4 Signs You’re Struggling With Hidden Trauma and 6 Powerful Steps to Start Healing Yourself Naturally

On Purpose has been nominated for a Webby Award - help us win by voting NOW! https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2021/podcasts/general-series/health-wellness Chances are you’ll experience trauma at some point in your life, we all have: a breakup, difficult parents, injuries, or disease. But the emotional effects of trauma do not have to last forever. The memory of the traumatic events fades over time, leaving you with deep-rooted negative feelings you may not even realize you have. In this episode of On Purpose, Jay Shetty uncovers the common signs of hidden trauma & shares a few powerful steps for becoming a stronger you. Like this show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps! Post a screenshot of you listening on Instagram & tag us so we can thank you personally! Episode Resources: Jay Shetty | Instagram Jay Shetty | Facebook Jay Shetty | YouTube Jay Shetty | Website Achieve success in every area of your life with Jay Shetty’s Genius Community. Join over 10,000 members taking their holistic well-being to the next level today, at https://shetty.cc/OnPurposeGenius See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1. Are you feeling September reset too? Shorter days, longer to-do lists, earlier alarms, all those routines you promised yourself you'd pick back up. It can feel like your whole life is recalibrating. And when everything around you is changing, it helps to have a few things you can rely on. AG1 Next Gen is one of those easy habits to keep. It's the clinically-backed, comprehensive daily health drink that supports your gut health, energy production, and foundational nutrition all in one scoop. AG1's ingredients are sourced from quality partners for absorption, potency, and nutrient density to deliver the foundational nutrition your body needs. And alongside a proper diet,

• 0:44Jay Shetty?

  AG1 Next Gen meets 94% of nutrient requirements and it's clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at drinkag1.com/onpurpose. That's drinkag1.com/onpurpose. This episode is brought to you by Vinted. Value can be found anywhere, even in the clothes sitting untouched in our closets. That's where Vinted comes in. Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes you no longer want and get more value out of them. Whether you're running out of space, moving, or simply updating your wardrobe. Listing items is a quick and simple process, and once something sells,

• 1:30Jay Shetty?

  Vinted creates a prepaid shipping label for you. And the best part, there are no seller fees, so you keep what you earn. It's a simple way to clear out your closet, be less wasteful, and maybe make some extra money along the way. And if you've been thinking about a wardrobe refresh, this can make it feel a little more worthwhile. You're not just letting go of clothes, you're getting more value from what you already have. Give your clothes a second life with Vinted. Download the Vinted app for free to start selling with no seller fees, so you keep every dollar you earn. This episode is brought to you by AG1. Are you feeling September reset too? Shorter days, longer to-do lists, earlier alarms, all those routines you promised yourself you'd pick back up. It can feel like your whole life is recalibrating.

• 2:16Jay Shetty?

  And when everything around you is changing, it helps to have a few things you can rely on. AG1 Next Gen is one of those easy habits to keep. It's the clinically backed, comprehensive daily health drink that supports your gut health, energy production, and foundational nutrition all in one scoop. AG1's ingredients are sourced from quality partners for absorption, potency, and nutrient density to deliver the foundational nutrition your body needs. And alongside a proper diet, AG1 Next Gen meets 94% of nutrient requirements and is clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1

• 2:59Jay Shetty?

  Pro at drinkag1.com/onpurpose. That's drinkag1.com/onpurpose. One of the things that often weighs us down or holds us back is the awareness that we can never erase our trauma. We never get a do-over. So we feel like whatever we will try will in some way fail because that trauma will always be with us. But it's not about erasing the trauma, it's about releasing it.

• 3:31Jay Shetty?

  Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose. I am so happy. How many of you heard the Will Smith episode that we just had on Monday? It was insane, it was incredible, it was a full one hour, 45 minute episode or something like that. And the feedback from all of you has just been phenomenal. Thank you so much for making the time to listen to it, to share it on your stories, to talk about it everywhere. It's been absolutely incredible to see and I'm so, so, so happy to see that so many of you are taking away so much from it. Anyway, highly go and recommend listen to it if you haven't listened to it already.

• 4:15Jay Shetty?

