"The Father Of Positive Psychology" Says Therapy And Medication Won't Heal The World? | PTSD TV

Hey everyone, welcome to PTSD TV. Today is Tuesday, it's our book club, it's our PTSD book club, and today we're talking about why you must take recovery into your own hands according to the father of positive psychology with this book, Learned Optimism by Dr. Martin Seligman. So 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 Keeleen. I'm a PTSD and CPTSD recovery coach. I had CPTSD of my own for more than 15 years and now no longer do, and that's why I'm able to help all these amazing people all over the world recover from their own. 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 her entire recovery journey and was also went through my own healing process as well. And I'm excited for this because this will give you a shocking, shocking ice-cold shower and wake you up this morning. With some truth.

And he made me eggs this morning.

And I made her eggs.

That's who he is. So today we're talking about why you must take recovery into your own hands according to the father of positive psychology. So of course we're going to cover who is the father of positive psychology, which you might already be able to guess. What does he think about drugs and therapy and what it means for you and your recovery journey and why it is so important. So, so who is the father of positive psychology. It's this man here, Dr. Martin Seligman, who wrote this book, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. So this is an amazing book. If you've heard of it before, there's a reason for that. It's a pretty famous book. And Dr. Martin Seligman was also the president for a while. He was the president of the APA. So the APA is the American Psychiatric Association. So we like to think he knows what he's talking about. when it comes to mental health. And now his specialty is depression, right? His, uh, his kind of his niche, his obsession was always depression, um, which is why, you know, you hear a lot about him and optimism and pessimism, mostly optimism. Um, so it's really neat. So I want to read something from this book, Learned Optimism, and this is kind of his perspective on drugs and on therapy, which is really, really interesting. Um, so I want to share that all with you because To get his perspective on this is, is pretty special.

Yeah. Yeah. This is amazing. Amazing perspective. And like I said before, like, this is going to wake you up with the truth because this is something that we certainly needed to hear at the beginning of our recovery journey because, well, you'll see.

You'll see. So again, this is the father of positive psychology and this is, you know, he, he, he was the president of the American Psychiatric Association. So this is what he says. Again, his specialty is depression, so you'll hear that in here, but this applies to mental health in general. This problem will not be ended by Prozac. We are not going to give antidepressant drugs to an entire generation. Antidepressant drugs are ineffective before puberty, and there are grave moral dangers to making an entire generation dependent on drugs for their mood and their productivity. We are also not going to do therapy with an entire generation. because there are simply not enough good therapists to go around, right? So I'm going to read that last, that last thing again. We are also not going to do therapy with an entire generation because there are simply not enough good therapists to go around, right? So he's talking about drugs there and therapy. And now this, you know, can be kind of a taboo topic, but it doesn't have to be. And, and what he's saying is, you know, it's, it's not— essentially what he's saying is it's not morally acceptable. It's not okay. You know, it has definite damages to a society as a whole to put everything— everybody on mood drugs, to put everybody on medication to quote unquote solve problems. And unfortunately, right where we're at right now is there are not enough good therapists to go around, right? So he's not saying there's not a time and place for drugs. He's not saying there's not a time and place for therapy. He's saying it's not enough when it comes down to the individual journey. It is not enough to rely on drugs. It is not enough to rely on therapy to heal your own self, to be on this journey and to complete your recovery journey, whatever, in whatever kind of niche you're in. So whether that's depression, right, or PTSD or whatever you're dealing with mental health-wise, what he's saying right here is you must take it into your own hands. You cannot rely on people. And, and, you know, we're not telling you not to, you know, you know, we're not telling you to drop your therapist or, you know, stop taking medications or anything. You know, you want to do what's right for you. What we're telling you to do, right, is take recovery into your own hands. Make sure you're in control, right? When it comes down to, to drugs, when it comes down to therapy, make sure you're the one steering the ship. Make sure you're the one giving instructions. You know, you're employing them. You want to think of it like that. You're everybody's boss. You're the big boss.

Yeah.

