00:00
It’s not just about managing your mindset. It’s not just about positive thinking your way through it. That’s not how it all works. It’s a piece of it. But it’s not the entirety of the pie. It’s about being able to understand the context, what you’ve been through trauma wise, and how your brain affects all of that going forward.

00:33
Hello and welcome to the Mindset and Self-Mastery Show. I’m your host, Nick McGowan. And today on the show, I’m gonna talk about how trauma affects our mindset. The first thing I wanna talk about is there are a lot of people that talk about mindset at a very bypassy level. And I’m just gonna assume that some people may listen to this show or even see the title and go, eh, fuck that guy. He’s probably just bypassing it, because everything’s about mindset. And I’ve heard people say that, where it’s,

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If you can just manage your mindset, if you can just maintain the mindset and everything else will be all right. That’s not really true. Because when trauma is involved, your mindset is only a piece of it. Now I know based on previous episodes that I’ve had guests on the show, even solo episodes where we’ve talked about things that just are about mindset and may seem bypassy in certain ways.

01:33
But there’s depth that needs to be taken care of and thought about as you go through managing your mindset. Because in those previous episodes, when we’ve talked about things, like when I’ve asked the questions of how did you manage your mindset in that time, I’m really asking the question of in that moment, what did you do with your brain? How did you handle the crazy shit that was going on? Because when you’re in a traumatic experience or even a

02:01
just a rough experience, you still need to manage your mindset. But it’s not just managing your mindset that changes everything. It’s not about just managing the way that you think about things. You have to take into account the traumatic experiences and how it affects your body and how it affects your soul, how it affects every single bit of what you go through. Now, some people

02:30
have loads of trauma, just loads of trauma. And there are some people that may not really have much trauma at all. I even think childhood is kind of a traumatic experience for everybody. My partner says that often, that no matter what experience you went through as a child, there’s always trauma involved. I was listening to a book earlier today about how the body keeps score.

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it’s the name of the book, and it’s about trauma. And in that book and the chapter I was listening to today while at the gym, I was listening to how a baby was reacting to its mother and how the mother had reacted in a way that maybe she shouldn’t have as an adult because the baby pulled on her hair and baby didn’t know baby was just being a baby and just tugged on her hair. And my mind’s eye could picture the

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the woman going, ah, and cringing her face and just being in pain. That baby doesn’t know what the hell’s going on. It was just trying to tug on the thing that looked tugable in front of it. And that affected the baby. That also affected the mom. Knowing that little story, within 12 seconds, the mom was able to understand what had happened, tickle the baby, and the baby came back from feeling that trauma.

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can almost guarantee that years later, there’s something about that within the babies or the adult, you know, at that point within their body, because our body does keep the score. So it’s not just about managing our mindset through everything. It’s about understanding the context of what we’ve been through and the situation that we have in front of us. If somebody does something

04:28
stupid and simple at work, let’s say in your office and knocks over a piece of paper on your desk. To most people that just might be an inconvenience. To other people that might be a trigger. It might be something where that person can think they did that on purpose. They’re coming after me. They’re trying to come after me and they may be. They may not be.

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but the way that we manage our mindset in that moment depends on how we’ve been affected by trauma. Because you could just tell people, look, in that time, you should just consider that they’re not trying to do this to you on purpose and that it’s okay and we’re all human and you can manage your mindset through it. As a mental health advocate and somebody who really preaches about living your purposeful life and having a purpose-driven

05:28
experience in life, you’ve got to understand where other people are coming from, or at least think about where could that other person come from. You don’t have to do anything, so I take that back. You can do whatever you want. My suggestion is to be able to experience and try to understand where that person is coming from. You have to also understand why you feel that way. If you’ve never had any trauma,

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of somebody knocking something off your desk and then throwing something at you, then you may experience that piece of paper being knocked off your desk a bit differently than somebody who’s literally had somebody knock everything off their desk, throw shit at them and maybe punch them in the mouth. Wouldn’t you think that would be a bit of a different experience? And especially for somebody to do that a few weeks or months or years later. Now, again, with managing your mindset in that time, you can manage it as best you can.