  And today we're talking about four signs you may have hidden trauma and six steps to letting go of what's holding you back. Now, I just want to give a big shout out before we dive in to the 15,000 of you that have left a review on the podcast app. It means the world to us, honestly, and I'm going to read out some of these incredible ones. So here's one from the beginner investor. Jay, I came across your podcast as I took the leap to start my own business and felt the universe was pushing me to grow. Your podcast has been a daily routine for me to keep me focused, motivated and grounded. You're truly walking in purpose and a true change agent. Thank you for sharing. Beginner investor, thank you from you.

• 4:58Jay Shetty?

  This is from Acapella. Whenever I'm consistently listening to Jay Shetty's content, I find that my life happens to be in a good place. No coincidence at all. Thank you and your team for the knowledge and love you put out into the world. I want to give a big shout out to my team that's working tirelessly to bring this podcast to all of you. And this is from Sienna Miller. I started this podcast alongside Jay's book, Think Like a Monk. I finished the book this morning, but will continue using the podcast. It has helped me navigate growth during a very challenging time in my life, following the first near-death experience I've ever had. Even the strongest minded of us all find ourselves struggling at times for many reasons. And the sharing from people like Jay can greatly help us

• 5:40Jay Shetty?

  get through those struggles and find beauty in them. I highly recommend Jay's tools of helping you flourish wherever you're currently planted in life. Thank you, Jay. Thank you for all your amazing reviews. They mean the world to us. And I hope that those of you who are loving the podcast and listening will leave a review for us as well. So let's dive in to today's podcast. Have you ever had the experience where there's something you want to accomplish and you've tried all of the productivity advice and you've done all the steps they say you should do, breaking things down into smaller pieces, scheduling time for focused work, minimizing interruptions and distractions, and when you sit down to do it, you're blocked?

• 6:25Jay Shetty?

  You can't focus, or you find even more ways to stop and limit yourself. Or do you notice the same patterns and challenges keep popping up in your relationships? And you just can't figure out why? You keep over committing yourself, you keep getting into relationships with people who are more takers than givers. Or maybe every time you start to get close to someone, you get scared and things fall apart. Now, there's so many reasons that any of those things can happen. But if you've explored some of those reasons, or read lots of self-help books on work or relationships, and they just don't seem to be helping, it could be that the source is trauma.

• 7:09Jay Shetty?

  Sometimes we're aware of our traumas we've experienced, but sometimes we're not. Sometimes our bodies and minds are holding traumas we don't even realize. Today, we're talking about how to uncover some of those unrealized traumas, along with steps you can take to begin to release them. Now, I just want to have a vulnerable moment and be open and honest with you. There used to be a time when I would say something like, "Oh, I never get stressed. I never experienced stress." And what I actually was, well, I didn't understand this then, but what I was actually trying to say is that I don't experience stress mentally, but I was unconscious to the fact that I experienced stress physically, right?

• 7:51Jay Shetty?

  I was experiencing so much stress physically that I wasn't even aware of it. And when I became aware of it, I realized that all the stress I didn't feel in my mind was just being stored in my body. And so, some of you may find you experience stress in the mind and stress in the body. Some of you may find it either or. The point is that trauma and stress finds a place. It's energy. Energy doesn't just disrupt itself, like it doesn't just destroy. It needs to transfer and move. So we have to ask ourselves, if we're not moving that energy outwards, it has to be landing somewhere inwards.

• 8:33Jay Shetty?

  So that was my personal experience that I wanted to share with you because I too had that internal dialogue of, oh, this doesn't affect me, I'm strong enough for this. And as time's gone on, I've realised that being strong is accepting what we're feeling, not negating it. And when I look at the studies, you know, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, sixty-one percent of men and fifty-one percent of women report at least one traumatic event in their lifetime. Now, there are many types of trauma, individual events to things that happen to families, other groups, or even entire communities. Examples are things like natural disasters, such as the 2004 tsunami, or Hurricane Katrina,

• 9:18Jay Shetty?

  or Australian or Californian wildfires. Yet, we can also be affected by hidden traumas that can be the source of everyday challenges. And a lot of us don't realise, like, traumas could have happened when we were younger. Traumas don't have to be the external horrific event that we think they do. Sometimes they can be what someone said to us, or how someone behaved with us, or how someone ignored us. One of the reasons it can be difficult to identify past traumas that are affecting us in the present time is that we think traumas have to be of a certain nature, like childhood abuse or a terror attack. We think they have to be obvious traumas. For instance, I know someone who has a very young child, was left in a car for a short

