If you are stuck “trying to heal” for years

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]In this video, I'm going to explain how to actually heal from trauma as someone that has healed from trauma after 22 something years of trying to. I'm currently 34 and I grew up in a very traumatic household. There was a lot of violence. I grew up in a very unsafe environment. So, that meant that my whole life I've been on alert. I've been on edge and and the the stories or the the narrative that I've gotten in my childhood was, you know, you're not good enough, you're not sufficient enough, you have to do all of these things, you have to be perfect in order to get like a tiny sliver of love. But, you know, you might even not get that. And so, if you've not been fed love with a silver spoon, you learn to lick it off the knife. I think it's some quote that I I uh read somewhere and I think that's completely right. So, being someone who grew up in a very traumatic household, who then used all of my might, I think I'm very proud of myself for always trying to heal that I was doing. I've done insane amounts of different kinds of therapies. Um, I was I went to talk therapy for over two years. I did hypnotherapy for yeah, I think about nine months. I did um the tapping. I've done inner child work um internal family systems. I went to sort of um what was that other therapy called that you you know talk about all everything is about feelings and then you learn how to communicate non nonviolent communication [music] therapy um all kinds of therapy that I've tried and never did it get to um a place of where I felt like I was healed from my trauma and that's the thing, right? Because when you're trying to heal, you're always trying to heal and you never get to the end of it. And if you want to heal, and what does that even mean? So, let's define what healing looks like. If you want to heal from trauma, a person who is not traumatized, who lived in a safe environment, who grew up thinking and being loved and being accepted, and who just walks around the world being like, I'm great. I'm okay. I'm okay with who I am. I mess up sometimes, that's fine. I go through stuff sometimes, that's fine. If I have a stress stressful situation happening, it'll happen and then it'll be gone. So, I won't be at high alert all the time. So, that's sort of the narrative of what a person that didn't go through childhood trauma, the way they think. They they don't have that sense of like love is suffering and you have to be, you know, you have to do a lot to earn love. they don't have all of that narrative that someone that grew up in a very you know toxic violent um unsafe childhood has right okay so the the thing what the healing looks like on the other side for me what that means is your body is relaxed you can relax I think that is the biggest thing you just you can do you can stop that you can just be like I'm relaxed this moment and then another thing that um healing looks like for me specifically, but I think a lot of women who grew up in unsafe homes have that is like that constant awareness of everything and everyone that you think like that person's upset, that person looked weird, did that person didn't think this joke was funny. Because when you grow up in a in a traumatic household and you're you have to keep everyone's mood, you have to keep an eye on that and then try to mitigate situations, try to make situations better in order to keep yourself safe.

[00:03:52]So, a lot of these times people will call themselves empaths, like, "Oh, I'm such an empath." But actually, it's a sort of a trauma response because you've just learned how to be hyper vigilant of situations in order to keep yourself safe. And empaths typically are not really me like I I I am that way. I mean, I can notice everybody's moods and I'm hyper vigilant if someone's in a bad mood. But it isn't kindness. It's not empath as in empathy. I feel like empathy with you. It is more like if that person is upset, it will make me unsafe. So, I'm going to try to make him make the situation or the tension go away to keep me safe. It it all revolves back like empath in a sense are very um self fulfilling or self self-centered in a sense that they the way the the mechanism works is you know keep everybody happy and then you get to be safe. So that's the bottom line. Okay.

[00:04:53]If you are healed what that looks like is just you're calm. Somebody's upset.

[00:04:59]It doesn't really mean that much like, oh yeah, that person's that people can be upset sometimes. It's not a big deal.

[00:05:04]It doesn't mean that that's a threat to me and my safety and my, you know, my livelihood. None of that. Um, and that is what for me um healing looks like.

[00:05:19]But what is the the the current climate as we keep talking about the trauma, keep talking about the trauma and see like what happened and who hap and and who did what and how horrible and terrible and that was and that was unfair and that was unfair. But you keep muddling in that same pool. you'll be just like bringing up the stuff, bringing up the stuff and then actually it never goes away and you end up trying to heal all the time instead of just being healed.

