Myopic focus on childhood trauma is erroneous

Pop psychology and the broad personal-development adjacent culture sphere have become VERY trauma aware. This is a good thing in a lot of ways, as trauma affects us all. But, I'll break with the mainstream, by contending that myopic focus on trauma is a mistake. And it might be something you don't need to focus on at all to break away from the pain and pattern of the past.

My story (it has a happy ending)

Growing up, for the better part of a decade as a child and young teenager, my mother emotionally dumped on me all her disappointments with my father. His emotional insensitivity, his anger issues, his bullying of her over the very silly issue of keeping the house clean - I heard about them all on practically a daily basis. I spent a lot of my childhood feeling sorry for my mother, my life was kind of an emotional "Groundhog Day" with her - wake up, go to school, come home, listen to mom complain about dad, REPEAT.
Psychologists term this an "emotionally incestuous" relationship with a parent, and apparently, it's something a lot of mothers do with their sons. Which has predictable results when they grow up; it royally fucks up the way they relate to women. As you can imagine, a lot of these men end up pretty simpy, they dramatically overcompensate in trying to be the "nice men" their mothers didn't choose. They become unassertive chumps that can't attract women, they let women walk all over them, or they become male feminists or gay - I imagine in some cases. They end up with crippling cases of "Moma's boy" syndrome. And I'm sure a lot of them end up very angry at women.

But not me. As a young adult, I had relatively healthy relationships with women. I dated a few women who were less than classy, but never for long. I went through a promiscuous phase that I have a few regrets about. And then I married a beautiful, classy, virtuous Bulgarian girl and we've stayed married for seven years now - we're happier than ever with each other! I ended up surprisingly well-adjusted in regard to women, despite the emotional dumping I endured in my formative years.

THIS is because of the personal development influences I had as a young adult.

• I started by reading Think & Grow Rich, then I read Donald Trump's business books (which are really about mindset).
• I consumed a lot of pick-up artist and "game" content which I contend is dramatically healthier than the modern cultural programming on dating, relationships, and sex. You might be surprised by how much the pick-up artist gurus emphasize empathy, consent, respect, and healthy holistic masculinity. The pick-up artist movement has produced a lot more decent men in healthy relationships with women than it has predatory creeps!
• Then I got into Biohacking; Nootropics, smart drugs, meditation, brain training, etc.
• I quit porn and cultivated myself as a tantric man - reclaiming my sexual sovereignty from the pixelated pleasure planet.
• And I studied philosophy and ethics - learning much about real-time relationships from Stefan Molyneux, the world's greatest living philosopher.

These influences were very pragmatic ones; I took action every day on the things I learned about and charted my own course. These influences taught me how to be confident around women and how to walk that precarious tightrope in my relationships with women - balancing between assertively providing leadership and being a doormat.

I haven't spent more than 30 minutes talking with a therapist about my relationship with my mother and more than a few pages journaling on the topic. I paid the cost to liberate myself from the Jungian shadow of my mother with action-taking, not sitting on the couch of a $100/hour psychologist. I've heard a lot of people talk about going to talk therapy for their childhood trauma (for years, spending thousands of dollars!) and it sounds like an arduous, tedious, and painful excavation of the past. Whereas, the personal development approach I took - taking big risks as an entrepreneur, going salsa dancing at a beach club in Spain, doing Daygame in Colombia to practice my second language, taking Ayahascua in the Andes mountains, trying hundreds of smart drugs - that all was fucking fun and produced a bunch of great memories that I'll cherish for the rest of my life.

Avoiding sin > trauma awareness

A Christian masculinity podcast I listened to said something interesting about trauma. The two hosts were speaking highly about their wives and our now very trauma-aware pop culture. One man said...

"My wife worries more about avoiding sin than she does her trauma."

Trauma is not a choice, it's something bad that happened to you when you were powerless. And it happened in the past, you can't change what happened. But sin, in the Christian view is very different, sin is a choice - every time. The Bible couldn't disagree stronger with the stylish modern "No Free Will" notion. Sin is something to be avoided every day, demanding our eternal vigilance and devotion to something greater than ourselves. Avoiding sin is about the future (yet unwritten), while trauma is about the past (set in stone). By focusing a lot on your trauma might you be damning yourself to remain in its shackles? But when you avoid sin you're taking back your power from the demons of the past, and architecting a more virtuous future.

And, of course, the trauma you endured is almost certainly the result of someone else's sin - rage, pride, or lust. By avoiding sin yourself you are casting a gift more valuable than gold into the future, you're breaking the cycle. When you focus on avoiding sin instead of trauma, you're broadening your scope from putting a small injured part of yourself under the microscope to a Christlike love and concern for others. If you're a person of faith, does your holy book recommend focusing a ton of time and energy on the wrong done to you in the past? Or does it spend a lot more ink calling you to practice your free will in avoiding sin? That should give you a hint as to what will actually help!

