The Power Of WHY In Trauma Recovery | PTSD & Trauma Recovery

Hey everybody, Brad Schipke here, and today I'm talking to you about the power of why when it comes to PTSD and trauma recovery. Now, the reason why I'm shooting this video for you today is because I see so many people crippled with fear, crippled with inaction, and are unable to take the steps and the actions they need to take in order to fully recover on a consistent basis. So what I'm going to be showing to you In today's video is not only how to craft a powerful why, but I'm gonna give you all the supporting reasons why this tool is so important, why this is going to absolutely transform your life. And at the end of this video, I'm gonna be walking through a worksheet that you'll actually be able to download and go through. So you'll have a sheet of paper that you can look at and read for motivation to remind yourself of why you're going on this journey, why you're doing all the difficult things every single day to work through the pain, to recover, to process your past, to build these new routines and build this new lifestyle of healing and recovery. So at the end of this, I'm gonna go through a worksheet with you that you can actually download and fill out for yourself. But I have in total of 4 things I wanna go through today to help with this whole process. So the very first thing here that I wanna go through when it comes to crafting your why is Weighing the pain of change. Now, if you don't know what that means, that's okay. I'm gonna explain that. So the first thing here is weighing the pain of change. So what happens to most people when it comes to recovery is that they get crippled by the fear of their past, right? So most people go into recovery And, you know, they think that they have to face their past all at once, that they're gonna be reliving this, and that it's just gonna be this really, really, really horrible experience. Now, to tell you the truth, the journey is difficult. And I'm not here to lie to you or say like it's gonna be this beautiful, easy, fairytale, rainbow, butterfly journey. It's not. But it's not nearly as bad. as the way that you are living day to day right now. And that is what this is all about— weighing the pain of change. So this is a tool to help you craft an extremely powerful why. And this is something that Kayleen and I actually did on our recovery, which is why we recommend it, because it was so powerful in our own recovery. Um, we started teaching it to other people, and it really had a massive impact on them as well. So This goes— so I remember that— I'll tell you a story about Kayleen's journey where she got to a point where she was at rock bottom and she was having flashbacks and nightmares pretty much every second of every day unless she was passed out from sheer exhaustion. So she was at this point where she couldn't imagine Facing her past. She couldn't imagine working on healing or recovering because her past was so painful, right? But then I went up to her and I told her, what I want you to weigh your options here. I want you to look at the 2 options that you have, and the 2 options that you have are to stay where you are right now, to stay in this pain and all the years that you had before and not do anything different. Or you have the option to change, to do something different, to face your past, to process your past, and to try something new to help you heal. And really what motivated her to action was weighing the pain of those 2 things. So what I want you guys to do is I want you to think about your life right now, right? I want you to think about— and this is a painful thing, but it's an important step. Mm-hmm. If you are to discover a very, very powerful why. So this isn't meant to dig up any painful things or make you go through any bad experiences, but I want you to look at your life objectively and look at how much pain PTSD has caused you. Look at, you know, your entire life, however long you've had PTSD, how PTSD affects you on a daily basis. Is it giving you all of this anxiety? Is it giving you— fear? Is it ruining your relationships? Is it ruining your finances? Is it ruining your health? You know, what is that current reality, right? And that current reality for most people is, you know, is, is a reality where they haven't committed fully to their recovery. You know, it's something that they would like, right? But it's not something they're committed to. It's not something that they're working every single day at to get better, right? So you have that option of not doing anything different, or you have this option of temporarily facing your past, temporarily going through the hard moments to get through the other side. And what you will find with those 2 options is that facing your past, going through it, processing it, is much less painful than living the rest of your life with PTSD and all the impact that that will have in your future. Because all of us, we have years and years and years ahead of us, right? You have years ahead of your life. How do you want those years to— how do you want those years to be? Do you want them to stay the way that they are right now, or do you want them to change? And if you want something to change, you're going to have to do something different than you've been doing right now. You're going to have to commit to fully recover. You're going to have to commit to doing whatever it takes to heal, to recover, to learn what you need to learn, to do what you need to do, to find the resources that you need to heal and to recover. And that was a really defining moment in Kayleen's recovery when she looked at it like that, when she looked at her life and she's like, wow, I am having nightmares and flashbacks almost every second of every single day, and I cannot imagine having that for the rest of my life. So I'm willing, I'm willing to take the chance and face my past, to try something different, To learn more about how I can process the past and see if that actually changes things. And once she did that, she saw incredible, incredible changes in recovery. And I believe