When The Past Lives In You

SPEAKER_01 0:04

So hey dear listeners. Today I want to share something. Maybe you can relate about your life. Like you know, like that feeling when something from the years that uh years ago still shows up in your body and in your reactions. In the way that you move through a room. Right? Maybe it's the tightness in your chest when someone raises their voice, or the way you apologize for things that are not your fault. So trauma doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it just quietly rewrites the rules of how we exist in the world. Right?

Welcome And Why Trauma Hides

SPEAKER_01 0:44

So hey day listeners, welcome back to another powerful episode of Healthy Mind, Heavy Life. I'm your host, Havik, and this is the podcast where we talk about mental health in real terms, the stuff that actually shows up in your everyday life. So, there is no quick fixes, just the honest conversations about uh what it takes to live well in your own mind. Right? And today I'm with someone, um, very lovely guest. Please welcome Daniel Burnock. So, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm a pleasure to be here. Lovely. Thank you so much, Daniel, for joining us today. And Delusness Pickly Out of 236 with Daniel. So Daniel is here to talk about something that a lot of us carry but don't always name it. Like how trauma shapes our mental health and what it actually looks like to heal.

unknown 1:38

Right?

SPEAKER_01 1:38

So I'll not take much of a time, Delusness. Let's get started. Yeah. So Delusness, like I mean, stay with us because the conversation is something where you will definitely get to uh learn, experience and a lot of things which can match with your daily and your own life.

Trauma Is Not The Event

SPEAKER_01 1:58

So Daniel, like I mean, there's this idea that trauma is only about the big and dramatic events, maybe the kind of things that we see in the movies, right? But that's not always how it works. So, what is the one of the biggest misconception I'd say that people have about what trauma actually is? So, what do you have to say?

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Their biggest misconcept is that people think trauma is what happened to them. That is not what trauma is. Trauma is not the event, it is not the occurrence, it is not the experience. That is not what trauma is. Trauma is the wound on the inside of a person, it's what's left behind after they've gone through an experience and their physiology has been overwhelmed and it's left a wound on the inside of them. And trauma is very personal as well. So you can't measure trauma by what the event was because two people can go through the exact same event and come out completely different. So trauma is not the event, that is the biggest misconception.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Okay, okay. So, like so when someone hears that and starts to recognize, or maybe what I went through does count. So, what actually comes up for them in that moment?

Validation As The First Step

SPEAKER_00 3:18

I start to recognize that they it changes you when you it needs to be validated. That's when they recognize that that's a validation, and validation is the first step for someone to be able to heal from it because you can't heal from something that you don't see, you don't recognize. So it is extremely important for trauma to be validated, that for someone to go through something and validate what you went through, this really happened, and it left this behind that this is really true. Because when people say it's not that bad or just get over it, what that is, it's a form of gaslighting. It's telling them that their reality is not real.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Okay. So um, I think such a obviously it's a kind of important shift, like moving from it was not that bad to kind of it actually matters the most. So uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

So that was the shift that I went through when I wrote my first book. I was in counseling because I wrestled with validating my trauma. I had a lot of trauma that I didn't know was trauma until I started getting some help for it. I just had emotional health issues, mental health issues, physical health issues, relational health issues. I had issues everywhere, like a subscription to bad things. And I had to validate that what happened to me mattered. And it it stopped comparing it to other things because that's something that we tend to do. It's not that bad. It's not as bad as that, but it doesn't matter. It's you can't measure them. It's like measuring a tree with with a dog. Um one's a plant and one's an animal. They're they're not the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

And okay, so so here also I'd love to ask is uh so when trauma lives in someone's nervous system for the long time, what do you think are some of the deepest patterns

Survival Patterns And Old Software

SPEAKER_01 5:20

that start I mean that that start to form? Like what does it actually do to the way someone relates to themselves or the world around them?

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Oh, it it affects a lot of things. I have an assessment my website that has 30 questions, so that gives you a clue that there's 30 ways right there that it could be affecting you. It affects people with their attitudes, with their mindset, passive-aggressive, people get PTSD, people get C PTSD, which is complex PTSD, people have sleep issues, eating disorders, anxiety disorders, mental health issues, they have attachment issues, all kinds of things, and and how they think about things, how they think about themselves, how they talk. If you stop and listen to how you talk and pay attention to that and give some awareness to that, it will give you a little clue of are you treating yourself and treating others with kindness, or are you being cruel or or nasty or snarky? Because those are a side effect of something went wrong.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Okay, okay. So so I mean I mean, do people usually recognize those patterns in themselves, or it's more like they notice the kind of effects, but don't always connect and back to the source?

