The PTSD Technique Nobody Talks About: Pre-Processing
In this masterclass Brad Schipke introduces "preprocessing," a proactive mental‑rehearsal technique that prepares you for future painful or anxiety‑provoking situations before they occur. He defines preprocessing as visualizing a feared scenario, processing the associated emotions, and reshaping the underlying core beliefs, thereby reducing the emotional charge and boosting confidence. Schipke explains the two‑fold nature of processing—emotional and logical—and shows how changing beliefs while releasing feelings creates a safer internal reference for real‑world exposure. He contrasts mental rehearsal with in‑vivo exposure, emphasizing that while real exposure builds the strongest belief‑changing reference points, many trauma survivors (especially those with PTSD) cannot safely face the situation without severe decompensation. Visualization, he notes, has been shown to produce performance gains comparable to physical practice in athletes and musicians, underscoring its potency. The talk includes personal anecdotes: confronting an abusive individual, overcoming work‑related PTSD that crippled his ability to function as a realtor, and progressively expanding visualizations from simply entering a workplace to performing at peak efficiency. Schipke outlines a step‑by‑step progressive approach—start with a minimal, manageable slice of the scenario, process the emotions that arise, then gradually enlarge the imagined scene until full‑day performance is visualized. He warns against using preprocessing as a crutch, insisting that real‑world exposure remains essential for building unshakable confidence. The masterclass also introduces a side‑note on applying preprocessing to internal “protectors” (parts of the self that act defensively), allowing those parts to be visualized handling stressful situations, thereby transforming them from fearful to empowered. Finally, Schipke encourages ongoing nightly visualization to push personal growth, whether for trauma healing, skill acquisition (public speaking, sales, business), or general self‑improvement. The overall message is that preprocessing is a powerful, evidence‑backed tool that, when combined with real‑world exposure, accelerates healing and performance.
Chapters
Welcome to today's masterclass called preprocessing. Now what I'm going to teach you in this masterclass here today is how to mentally prepare yourself for future painful events. Now there are tons of things and tons of things that we get worried about and anxious about in the future, and I'm going to show you a process on how you can actually preprocess those experiences before they happen. So if you are anticipating We're just coming out of the holidays now. If you are anticipating holidays, if you are anticipating an anniversary of your trauma, if you are anticipating a difficult, difficult conversation with somebody or an argument with somebody and you have to face that, this will help you mentally prepare yourself for that so that you have a plan going into it, you're confident going into it, and you remove, remove the emotional, uh, charge before you actually go into it, which will allow yourself to perform at a much better, higher level. So first, let me explain what I actually mean by preprocessing, right? So in the word itself, you can kind of think of— think about what I mean there. It's like we're going to be processing before something actually happens, right? So we're going to be proactive about our own healing, our own processing, and help ourselves process things before they happen, process bad things before they happen so that we can actually be prepared and go into those situations confidently. So really what it is is about thinking about future events that you're scared of and processing them ahead of time and visualizing yourself to be successful in that event. So we're not only envisioning ourselves in that scenario and processing it, we're also envisioning ourselves being successful in that scenario. And then we're also, as we're processing this— because there's 2 components to processing, there's the emotional journey and the logical journey, you'll hear me say that all the time, we're going to be changing the core beliefs that we have and also releasing the emotions around this event that is happening in the future. And that event in the future could be just anything that you're worried about, right? So it could be a family event, it could be difficult conversations that you're going to be having with a loved one, it could be a trauma anniversary that's coming up, something that, you know, every year, like when this time of year comes around, you just feel the same emotions and all these emotions get triggered. You can imagine yourself in that scenario and going through it successfully and analyzing the emotions and the beliefs that come up and start working with those and changing those ahead of time so that you're prepared. And when you do this process, you will— it'll bring you so much peace of mind, and you will actually find that you will want to do it more because then you're able to process so much more. Because if you think about it, facing your fears is one of the core components of healing and processing. It's like we're putting ourselves into distressing situations and allowing our body and mind to basically acclimate to that with the tools that we have. But we're putting ourselves and constantly facing the dark parts of our mind, the scary things in our life, the things that we don't want to face, so that we can be stronger and more empowered for doing that. So you can either do that by facing those fears in real life, which is how a lot of people do that, which is