 There's so many aspects of our life that we have little to no control over and this is especially true when it comes to traumatic experiences. But no matter what, we have a choice. No matter how much pain we feel, we have a choice. And the sooner we realize that, that is when we start taking back our power, all right? So in this video covering the Jesse Smiles and Gabby Hannah situation, we're gonna be talking about trauma, forgiveness, and recovery. What's up, everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health and sometimes what I like to do is take different topics going on in the YouTube community and try to see what we can learn from them to improve our own mental and emotional well-being. So if you're into that stuff, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And if you're not yet, follow me over on Instagram and Twitter at the Rewired Soul. All right, so yeah, for those of you who don't know me, hi, my name's Chris. I am not a licensed therapist, but I am somebody who is like most of you watching this video right now. I am somebody who has experienced a lot of trauma in my life, all right? So your trauma might have been not as bad as mine. Some of you might have had traumas that were way worse than anything I have ever been through in my life, but here's the thing. I understand that pain and that suffering and the confusion and the anger that comes along with that trauma, all right? And that's what we're gonna be talking about today and I'm gonna be sharing some of my experience of how I've been able to overcome it and the things I still do in my day-to-day life, all right? So if you're not caught up on the Jesse Smiles and Gabby Hannah situation, I've done two videos on it. You can check out the info card or down in the pinned comment below, all right? So let's talk about this and the best thing that I know how to do is share my own experience. So I'm not gonna dive into every single little detail about my life, but some of you might be able to relate to this one thing and it's that I'm the son of an alcoholic mother, all right? She is sober now. She just actually celebrated 14 years sober, but for anybody who was raised by an alcoholic or a drug addict, chances are you had some traumatic experiences, all right? I'm not gonna share every experience I've been through, but like this time of year, the holidays always get me remembering things from when I was a child because I would always visit my mom during the holidays because my dad was raising me and holidays were a nightmare for me as a kid. I'm talking about five, six, seven years old. When my mom drank, she became homicidal and suicidal. I remember Thanksgiving dinners or Christmas Eve's where she was threatening to stab one of my other relatives. And as a child, that's not something most kids see, right? I remember times when my mom was drunk during the holidays, locking herself in the bathroom, threatening to kill herself. You know what I mean? These were very traumatic for me. Aside from that, when you have a parent who's addicted, it's common to be just put into very not good situations. I'm a father now and I look back at some of those things and I'm very grateful that I'm sober now. So I'm not putting my son in those dangerous situations. But these are all things that make me wanna hold on to this resentment. And basically my mom got sober and during the time she got sober, I became addicted to alcohol and drugs and things got really bad. And one time, because my mom never came out to Vegas to visit me, but one time she came out to visit me here in Vegas. And we didn't really hang out that weekend, but before she left, she wanted to meet up and have breakfast because she needed to talk. And I'm like, okay, whatever. So of course, being the alcoholic I was, I said, hey, there's this bar across the street and it's Vegas, so they're 24-7. We can get breakfast, I can get my drink on, you know, whatever. So we go there, I meet my mom there, one of my favorite little pubs here in Las Vegas and I get an omelet and I start drinking. It's like eight o'clock, nine o'clock in the morning, right? And my mom sits down and she makes amends to me. She apologizes to me for everything she's done. She was probably a year or two sober at this time. Now, something I wouldn't figure out until years later, but some of you already figured this out, she was actually doing her ninth step, which is making amends, right? And I was like, okay, whatever, right? Because something I talked about in my video from yesterday is I am somebody who can hold onto a grudge like you wouldn't believe, right? So I didn't forgive her, like I said to her, yeah, I forgive you, but I had so much anger and resentment from the things that happened to me during my childhood and I blamed her for my addiction, okay, like I'm not gonna dive into the studies and science of it, but you are very likely to develop a substance abuse problem if you were raised by somebody with a substance abuse problem. That and or you'll date somebody with a substance abuse problem, right? So I blamed my mom for how terrible my entire life turned out. So years later, seven years ago for me when they had an intervention