Hi Friends,
This week a life-changing podcast released.
The description started like this, "For me, this is the most important podcast episode I’ve ever published." That got my attention.
In this episode, Tim Ferriss, one of my favorite authors / thinkers, with a friend Debbie Millman, shared his story of a painful & unfortunate childhood trauma. Tim has never spoken about this publicly before.
He said multiple times in the episode that he was unsure if he was going to publish the episode. I'm really thankful he did.
As a child, Tim was routinely sexually abused from age two to four. In 1999, Tim nearly committed suicide, and he talks about it in his most recent TED talk. Debbie also talks about confronting her step-father who sexually abused her. They both share many resources on what is helping them address the trauma.
Take a breath. I was so sad to hear these stories.
It really hurt to hear the pain they both went through.
But it was also very comforting and beautiful to hear them turn this trauma into purpose.
This year has been a major journey of mental health. I've dug into my past and explored things that weighed on me for decades (I'm 30 years old). My default reaction to trauma, as it is for many, is to suppress it, ignore it, and 'push past the pain' so to speak. But that never really works.
My hope was that some day past trauma would just dissipate on its own.
Befriending Trauma
What I've found to work: Befriend the trauma. Befriend the suppressed parts of your personality. Why? Because, as Henri Nouwen put it, "There is always something in us searching for an explanation of what takes place in our lives and, if we have already yielded to the temptation of self-rejection, then every form of misfortune only deepens it." Said differently, trauma, though in the past, will follow us everywhere we go, unless we become familiar with it.
Carl Jung said this:
"The patient does not feel himself accepted unless the very worst in him is accepted too."
When I first heard that statement, it cleared up so much about why befriending trauma or looking at your trauma directly helps you to release the trauma. Just as a doctor addresses the worst parts of his patient (the disease or sickness), only then can the patient feel fully integrated. Imagine a doctor pulls out an x-ray and says, "This part in the bottom left corner, it looks bad, but let's ignore it..." What? No! Let's address that. In the same way, befriending those parts of ourselves that have been suppressed have a way of healing us and making us more whole.
"Befriending it and putting it under the blessing do not necessarily make our pain less painful. in fact, it often makes us more aware of how deep the wounds are and how unrealistic it is to expect them to vanish." - Henri Nouwen
And if that doesn't spark enough motivation in me, I remember this: The more you navigate your pain, the closer you will get to others. Because, my pain healed then can be motivation for another to move beyond their pain. And all the hope you need to get through it is just enough to take one more step. As Debbie said in the podcast:
"I feel I have one notch more hope than I do shame." - Debbie Millman
Life & Trauma
A few things I've learned through my personal journey of healing that were discussed in the podcast:
- Everything in your personality is connected: One unhealthy addiction is tied to other parts of your personality. As Tim put it in the conversation, "I realized these, let’s just call it 17 seemingly inexplicable behaviors of mine, these vicious cycles or triggers that I had been treating like separate things, separate problems to be solved, were all downstream of this trauma..." It's definitely possible that things that seem unconnected on the surface are actually connected.
- Separation therapy: They never used those words, but Separation Therapy is when you speak to sub-personalities as discrete, separate parts of you. For instance, you have a conversation with anger, shame, or guilt and ask things like: What triggered you? What is going on? How old are you when you feel this? This method, for me, has been the most impactful. It's how I've befriended parts of me I suppressed for many years.
- Talk Therapy: As one of my therapist put it, talk therapy is an hour where you invest in yourself, daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly to do a deep, intensive self-study. Jordan Peterson once said something to the effect of, we learn to read and write other people's stories and books in school, but rarely spend time examining our own.
- What's Important to YOU?: Finally, I'd say it's worth remembering that our trauma can also be tied to something that inherently important to us. We want to be loved, known, and seen. As Debbie was speaking, she said this:
"People like you and I who are highly empathetic often will organize the way that we speak, what we say, based on almost imperceptible facial recognition patterns that we understand." - Debbie Millman
On the receiving end of hearing about someone's trauma
If you are on the receiving end of someone else's trauma story. A few tips I've learned:
- Connect with the pain, not the solution: People are looking for space to exist before they release trauma
- Feeling seen and heard is more important than proving or justifying: There is a time for justification, but when someone is expressing their pain, it is a good reminder to give them space to feel seen and heard before anything else.
- Good replies can be: I'm sorry that happened. That shouldn't have happened to you. That is such a painful experience. I'm here for you. I support you. You are so brave. What you just shared must have been tuff. I'm sorry. I love you. You didn't deserve that.
The goal is not taking a step. The goal is to get into the well, deep into the pain with the other person, and from there when someone feels seen, protected, known, and loved, it gives them the courage to release and step forward. "I need someone," Henri Nouwen put it, "to keep me standing in it, to assure me that there is peace beyond the anguish, life beyond death, and love beyond fear."
The Podcast
My Healing Journey After Childhood Abuse (explicit language) (2 hours)
Link to the podcast: https://tim.blog/2020/09/14/how-to-heal-trauma/
The Final Note
Daniel Gilbert says, "Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished." You are not finished yet. A final quote from Tim.
"I would like people to realize, and to believe, that no matter the trauma, they’re not alone. They’re never alone, and it is never hopeless. Because I’m speaking to you, Debbie, as someone who came within a hair’s breadth of killing himself with utter conviction, no reservation, and it wasn’t necessary. It was not necessary, but I had lost hope. I felt like I was permanently damaged, flawed, incapable of feeling happiness, even when things were going well." - Tim Ferriss
My favorite finds this week
I'm going to pause this week on my favorite finds and point you to the podcast above. Enjoy :)
All in,
David
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By David Iskander
I'm David, a search specialist, and beginner YouTuber from Orange County, CA. My motto is: Whatever you do, do it beautifully. I enjoy making YouTube videos about website design, tech, productivity, and faith.
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