SPEAKER_00 6:47

Definitely the last part. They don't notice and they recognize it by the side effects. That's because trauma is not something you can see unless you scan your brain, and we don't go around scanning our brains. So we have to recognize it through the side effects, and so many of the side effects are survival skills that sometimes get championed. People praise you for them because they look strong and they look good, but it's you're not being your real self. You're using it as a strategy to cope instead of bringing your full self to the table because it's not safe in some capacity.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Yeah, okay. So yeah, I I totally understand. And it's like the body's still running old software and they're just trying to protect you from something that's not happening anymore.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

Right. And it becomes it becomes your normal because you when you needed it, it became your normal through habit. But then later, it's something that you can recognize and heal. That's why I have my books that I've put out there, and I have a new one coming out this year as well to address this very thing of how to recognize these things and and what's the way that it could be. When my counselor said to me something went terribly wrong when I was answering a question of hers, it took me by surprise. I did not know something had gone wrong. This was just my normal. And so from her to say that to me arrested me in a way, like, well, what are you talking about? And then she began to unpack for me what a normy, normal, healthy situation that I was addressing would have looked like. And my mouth dropped open in awe because I didn't know that was even a thing. And see, that's part of the problem. People don't know what it can be, what it can be, what healthy life can be, what a healthy relationship can be, what a healthy upbringing looks like, what a healthy relationship looks like because we are so surrounded by dysfunction. It has become a kind of normal, but it's it's not how we were designed. It's it's not how we were created. We were created for connection, and there's so much disconnection in the world. That became a certain kind of normal since the pandemic. And people have gone into a lot of isolation, which is very toxic, but it's become a kind of normal, which is more toxic than the isolation itself. The normalization of something that is not healthy keeps you in it, and awareness is the beginning of coming out.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

Exactly.

Somatization And Physical Symptoms

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Exactly. So so I want to ask you on the everyday life part, because I mean, this is where we can definitely relate and people can relate as well. So, what are some of the signs that trauma is affecting someone's mental health right now? Like in the ways that they might not even realize.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

Oh, trauma causes all kinds of physical health problems. Trauma causes diabetes, trauma causes cardiac problems, trauma causes sleep problems, trauma can give people fibromyalgia, trauma can give people all kinds of sicknesses and diseases and immune problems that get chalked up to something else. And it even gives people things that science has not identified yet. I and it's called somatization, is what that happens. That's when the body keeps the score, when the body is manifesting the trauma as a physical symptom. It's called somatization. The word psychosomatic, when I was growing up, that kind of meant pretend. When I was going through my body somatizing, they told me I was making it up. I was not making it up. The trauma was in my body creating these symptoms. The psycho in psychosomatic is the mind is making the body sick. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

Yeah. And when someone starts to notice those things in themselves, what do you think? Like, what's usually the first step they uh and that actually helps? Not to fix it right now, kind of, but the way that

Where Healing Can Start Today

SPEAKER_01 11:10

like I can begin to make sense of this. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Well, gathering information is a good place to start, like listening to your podcast, uh, reading a book, like my book, Emerging with Wings, or contacting a coach or a counselor, depending on what you're dealing with, going to the doctor. If you are having physical symptoms, yeah, you need to treat the body as well. It's not just the mind. We are a mind and a body, you know. We we're mind body connection. We need to deal with both. We don't just deal with one or the other, but so much so much of the time people deal with just the body and throw a whole bunch of drugs at things. But if they would bring the mind and the emotion and even the spirit into it, they bring their whole person into it, then they can find wholeness again. Got it.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

So, yeah, definitely I would say, I mean, it it really makes so much sense because it's not about battlezing yourself, but it's all about understanding why you're why the system is doing what it is doing. And there is, I believe there is a lot of compassion in that as well.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

So oh, yes, we need love. We need love. Love is our greatest need as human beings. We need to have compassion for ourselves and for other people. That is that's a part of my four-step framework self. The L stands for love, because we need that. Without that, we won't take courage to do anything about the things that we see, because self-esceat, expose, love, and free. We see things to be aware, we expose the reason why, but then we need the love to give us the courage to move into the effort to get free to some sort of action step, to read a book, to talk to someone, you know, gather information. But the most important part of all of that is to do something, to start. And it won't be immediate, but you won't get anywhere if you never start.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

Exactly,

Connection Over Isolation

SPEAKER_01 13:10

exactly. So so here also I'd love to ask you about. So once someone has that awareness, so what do you think? What is the practical approach that they can start with you know, with totally to actually support their own healing, like something that doesn't require them to have it all figured out.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

Where can they start?