great. And I'm not saying that is bad. I'm actually saying that's a very, very good thing. You want to be facing fears not only in your mind but also in real life as well, because those provide the strongest references for the new beliefs. So when you're facing beliefs or when you're facing fears in real life, you're actually creating references in real time. So we want you to go out and push yourself out of your comfort zone Because that is what creates the strongest reference points. However, you don't always have the opportunity to face your fear in real life. So let's say like your fear is maybe going out and confronting somebody, right? Somebody that's been abusive to you or whatever else, or setting a certain boundary, whatever it is. Maybe that's the thing that you're scared of and that you're anxious about. Now, there's only a limited amount of opportunities that you have to actually go and take that action in real life. Right? Like, that's not something that you can do whenever you want just to practice it. However, if you mentally rehearse it beforehand, you can practice and put yourself mentally into that scenario as many times as you need to prepare yourself for that. And this is something that we say too, it's like your mind cannot tell the difference between something that is vividly imagined or vividly visualized and real life. And this has been proven. We talk about this in the program. There have been studies done with athletes and things who have mentally, you know, practiced their golf swing and people who actually practice their golf swing, and they improved the same exact amount. Same thing done with pianists— people actually practice the piano in real life or just practiced it in their mind, they both got better the same amount, and they actually saw the same brain development in both scenarios. So visualization is a very powerful technique. It's not something to be underestimated and is something to be utilized. And it's really cool too, because then you're allowed to— you're able to push yourself further and make yourself stronger without actually having to go into that scary scenario in real life. And again, I'm not saying don't go into that, and I'm not saying avoid the scary scenarios in real life. I'm not saying doing this in lieu of that. I'm saying do this on top of that. Still face your fears in real life, still run towards them, and put yourself in those uncomfortable situations so that you grow, because we only grow from putting ourselves into uncomfortable situations that we're fearful of. Keep doing that, but also do this, this preprocessing technique, this visualization technique to put yourself into that painful situation beforehand and preprocess those emotions so you can just build that much more strength, um, that, that much faster. So this is another benefit of being able to do this and preprocessing traumas before it actually happens is That with PTSD and trauma, and specifically putting yourself into, like, facing the fear in real life, can be debilitating. Like, literally debilitating to the point where someone could have a seizure, could have a flashback, uh, panic attack, could just break down crying. And that's, that is what is so debilitating about PTSD is that, you know, a lot of these traditional, like this, the traditional advice of like, oh, you just need to go like push yourself out of your comfort zone, or You just need to go out there and face your fears. You just got to go and do it, right? That's a harder thing to do when you've experienced trauma and you have PTSD. I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm not saying you can't do those things. I would never put limits on anybody. However, it can be very hard when you do push yourself out of your comfort zone and your reaction to pushing yourself out of your comfort zone is so intense that it causes you to break down crying, have a panic attack, have a flashback, something like that, which can actually cause you to Experience more trauma and more shame around yourself. So another benefit of preprocessing is like you don't have to put yourself into that scenario where you would be compromised to the point where you would be breaking down, having a flashback, having a panic attack or something like that. You're putting yourself in your, like, in your mind in a more controlled environment that's still uncomfortable, but you can face it as much as you're able to face it, right? So maybe you just face it a little bit at a time, or maybe you face just a certain aspect of it. So you just visualize, okay, I'm just gonna go in there for a few seconds versus like if you're in real life, you're there and you can't get out. So that's another benefit of this is that you're able to face the thing. And this is just another benefit of processing in general, like knowing the processing tools because you don't have to, you know, go do the exposure therapy in real life and push yourself out of your comfort zone into a situation that would be dangerous for you. Now again, I'm not saying that's a bad thing and that you should avoid putting yourself out there into your comfort zone. That is 100% something we all should be doing. Um, it's just that if you push yourself into the comforts— out of your comfort zone and you have a flashback, it's like that's not going to help you progress forward. So we want to push ourselves out of our comfort zone as much as possible. Um, but this is just a way you can do that. So preprocessing, very, very, very, very powerful if you utilize it. Uh, will change your life, right? I've used this in so many scenarios in my life when I wanted to have a difficult conversation that I was scared of, or I had to confront somebody