and my mom's trying to get me sober, I was screaming at her because all of that anger and rage and resentments were just built up inside of me and I was like, this is your fault. You're the reason on this way, right? And thank God I got sober, but just because I got sober doesn't mean I forgave her. Just because she helped save my life doesn't mean I forgave her. I had so much anger and rage towards her, all right? Because of what happened during my childhood and so many other things. And that is when I had to start working on myself too. It's one of the reasons I started first working on my anger because it was causing me a lot of problems, but through working with a sponsor and having a support group and just getting some clarity, like you guys, I saw some comments and I had some people reach out to me in all my last video about Jesse Smiles and Gabby Hanna about like, you can't just let this go. You can't let this go. And like I said, like we have a choice and I came to realize that I had a choice. I had a choice, all right? It was no longer on my mom, I was an adult. I had a choice if I was going to hold on to the past. It was my choice and what helped me greatly was once I put it in that perspective, now I either choose to hang on to it or I choose to figure out a way to let go of it, right? Or at least, at least try to start healing from it, okay? We are always presented with two opportunities. We are in control, okay? And that's what I realized. And I looked at my two options, right? I hang on to this thing that is making me angry, resentful, miserable, right? Or at least try to figure out a way to heal from this thing and let it go, all right? Something that I always try to teach people is forgiveness is not this act of letting someone off the hook. Forgiveness is letting ourselves off the hook. As soon as I started forgiving people, my life started getting better. It's this weird paradoxical situation that we get in where we refuse to forgive somebody but we're only hurting ourselves, right? Like, it doesn't make any sense when we look at it from a logical state. You know what I mean? And this is just the prime example of trauma and forgiveness, right? Like, I've been through a lot in my life, a ton in my life. I had plenty more experiences that happened throughout my years growing up and in my addiction. I wasn't living the best life and everything like that. I've had friends turn on me, backstab me, you know, girlfriends cheat on me. Just so many things, right? And one thing is I started accepting that things are gonna happen, right? People are gonna do bad things to me. This is something that's gonna happen. But I try to look at every single situation and I promise you this will help you too. Try to look at every single situation and remember that I always have a choice, okay? So like I said, your trauma might not be as bad as mine. Your trauma might be a lot worse than mine. But I want you to start thinking about what do you have control over, okay? You have the choice on whether or not you wanna hang on to that resentment, okay? And like I mentioned yesterday, ask yourself, is that helping you become the person you wanna become or is it hurting you, all right? Like what value is it bringing to you? Look at that thing, look at it like it's in your house. Has anybody watched that show on Netflix with the woman who like tidies everything up? Is it called Tidy Up? I don't know, right? But I haven't even watched it but I've heard the philosophy, right? Does this thing bring you joy? No, boom, it gots to go, right? Same thing with everything else in our life, those feelings, those emotions and everything like that. And I don't in any way mean to try to make this sound like a simple process. This is something I've been working on for years, okay? I have a therapist as well who I work on this stuff with. I've had sponsors, I have a support group, right? But I get to make the choice of how much effort that I put into my healing process, all right? So the last thing I'll say is if you wanna hold on to that anger, if you wanna hold on to that resentment for the things in your life, if you wanna do those things, that is 100% your choice. But at the end of the day, when you rest your head to go to sleep, always remember that you made that choice, all right? Although you may have had no choice whatsoever in what happened to you, like what I was talking about, like especially childhood trauma, we had no control over that. But today, we have a choice, all right? So I want you to ask yourself, what choice are you going to make today? Are you gonna hold on to it, or are you gonna start working towards the healing process? All right? But anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And a huge, huge thank you to everybody who supports the channel over on Patreon, as well as everybody who supports the channel by buying my books over at therewiredsoul.com and my merch and all that other good stuff. And if you guys ever have topics or you just need someone to talk to, like I'm starting a mental health support community, but feel free to email me or DM me anytime, all right? Thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time.