Alex Charfen argues that adult behavior and business outcomes are heavily shaped by childhood patterns and unprocessed trauma. He gives a case study of a client (Cosmo, real name Darian) whose company grew substantially after he did EMDR therapy for severe childhood burn trauma, and describes how entrepreneurs commonly repress emotions—claiming processing them (e.g., via EMDR) can unlock personal and business potential. Charfen also shares his own experiences with bullying and therapy.
Questions this video answers
Darian (goes by Cosmo).
About $2–4 million (Charfen says '2 or 3 million' and later '3 or 4 million').
About $13–15 million (Charfen: 'I think, 13 or 15 million').
EMDR therapy.
Chapters
We recreate the energetic of our childhood as adults. And you can see this clear as day in so many people's lives. Like, you meet somebody's wife, you meet their mom. There are so many similarities. You meet somebody's father, you meet their. You know, I always tell men, like, be the person you want your daughter to marry, because that's what's going to happen anyway. And we. We. It's true. Yeah, it's really true.
So good.
You know, we. We repeat the patterns that we had in childhood. And so it's. If our childhood was a pattern of overcoming pain and a pattern of addiction and a pattern of. For me, I had a father who communicated in three ways. It was either rage or silence or punitive teasing. And I spent a ton of time with him. And so as a child, I was always afraid of setting him off. I was terrified of him teasing me because I would get emotional, and then it would make the teasing be even more. And I was kind of happy when it was just nothing. And so as an adult, I had long periods of time in my life where I isolated, where I didn't go around other people, where. I mean, I went five or six days in an office by myself without seeing people. And so I think that when we understand that so much of where we are today is motivated by what we're overcoming from our past, and that's just universal, we can change things like crazy. I'll share one story with you. We had a. And it's. I've got tons of these. But we have. We had a client, still a good friend of mine. His name's Cosmo Kazravi. His name's actually. Actually Darian, but he goes by Cosmo because in his world, he is a world champion Pitmaster. I didn't even know this existed. But he's like, barbecue, huh? Yeah. Yeah. He's. He. And now he sponsors, like, seven world champion Pitmasters, and he's got a company called Cosmos Q. So Cosmo came, and we were working together, and I think his business was at about 2 or 3 million. And we put some structure in place. We put some. Some systems in place. We put our planning systems, our simple operation system in place, and the business started growing. And we were at one of our events, and he sat down next to me, and he's like, alex, so you see what I'm doing, and I want to grow more, and I want this to really get out there more. What do you think I should do? And I said, cosmo, I think you need to work on yourself. And he's like, what do you mean? I said, well, dude, I've been around you enough to know that you are overcoming some massive trauma you've had as a kid. And it's probably something you've denied for a long time or. Or you're not aware of, or you don't really know what it is, but I can feel it, and I feel like if you work on that, it's gonna change everything for you. And he kind of got a little emotional and he said, yeah, you know, when I was a kid, I got burned and I was in a hospital. I can't remember for how long, he said, but it was forever. It was like months or maybe even over a year. And his family got to the point where they didn't really visit him a lot. And he was in massive pain all of the time. He was in this burn ward recovering from really, his whole lower body had massive third degree burns. And when Cosmo went and started getting some EMDR therapy and started dealing with the feelings and the energetic patterns that were still in his body from that period of time, from the abandonment issues, from the solitude, from the pain, just the massive amounts of physiological pain, almost immediately, his company exploded. He went from 3 or 4 million to, I think, 13 or 15 million. And it made such an impression on him that Cosmo has a YouTube channel and a podcast that goes out to all these pit masters. And he's sharing EMDR with him and telling them that they all need to go get therapy. And that is not like a therapy.
That's not the traditional space to have those conversations.
Have you thought about your childhood? Right. But it changed so much for him. And like I said, I can repeat this story hundreds of times because here's what I believe about our personality type, and I think this happens to everybody, but I think it's way more dramatic for entrepreneurs. If we are truly evolutionary hunters. We have this ability to rapidly and severely repress the emotions we're feeling in the present. It would make sense if we were hunting and you and I are running towards something and you're a really good friend of mine and you get hurt. I still need to go finish this thing. I'll do that later. I'll feel those feelings later, maybe, or maybe I'll just repress them until I don't. And I think that for us as entrepreneurs, the more we get into that place where we are repressing, we are repressing, we are repressing depending on the person, finally. That is the thing that starts to affect us the most. And when we're willing to draw that stuff up and process it and understand it and bring it out into the light and say, okay, here's what I'm dealing with, and we can overcome those things and process the feelings that we didn't have, that's when we really unleash this massive amount of potential that we have. Because that suppression of our emotions creates suppression everywhere else. And so many of us as entrepreneurs, as kids, we were suppressed anyway. I mean, how many times were you told to sit down, stop talking, stop moving, quit making everybody else uncomfortable? Did you hear that dialogue?
Of course. Yeah. There was also a lot of bullying, too. I was overweight when I was in school. Like, that was a thing.
Yeah. When I was in high school, there was this commercial that ran that said, don't squeeze the Charmin. And it was people squeezing this toilet paper. I don't know if you remember it, but if you look it up on YouTube, it's there and walking. When I was a freshman and a sophomore in high school, I was very small and overweight, and people would run up and grab the sides of my waist and squeeze as hard as they could and yell, don't squeeze the Charmin or Don't squeeze the Charfen. And, dude, I would come home and have bruises on the side of my body. And so there was, like, this amount of suppression of who I was and how I was and how I felt and how I thought. And I feel so fortunate that in my 20s, one of the things that really changed things for me was I got into trauma therapy, and I started talking to an EMDR therapist, and I didn't. And I got. First, I got into cognitive behavioral therapy, which was fucking horrible. Sitting across from somebody and, like, spilling your guts and having to go, how does that make you feel? By the third time, the therapist said, how does that make you feel? I'm like. I literally said, I feel like I want to come across the room and punch you in the face. She's like, what are you talking about? You can't threaten. And I'm like, look, I'm not going to do it. But I feel like this is totally unproductive. Like, stop telling me, asking me how would I make you feel? Like, how does it make me feel? Fuck. I'm here because I'm not feeling great, and you just keep asking the same damn question, and it's warped. So I feel lucky. I found EMDR therapy because it's a different type of processing, and I've recommended it to literally tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, and not a week or a month, not probably a week or two weeks goes by that somebody doesn't reach out and say, hey, I just had my third session. And it's life changing. And it's one modality. I think there's a lot of them out there. But when we are willing to process what we have repressed in the past, I believe we release and enhance all the abilities we have in the present.
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