and have a conversation with them. A lot of emotions would come up, right? And I would mentally put myself into that scenario and identify the core beliefs that came up. So the negative beliefs that caused me to feel fearful. So for example, there was this one person where I basically had to confront. They were, they were like this very abusive person. They were treating somebody that I cared about very, very poorly, and I had to face them. And at the time, I had a lot of PTSD. It wasn't from this person, but what happens with trauma and PTSD is it affects other areas of your life. So, you know, maybe in the past without PTSD, you wouldn't be— or without the PTSD that you experienced, you wouldn't be fearful of this. But now you are just because you're fearful Basically everything. So I would visualize myself going into this scenario and this person not reacting the way that I wanted to, or reacting very poorly or getting angry, and then me having the right beliefs about myself, staying true to myself, and speaking, speaking my piece in the way that I wanted to speak it. And I also allowed myself to release and confront any emotions that came up after that. And also, when you put yourself visually into a stressful situation, what it does is it reveals to you all the emotions, all the negative emotions that you have, which can then be used as ammunition to actually process and heal that problem. And this is like the same kind of methodology or the same type of mindset that we have around triggers. Once you know the processing tools, triggers no longer become a bad thing. Because triggers reveal to you the negative emotions and the pain that needs to be healed. So once you know the processing tools, a trigger now becomes an opportunity for further healing because a trigger is really just revealing, revealing to you something that needs to be healed and processed. So the same thing can be thought about in this way, is you put yourself visually into this painful scenario and these painful emotions come up, and you can use those painful emotions as information to go deeper and actually heal them, right? So then once you know the processing tools, things become so cool because every piece of pain that you experience becomes an opportunity to heal. And because pain really is, it's just a notification system of our body telling us, hey, there's something wrong. And most people don't have the right tools to deal with that pain, but in this program you do, and that's the cool part. So then you like You get to this point where you know the processing tools and you like want to experience pain so you can solve the problem, because more— the more pain that you solve, the better you feel. Because all that pain that you have, and maybe you're not experiencing it right now, but it's there, and it's, it's there in your long-term memory. It's still affecting you. It's still draining your resources, draining your energy. Even if it's not triggered right now, it's still in the background running 24/7, and that's why you can feel drained. Like so often is that you have all these traumas and you have all these unprocessed memories in your mind that's just constantly pulling on your resources. So you can use these painful experiences, you can use any experience that causes pain or spikes pain as an opportunity to identify those traumas in your long-term memory and heal them and release all of the— or, and, and prevent them, stop them from using all those negative resources and free up All of those resources for just living your life, for going after your dreams, for building the business you want to build, to build the relationship you want to build, whatever it is. Instead of those resources in your mind being occupied with trauma from your past, you heal those. So that's the way that I kind of thought about my own healing. It's like, I want to put myself into as many painful situations as I can so I can identify all the unprocessed things in my past so that I can heal them and release all that energy. And free up all that energy so I can actually live my life, right? So when you're empowered with the tools, this becomes incredibly exciting because you want— like, pain is no longer pain. Pain is just information that allows you to go deeper into your healing and create a better life. So that's the way I thought about this process and how this process has changed my life is that, you know, I just— I want to put myself— like, I want to put myself into the painful situations. I want to identify the painful situations in my life, put myself in there visually. And then process them, because my life would just get better and better and better and better and better the more I faced these parts of my mind that I was just avoiding for so long. So you want to go, you need to go to the dark parts of your mind to identify the pain and heal it, and that's what this preprocessing kind of concept will help you do. So another example that I used this This was with work. So I had PTSD that was pretty bad to the point where I could not, I just could not function at work. I remember driving into, you know, this was back when I was a realtor for a little while, very little while, like a year, year and a half. And I was very ambitious, and I still am, but— Back then, it's like I wanted to show up at the office before everybody else. I wanted to do more calls than everybody else. I wanted to reach out to more people than anybody else. I want— like, when I did an open house, I put out like literally 50 signs because I wanted more people to come to my open house. It's like I wanted to just be the best that I could possibly be. And I just remember there getting there in the morning and just my whole