[00:05:50]So, um this is my practical tip. I am not a therapy. Uh I'm not a therapist. I I went to law school. I studied law. I have been I did a master's in in in law and then I did a another masters in tax law. Then I worked in tax my whole life.

[00:06:08]I've been in the tax field for the last decade current. I've been as working as a tax manager for the last 5 years. So I just just to preface that this is not my profession. I'm I'm not a therap I'm not a therapist, but I do believe that I have very valuable insights as someone who um experienced this and actually knows for myself what worked. And if you've been trying all of these different therapies or all of these different methods for a very long time and it hasn't worked, it might be good to, you know, get another perspective.

[00:06:46]But I'm just a stranger on the internet.

[00:06:48]You don't have to take you don't have to do anything. Um I'm not advising against anything. So what is the biggest problem with um I think modern day therapy is when I used to go to therapy, it would be like okay and I would I would talk about my childhood and it would be like okay and this happened and then they you know they did this and then they said that and you know this horrible event happened and this other horrible event happened and so it was all of that narration and I remember distinctly one of my the talk therapy that I did for over two years. It was a very expressive woman, the the the therapist, and I was like explaining my childhood, and she would be like, "Oh." And she would be very like, "That's horrible." And like, "What an injustice and all of the things that you went through." And that felt incredible.

[00:07:40]I love that feeling. I was like, "Oh my god, somebody, you know, is empathizing with me and just just hearing my story and being like, that was, you know, that should not have happened to you." Okay. And that felt incredible. So I went and then again the next month and the next month and the next month and the next month and I it kept going month after month after month. But at a certain time I think I was like almost 2 years in at that point I was telling she was asking again about some you know something that had happened or something that I was dealing with. I was just like I still feel unsafe. I you know and and this is and this and then she asked again about like something that happened in my youth. And when I was telling about she did that that that thing again of like oh my god that's so sad. And in that moment I was like okay now what? You've you've you've I've told the trauma I've focused I again went back relived it for the millionth time.

[00:08:38]You know I've gotten that sense of empathy. But now what? We've unpacked it. We've we've we've gone through everything that needed to. But I still feel in my heart, in my soul, and specifically in my gut, I have this muscle that was always clenched, the shoulders that were always tight and always hypervigilant. And um and I was recreating the same situations that were happening in my youth again as an adult in my life, feeling unsafe, walking on eggshells, being afraid of angry people.

[00:09:12]the just the story was repeating itself and I I didn't feel like I had moved on from from the past at all. It was just muddling in it. And so at a certain point I just sort of felt like I'm sick of this. I'm just sick of just constantly going over it and just being like, well, yes, and this is how it is and this is how it's going to be. It's just like it sort of made me kind of like I'm done with this. I really am done with this. And um and the thing that I've learned is that your mind or your attention is actually liquid gold.

[00:09:52]It is actually, you know, money there's an abundance of. There's mountains you can make and you can print another mountain tomorrow. It's just very mundane. But your attention and your energy life force, the way I like to visualize it is like you wake up with a pot of gold and it's glistening. It's inside of this um container and it's glistening and it's beautiful. It's like this life energy and there's just a a finite amount that you're given every single day of of your life energy. And this is what everybody wants. Everybody wants a piece of that energy. Everybody wants your attention. Everybody wants a little piece of that gold because this is the most valuable thing in the universe, your energy that you wake up with. And so you with your thoughts and your thing, imagine that they're out of your eye, out of this bulb, right?

[00:10:46]There's a headlight. There's a lamp going in and you get to decide. So you have the life force energy and you have the bulb. The way this is just how I visualize it that's helped me. So I visualize that there's a lamp right here and I'm shining right. Okay. So this is my lamp and wherever I put my focus on the life force that pot of gold that I have goes through and then the the gold the actual energy is going through whatever I'm focusing on and it's making that thing bigger. It's making it grow.

