they can get better overnight. Like, no, we're telling you you need to commit to lifelong growth because even if you heal PTSD, like, you can be unhappy. I don't know how many people are telling you that, but you can, you can live a life with zero PTSD and be totally unhappy. That's true, because you're not committed to growing, and growth is what fulfills human beings. I mean, human beings are meant to grow. We are like designed to grow, to expand. I mean, look at us 100 years ago, 200 years ago.

Where were we?

Right? And there's an argument that can be made that you know we had a lot of external growth, but not we kind of went backwards internal in internal growth. That's what like Buddhist people say. Great.

Great.

So a little ranty rant for you guys.

You guys just got a glimpse into my world and the conversations that we have. A short, short, very short glimpse. No, so you have to commit to lifelong growth, and everything, you know, Brad said is true. Like, you have to keep growing. And if you're committed to lifelong growth, you know, you're committed to making yourself better every day, right? So you knock off the first commitment. If you're committed to lifelong growth, you're committed to making your relationship better and understanding better. And, you know, everything, everything is getting better. So you're committed to growth in all areas. And, and like Brad said, like, so the reason that, you know, we call the program Broken to Unbreakable is specific, and that's because you can go from feeling broken, right? You're not broken, but a lot, a lot of us feel broken when we're at that, that rock bottom, right? You can go from feeling broken to normal and still be unbelievably unhappy. So what we do is we take you from feeling broken, you know, far past healing PTSD, to unbreakable, right? To an unbreakable life and an unbreakable lifestyle and how to achieve goals and how to be happy and how to have Great relationships and things like that, right? And because you can you can be you can be average, right? You can you can have no PTSD. Like Brad said, you can heal your PTSD and still be incredibly unhappy. But the recovery journey, healing that PTSD gives you these amazing superpowers, and we don't want to waste them. And it gives you this amazing momentum, and we don't want to waste it. There's no point in wasting it. It's so so important, and it's so so powerful. So committing to lifelong growth is really really important when you're when you're healing relationship and when you're healing yourself and. Yeah, you always want to be on the same page and kind of, you know, setting new goals. And once you achieve something, great. Now, now what's the next thing? Now what's the next thing? And it's not that it's never good enough. It's that, you know, we always want to be growing and getting better. And, and that's how we, you know, like, I don't know if enrich— like, we, we feel, we feel fulfilled and we enrich our lives is by, is by growth and doing things. If you don't do anything, hmm, oh my, like, if you don't do anything, like, it's okay right now.

Oh my.

If you don't do anything, right? Because you're hurting, right? And we want to, we want to get you to do stuff. But if you're not constantly growing You're going to move backwards. And I'm not talking about like you're gonna heal your PTSD and then if you stop, you're gonna have PTSD. I'm not, I'm not saying anything like that. I'm saying if you stop growing, if you're not constantly reaching for growth, you're going to be very, very unhappy.

Yeah, and the problem too is that a lot of people are afraid of putting the work in to grow, and that is because they don't put in the work long enough to actually reap the rewards at the end.

Right? Yeah.

So it's like the people who go to the gym for a week and expect to lose 20 pounds, you know, it's like, no, you got to go to the gym for a year to see some really big changes in yourself consistently over long periods of time to see a huge change. And what most people do is they work for a short period of time. Maybe they do like a huge burst of like exercise or something, or maybe you like show up to the podcast and do all this work for a week and then you like drop off. And like, I'm not saying like everything's over and like you're a failure or something because you drop off. Like, I went through these cycles too, and this is how I had to learn this lesson. But you need to push through a certain amount of time, a certain amount of pain to grow, to get the pleasure at the end of the end of all of it. So you're just associating what most people do to like they associate pain to growth, to growing because it is work, right? But they don't put in enough work. They don't put in enough time to actually get the reward at the end of it. It's like you're you're always constantly doing things halfway, and like you just keep going halfway and back. Like you make it halfway to the to the goal, and you're like, ah, this this hurts too much, and I'm not gonna get there. But it's really just because you don't see. like the endpoint. You don't see how much you actually need to succeed. And this was a huge turning point for me in growth. And because it is, it's literally like there's no, there's no finish line. It's your life. We talk about lifelong growth. We don't just say like, just grow for this year or just grow for this next 20 minutes while you're on this podcast. Grow forever.

