 You are not defined by something that others chose for you. What defines your life, what defines your character, what defines you as a human being, having this human experience on earth is the actions, the thoughts, the words that you take, the story that you write. No matter what story someone tried to write for you, no matter what thoughts, actions, words someone tried to put inside of your brain, put inside your mouth, put inside your body, you can still choose to spit it back out. You can still choose to write something over what they wrote for you. You can white it out and write something new in the story of your life. Never forget that you have that power. Hi guys, this is Linda from Brain Education TV. If this is your first time, welcome to our channel. Please like this video, subscribe to our channel, and click the bell for notifications of each new episode. In this video, I just wanted to sit down and offer some words of encouragement for people who are struggling with trauma. This was a request from one of our viewers. Actually, a lot of people in our comments have been asking about how to deal with trauma, how to take care of your mental health during trauma, how to recover from trauma, how to interpret trauma, how to overcome trauma, so many topics about trauma that I just decided to open it up and talk about it in a video. Some people experience trauma in their childhood years. Some people experience trauma in their teenage years. Some people experience trauma in their young adult years, middle age years, later years, or maybe all of the above. Maybe there's some people who experience trauma in all stages of their lives. Trauma is very real and it's something that greatly affects our mental well-being, emotional well-being, and as a result of affecting our mental and emotional well-being, it has an impact on our physical health as well. So first of all, I just want to say that your trauma is very real. It's an experience that you're embodied. It's an experience that you're holding onto. It's an experience that has left its mark inside of your body. So because of that, any sort of after symptoms that you're experiencing because of the trauma, whether it be a physical thing, an emotional thing, or a mental thing, is very real. So if you're aware that you are carrying trauma inside of your body, how can you resolve it? What do you do with this to heal and get better? The first step is to acknowledge your trauma. This can be a very difficult thing to do, especially if that traumatic experience left feelings like guilt, shame, embarrassment, something that makes you hate who you are, hate your very essence and your very being. If you experience some deep trauma like that, accepting the trauma can be very difficult. However, accepting the trauma from a non-emotional way is the first step for you to be able to let it go because if you deny your traumatic experience, if you deny your feelings, if you deny how this has impacted you in your life and you try to just stuff it under the rug and pretend that it's not there, you can never fix something that you refuse to see. This is kind of a gross example, but let's say you had a toilet leak in your house. It's gross. It's messy. You don't want to look at it. You don't want to deal with it like trauma. But if you don't look at the problem, if you just say, oh, the toilet leak doesn't exist, I'm just going to do other things to distract myself and pretend that it's not there, that leak is still very much there. So it's just going to keep leaking more and more and more and more until it starts to dirty the bathroom. And then it's going to start creeping into the bedrooms and then creeping into other rooms in the house until your whole house is leaking from that toilet leak. Now, if you substitute the image of the toilet leak with trauma, that's what can happen to trauma in our lives. If you don't acknowledge it first and see that it's there and pretend that it's not there and try to do something else to distract yourself, that trauma is going to leak into other areas of your life, bleed into other relationships, other experiences, other memories until it controls your entire life. Whereas on the other hand, yes, it sucks. You don't want to deal with the toilet leak, but okay, you recognize that it's there. Now that you recognize that it's there, now you can roll up your sleeves and do the work of cleaning it up so that it doesn't bleed into other areas of the house. Just like that trauma, it sucks. You don't want to look at it. You don't want to deal with it. You don't even want to see it because it made you feel so bad inside. It makes you feel not good enough or not worthy or other negative emotions. But when you acknowledge that it's there, then you can do the work of releasing it. So step one in dealing with trauma is acknowledge your trauma, all of it, all the emotions, all the occurrences, all the people, all the circumstances, acknowledge that it happened so that you can heal. It takes courage. It takes vulnerability, but this is the only way to heal. And then step two is digging deep into yourself in a very honest, deep place and asking yourself the question, how great is the suffering of me holding onto this trauma? Because actually more than the traumatic experience itself, it's the fact that we