it was within 2 years, she was able to go from that rock bottom spot to a place where she was fully recovered, starting a business, our relationship was great. Everything was awesome. But it really started with that decision of committing to your recovery in the beginning. And all of this ties back into your why because what you want to do when you weigh your current reality, you're like, I don't want to live the way that I'm living right now. Why do you want to heal? Why do you want to get better? Because I don't want to live like this for the rest of my life. So that's how this connects. with your why, and it's one of the first steps to help you develop that why. So you can look at your life and be like, am I spending enough time on healing? Am I spending enough time, you know, learning things, implementing things, trying new things, and just changing the way that I'm doing things, right, in order to heal? So that's the first thing right there— weighing the pain of change. And when you can weigh it correctly, it's a super powerful force in crafting your why. Now, I wanna talk to you next about the second thing here, which is really, really important. And it's gonna help you shift kind of your perspective on crafting your why for the future, is I wanna talk about why recovery is your number one priority. So this is really important. Why recovery is your number one priority, right? So why? So this goes back into your why too. Most people that I see, I lived most of my recovery not committed to my healing, not putting recovery first, right? You know, I didn't connect all the dots, and most people do not connect all the dots when it comes to PTSD and how it really just ripples out and affects every area of your life. And at one point in my life, I made this connection. It was basically like this— it was almost like this epiphany where I just remember sitting there one day in my bedroom, super, super depressed. I was just like looking at my life like, what is going— what is going wrong? You know, why, why, why am I feeling this way? Why did my life get this bad, right? Like, why are these— why are all these bad things happening to me, right? So I just started questioning my reality and like questioning my actions, questioning everything that was going on inside my head. And I made the connection of— and I asked myself, I asked myself, what, what is the root of all this pain? Right? Why are all these things going wrong? And every single answer— why are my finances bad? Why has my health gone down the tube? Why is my relationship bad? Why have I ruined all the relationships that I used to have? And all of those answers converged into this one thing, which was PTSD. All my problems in my life were caused by this one thing. And guess how much time I was spending on healing my PTSD? Zero. Nothing. I was spending zero, zero time on my PTSD. I wasn't doing anything at all to help myself, to heal myself, or anything like that. I wasn't committed to my healing. I wasn't willing to do whatever it took. I wasn't even trying to read books. I wasn't even trying to watch videos like this. I wasn't looking for resources. I wasn't doing anything. And I find that that's the place where most people get. They get to this place where they're just completely hopeless. And don't end up doing anything. But what I want you to realize is that if you really ask yourself, if you're having all these problems, if you're having financial problems, if you're having health problems, if you're having relationship problems, why are all those things happening? Why are all those things happening? And I almost— I can almost guarantee you that all of those are happening because of the trauma you've had in your past. And if you heal that thing, if you focus on that thing, if you work on that thing and you're committed to healing the past, healing the trauma that you've gone through in the past, and it is possible, we help people every single day do it. But if you're committed to that, all of these outer problems are going to get better almost magically. I know that's like a kind of like a weird thing to like imagine or say, but like, you know, in my finances, my life got so bad where You know, I got fired from 2 jobs, right? I couldn't work, right? I got fired because I couldn't work. I couldn't show up to work. I was too scared. I was like, I couldn't do anything. I couldn't function at work. So my finances were in the tubes. I was eating junk food 24/7. I wasn't going to the gym. I wasn't exercising. I wasn't doing anything. I was like probably 30 pounds overweight, all because of my trauma. My health was down the tubes. I was fighting with Kayleen, right? I was fighting with her. I'm not someone who yells. I'm not someone who gets angry. But suddenly I found myself getting angry all the time. I found myself yelling. I found myself breaking things. I found— I didn't recognize myself. I thought I was going crazy. And why did that happen? Because of my PTSD. So my relationship was down the tube, and even my relationship with my family. And luckily, I didn't do anything too drastic with them, but what I did with that is I isolated so much from my family that it felt like— and I basically felt like I wasn't worth any of their love, right? So the relationship with my family was down the tubes. And the core of all those things was PTSD. Now, the reason why I'm telling you this right now is because this is all fuel to help you build an extremely powerful why. Weighing the pain of change will help you build an extremely powerful why, knowing how PTSD is affecting your life. And this is just another layer of that— why recovery is your number one priority. Because everything in your life, if you can just look at all— ask yourself, look at all the problems that you're experiencing in your life right now, all the things that you complain about, and ask yourself, what is the root of this? And I guarantee most, if not all, of them will be from trauma. And then ask yourself, how much time am I spending on my recovery? How much time am I dedicating myself to healing? And if