8 Daily Habits to Overcome Your Traumatic Past CHAMPION

Hello everybody, and welcome to this brief video on surviving your eight daily habits. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Now, before we get started, please click the like and the subscribe button. That way you're notified every time we put out a new video. So the mnemonic I created for these eight habits is champion. Because when we are surviving our past, we are becoming champions. C stands for choose how your past impacts you in the future. When you wake up each morning, you have a choice to let your past drag you down, let your past haunt you, or choose to let it be a part of who you are and encourage you to move forward. H stands for be honest with yourself and others about your thoughts, wants and needs. What is it that you want and need to move toward your rich and meaningful life? It doesn't have to depend on your past. What is it that you in the present deserve? What is it that you in the present want? What are your thoughts in the present? A stands for accept things that can't be changed. Some things just suck. Your past can't be changed. Again, you can choose. You can change how it impacts you in the future. Whether it drags you down and makes you feel depressed and hopeless and ashamed, or if you process that stuff and recognize that you have moved forward and you've gotten stronger as a result. Not that you would have wanted to choose that path, but it has made you stronger. M stands for mindful compassionate awareness of your needs. And I know this isn't necessarily in order because you need to be mindful of your needs before you can be honest with yourself and others, but it just worked for the mnemonic. Mindful, compassionate awareness and compassionate or non judgmental, whatever word you want to use is so important. Don't should yourself to death if you wake up in the morning and you recognize that, hey, I'm starting to get burned out, I need to take the day off or I need something else. Don't be hard on yourself. Instead, be compassionate and go, okay, if this is what you need right now, then let's make it happen. Being compassionate and paying attention to what your mind and body tell you are very important. And that is something that a lot of people who survive trauma or stressful traumatic childhoods have often not done. Even if you had a great childhood, if you had a stressful traumatic period, you may have learned to just shut off your own needs. So becoming mindful and compassionately aware of your needs. In the morning, you get up and you check in with yourself. You know, hi self, how you Doing? What are your needs today? How is my past going to impact me today? What is it that I need to be honest with myself about? About how I feel, my thoughts, my needs, and what do I need to be honest with others about? If I'm having a crappy day, maybe I need to be honest with them and say, you know what? I'm having a crappy day and this is what you can do to help me or get out of my way. P stands for purposeful action. That is, using your energy to move forward toward your rich and meaningful life, not dwelling and stewing on the things that cannot be changed. You've accepted those. You're using your energy to say, how can I improve the next moment? How can I use my energy today to nurture or develop something that's important to me, whether it's my relationship with myself or my relationship with somebody else or a hobby or my health or whatever it is. How can I purposefully use my energy? And a lot of times when I talk about purposeful action, I talk about mobile devices. And a lot of us have a limited amount of battery on our mobile device, so we need to choose how we use that battery. Could we watch videos on it? Sure. However, that would probably completely drain your battery before the end of the day. And if you can't recharge, then you might not have enough battery to call people or to do other things that are necessary. You have a certain a finite amount of energy yourself every day, and you only get to recharge periodically, like at night when you get good sleep. So how are you going to use your energy in the best possible, most effective way to move toward that rich and meaningful life. I stands for inventory. Who you are today. Who you are today may not be who you were yesterday, may not be who you were six months ago or a year ago. Continuing to hold yourself hostage for mistakes that you've made or for things that you didn't know that you've since learned is not helpful. Who are you today? What do you deserve today? And forgiving yourself for. For past mistakes, making amends where possible, for example. But again, not continuing to hold yourself hostage or criticize yourself for mistakes you made in the past or things you did that you look back and you go, oof. I wish I wouldn't have done that. O is for observe your cognitive distortions. A lot of times when we have gone through a traumatic period, whether it's in childhood or adulthood, our thoughts become much more extreme and what some would say distorted. They're not 100% accurate. Some of these cognitive distortions that are particularly problematic in people who've survived trauma or survived a traumatic past include all or nothing thinking. Everyone is out to get me. Nobody is safe. I can never feel safe. So we want to address that all or nothing thinking by looking for exceptions. What would have to happen so you could trust someone, so you could feel safe thinking back in the past, even if it was for a brief period of time? When did you feel safe or was there somebody that you were able to trust? Mind reading is another skill that we develop to survive traumatic or dangerous situations. We, we try to guess what our, the people around us are thinking. That way we can meet their needs and keep them from getting angry or upset or, you know, dysregulating in some way. However, a lot of times we are not effective at mind reading. Therefore it causes a lot of excessive stress. We may assume somebody's upset with us or assume somebody's upset when in reality they're not. They were just, you know, daydreaming about something. And then we get stressed because they're stressed but. Or we think they're stressed, but they really weren't. So we want to adjust mind reading and look at the facts. What is this person needing right now? What do we know? What are the facts? Not what are we assuming, but what are the facts? And then ask them. Oh my gosh. New concept, communicate. Jumping to conclusions is similar to mind reading, but not always the same. Jumping to conclusions is assuming you know what happened or what's going to happen in a situation. Again, you want to look at the facts of the situation. And personalization is the final one that we're going to talk about. Because a lot of people who've gone through traumatic experience were blamed for what was going on or felt like it was their responsibility or their fault. So they start to personalize everything. Look for alternate explanations. Besides, it's all about you. Now why do I have this in daily habits? Because during the traumatic event or events, your thinking changed. So it's important to observe throughout the day, make it a habit to observe your thoughts and notice when you're using these extreme thinking or when you're jumping to conclusions and start to address it. When you, as you make it a habit, then you will slowly start altering the way you think and you'll notice that you use those distortions a lot less. And finally, N stands for nurture your inner child. If your trauma occurred when you were a child, then that inner child may be scared. It may have low self esteem it may feel ashamed of things, ashamed of who they are. So it's important to nurture your inner child and let them know that they are lovable, they are okay, they are safe now, and that you're going to move forward. If your trauma did not happen when you were a child, you still have an inner child. That inner child may be happy, which is great. So connect with that inner child. Remember what it was like to feel footloose and fancy free, to be able to just have fun and laugh at things. So your inner child, even if it wasn't, the trauma, didn't occur during your childhood. You still have that inner child. And we want to get that inner child for everyone to a place where it can be a kid, where it can allow us to be silly sometimes, to cut loose, to not always have to be so serious and worried about what other people think. If you want more information on this topic, I have videos on the YouTube channel, YouTube.comdocsnipes I have videos on the inner child complex post traumatic stress disorder and trauma, mindfulness and addressing cognitive distortions. So feel free to check some of those out.