And you really want to take things into your own hand. You want to trust yourself. You want to know what's right for you. You want to tell, you know, your doctors, your therapists, your clinicians, whoever you're seeing, you want to tell them what's right for you. And ultimately, you want to be in control of your recovery journey.

Yeah, and you want to know what's right for you. And most people do wait for other people. They do wait for their, their doctors or their therapists to tell them exactly what to do. And if I look back on my own recovery journey and Kayleen's recovery journey, That, like, we both have gone to therapy before and it was helpful, but there was this piece that, like, it just couldn't— like, it was— it was like therapy was just like this one piece, right? But the majority of it was what we brought into it, right? So even when we went to go see somebody, it was like, okay, this— these are the things that I want to work on. Um, this is how we want to work on it, and this is how I want my session to look, right? Because I had very specific objectives Going there and knowing what I wanted to get out of it, I could go into that session and be like, okay, you you can or you can't help me. And at some point, those therapy only took me so far. It didn't bring me to the point where you know I felt happy every day. But um but the missing piece is the the personal responsibility, the personal control, the personal piece of you that just like takes control of the situation, takes control of your own life.

Yeah, I get a lot of questions from people. A lot of people reach out to me and say, you know, like, I'm on, I'm on all these medications and I don't want to be on these medications and I don't know like what to do about it. And I don't know, you know, if they help. Like, I just, I don't feel comfortable taking them, but I don't feel comfortable not taking them. Right. And so in that case, you're not, you're not in control of your journey there. You know, you need to have a dialogue with, with everybody who's involved. Right. You need to be the boss. You need to be your own coach. Like Brad was saying, like, if you're going to see someone, right, if you're going to see a therapist and therapists they're, they're, they're amazing. They provide an amazing service, right? Especially when you get a good one. You know, when you have to be in charge of that. Brad is saying, you know, he went in with an agenda. You know, he went in with, these are the things I want to accomplish, these are my goals, these are my objectives, because he was in control. And that's really, really, really important. So whether you're going to a doctor or a psychiatrist or someone's gonna prescribe you meds or change you or whatever, make sure that you're in control. Make sure that you're speaking up for yourself and that you're saying, I do want this, I don't want this, you know, I don't want to be on meds anymore, so like let's not do this anymore, right? Let's find a different solution. And that's, that's okay, right? And that's totally possible. You know, when it comes to medication, a lot of times, you know, medication isn't healing, right? It's— there's definitely a time and place for it for some people if that's what you're into. Um, but at the end of the day, it doesn't heal the root cause of the problem when it comes to mental health, right?

Yeah.

You don't get to the root of it. So when you don't pull out the root you're kind of always going to be treating it instead of actually solving the problem. And, you know, with therapy, you know, people— you can go to therapy for decades, decades and decades and decades. And of course, you know, it can be great, but also you want to live your life. You want to be in control of your life. You want to be able to, to handle things that come up in your life and, and have that personal control.

Right.

And what we always talk about is like, we always want to put recovery in your hands. I don't want you to ever, ever rely on us, right? So like when I coach people, I give them everything that I have. I give them every tool and everything that they need to, you know, take the program, to work with me one-on-one, to do the coaching, and then to go and live their life, right? And so like, I'm not, you know, I'm never gonna take away that information from them, but I never want them to feel like they always have to come back and rely on me for something.

Right, right.

Because it's, you know, this is your life, right? And I'm not trying to come off like cold or harsh, but I sometimes do when I talk about this, because this is your life that you're, you know, you're kind of messing around with, and you want to make sure that you're in control. You want to make sure that you're steering your ship, you're pulling your strings, whatever you want to call it.

Yeah.

This is your life. You know, you need to have the information in your hands. You need the information to be able to serve you, you know, essentially forevermore. You know, you don't want to have to be relying on people or medication, or you don't have to— you don't want to have to, you know, wait for insurance. You don't want to have to wait for doctors to call you back and tests and things like that. And, you know, I'm talking about mental health here, right? Like, obviously there's a place for doctors and stuff. I'm not saying never go see your doctor again. You know, what I'm saying is make sure you're in control of all of those things.