• 10:01Jay Shetty?

  time while his mother ran into the post office to pick up a package. He'd been asleep and his mother thought she'd just be a minute, but there was a line and he woke up while she was gone. When he saw she wasn't in the car, he was terrified. He began to call for her, he felt trapped because he was too young to unfasten the belt on his car seat. He became frantic. By the time his mother got back to the car, he was hysterical. For some of us, these types of childhood events are ones we experience and move on from. Our parent is able to soothe us, for example, and we feel safe once again. But sometimes, these events become written in the memories of our brains and bodies as trauma.

• 10:40Jay Shetty?

  A common and broad definition of trauma is any event in which we had the experience of too much too soon, meaning our nervous system went into a state of overwhelm and we were unable to resolve the event. Typically, we're unable to understand and process the event at the time. So at least some part of us, whether we're aware or not, becomes stuck in that trauma. We're unable to fully move on, or that trauma gets stuck inside of us. For the person I know who had the experience with his mom at the post office, for whatever reason, his mother's reassurances, when she returned, didn't resolve that event for him, and so it stuck with him.

• 11:21Jay Shetty?

  Many years later, he and his girlfriend had gotten into a fight over what she saw as him being possessive and smothering. He was content to spend every night together and would even feel anxious when she had other plans. The way he became aware of this being the trauma wasn't as obvious as this being a strong memory. He actually started meditating to try and deal with some of the anxiety and the fact that he couldn't sleep, and as he meditated more, he actually uncovered this event in his visualization. And this is the power of meditation. Sometimes meditation's not relieving your anxiety first. It actually makes you relive your anxiety to understand where it's coming from.

• 12:01Jay Shetty?

  So meditation will first make you relive your anxiety before it relieves it. And that reliving allows you to experience where it comes from, why it's there, what you're struggling with, and then you can truly make a change in your life to overcome that pain. So I want to talk to you a little bit about the signs of trauma, so that you can become more aware of this. One of the most challenging things about trauma is that we're often not able to remember it clearly or fully, at least not at first. And that's why it can be so hard to identify when trauma is playing a role in the challenges that are facing us in our lives. Trauma can have a way of camouflaging itself. It can blur its edges, so it's difficult to discern. And that's one of the signs

• 12:46Jay Shetty?

  that you may be dealing with a hidden trauma, that you're unable to track your anxiety, fear, or other emotions to a clear source. Or that when you try and remember certain events or periods in your past, they're fuzzy or difficult to recall. Not remembering certain things doesn't always indicate trauma. Researchers say that the intensity of emotions at the time of the event impact how our brains encode memories. If an event wasn't particularly stimulating in any way, good or bad, it simply may not stand out in our memory. Or it can indicate that our minds are keeping something from us. We're not ready to process. That's the genius of our brain and our mind. Sometimes we think, "Oh, I wish I knew about this sooner. I wish I was aware of this sooner.

• 13:31Jay Shetty?

  I wish I dealt with this sooner." But actually, your mind and your brain and your life experience are allowing you to process what you need to process at the right time. This is why I'm always repeating, "You're exactly where you need to be." Because we think you can't rush or hurry your rehab, your rejuvenation, your, you know, whatever you want to call it, right? You can't rush your process of healing, but your mind and brain are becoming more prone to healing at the right time. As embodiment expert Mala Madron says, "When traumatic experiences are not immediately accessible to us, that's actually part of a survival response.

• 14:15Jay Shetty?

  Our bodies and minds work together to sort of encase the trauma and shut us off to it because they know we're not currently equipped to deal with it. So it actually helps us survive and get to a place where we eventually may be." Explains that frequently, when we uncover traumas later in life, it's because some part of us perceives that we may now have the resources to begin to work with and resolve that trauma. That's for some reason, the mind-body intuits its time. Now, as I was saying earlier, that trauma is mind and body. And this is why massage therapists and mental health providers often say, "Your issues are in your tissues," right? Response to trauma is a combined mind-body response.

• 14:59Jay Shetty?

