Empowering Your Mind, A Gratitude Practice for PTSD, Ep34 Hardcore and At Ease

I said, thank you, brain. Thank you for keeping me safe. I am safe. I am here. I have the power here. So you want to thank your brain, but one of the things you're also doing and doing that is you're level setting your expectations. You know that going to the movie theater in that particular scenario or going to your kids parade can trigger sensory overload. You're level setting your expectations. You know what's senses are likely to be triggered there. Now I want to talk a little bit about level setting expectations. So Shelley mentioned with my bio that I was working on my law degree. It was an online law degree, and I was working on it while I was deployed as a government civilian over to Baghdad. Now, we had explosions all the time. We had indirect fire coming in a lot, and if it wasn't coming to us, we could hear it in other places. I was in the green zone, but you could easily hear it right outside the green zone. Probably not the best place to be for a person with ptsd. But I pursued it. However I expected it, there was nothing that happened regarding explosions in Baghdad that triggered my PTSD because my brain expected it. And that's what we're trying to do here. Level set the expectations and empower your brain. Now, I'm not saying that I didn't have any triggers in Baghdad, because I did, but none of them had to do with explosions. As ironic as that was.