Yeah. And your entire life you're just taught, either consciously or subconsciously, to just allow other people to control your life and dictate where you go. I mean, like, as a child, you didn't really have the choice of you know, what you really wanted to do. So you just followed what your parents told you what to do, and like, that's what you had to do. And then in school, it's like, oh, you have to learn these specific things and you have to follow this. You learn to follow the advice of other people. And we were talking about this last night, actually, about how school teaches you, um, not how to think, but how to just recite the same thing back to them. It's like, here's what you need to learn, just recite it back. And you never have to think for yourself. You never have to think independently. You never have to take control of your life. You never have to make any decisions. All the decisions are made for you. So when you— when society just throws you out there, like, you kind of— like, that's why most people just go through like this, the same path in life. And it's because like your whole life you're just like in this, in like the flow of everybody else, and like you're always in other people's control. Yeah, that's a good point. And you are going to have to break out of that. You're going to have to start asking yourself, what do I truly want? Do I wanna let all these outside forces tell me what to do or do I wanna tell me what to do? Do I wanna wait for all these things to help me and to serve me and to heal me or do I wanna learn what I need to do to heal me? And this was like a, it's a pretty sobering thing 'cause most of your life you're not in control. Most of my life I was not in control. And it wasn't because I didn't have the capacity to be in control. It was because I let other people control me. I let other things control me. I let my own emotions control me. I let my own urges control me. I let all these other things control me. I never did what I truly wanted to do. And it was quite a bit of a learning curve to, to actually listen to myself and what I wanted to do and to really take responsibility for all these things that in the past I blamed on other people or I like, oh, it's their responsibility to do this for me. But at the end of the day, it's really just you.

And I think responsibility is a great word there. I'm glad that you said that because that's ultimately what it is, is, you know, you have to take responsibility for, for your life, for your recovery, for this whole journey. You have to, have to take responsibility. You know, don't worry about what your doctor says, what your psychiatrist says. You know, if you want to rely on your doctor, go see 10 doctors. You know, make sure that you're in control, that you're in charge, um, and trust yourself before you trust anyone else. Always trust yourself. That's a really important part. And, and like Brad said, you have to take responsibility. You have to, have to, have to take responsibility and say, okay, this is my issue. This is my problem. This is my life. How am I going to solve it? Right? And so like when your insurance doesn't come through and they say, no, we're not gonna cover that thing, you know, you can't throw your hands up. You have to say, okay, this is my responsibility. How can I get the money to pay for that thing out of pocket? Or how can I, you know, find something else that they will cover? How can I convince them to cover this? Whatever it is, you have to Take responsibility because this is your life ultimately. Like, and for anyone watching this, right, you're either watching this maybe because you have PTSD or CPTSD, or for a loved one, or maybe you're just a clinician, right, and you're trying to help people with PTSD or CPTSD. You know, whatever the case, once you solve this issue, once you solve this PTSD thing, this CPTSD thing, your life will exponentially get better when you're in control of your emotions, when you don't you know, react to— you're not always, you know, they call it hypervigilance. You're not always on edge. You're not always anxious. You're not always like depressed. Your heart isn't always racing all the time. You're not always scared. Like once you get rid of all those things, your life— and I don't mean to laugh— your life just gets like exponentially better, just like, just by happenstance.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, and then you can— what Brad and I like to talk about is, you know, you can solve new problems. You can have new problems, which is just like a beautiful thing.

Which is amazing. Instead of focusing on PTSD, you're focusing on how can I be How can I be— what's a—

I don't know, how can I be a better spouse? Or how can I be a better mom? How can I, you know, be more effective at work?

How can I be more confident? How can I become really the person I truly want to be versus just how can I get out of bed? You know, so like you're gonna have problems throughout the whole recovery process, right?

Right.

But they're just new problems. And when you reach those new problems, you're gonna know and you're gonna be like, they told us.