  And so traumas can also become evident in bodily challenges. That's a second sign that you may have hidden emotional traumas. You could have seemingly unexplained health challenges, such as muscular pain, digestive problems, or any number of other health issues that don't seem to have an exact cause or source. A psychiatrist and bestselling author, Bessel van der Kolk, writes in "The Body Keeps the Score," by the way, it's a phenomenal book, you have to check it out. "Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies. The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs. And in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings

• 15:43Jay Shetty?

  and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from theirselves. Some of those physical challenges can come from some part of us always being on hyperalert, and that chronic stress can have health effects." You may be thinking, "Jay, I don't feel chronically unsafe in my body." It's important to understand that, again, we're not always aware of these feelings. Or we may be aware of one aspect of them. What I learned in my monk training to call "the branches of the issue." We may feel emotions or body states such as depression, anxiety, and so on, but not connected to the root of feeling unsafe within ourselves. I'll give you an example. When most people sit to meditate, in silence, in quiet,

• 16:26Jay Shetty?

  they'll actually notice that they might have some body pain, or they might have a body ache. The stillness allows you to recognize the pain that exists. Whereas when you're rushing, busy, moving around, you kind of miss what your body's actually trying to tell you, right? And it's kind of like with our family, our partners, you can't listen to them when you're rushing around. Similarly, you can't listen to your body or your mind when you're rushing around. And much of our trauma happens in childhood because we have fewer resources to understand the world around us and to contextualize or rationalize what's happening. Additionally, our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that deals with logic and helps us understand things rationally, doesn't develop fully until our early to mid twenties.

• 17:10Jay Shetty?

  Before that, we process our experiences more through the emotional circuitry in our brain, and we look to caregivers and others around us to help us regulate ourselves emotionally and process information and experiences. If you've ever seen a child fall and a parent gets up and runs over to them and yells, "Oh no, are you okay?" You may have noticed that in many cases, the child doesn't start to cry until they see the parent is upset. Unless they're legitimately hurt, they get the cue on how to respond from the parent. If the parent freaks out, they are likely to as well. With a trauma, the opposite can happen as well. A parent might minimize something that was actually a big deal,

• 17:53Jay Shetty?

  and that disconnect between our own experience of something being confusing or upsetting and an adult telling us it's okay or not knowing about it at all, and therefore not being able to help us deal with it, can cause trauma or really amplify the traumatic event. A third indicator that we may have hidden trauma is repeated fears, and often fears that seem irrational. As a coach, one of the most common issues I see come up again and again is fear in relationships. And this can play out in so many ways. A client can have a pattern that relationships always seem to start out great, but as their commitment deepens, they start to feel anxious and afraid. Or they fear being abandoned by their partner, or they fear their partner will learn something about them

• 18:37Jay Shetty?

  that will cause them to not love them anymore. I mean, the list goes on. Typically, by the time they come to me, the client has experienced this pattern on repeat and can't figure out why their relationships always seem to end up in the same place or what's causing this fear. Other fear patterns can include chronic fear of socializing, such as social anxiety, fear or obsessive worry over developing health issues such as hypochondria, fear of losing all of your money or possessions, and the list goes on. These fears really can take any form, but the key is that they are chronic. These chronic fears are often tied to trauma. This is usually where I'd introduce one of my clients to a therapist to work with or to work with a professional in that space because a lot of these may be health-related.

• 19:22Jay Shetty?

  Author and philosopher Alan de Botten says that this fear is essentially the fear we experience inside ourselves during the trauma, projected outward onto the future. As a result, we feel dread and anxiety about our place in the world.

• 19:39Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. I know how important every hire is for a business. If you need to make the right hire, this is a job for sponsored jobs. Indeed sponsored jobs helps find quality candidates when you need them most. You can reach who you need based on whatever criteria you're looking for, like skills, certifications, or location. In fact, people are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In the minute I've been talking to you, companies like yours made 27 hires on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast.

• 20:22Jay Shetty?

  That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Wayfair. Home should be a place that feels like a sanctuary, a space that truly reflects who you are, but it can be challenging to balance style, budget, and endless options. I was looking to create a dedicated calm space for my morning meditation and reading, but I was struggling to find pieces that felt grounding but could also stand up to daily I went on Wayfair and found a beautiful, solid wood accent chair and a bookshelf. Now that corner is my favourite place to anchor my day. The quality is incredible, it's built to last, and it completely shifted the energy of the room.