you're like me, it might be zero. It might be 15 minutes. But really, it's a sobering exercise to look at that, and it's something that you need to do to look at the reality of what's going on. Because if you just ignore the reality, you're going to keep getting what you've always had. So it's something you have to look at, even if it's painful, especially if it's painful. If you've been ignoring your past, if you've been ignoring the impact that PTSD has been having on your life, you're going to keep continuing down this really, really scary path, this really, really painful path that you do not have to go down. And that's why I say these things, even though they're hard, even though it's painful to hear. That's why I say it, because I don't want you to keep going down that path that you've been going down. I've made that choice. It's not fun. It's not a fun choice. And you know it's not a fun choice. I don't want you to go down that path anymore. And that's why I have these— that's why I'm talking about these things is because it's— I don't want you to— I don't want you to experience those things. I don't want you to experience the pain. I don't want you to suffer as long as Kayleen did. I don't want you to have to suffer any longer than you already have, and you don't have to. So that's the second thing here I wanted to talk about. Now, The third thing here is, um, it's, it's another objection that, um, people give me all the time why they don't want to heal, right? And in order to really start recovering and to develop a really powerful why, you need to get over this objection. And it is so deeply ingrained into society And pretty much our entire culture. So it's kind of weird, but it's called the selfish myth, right? So what I mean by this is people are too afraid to take care of themselves, to spend time on themselves, to put themselves first because they don't want to be selfish, because they've been taught that you must always put other people first, you must always give. 100,000% of the time. You always need to be giving. If you're not giving, if you're not doing something for somebody else, you're selfish. You're doing something wrong. You're a bad person, right? If you do anything for yourself, if you do anything out of like something that you want to do, you're a selfish person, and that's bad. But that is one of the biggest blockers when it comes to recovery, and I'll tell you why. Because if you think of it like this, if you kind of think of life as a chain, so imagine these are links in a chain, right? I think you guys can see that. So let's imagine like this link down here, this is your finances. This link here is your health. This here is relationship with Fido, my dog. All right, and this one is family, right? So all these links right here, this first link here, if you guessed it, Is you. And all the links behind this, if you break this first chain here, if you're not good, all the rest of the links in the chain fall away. So if you do not take care of yourself, you are the very first link in the chain. Without you, none of these other things are going to be good. If you're not good, your family's not going to be good. If you're not good, your relationship with your dog Fido isn't going to be good. We don't want that. Not your dog. That's the last thing, man. And if you're not good, your health isn't gonna be good. You're not gonna be going to the gym. You're not gonna be eating well. If you're not good, your finances aren't gonna be good. So you really are the first link in the chain. And if you're not good, nothing else in your life will be good. And what you really need to do, and what I want you to do on this video here today, is to change your belief about selfishness and realize just the truth. That it doesn't have to be one or the other. It doesn't have to be, if I take care of myself, I'm a bad person, or if I give— and when I give everything, that's good. That's very binary, black and white, one-sided thinking. What we want to do is meet somewhere in the middle where you can say to yourself, I know I'm a good person. I know I, I will give to people. I will help people. I will be— I am a really good person, right? But I can't be a good person to other people unless I'm good, and I matter too. My life matters too. My health matters. And honestly, I can't help anybody else if I'm not good. So I want to shatter this myth with you that being selfish is bad. I want you to see selfish as something good because you need to take care of yourself. And the quality of your life is the quality of you. So if you're not taking care of your mental health, nothing else in your life is gonna matter. So all of these things are things that I'm helping you through the process to develop a really powerful why. Now, this last thing here is going to be our action. So A for action. Right behind Billy here. A for action. And this is something we call commitment contract. The commitment contract. So what is the commitment contract? Well, it's something that we have every— it's the very, very first thing that we have All of our clients go through. So if you were to join our recovery program, the first thing we would have you do is develop an extremely powerful why. And we would have gone through these things, these first 3 things, and I would have told you— we would have told you to fill out this commitment contract. And it's inside of this workbook. We send this to all of our clients here. What I'm going to do with you right now is actually open up this workbook, go through this together, And explain to you what the commitment contract is, why you want to do it, and how to craft it. So the commitment contract takes the power of your why and puts it into this this contract that you actually write out or type up and sign and date, and it marks the day that you fully one hundred thousand percent. Commit to fully recovering from PTSD or anything else that you're going through. What it really is, it's combining all of these things into this one singular contract to help you, something that you can look at day to day. And what we do is we actually send out a folder to our clients and have them put this contract in their folder, and they put the folder next to the bed. And we tell them every single day, when you wake up, we want you to read this contract and get reconnected to why you are on this journey, why you are going through the hard times, why you are going through the pain, so you can stay focused on the goal. And really, it's such a powerful thing when you can just dig in, find the why, and put it into this contract that you can then read and rely on. And what we want you to do is read it every single morning, and whenever you feel like you've gotten off track or you're having a bad day, I want you to go through and read this contract to get re-motivated and reconnected with your why so you keep taking those steps forward. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to quickly read through how to actually craft your commitment contract, and then I'll even give you an example. I'll read an example. And if you guys want a copy of this commitment contract, we will put a— I'll put a link below this video straight to the Google Drive document. So you don't have to opt in, you don't have to put your email in or anything. It'll just go straight to a Google Drive document that you can then print or make a copy and put it into your own Google Drive. So really, in this, in this worksheet, what we do is we walk you through 4 different questions to help you put pen to paper and develop all the reasons why you want to commit Why you want to fully recover. So those questions are, why haven't you fully committed to recovery in the past? What pain have you linked to committing to full recovery? Right? So what pain have you linked to committing full recovery? And some examples for that is, I didn't think it was possible to heal, so why even try? I thought facing it would make things worse. I didn't want to trigger myself and relive it. I didn't want to keep getting hurt. And we have a few other examples to help you figure that out. And then what we do is we want you to write down all the pleasure you had in the past by not committing to full recovery. Some examples being, I don't have to admit that I'm hurt, or I don't have to feel ashamed about it. So you avoid all these things. What are all these pains in, in not committing to full recovery that you get to avoid, right? Which all adds to the reason why you're staying where you are right now. And then we have you ask, what will it cost you if you do not change right now? What will it cost you? And it goes back to weighing this first thing that we talked about here, weighing the pain of change, right? What will it cost you if you don't change? What will it cost you in your, in your health, in your relationship, in your finances for the rest of your life? What will happen if you don't change? If you don't spend the time you need to spend on healing? And then the last one is write down all the pleasure you will, you will receive from committing To recovery right now? What will each area of your life look like when you fully recover, and how does that make you feel? So at this point, we want you to imagine yourself when you fully recovered and imagine what that life will look like. So basically what we're doing when we have you craft this contract is we want to build up as much pain as we can for staying where we are now and build up as much pleasure as we can for committing to recovery, to going through the pain And, um, going— getting to that finish line of full recovery. And that's how— that's— we really have crafted this in such an intentional way that we break it down to really have a major shift in your mindset. So every time that you read this, you get that same connection in your brain. Now, um, I'm not going to go through the rest of the instructions on here. What I want you to do Because we give an example of how to do this and we give you all the questions inside of this. And again, this is usually only for our clients, but today I want to give this to you absolutely free in a Google Drive document. I want you to go down there. I want you to complete that. And the problem is most people, they'll watch a video like this, they'll watch it even all the way to the end, but then they won't take that next step. They won't take that next action. And what I want you to do is to commit to completing this one worksheet in full. And I promise you, you are going to feel so good. You're gonna feel so motivated, motivated, and you're going to have this to rely on, to look towards when you have a bad day. And again, I want you to read that every single morning, put it by your bedside, and allow the commitment contract and all the things that you've come up with to really start changing your mindset on a consistent basis. So that's a simple routine, a simple system that I want you to get into. And it will absolutely, absolutely change your life if you implement it. So I hope, I hope that you do that. Please go do that. And if you guys enjoyed this video, please hit that subscribe button and the little bell. I release a video like this every single week. I try to provide as much value as I possibly can, and I try to give you guys some type of action item as well. And if you like this video, hit that little thumbs up button to let me know that you liked it and leave a comment below with the things that you liked. Or any other future things you'd like me to cover in the future. But thank you guys so much for showing up. I really appreciate you for listening to this. I know some of these questions were hard to get through, but you guys are going to do absolutely awesome with this. Now, what I want you to do is to go down right now, click on that link, and again, it's absolutely free. It just goes to a document, like a PDF document. I want you to print that out and do this exercise. It will absolutely change your life. But thank you again for showing up. I really appreciate you guys. I believe in every single one of you, and I know that you can do this. So keep up the amazing work, and I will see you next week.