[00:11:24]It's like magic. It works like magic. So your life force your attention that you have every single the attention that you have. So now I have my attention here.

[00:11:35]Now I have my attention there. Wherever you're thinking about this is what your the the pot of gold life force is going into and it's making it grow. That's how it works. So you know that they say u focus on and grows. Focus on yourself and you grow. It's exactly like that. But the problem with all of these therapies and the thing and the and the talking about it and going on and on and on about it is you are focusing and say I'm a victim. This happened to me. This was horrible. This is the And you're making it. It's almost like the past has never left. It's still there.

[00:12:13]And I do want to say if you do not know anything about anything, it is it is good to understand that like I think therapy in a sense of just to say okay I um felt like I needed to earn love and I was unsafe and these are all the methods that I use in order to keep myself safe.

[00:12:33]Like if you don't know the basics, just understanding why you do certain things, why you have certain addictions, why you run away from problems this way, just to understand a little bit of your your framework. But I think a lot of us have we past that point where you just understand, okay, this is this is the thing that happened. This is trauma.

[00:12:53]This is childhood um abuse. This is the result that that has on you. either you shut down or you're trying to people please or all of these dynamics once once you've understood it there is no more point of of putting your putting your light okay and if you if you understand that if you understand that your attention is liquid gold and the way you sparse it out you make it grow there you will start to see that there's no point in focusing on your trauma focusing on the bad things, focusing on the, you know, awful colleague or focusing on because you make it grow. It is not like people or things or events have a value in and of itself. They don't actually they don't. Something everything you know that that saying like life is meaningless, everything is meaningless. In in essence, it is true.

[00:13:53]Everything is meaningless. And you know what the magic is? You are the magic.

[00:13:58]You are the person, you are the power, you're the force that makes a meaningless thing have meaning. So if you if I would go into your life and a certain event would happen, someone would call, you would get a text, you would get that something or you know um your cake would burn down, whatever happened, I would think like oh that's great, but but I don't have that context in your life. So, I might be labeling things that you find like someone cancelled and you and I might say, "Oh, damn, they canceled." And you might say, "Oh my god, amazing. They canled."

[00:14:36]Because you're the person bringing meaning to your own life. Things in and of itself, events in and of itself do not have any meaning. You're the person bringing the meaning.

[00:14:47]And if you understand all of that, understanding that you know we are the creators, we are the life force, then focusing on this negative thing that happened in the past just just really really really pointless. So my way of how I was able to to to end this constant incessant thinking about the bad things that happened, thinking about the trauma, thinking about how unfair and unjust and how I did not deserve everything that um is first realizing that I think that is the big biggest point realizing that it feels like it's doing something but it's actually not doing anything. You feel like you're healing because you're working through the trauma. You're you feel like you're doing something and then you need to unpack and you need to, you know, maybe there's another layer. I always thought that me being overweight was because of my trauma. That because I had learned that being seen was dangerous. So that my body was keeping me fat in order to protect me. And I believe that. And so I always thought like behind this bush, behind that like maybe there's another event and an suppressed um you know memory that is keeping me um trapped. I did the whole inner child work where you know I ch talked to all of these different versions parts within myself in order to get to that point of like discovering. I always thought that I was going to discover like one nugget of information like in that movie Inception where there's I don't know if you know that but there's they write something down and they hide it in like your deepest soul and then if you see it then that's like the core core core of who you who what the issue is or who you are or like the core of who you are. And I thought I was going to find that. I I I thought in therapies I was going to find like oh this is the reason and if I heal this then I'm going to heal everything in my life. But that's exactly how it doesn't work because if you focus on if you focus if you put your attention on the misery and victim and how dare they and how could they and no that's the thing that grows. And so I could see that as a person as I I'm you know a rational person. I could see like with the therapies and being like, "Oh my god, this happened to you." I mean, like this is not working. It's not doing anything. And what I want is to move to the other side where I am relaxed, where I'm just like, "Oh, yeah, that, you know, used to happen to me, but you know, it's in the past." And I wanted to move to the other side. So, um, the thing that worked, which I've talked about, is walking. I started walking 20,000 steps every single day for um eight months and then I started walking 15,000 after eight months because I had lost all the weight. But in that 8 months of walking 20,000 steps, I thought of little else. It wasn't like a conscious thing, but I was just it's very hard for me to do that.