body was just so freaking anxious all the time. My heart was just like Literally pounding. And I remember I was like typing away upstairs. It was this beautiful office, but I was typing away upstairs, um, kind of writing some emails. I forget exactly what I was doing, but I was on my computer. And then the office assistant came into the office and she was like, Brad, are you okay? It's like, you're breathing really deeply. She's like, when my, you know, my dad usually breathes like that when he's really, really angry. He's like, are you okay? I'm like, Yeah, I guess. Like, I didn't even realize that I was doing that. Um, but I, I, at that point too, I was not even aware of what PTSD was. Like, literally, I did not know what PTSD was. Uh, that's how ignorant I was when I first started this journey. It's like I didn't even know what it was. I didn't know I had it. I was just, wow, I'm incredibly stressed out and I have no idea. I mean, like, I know why I'm like experiencing these stressful things, but I didn't know The thing about PTSD. And eventually just got worse and worse where like I just— it got to that point where, you know, these triggers would happen and I would get debilitated. So then, you know, I would be called on to like this listing or this open house or whatever it was to do the showing, and I would get so triggered that, you know, I was debilitated, right? Where I couldn't do anything. So I had a lot of fear around work. I had a lot of shame around work, um, and a lot of negative beliefs, you know, because me not knowing— like, I, back then, I didn't make the connection of like, I'm not able to work because of this trauma. And I didn't believe— I didn't know anything about trauma or anything else. So I just, instead of attributing the— my lack of being able to work to the trauma and then trying to work on the trauma, I attributed, you know, me not being able to work to me being a failure and me not being a good person and me just being a loser because I couldn't get myself up to work. So I treat like the attribution that I had towards the problem was, was wrong, right? And like there's an element to that because like there's always more that I can do, right, to, to solve a problem. However, I attributed 100% of the response— not responsibility, attribution— onto me. Right, because I take responsibility for the problem because it's my problem, it's my trauma. I like— they're my emotions. I needed to take responsibility for it if I wanted to fix it because it's nobody else's fault except for mine. But I attributed 100% of the fault to me, and then I blamed myself, and I was just so hard on myself. Um, so I had a lot of negative beliefs around work. So I like— when I was actually trying to get myself to increase my performance at work again, or when I was trying to go back to work, I had so many false beliefs, so much fear. And so many limiting beliefs, because I just thought I was a failure. I thought I was always going to be a failure. That you know, I had so much of that that I couldn't, I couldn't even get myself to work. But the way that I got myself out of it was this process here. I would visualize myself going into work. And at first I was like terrified, but when I did that, when I visualized myself going through, because like my goal was like, okay, I need to be able to at least, if I'm going to go through my workday, if I'm going to be able to work, I have to at least visualize myself, be able to visualize myself working. So to me, I was like, okay, I am at that point, I was like, I'm too debilitated by this fear to actually go in and work. So I was like, okay, well, what's the next step that I can do? It's like, okay, well, I need to at first be able to visualize myself going through a workday before I can actually, you know, if I'm going to go through a workday. It's like, if I can't even visualize myself going through a workday, how am I going to actually get through a workday successfully? So then I would start doing that. It's like I would literally visualize myself going into work and sitting down, and even that, just going into work, brought up so many emotions. But Then I started to work with those emotions. I started to process those emotions so I could actually visualize myself going to work and sitting down pretty calmly. But then I was like, okay, now I need to visualize myself going to work, sitting down calmly, and actually doing the work. So then I started visualizing that, and that brought up more emotions, more limiting beliefs, more bad things, or more bad things I believed about myself. So then I worked with that and I started to change that. And that I just expanded it further and further and further until I was working throughout the whole day in my mind, and I could see myself doing that. And this didn't happen overnight. It's like I progressively expanded, you know, what I believed was possible for me. And then after that, I started just tweaking up even further. I was like, okay, how can I work at peak performance? How can I work at my highest level? And I'm still doing this to this, to this day. I'm like, how can I work even better, even faster, even more efficiently. So I'm like visualizing myself at that next level, at that next level, at that next level, and I always want to get better. But in the beginning, I used this process of putting myself into that painful situation, which was work, and so that it spiked the emotions so that I could deal with the emotions and then be able to actually go and work. And now I'm able to work. So this process works. But those are just a few examples of how I actually utilize this, how you can, and how you can utilize it as Well, but really just think about anything