And I want to share something that I shared with, with the members of the Broken to Unbreakable community. Just, just, I think it was just yesterday I shared this and it's something that I talk about. And if If you've listened to the podcast for a while, you've heard me talk about it before. But just because it's fresh in my mind and we're talking about lifelong growth, I want to talk about the compound effect.

Mm-hmm.

And so the easiest way to kind of sum up the compound effect— so when we talk about the pillars of recovery, right, I talked about mindset a little bit earlier. Then I talked about— well, no, now I'm going to talk about building unbreakable routines. And, you know, when people— they'll watch the webinar training, and the link will be below, and they hear the pillars. And then a lot of people reach out and they ask me, you know, how important really are the routines when it comes to recovery? That doesn't seem like it's really important, but it is really important. And the kind of blanket thing I usually say to people is, is, do you know what the compound effect is? And the compound effect can be described very simply like this. Would you rather have $1 million— in 30 days, I'll give you $1 million— or In 30 days, I'll give you a penny that was doubled every single day. So on the first day, you get a penny. On the second day, you get 4 cents. On the third day, you get 8 cents. On the fourth day, you get 16 cents, and so on for 30 days. And a lot of people take the lump sum, right? And a lot of people take the million dollars. But if you, if you wait it out towards the, you know, the 24th, 25th day, that penny that's being doubled every single day outdoes the million dollars. So it becomes $1.5 million, and then it continues to get doubled. So by the end of the 30 days, it becomes like $5 million or something, right? And so it's just kind of a— I hope you kind of follow that.

I know it's not easy to follow auditorily, but, um, well, up to the, up to the, like, whatever, the 24th day, you feel like you are losing, right? You feel like you've failed, right? But once it switches over, once, once the compound effect like kicks in, That's when you start seeing those massive results and those massive changes.

And it's that much better, right? So instead of $1 million, now you have $5 million because you were getting, you know, you were doubling it every day. And so when we talk about like growth and lifelong growth, we're talking about, usually we'll say, you know, tomorrow I want to be 1% better than I was today or half a percent better than I was today. And if you can do that for a year, 365 days, if you can get half a percent better every day for 365 days, you get more than 100% better. in a year, right? You get 150% better, right, if you get half a percent better every day. So, so like, you— it's, it's really about little changes, and it's really about like, you don't see it until you look back over a long period of time, right? You don't see the rewards of that penny doubling until you're at the 24th day, right? So for 24 days, you're like, what?

Why? Why am I doing all this? Why am I putting all this work in? I'm not seeing anything. And that's the thing too, like, you can put in the work and then You, you won't see that half a percent. You'll be like, why the heck did I just do all that crap? Right? Because like, I don't see anything today. But once you keep doing that and doing that and doing that and doing that and doing that, you're gonna see huge shifts.

And if you give up at the 24th day, you got nothing. You don't get the $5 million, right?

And this goes perfectly into our last, our 4th commitment, which is the commitment to never giving up. And at any point in time, you always have 2 choices. Your first choice is to give up, to give in to the pain, to everything. Or the second choice is just to keep freaking going. And like, this is why I tell myself too, it's like, Brad, okay, are you gonna give up right now? Are you just— are you— or are you gonna keep going? Because those are your two options. And like, I'm like, I can't give up. I need to keep going. And like, it doesn't matter how slow you go through that process. It doesn't matter if it's half of a half of a half of a 1% every day. If you're taking a tiny step every single day, you are making that progress forward and you are generating that momentum that will turn into something that is unstoppable over a long period of time. And that's something that, like, if you, if you saw me, what, 4 or 5 years ago?

Mm-hmm.

You'd be like, no way would you, no way would you get to this point where you are right now, you know? But day after day, I just kept chipping away at myself. I don't know if that was a good way to say it. I kept chipping away at improving myself. And I am now someone that I, I always knew was possible. You know, that was the thing. I was gonna say that I didn't believe was possible, but I always believed that this was possible, and that's part of, part of why this was able to happen. But, um, turned into somebody who was totally unrecognizable than I was back then.

Definitely. So in an amazing way.

Yeah, and you don't even want to consider it. That's the other thing, is like you want to commit to never giving up. And like I said earlier, it's like you just take all your other options off the table. Right? Yeah, you just keep going and be like, okay, my only option is just to keep pushing through this.

Don't give yourself up.