[00:18:00]It's 20,000 steps is a lot for for me specifically because I'm a single mom. I work full-time as a tax manager. I have two small kids. There are two and five.

[00:18:10]So, every moment of every day, I had to be constantly constantly thinking like, okay, am I going to get these reps?

[00:18:16]Okay, I have now I I now have like walk math is a real thing. Like, I have three. Okay, what if I go um after work and I'm going to pick up my kids and then instead of taking a bike, we're going to we're going to walk to the supermarket. That'll be like another thousand steps to go to the supermarket and back and and doing all kinds of micro calculations in your head trying to get these steps trying to get these steps trying to get these steps.

[00:18:41]Prioritizing these steps above everything else and and the walking because you're doing something with your body. You're not thinking. You're not all day long just being like, "Oh, and why?"

[00:18:56]Um, at that time when I started March 25th of 2025, when I started this 20,000 step journey, I was really at a low point in my life where I, you know, was overweight for over 22 years, binging, restricting, binging. It was like a loop from hell I couldn't get out of. I'm a single mom. I have these two kids. I feel heavy in my body. Um, you know, I I have work, but it's, you know, it's very hard. And like everything felt hard.

[00:19:24]Like every aspect of my life just felt like hard. And I felt like I needed to survive every single day. Just like I just got to get through this day and then we just got to get through this day and I just got to get through this day.

[00:19:36]That was the the heaviness of life. And I started walking 20,000 steps. And when you put your focus not on the issue, none of this was really um something that I had planned, but it just happened to happen that way. But I learned that when you place your focus not on the trauma, not on everything that's going wrong in your life, but you put your focus on something that is benefiting you, that's helping you, that's an action with your body. And I think walking is great because you're outside, you see the sunlight, you see the trees, you are not the way that you know if if you take that example of this of the flashlight that is coming out of my the way um that focus is you're focusing on something that is benefiting you. You're focusing on like wow the trees and the birds and like you see life as hope and how beautiful the sunset is. Your your focus is different, right?

[00:20:36]Okay. So then I stopped focusing on um on the bad stuff and over time I started to feel better in my skin and the thing that I had always been looking for. So what what my end goal would have been of all the therapies and all of those things was like I just want to feel good. I just want to feel safe. I just want to feel be able to breathe and I want my I want to be like I can relax.

[00:21:04]that the lived sensation because I knew like I'm an adult. I have a job. I have my own money. I can, you know, I am safe. Nobody's going to come and harm me in the way that you are. You know, you're you're dependent as a child. That that's not going to happen to me as an adult.

[00:21:24]I knew that in my in my brain, but I didn't know that in my in my body. So, I started walking um 20,000 steps and over time that changed because you're just doing something. You're not putting your focus on on the bad stuff.

[00:21:42]And one of the things that really really helped me with that is one of the quotes that I learned is it does not matter what your life looks like on the outside. It only matters what it feels like to you.

[00:21:57]And as dumb as that may sound, I thought that was a real revelation to me. I thought that to to to know that the metric of how successful my life is is solely measured based on how good I feel in my life instead of what it looks like. Because I'm a person that all I cared about was what it looked like. I always wanted to do what was right. I always wanted to do not what was right but I wanted to what looked right to other people. So every choice I had made up until that point of you know studying really hard and going to law school and getting them the the the career I picked the the jobs I picked everything was done so that from the outside it people would look in like he's doing great cuz look at all of her accomplishments and look at all the things she's done.