You're gonna celebrate those new problems.

You're like, yes, finally I get to work on something that is gonna make me Happier and not just like a little less depressed.

It's amazing. It's amazing because instead of like, how can I even get through the night, right? How can I even sleep through the night? Once you're sleeping through the night, it's gonna be like, wow, how can I, you know, how can I focus more? And like, focus more is like, like a non-issue, right? But like, it's so, so neat to, to move on to those new problems. So it's really important, like what we're saying, and we could go on for hours talking about this, but what we're saying is it's really important that you take recovery into your own hands. That you ask yourself right now. I want to ask you, and I want you to ask yourself: Do you have a recovery plan? Do you have a recovery plan? Yes or no? Oh, no, no, no.

That was a dramatic pause. Okay, good.

Just I just want to be dramatic. You know, like truly ask yourself and answer that for yourself right now. You either said yes, I do. Right? It's it's a yes or it's a no. There's no like well kind of no. Then you. don't, right? And again, I'm not trying to be mean. I love you and I'm here for you. And I just, I want to push you in the right direction because it's either an affirmative, yes, I have a recovery plan, or it's a no, someone else is trying to plan my recovery, right? I'm relying on my, you know, clinicians, doctors, therapists, whatever, to point me in the right direction. Don't do that. Don't do that. Get your own recovery plan, right? Make your recovery plan.

Yeah.

And if you, you know, like I talk about in that free training that I run in the webinar training, I I talk about the pillars of recovery, you know, make your recovery plan around that. I want to put the power in your hands. These are the things you need to do. And so that's the best way to, to craft your recovery plan is around the pillars.

Yeah. And the reason why we keep saying this over and over again is because there's so many people that we see over and over again who are waiting and waiting and waiting. And we were talking about this the other day, like we see all these people just waiting. For other people to come and help them, but they need to they need to see. We need to tell them. We need to tell you that you need to stop waiting and you need to start doing and you need to start going out there and taking taking like grabbing life pulling it in and like doing it for yourself. You know, and this whole journey, this whole thing is about personal growth. And another thing that we were talking about recently was that like we have the knowledge in our minds. We have the knowledge, the experience. We know exactly what to do that. if we were put in a situation where we both had PTSD again, like, we'd be able to recover in— what would you say?

I mean, under 2 months. 100% under 2 months.

Literally, probably weeks, honestly.

Yeah, like, honestly, weeks.

If we were put in that situation, we know exactly what to do. And it really comes down to that. It's like, like, we don't have to wait for other people. We don't have to wonder about what to do. We know exactly what, what to do. And that's like the key with everything that we're everything that we teach is like, we want to teach you how to get to that point where like you can just boom, you know exactly what to do. And that's exactly what Caitlin does in her training and in her program is like she just creates these people who are completely independent and can just really like— they have something they want and they can get it, you know. They want to feel this certain way, they want to, you know, eliminate this certain type of emotion or the certain feeling, and they know exactly how to do it. You know, without having to, you know, wait or wonder or just ignore it or just hope or just hope that time's going to take it away because it just doesn't.

It doesn't.

Yeah.

That's a great way to put it. And I think one thing I want to mention, we were talking about this this morning is, you know, if, if we had kids, I'm right, we don't have kids, but if we had kids, this is the exact information that we would be telling them. Like our family and our friends don't get special treatment. You know, we do.

We'd probably be harder.

Everything that we say to you all and to everyone who listens and to everyone that we come in contact with is exactly the same, right? So this is the information we would give our kids. This is the information that we give our friends and our family who are struggling. These are the words that— the exact words, right?

Yeah.

These are the resources that we send them to. And I want to be, I think, transparent about that because that's really important. And we were just talking about it this morning on the way into the office that, you know, our friends and our family don't get special treatment because You know, we want to serve at such a high level, and we do serve at such a high level that we put everything that we have into what we, what we create and what we put out. And I put everything I have into the program and into the trainings because they are truly the best resource. And I want to serve the world with this. And if we had a kid, right, if we had a kid, I mean, that could—

Yeah.