I know that there's gonna be another— the other side, you know? And if I quit early, I'm never gonna get that swing up. I'm never gonna get to that where, um, the compound effect kicks in and like just I crush it.

Yeah, that's right.

So you just gotta keep going no matter what. Take all the options off the table.

No plan B. And if there's no plan B, you're gonna make plan A work, I promise you. So take it off the table. And that— yeah, I mean, that, that is you know, an easy-peasy one, but an important one. Yeah. So our 4 commitments are commitment to yourself, commitment to your relationship and understanding your partner and their point of view, commitment to lifelong growth, and commitment to never giving up. So those are the 4 commitments when it comes to having a successful PTSD relationship, right? And bringing your best self to the table and, and making that relationship succeed. Yeah, by growing and by healing yourself.

And notice that 3 out of the 4 things, actually all of them, they're all your own commitments. All of them are about you, not your partner. How do you make a successful relationship work? You commit to yourself. You commit to your relationship. You commit to lifelong growth. And you commit to never giving up. Just a fun fact.

It's just really important.

Yeah.

So our action today, communicate your commitments. This is the action today. Now, these commitments are, you know, they're— a lot of them are self-commitments, so you can communicate them to yourself, right? Commit to yourself verbally, commit to yourself on paper. That's a great exercise.

Mm-hmm.

But commit to your relationship, commit to yourself, commit to lifelong growth, commit to never giving up. Now, if you're in a relationship, you know, sit down and have this conversation with your partner and commit your commitments to each other and verbalize your commitments to each other. And something really powerful will happen where you get on the same page and you understand each other at a higher level. And you kind of, you bring your whole relationship up just by having this conversation and verbalizing your commitments to each other. So you're, you kind of create this like security in yourself, right? I'm committed to myself. I'm committed to never giving up. I'm committed to growing lifelong, and I'm committed to our relationship and understanding you. And if they do the same thing, you get this amazing, amazing kind of foundation. But, but it is important that these commitments come from you.

Yeah, and, and And the other person will likely jump on board. When someone sees you making all these positive changes, it's— I mean, it's really hard, you know, because at different points in our relationship, you know, we need— we, we like fed off of each other. When I didn't feel like it, like Kayleen was crushing it, and I was just like— it made me step up to a new level. So it's good. But like Kayleen said before, a great way to, to kind of commit to this is like go through all these 4 things and, and just write it down. Kayleen has an exercise that she actually gives away for free in the webinar workbook that she has on our webinar called the Commitment Contract. So if you go check out the webinar, she hands out like a, what, 100, 150 page workbook at the end of the webinar. And in that is the Commitment Contract. So because it is like the commitment is the very first thing that you need to do, you need to commit to your recovery, you need to commit to never giving up. And you get like this 100-something page workbook at the end of it for free. So you can check out that webinar and get the commitment contract worksheet and everything else that's in that webinar workbook for free at overcomingptsd.info/go. That's overcomingptsd.info/go. And you should go check that out right now after this webinar, after this podcast. And, uh, definitely check it out because that, that this thing is truly awesome. And she spent A long time.

Brad sees how much time I spend putting that. He's the only one who sees, who sees how much time that, that we spend doing these things. But one other thing I wanted to mention, I, at the beginning of the episode, I mentioned the, the pillar. I always, I'm talking about the, the 3 pillars of your PTSD recovery. And, you know, I talked about the pillar of mastering your mindset, and then I, I touched on the pillar of building unbreakable routines when we talked about the Um, the compound effect. And, and those are the things that I talk about in the webinar. So if you, you know, want to take recovery into your own hands and you, you want a plan to heal and you want to know like where the heck you should go and what the heck you should do on this journey, go and check it out. And, and you can, um, you get a digital version of the webinar workbook.

And yeah, it's awesome. It'll just clarify the whole process for you. But I think that's all we have for you guys today. Right?

That's right.

And, um, we really care about you. What do you say?

I'll just let you flounder.

We love you, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Okay, okay, that's what we have for y'all. We love you, we believe in you, we're here for you.

There it is.

Um, we truly do from the bottom of our hearts believe in you. You can do this. Um, we're here for you, and if you have any questions, you can always reach out. For those of you on social media, we'll stick around and answer some questions for those of you who have any. But for those of you on our podcast, thank you for listening, and we will see you all mañana.

Yeah, mañana. Happy Halloween.

Hasta luego.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.