I tend to think that the universe bends to the will of the man or woman determined to impose it with absolute belief. And actually, that's the most proven fact in science with over 150,000 gold-standard clinical trials proving the power of belief over the material structure of our biology (fixing broken bones and curing cancer, to mention a few things) - more about the placebo effect a little later. Your tenacious determination, empowered by the right tools, will accelerate you to escape velocity, and beyond the gravity well of your trauma.

Women's mental health

An example of the myopic focus on childhood trauma...

In another podcast, I listened to recently, a husband called in for help with his wife who was experiencing extreme postpartum woes. It sounds like she was somewhat suicidal and acting quite crazy, undermining his career and the healthy development of their babies. The host spent about 20 seconds asking about her health...

Host: Has she seen a doctor? Gotten blood tests done? Is she getting enough sleep?
Caller: Yeah, they said everything is fine on her blood tests. She gets 8 hours a night.

And then 90 minutes on her childhood trauma; speculating that she was so far gone in the mental health department because her having children re-ignited her unresolved childhood trauma. Oh, and she had been in talk therapy for years, with little apparent positive effect.

I'm sure there's something to the idea that becoming a parent for the first time would reawaken old childhood trauma, but there's NO WAY this woman is in good hormonal health! I've listened to a lot of podcasts about women's health and read a couple of books around the topic, and women's mental health issues have a lot to do with hormonal imbalances, vitamin/nutrient deficiencies, the standard American diet, or spending all day swiping on a smartphone. Mental health issues can often be resolved quickly by Biohacking; Nootropics, smart drugs, diet hacking, detox protocols, sleep hacking, exercise, and even personal genotyping (your genes might reveal what's making you a bit mental).

It's also important to note that blood testing can often be misleading; just because you're "within the range" doesn't necessarily mean your levels are healthy, it just means you're within a statistical average. What you actually need to do (and this is a bit of work, unfortunately) is...

1. Make sure you are getting ahold of your blood test results.
2. For every biomarker, look up what is the optimal range, this is a place where Googling it usually yields helpful results from Pubmed.
3. You'll identify several biomarkers where you have significant room for improvement. Time to go down the research rabbit hole: figure out which supplements, nutrients, and lifestyle things fix this biomarker.

Ideally, our doctors would do this for us, but they have 25 other patients to see and a stack of insurance paperwork to fill out, so you gotta DIY this. At the least, if you're dealing with mental health issues and your doctor tells you "Your levels are healthy," get another doctor! Find a good endocrinologist who will dig deeper.

Jungian journaling for the gents

There's a book I reviewed a little while back, entitled simply, Men's Work. It took a Jungian approach to men's personal growth and had some quite good journaling prompts for integrating the shadows of your mother and father. I spent maybe 90 minutes doing this journaling and found it liberating. If you're a guy, check out the book, take a little time to do that journaling and you might find yourself more in control of your anger or self-sabotaging less in your relationships.

Men's Work

Category: Book

Heal trauma in 50 minutes

One of the best tools I've encountered in my +12 years of obsessive research and self-experimentation is the epigenetic transformation meditation developed by Dr. Joe Dispenza. It's a guided meditation that essentially yields the awesomely powerful placebo effect to heal the mind and reprogram old self-destructive patterns of impulse, thought, and behavior. In the Dispenza Facebook groups, you can find some pretty mindblowing testimonials of people who used it to resolve significant traumas, both mental and physical. With a few 50-minute sessions I reprogrammed myself completely from a promiscuous Passport Bro mindset to a temptation-bulletproof, monogamous, one-woman-man mindset after I got married (should have done it before I got married!)

Instead of spending another $2000 on talk therapy, maybe read Dr. Dispenza's book and give the Epigenetic Mindset Transformation meditation a few sessions.

You Are the Placebo

 

5.0

Category: Book

I should add that this is just my two cents based on (a lot of) life experience

NOT a rigorous meta-analysis comparing the effectiveness of trauma therapy to more pragmatic lifestyle approaches to personal development. There's an author, Abigail Shrier, with a book critiquing "therapy culture" that makes some rigorous arguments - worth a read for anybody who wants to ultimately determine for themselves whether talk therapy is a bullshit industrial complex unto itself. I don't have my mind made up on it.

Perhaps I'm a bit biased on the topic of childhood trauma because mine didn't get much worse than occasional spankings (still counts as harmful child abuse, according to the experts) and the aforementioned emotional dumping, my parents never beat the shit out of me or let a creepy uncle sleepover in my bedroom (and my uncles are all hunters, the kinds of men who would take a molester out behind the woodshed to dispose of!) My parents did a downright decent job of raising three rowdy boys (I also have a sister who was very young when my parents divorced - I don't think she benefited from the same quality of parenting in a nuclear household) when a lot less was commonly known about things like "emotional incest" (a really nasty phrase for something that didn't seem that bad at the time to either of us). My mother is deeply regretful of the emotional dumping she did with me and has apologized profusely, and I forgive her, she was only human and dealing with her own demons. 

If you did talk therapy and it effectively cured your trauma and powerfully liberated you to live life on your own terms, let us know in the comments because I sure hear about a lot of people who do years of talk therapy still bound by the pain and pattern of the past.