The one idea that calmed her worries about the past
I mentioned my neighbor yesterday.
From the outside, what you’d see is an energetic, slightly forgetful mom with a competitive edge in pickleball (or just about any other sport), a love of connecting with people, and a pretty open-minded approach to new ideas.
Life has made her that way.
Imagine having some form of chronic headache or pain since age 17.
Imagine having loose enough joints that your kneecaps turn inside out at random times.
Imagine having allergies that seem to be causing some of the above but no histamine response to let either you or the doc looking at the blood work know about it.
I’d been open to new ideas, too, if they had any chance of changing things like that, but some of those new ideas apparently worry her.
She tells me she’s heard the tales of everyone in the neighborhood doing the “deep healing work”. She’s read up about hidden childhood traumas, and frankly, she’s a tad concerned that she’s going to suddenly remember that she was abused as a kid.
Or bullied.
Or that some part of her life isn’t what she thought it was.
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Side-note: this is such a common trope these days. Some authority somewhere linked “childhood trauma” with these mental, emotional, and physical issues AS A HYPOTHESIS, and the rest of humanity has gone bonkers trauma hunting — blaming their parents, reading into their upbringing, and chasing some reason for why they are the way they are.
Just stop for a sec, okay? It’s a hypothesis, not a fact.
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Anyway, Jasmine and I are sitting on the front porch watching this incredible lady get all worked up about this. Meanwhile, she’s missing the stunning colors of the sunset slanting across the grass and the smell of the crisp, post-rain air.
So I lift my arm to get her attention and share one simple observation:
“Don’t worry about any of that. Doesn’t matter what happened in the past, none of it is happening right now in this moment. The only thing you ever really have to deal with is tension, chemistry, posture, breathing… very simple, physical things.”
She gives a half-pause.
“That actually makes a lot of sense… It’s just that I’ve heard about all these other peop—“
I stop her again.
“I know there’s a lot of hype about trauma around. Lots of crazy stuff has happened to them, but the only reason they feel like it’s trauma is because their body is reacting uncomfortably to those memories and thoughts. And that means, tension, chemistry, posture, breathing, and all the rest.”
Now she actually relaxes a bit and takes a deeper breath.
Without realizing it, she has let go of some anxiety by letting go of tension and breathing a touch deeper. It’ll take her a bit to connect those dots, though, so I leave her with something to mull over:
“That’s why it feels like my own past life happened to someone else. I didn’t lose any of the wisdom or memories. It’s just that I taught my body to no longer react to them as if they are real or carry any leftover tension or chemistry from them. They are just things that happened.”
Now, I get that this idea is neither common nor popular.
I recently had lunch with a fellow who runs the nine largest rehab centers in Utah. Including being a consultant for the one that serves celebrities and elite like Robert Downey, Jr.
After relating the above, he looked me in the eye and said, “I’ve got a group of ex-military who would slit your throat if you told them their trauma isn’t real.”
(As if a murderous reaction to an observation means that it’s somehow wrong??? I mean… I usually only get angry when I know deep down that the other person is right, and I’ve been caught… just sayin’)
So let’s avoid any confusion or blowups. In the famed words of Inigo Montoya, “Let me ’splain. No. There is too much. Let me sum up.” —
Their physical experience when thinking about those past events or reacting to similar situations is very real. It’s that experience that we have to deal with, not some abstract thing called trauma.
Retrain that reaction, and there’s no longer anything to cope with.
And that takes working with the body far more than the mind.
That what I start everyone with.
I go into this in far more detail in my recent book Built For Freedom: Adventures Through Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Addiction, Trauma, Pain, and Our Body's Innate Ability To Leave Them All Behind.
When you sign up for my daily emails, you can get the first chapter (including audio) for free.
Or you can simply purchase a digital version of the book (plus the companion courses that come with it if you want) here:
Bob Gardner