that you're worried about. Like, if you're worried about any sort of— like, I mean, I'm sure you have things right now. It's like, what, what, what certain things are you scared of? Are you scared of talking to this person? Are you scared of just going outside? Are you scared of just getting out of your bed? Are you scared of, you know, whatever it is? Anything, you know, going to work, public speaking. And if you've already fully healed, what's that next— what's that next level? What's that next level? What's that next skill that you need to develop that you're scared of? You know, like, if you want to build a business and you're scared of doing sales, you can use this technique to put yourself into that sales situation and start preprocessing those fears, on top of actually putting yourself into that situation. Now, there's a point where you, like, I wanna make this clear too, 'cause like, you could utilize this preprocessing technique, and it could, it could, it could become a crutch for you for not actually facing things in real life. And that's a really important caveat too, is because, you know, I want you to be able to face things in real life as well, because ultimately that's what matters. It's like, I want you to be living your life and facing your fears in real life. Um, this, this, this preprocessing thing though, it can be added on top of, and like I said before, it can be added on top of Facing fears in real life, or it can be used, used in scenarios where, like, if you were— if your PTSD and trauma is so bad that you can't face this without breaking down, you can utilize this to get to a point where you can actually start facing it in real life. But I do not want this to become a crutch to you to not face things in real life, because facing things in real life is scary. Facing fears is scary. That's the def— like, that's like in, in the word. It's like it's supposed to be uncomfortable. So, um, because I, I can, I can already hear like there's, there's certain like whatever coaches or gurus or whatever where it's like, no, like you don't need to visualize anything and blah blah blah blah blah, you just need to get out there and get yourself to do it. And that like a lot of times that's right, it's like you just need to get yourself out there or put yourself there. And at the same time, if you can add this on top of doing that, you will move so much faster. So if you add the visualization technique on top of facing your fears head-on and just going at it, you will move that much faster. And just be conscious, like, if you're— and there's nothing wrong with, like, if you're at that point where you're unable to face your fears because you literally break down, there's no shame in that. Like, zero, zero shame. I was there, and you have to start where you are. And But I'm just saying this as a caveat to not use this or allow this to become a crutch for you and to still push yourself, manageably push yourself, but push yourself because it's scary and it's hard and it's painful, but push yourself in real life to face those fears as well because that's what is really going to give you the confidence. If it's in your mind, 100% in your mind, there's going to be part of your mind where it's like, well, I never actually did that, so I don't actually know. But when you actually do something, you build a level of confidence that is like unshakable because it's like, I already did that. So like when people come to me, it's like PTSD is impossible to heal. I'm like, I did it. Kayleen did it. A lot of other people did it. Like, I'm not going to believe that. Like, I'm very confident in, in my belief that it's possible because I did it. You know what I mean? Um, So like actually putting it into practice in real life is, is important. And that's where the, like, the true confidence comes from. It's like actually doing it and actually achieving things and actually overcoming the fears in real life. So let me see if there's anything else. Oh, there is. So I have a few notes here as well. Side note, you can use your protectors. You can put your protectors through this process as well. Which is a really cool thing, right? So I talked about just you putting yourself into this, like into a scenario that is stressful and uncomfortable for you. But what you can also do is you can, when you're having a conversation with your protector, you can visualize that protector and put it into an uncomfortable situation where it then acclimates and acts successfully in that situation. So it transforms itself from a fearful protector part of you to someone who is empowered and can handle that scenario successfully. And that scenario in protector world can be real or it can be completely fictional and imagined. So it doesn't have to be like your protector standing up to somebody. It can be, it can be completely real, but it could also be very, very fictional, which is very powerful as well. And I'm going to do another masterclass on this as well. But that's just a side note, is that you can do this for yourself, or you can also do this for the different parts of yourself, which is actually pretty exciting as well. But that's it. Preprocessing, use it. It's an awesome technique. I still use this, you know, just to push myself to that next level. Every night I visualize myself pushing myself more, pushing myself more, becoming better, a better person. It just looks different because I'm not facing, you know, specific traumas or things that have to do with PTSD. It's like I'm pushing myself towards that next level. So this is a tool that you can have in your toolbox to push yourself to that next level from now to whenever, whenever you want. So see you later. Hope you enjoyed.