hold onto this trauma for dear life, instead of our bodies, instead of our hearts, instead of our brains, that makes us suffer more than the incident itself. Or on the other hand, some people when they experience some deep trauma with their body, they completely disconnect with themselves. They disconnect with their body. They disconnect with their emotions. They disconnect because the pain is so big that their mind, their attention leaves the body because the pain they experience in the body is too great. So some people hold onto this trauma for dear life while other people completely detached from themselves, both are coming from the same source. So whether you're disconnected or super attached to your trauma, ask yourself the question is holding onto this trauma or being disconnected in my life. How great is that suffering for me? Now, when you ask yourself in a honest, deep place, if the pain and suffering of living with this trauma is only 20%, then chances are you probably won't feel enough motivation to change. Or even 30%, 40%, 50%, still not enough motivation to let you change your ways. However, if you find that inside of you, the suffering of living with this trauma is big, 100%, 120%, 200%, then you have to really be objective with yourself. Even though all of these emotions of feeling unfair, feeling resentment, feeling anger towards the person who caused me this trauma, even though all of those emotions are justified is me holding onto these kinds of emotions, these kinds of memories, these kinds of traumatic things. If it's causing me 100%, 200%, 2000% suffering, then very logically, even though it's so hard to do, you have to let that go. Why? Because there is bigger fish to fry. Your literal life well-being is at stake. But if your mind is fixated on holding onto one thing or one person or one occurrence or a few bundles of occurrences that happened, that left a big imprint, no matter how justified your emotions are towards, I want to hold on to this, I hate this person, are you really have to look at the bigger picture at stake. Your entire life is in front of you. There are so many more people you will meet, so many more things that will happen to you. Are you going to let all of those experiences be tainted because of your attachment to this small picture in a relatively big picture of your entire life? And the choice is yours. Am I going to choose the small thing or am I going to choose the big thing? And that choice is something that only you can make. And that choice is something that you can make when you can really feel the cause of suffering that exists from you choosing the smaller thing rather than the big thing. So if you're dealing with trauma, if you are carrying trauma, I hope that you can spend some time in a quiet place with nobody around you to take a deep hard look at yourself with honesty, with emotionless perspective and ask. Ask your brain, ask your heart. What will I choose? And depending on your choice, the story of your life will be different. So I want to leave you with one last thing. You as a human being are not a series of things that happen to you. You are not defined by something that others chose for you. What defines your life? What defines your character? What defines you as a human being having this human experience on earth is the actions, the thoughts, the words that you take, the story that you write. No matter what story someone tried to write for you, no matter what thoughts, actions, words someone tried to put inside of your brain, put inside your mouth, put inside your body, you can still choose to spit it back out. You can still choose to write something over what they wrote for you. You can write it out and write something new in the story of your life. Never forget that you have that power. Even in your darkest moments, even if it feels like there's no hope and you have no power or control over your life, you actually always have power and control of your life. We just forget that we do. That's why we let other people write our story for us. But when that goes on for a long time of someone else writing the story of your life for you, you fall deeper and deeper into a state of profound emptiness, profound loneliness, disconnection and dissatisfaction with your life. And I'm willing to bet all my money that nobody wants to live that kind of life. You only have one life. You're only your age, your current age, once in your life. So please do not waste that one chance to be 13 years old or 16 years old or 20 years old, 30 years old, 40 years old, 50, 60. Do not waste your one chance to be the exact age that you are. When you can see how great the stakes are, because you only have one chance to be 22 or one chance to be 25, that can alter your perspective of how you choose to live this one year of your life that you will never get back. So I hope with that you can all write the story of your life with confidence, with self-love, with self-care and self-trust. Let me know in the comments below what you guys think about this topic of trauma and anything that I discussed today. If you resonated with something, if you disagree with something, I'm all ears. I want to have a discussion with you in the chat. So let me know in the comments below. Thanks for tuning in today. I'll see you in another video. Bye.