That was, you know, over, over 8 or 10 years old that could watch the training and get something out of it. that's exactly where we would send them. So I— it's like from the bottom of our hearts and from our souls, this is the information that we want you to have. We want you to put recovery into your own hands. We don't want it to be in our hands. We want it to be in your hands. This is your life, and it's so, so important that you get yourself a recovery plan. Go and watch that training, right? You can go to overcomingptsd.info/go. You go to overcomingptsd.info/go, and I'll remember to put the link below. Uh, when we're done here, for those of you watching on live and on the webinar, on the, um, podcast, it'll be below as well. Go and watch that training, get yourself a recovery plan, and take recovery into your own hands.

That's what it comes down to. You have to ask yourself honestly and be like, am I doing the right things? Am I doing the things to get me to where I want to go? And for most of my— like, it's— this is a message that we needed to hear day one. Right, this is, this is a message to Kaylee in your 20s. I don't know how many years ago, decades ago. And it's some— it's, it's something that's so important. It's easy to gloss over, easy to just be like, okay, and then move on with your day. But you really need to, to self-reflect and ask yourself honestly if you're doing the things that you need to do to get to full recovery. And more often than not, it's going to be a no. And if you're not, that's not a bad thing. I mean, it's not a good thing, but it's not— it's not like you're not supposed to— like, don't beat yourself up. Don't like blame yourself for that, you know, because you've made it this far, right? And you've had to go through all this pain and you've done the best that you could do with all the knowledge that you've had so far. But now we want to give you a new piece of knowledge that changes the direction of your life.

That's right. So if you're not right now, just move forward with it. Just take this information and run with it. Don't, don't look back on it. Just take it right now and run with it and create yourself a plan and And take recovery into your own hands.

Yeah. The past is gone, man. It ain't coming back. It ain't coming back. So don't, don't beat yourself up for things that you did or didn't do in the past. Just be like, hey, this is my reality right now. I have to accept it. What can I do right now? Right now, right this second. I mean, literally right now. What can I do right now?

I know.

Not in 5 minutes. Right now.

You can go to overcomingptsd.info/go and you can register for a time to see the training. Yeah, I promise you it'll serve you. I promise you it's worth it. It's an amazing, amazing training.

Yeah, and Kayleen wasn't kidding that like we have someone in our life that, you know, one of our family members was telling us about a family friend who probably has PTSD. And what we're going to tell them is exactly— we would tell them, hey, show up to this podcast, listen to this every day, get this positive input in your brain, and show up to this training so you know the exact steps to take to get to full recovery. That's exactly what we would tell them to do.

That's right. All our family, all our friends get the same message.

And this person doesn't have insurance either. And that's why, that's why they were talking about it too. It's like, oh, like they were dropped from their therapist because they didn't have insurance. And they're like, oh, now what do I do? And they feel stuck in this place because they're letting all these other things control them and like tell them where to go. But in reality, they need to take that control and take those steps forward themselves.

That's right.

Yeah, it's not— it's just the truth. It's— do you want the truth?

Come here for the truth.

Come here for the truth.

I used to have a teacher in high school and he had Veritas tattooed down his forearm, which is truth, I think, in, um, I don't know, Latin or something. Anyway, I'll get that. I used to go like this, you want the truth? Um, so if you're watching, Mr.

Kerr, Thank you.

Anyway, that's what we have for you all here today. Take recovery into your own hands. Go register for a time to see the training. I promise it'll serve you. You know, we're here for you. We love you. We believe in you. We know you can do this, and we want you to take recovery into your hands and only your hands. So that's what we have for you today. Thank you for those of you listening. Thank you for those of you showing up live. You can ask questions at the end of the day here today. We're gonna, we're gonna stick around and answer a few questions, but You know, in in the meantime, we will see you tomorrow.

Yeah, we'll see you guys tomorrow.

Thank you for showing up. Bye bye.

Bye.