[00:22:52]But it turns out that um if you turn that around, if you turn that around and you make the metric what feels good in your body, you start to make different choices and those choices start to align and make you like you make good feeling choices and those good feeling choices make you make your life the rest of your life you know also feel good. So whenever I was in my in my previous mindset of it had to look good, but even if it was conflicting, if it didn't feel good and like do it, do it. And I I just would do it because it looked good and people would approve, it felt incredibly bad. And now on the other side, I I think my life, if people would look at it, be like, "Oh, she's a single mom.

[00:23:47]She works full-time and she has to do all of these things by herself. Must be incredibly hard. It is incredibly It is not. My life is very easy compared to the life I had when I wanted to be perfect and when I wanted it to look perfect.

[00:24:03]And that would be that would be my advice for today. start focusing on something other than your trauma, other than your pain, other than so if you're so for example, if you're now thinking of a conflict, there's a conflict with um with your spouse, with your thing, or there's something going on in your life that you don't like, instead of ruminating on it and making that thing bigger, start focusing on an action that is only benefiting you. And that can be walking. I think walking is an incredible tool for that. But it can be anything. Painting. Do something with your body that is not the trauma. Do painting. Do learn a new skill. If you want to, you know, uh, advance your career, something that is only benefiting you and that's an action that you do with your body. Learn how to figure skate, learn how to, um, do that.

[00:24:58]And anytime you know all of these things that you do no longer want to focus on come up, focus on that instead. That's what I did with my walking. Anytime I would be feeling like, oh, and you know, you these these loops of thinking of feeling sorry for yourself, they're like a highway of of um misery, but it's a highway that you that's well walked. So before you notice it, you end up back on that highway. And so you must click, you must be really vigilant and be like, "No, how many steps do I have today?"

[00:25:31]Um, okay. Well, where can I get more steps? How can I get this done for me?

[00:25:36]How can I, you know, get my degree? How can I get my realtor's license? Or whatever it is, the thing that you want to do for yourself in your life, the action that you're going to be focusing on. Whenever you think about anything that you do not want to make grow, that you do not want to shed that magical light on, focus on on you instead. Focus on the steps instead. So then the magical lamp that is all the attention that everybody wants from you, you can invest that and you can see how when you focus it on something that benefits you, it grows and it grows and then and then you are benefited and then all of a sudden so one of the reasons why I realized that I was actually healing because I think these words like I'm healed or I'm not it's it's all very vague but I knew that it was working is because when I because I try I stopped trying. I stopped trying to heal. I was I noticed that my attention was no longer being drawn to things that were like do this meditation to heal your inner child. Do this um I when I was scrolling my Instagram or my Tik Tok would be full of those things of like oh yes and this therapy or try this and I would get these things all the time of like go to this retreat, go to because I was the ideal candidate for those type of, you know, interventions like, "Are you sick of feeling bad and you want to feel better?" And I would be like, "Yes, yes, it's me. It's me." And I would click on I would I would subscribe or I would buy the course or whatever it was.

[00:27:10]And once I had realized that my feed didn't really show those things anymore.

[00:27:14]It's like, "Oh, that's not where my attention goes anymore. I'm not actively trying to heal anymore." And so that would be my attend that would be my 10 cents uh two cents for today.

[00:27:27]If you want to heal then focus, pick an action. Put your full attention on it.

[00:27:34]Always redirect, redirect, redirect, keep redirecting to the thing you want until the old loop becomes thing. I mean, I'm always going to be someone that went through childhood trauma. I'm always going to it's just a thing that happened. But it's not like instead of that thing and the trauma and my fear and my thing having like if this screen is my life, it was like th this whole part of my life was ruled by that. Now it's just like this part like that happened. But all of this now I get to use on just enjoying life and I have my babies and you know going on adventures every day and helping people and talking about the things I want to talk about and it it's just like it's not that relevant. It doesn't rule your whole entire life anymore. So that would be my advice if you're dealing with childhood trauma and how to move past it, how to move with your body past that point of of not being stuck in the mud. So I hope this is helpful. See you in the next one.