• 21:04Jay Shetty?

  Plus, you can shop with Wayfair Verified, where product specialists carefully vet items for quality and functionality, so you can shop with more confidence. And if putting it all together sounds like a headache, Wayfair can handle delivery, installation and assembly. Join Wayfair Rewards today to get 5% back on every purchase and start saving on your next home upgrade. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W A Y F A I R dot com. Wayfair, every style, every home. This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. If you're talking about quality food, you can't forget Whole Foods Market, who've been holding themselves to the highest standards since they opened in 1980.

• 21:48Jay Shetty?

  That means you'll see thousands of organic products across their stores, from the produce department to the aisles. It also means you'll never see certain ingredients. They've banned artificial sweeteners and colours, high fructose corn syrup and more, so you can shop with peace of mind. Shop Whole Foods Market in-store or online. The fourth sign of possible hidden trauma is the opposite. Instead of fear, it's numbness or an inability to connect with our emotions. I once knew someone who was frustrated because no matter how hard she tried, her husband was unable to articulate how he felt about things. He relied on reason and logic to make decisions, but he was unable to connect emotionally with her or their children.

• 22:33Jay Shetty?

  It started to negatively affect their relationship and as a result, they went to couples counselling. There, the therapist helped the husband identify that during his childhood, when he displayed emotions, his parents ignored him or told him to get over it. They prized intelligence and the intellect, saw emotions as weakness and never described their own feelings. As a result, he learned to suppress his emotions and even grew to see his lack of emotionality as one of his strengths. Yet it was crippling his ability to relate to his partner and his children. Now I want to share with you the steps for uncovering and addressing trauma. We've talked about how to spot the signs. Now what do you do about it?

• 23:14Jay Shetty?

  Unfortunately, our fear of rejection, of looking deeply into ourselves and so on, may keep us from seeking help. Especially if you feel severe emotions such as overwhelm, depression and anxiety, you want to seek the help of a qualified therapist, counselor or coach. Sometimes we can get by with a little help from our friends, as they say, but it's extremely important to have some source of reliable and verified support. That's the first step towards uncovering and addressing trauma. Once you've identified that you have one or more of the signs of a hidden trauma, you need to find a place that's what clinicians describe as psychologically safe to uncover and address it. You can think of psychological safety as sort of protected area in which you're safe to explore.

• 23:59Jay Shetty?

  Think of a wildlife preserve where the animals inside are free to roam because there is a protective fence around them to keep the threats, real or perceived, at bay. If we're not psychologically safe, our nervous system is in our sympathetic or our fight or flight mode, or we can get into overwhelm, which is our freeze mode. As Marla Madron explains, "Deep healing literally cannot happen when our nervous system is engaged in flight, fight or freeze." When our body and mind are in this space, we cannot access the vulnerability necessary to heal because we're too preoccupied, consciously or unconsciously, with our own survival. When we feel psychologically safe, our nervous system could shift

• 24:42Jay Shetty?

  into parasympathetic mode, which is where healing happens. If your partner is abusive or downplays your feelings or simply doesn't have the resources to support you in this work, or if you don't feel comfortable with your coach or therapist, for example, you will not have the psychological safety you need to be able to recognize and deal effectively with trauma. The second step to releasing trauma is that once we've found a space of psychological safety, we can start to look for clues as to the source of the trauma. Alan de Botten says that when it comes to uncovering our traumas, we don't want to focus right away on going into our past events or remembering exactly what happened, but instead invoking curiosity about what it is we're afraid of happening now.

• 25:24Jay Shetty?