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

Like as I said, start by gathering information. You know, you can you know just use Google and you know, Google some things for help for whatever you're dealing with. It matters what you're dealing with, because there's no pet answer for all of them. Because you who are listening, you're an individual and you matter, and whatever you have, it's very unique to you. So that matters. And to find some help for what you're dealing with, Google whatever you're dealing with and uh find some information, a book, another podcast, uh, some videos on YouTube, something that will help you get more information and then get some help from someone because we heal in connection. Don't stay isolated, don't stay alone. You can start there. And I have a course on my website if that would be helpful for you to walk you through to help you identify those things. But do what's good for you. You who are listening, do what is good for you. That's what matters. That's compassion for yourself, is to don't try and copy someone else. Do what's good for you. What is your biggest problem? Start with what is your biggest problem, what's on the top of the pile, because generally a whole bunch of things, and we can't deal with a whole bunch of things at once. We can deal with one thing at a time. So pick the biggest, the biggest thing that's bothering you and start there.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Amazing. That's really amazing.

Setbacks And Getting Support

SPEAKER_01 14:58

And so one more thing is uh healing from trauma is kind of not a straight line, that is for sure. So there are setbacks, there are days when it feels like you are again back to square one. So, how do people sustain the over I mean work over time, like especially when it gets hard and when progress feels kind of invisible?

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Get help from someone, a coach. If you've already dealt with things and you're moving forward, coach is coaching is forward-facing. That's what I do. I do coaching, not counseling. Counseling, you can deal with the past a whole lot and you're focusing on the past, but coaching, you're focusing on the future and you know, processing the past as you're going forward. And but don't do it alone. As I said, don't do it alone because if you have someone they can help you be accountable, they can encourage you, they can make they can hold space for you when you need to just be. Maybe you need a space of rest in the middle and they can hold space for you there. Don't do it alone, get someone to help. Hire a coach, that's what I do, but I'm not the only one out there.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

All right, all right, lovely.

You Matter And How To Connect

SPEAKER_01 16:13

So and if you have to give one advice to the listmaster, then what that will be.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

You matter. Know that you matter, and if you don't know that you matter, that's something that needs to be repaired in you because you have value because you exist. That's something I did not believe I had value in my first book, Emerging with Wings. When I talk about it, I say it's my story of getting free from childhood trauma, but also finding my value. And that's something I'm real big on with my coaching speaking in all my books, is that you you matter, and that that that has to be something that you take ownership of that value, and that will empower you to heal, to love yourself, to move forward. It it has to start with you have value.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Amazing. All right, and if listeners wants to connect with you, what do we think they get to connect?

SPEAKER_00 17:11

On my website, daniellebernach.com. It's d-a-n-i-e-l-l-b e r n o c dot com. Everything is there or linked to there, so you can find all my coaching speaking books. I have a new book coming out that's linked to there as well, and workshops, all the things are all there, all the socials.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Perfect, perfect, great. So, dear listeners, what I'll do is I'll put all the links, details, everything into the show notes for your easier friends. And I have to say that um eating from trauma is not about erasing the past, but it's all about changing your relationship with it. So it does not yeah, so it does not get to write the rest of your story. Uh and and Daniel, thank you so much for being here and for bringing these conversations to life in a in a very real way. And uh I have to say there is sense like if you are there or you are listening, or maybe you'll be listening later, you carry more resilience than than yeah, you know about it. Because and if today's conversation starred something in you, that's not a kind of sign that something wrong, but it's a sign that something in you is getting ready to shift. So take your time, be kind to yourself, and remember that healing does not have to look like anyone else's version. It should be yours. Yeah, and and yeah, it should be yours and only yours. So with this, with this hope, this is your host, Avek, and this is Healthy Man, Healthy Life. We'll see you in the next one. Thank you so much. Thank you.