  As he says, "Our apprehension holds the best clues to our history." What is it we're feeling right now that can give a clue as to a potential past trauma? One of the exercises I like most around this idea is to write down your beliefs. You're going to take some quiet time, preferably when you're relaxed and alone. So take a screenshot of exactly where you are on the podcast right now, so you can come back to this later. That said, if it feels safer for you, you can do this in conversation with a trusted friend, counselor, or coach. And sometimes doing it along with a trusted friend or partner can help you get deeper into your own beliefs because you're being vulnerable together and plus something they say might help you connect with something in yourself. For this exercise, you're simply going to list out every core belief

• 26:08Jay Shetty?

  you can think of that you have about your life or about relationships. I like to tell people to go for lifting around 15 beliefs. That's a lot. But what that does is it helps you get past the easier or more obvious ones to the deeper ones. This can take some real reflection and sometimes you may even end up doing it a few times. So be ready for that. Or a belief might suddenly occur to you later while you're brushing your teeth or driving. But this exercise will help you get started thinking along those lines and opening yourself up to what's ready to come into your awareness. Some of the beliefs people have shared with me are things like, "If people know the real me, they won't love me." "Men leave or are unfaithful."

• 26:52Jay Shetty?

  "The main goal in life is to create as much certainty as possible." "If I can control my environment, I can be safe." I can never be safe. In the end, everyone is out for themselves. Expressing my feelings makes me seem weak. And from there, we can start to get curious as to why we might believe that or where that belief might have come from. The third step to releasing trauma, and something I can't emphasize enough, is to go slow. Again, an appropriately trained and licensed coach or mental health professional can be extremely helpful with this. A friend who is a body worker and body work teacher once told me that the most common mistakes new therapists make is that when they encounter a bunch of tight muscles,

• 27:35Jay Shetty?

  their automatic reaction is to want to relax them all. They want to make everything soften because they assume that's a good thing, but it can actually create more problems. She said the body comes up with solutions for problems, such as an unstable shoulder. By doing something called armoring, it tightens the muscles around the joint to protect it. If we suddenly loosen the muscles, we can destabilize the entire joint and we can even cause a phenomenon where the nervous system actually creates more pain. And that pain and that armoring can be physical or it can be psychological, but it's often a combination. So the point is, when we look at possible traumas, to go slowly to try and see what's really going on,

• 28:17Jay Shetty?

  to not assume we know, but to take on an attitude or curiosity and respect for the process. We can even hold gratitude to our minds and our bodies for finding an effective way to deal with the situation, given the resources it had at the time. Marla Madron says that when we start to connect to our traumas, we often feel shame that we didn't deal with the situation differently at the time. Gratitude helps to shift this feeling we can actually say to our younger self. Thank you. Thank you for doing the best you could. Thank you for getting me to this place. Now I'm here and I can help. And that links with step four. When we revisit traumatic events or periods, whether they were two years ago or 20 years ago,

• 29:01Jay Shetty?

  the key is that we don't want to revisit them as that younger self. We want to revisit them from present time with all of the learning and perspective that we have now. Otherwise, we may simply relive that experience and even re-traumatize ourselves. From present time, we can be in observer mode. We can see other elements of what was going on that we most likely did not see at the time. We can create context and awareness that we weren't capable of having then, and we can bring all the tools of life that we've learned since then to heal. Number five, as you start understanding and working with your trauma, some of them may naturally start to release as your perspective shifts. Remember the person I talked about earlier who'd been left in the car at the post office? After a series of relationship failures

• 29:46Jay Shetty?

  that always seemed to boil down to his girlfriend telling him some version of the fact that he was smothering her or too clingy, he made a belief list. Among his beliefs, which he was surprised to discover, was "she may not come back." He didn't understand that what that meant at first, but when he got curious about it and took it into meditation, eventually he landed onto that memory. And from there, he became open to the realization that he really was the clingy guy his girlfriend's described for a good reason. And he committed to doing what he needed to do to resolve the trauma, not only for the sake of his future relationships, but also for the sake of himself, so that he could feel a sense of safety in his own life that he hadn't felt before. But here was the thing.

• 30:31Jay Shetty?

  Even though he'd become aware of the trauma, his next relationship was better. But after a time, as they got closer, his smothering behavior started again. In this case, actually starting to feel safe was the trigger for his trauma. As professor of psychiatry Stephen Poirier just says, "If you've been traumatized by someone whom you deeply trusted, such as a parent's sibling or other loved one, feeling safe can actually be a trigger because you felt safe once before that safety resulted in trauma." So the two can be linked. I know it's kind of mind-boggling, but sit with it. This is another reason to take it slow. If those feelings of fear or anxiety start to resurface, don't push forward. Acknowledge it, get help,

• 31:14Jay Shetty?

  talk to your partner or your therapist or coach, meditate, breathe. If you're a spiritual person, pray, reach for that support. But another thing that he needed to do was want to release the trauma, and that's step five. It sounds counterintuitive, that's why you're listening, right? Of course, you want to release the trauma, and yet, it's often not so simple. When we release a long-held pattern, we will change, and that change can be scary. Sometimes, we unconsciously cling to the way we are, trauma and all, because we have no idea who we will be without those patterns. We hold on to a knife in our hands, even though we're being cut, because we're more familiar with that cut.

• 31:55Jay Shetty?

  One of the most powerful ways to address this challenge is to create a powerful image of your future self that you can link to, and this incorporates the sixth step for resolving trauma. One of the things that often weighs us down or holds us back is the awareness that we can never erase our trauma. We never get a do-over, so we feel like whatever we will try will in some way fail, because that trauma will always be with us. But it's not about erasing the trauma, it's about releasing it. When we release our grip on it, we're free to see and access the lessons that trauma can offer us. We can actually become a stronger version of ourselves through working with that trauma. As researchers show, healing from trauma actually makes us more resilient going forward.

• 32:38Jay Shetty?

  One of the best ways I've seen is to also help and serve others who are struggling. When we're involved in the change and the transformation of others, we start to see its possibility even for ourselves. There's some beautiful thoughts that I love to help us understand this. Musician and monk Leonard Cohen wrote, "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." And Ernest Hemingway wrote, "In a farewell to arms, the world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places."

• 33:10Jay Shetty?

  I want to tell you a story. This story moves me every time I read it and share it. So I want to share it with you. When Danielle Torley was just six years old, she woke up to her family house on fire. Now, she lost her mother in that fire. Though she eventually began to recover on the outside, excelling at school and participating in sports and everything else, but on the inside, she was still plagued by constant nightmares of being trapped in a fire. On a more subtle level, grief permeated all of her thoughts and decisions about life. One day, a friend who was an artist gave her two paintings. One cowered in the corner of a room, the other stood in the light, arms outstretched. She realized these were her options in life, and she had to choose.

• 33:54Jay Shetty?

  She used those portraits to create a vision of her future self. She would someday be that woman with her arms outstretched. Years later, while on a trip with a friend, she met a man who was a fire dancer. He would dance and perform with fire. Torley was mesmerized and vowed someday she would get up the courage to do the same. And slowly, one step at a time, she did. And she consciously began to reconcile the confidence she felt doing fire dancing with the terror she felt as a girl. It was a long road, and Torley says she'll never be without those vivid memories or the sadness of losing her mom. But she made a decision to cross that bridge and become something living, not from grief, but hope.

• 34:39Jay Shetty?

  And she says these days, the nightmares have almost disappeared completely. We can use this idea of learning and growing and developing resilience to help paint this picture of our own future self, who is not confined by our past experiences, but rather is informed by them. Hope for a stronger, more loving and resilient version of ourselves can bridge the gap between releasing the trauma and becoming a richer version of ourselves. Author Viktor Frankl, who wrote about his experience in the Holocaust in his book, Man's Search for Meaning, once said, "What is to give light must endure burning." This isn't meant to glorify suffering, yet suffering is something we all experience

• 35:20Jay Shetty?

  in life at one time or another. We can be consumed by this fire, or we can view it as the fire of the blacksmith's forge that can help us reshape ourselves into someone even stronger and more beautiful. Thank you so much for listening to On Purpose today. Make sure you tag me with what you're practicing, what you learned. Please pass this on to someone who needs it, and I'll see you again next week.

• 35:50Jay Shetty?

  Okay, I have some big news. Thanks to all of your support, I have been nominated for a Webby Award, pretty much the internet Oscars. Actually, we have, On Purpose, the podcast, has been nominated in the category of Best Health and Wellness Podcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it makes any difference in your life and has ever had an impact, it would mean the world to me if you vote for us for the People's Voice Award at the Webby's. The link is in the caption. Please, please, please go and vote. It will take all of 20 seconds, and it would mean the world to me if you come and support me and my team. Let's go win a Webby. Check out the link in the caption. I can't wait to see if we get number one. Fingers crossed.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You start, you freeze to death, that's what?

• 37:00Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 not a minute without parent.