06:24
You can even say, know this is the thing that’s happening and I know that something had happened to me before, but right now I choose to manage the way that I handle this, starting with my mental capacity. And that’s managing your mindset through it. You do have to be able to understand what traumas have affected you through that. traumatic stress can really show up at any time.

06:54
Your triggers can show up at any time. There are times where we as people just are unaware of triggers. We have no idea what’s going to trigger us until we’re actually triggered. Now, I’m sure you’ve had experiences like that. I think everybody at some point has had some experience where they just go off their rocker in a sense and they go kind of crazy or they lose their minds for a second. And it’s not about them going crazy.

07:22
or actually losing their minds. It’s them being triggered by something. And that stems back to trauma. So with trauma happening, even as a kid, the…

07:35
Associations with that are long lasting. Even somebody like myself, I’m 39 years old. I’ve had traumatic experiences as a child and in middle school and high school and in my early twenties. I’ve had different traumatic experiences throughout life. In my book, some were very small, minimal. Others were, they were monumental. And mine may be different than yours.

08:06
Yours may weigh heavier on you than they would for me. Mine may weigh heavier on me than they would for you. We have no right to be able to say to other people, who the fuck are you? And mine is worse than yours. Unless we understand where they’re coming from and how the trauma has affected them, that’s the only way that we can actually understand, as best we can, how they can feel that

08:35
Now that’s even a traumatic experience uh response. If somebody were to say, fuck you, you don’t get it because they don’t feel like anybody can understand that. I say that because I’ve said that before. I’ve legitimately told people go fuck yourself. You don’t understand what I’m going through. You’ve never been what I’ve been through. Only to find out from those people that they’ve been through some serious shit themselves. Some heavier in the way that I look at it than the stuff that I’ve been through.

09:06
And then really, who the fuck am I to say anything to them about that? It can be really difficult to wrap our heads around that. But I hope that you can wrap your head around understanding that the long lasting effects are there no matter what. So again, it’s not about just managing your mindset in those moments. It’s about understanding the context and the trauma and how those stress signals just linger long after trauma has happened.

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and they can pop up and show you, hey, here’s a trigger. You didn’t know it was here, but now you do. And this can all affect really how you think and how you feel and how you act in every single moment. So something I’ve learned is how the brain is affected by trauma. I’ve really been interested in how my organic being handles my subconscious and how the two of them

10:05
work either hand in hand or in fisticuffs in a sense and being able to fight against each other. I don’t ever want that. So I want to be able to work through that and understand how things work. So I’ve learned that there are main brain areas that are impacted and really affected in stress response, including the amygdala, the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. So with trauma, the amygdala

10:33
becomes hyperactive and your anxiety can just skyrocket and maybe even just bring you to a panic. I’ll think about that for a second. Have you ever been in a spot where you’ve been triggered and you just feel your anxiety just shoot straight through the roof almost like you can’t handle it and there’s just this deep deep panic that’s inside. It’s like that that

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pit in your stomach that’s being kind of tormented or ways that I’ve thought about it. It’s like my belly’s flipped upside down and it’s panic, just running straight through you. You could have been totally fine moments before that and something happens and boom, everything goes straight through the roof. Your anxiety, panic levels, all of it. You’re hyperventilating and even if that’s a bit extreme,

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Can you think about those times when you’ve had a little bit of that? Maybe back to when you were a little kid and your mom had said, just wait till your father gets home. I think a lot of us experienced something like that where you’re like, oh shit. And maybe it was your mom. Maybe they were like, wait till your mother gets home. And you’re like, oh shit. Or you forgot something at school. Or later on in your career, something happened. You lost a big account or you really bombed something bad.

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and that anxiety shot straight through the roof and that panic sets in. That’s where the amygdala is because of the trauma that has happened. Now, it may not just be that one time that happened, it happened in your career or uh in middle school or anything like that, but it could be from something that is even much further back in your childhood. And then it just stacked upon, but the body does keep the score and keeps pulling that back up.

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We’ve got to go back through and be able to work through that. But again, you need to understand where that’s coming from. So that’s with the amygdala. From the hippocampus standpoint, that can really affect the ability to recall some memories, specifically for certain people, because your subconscious is great at doing what it can to keep you alive and help you survive. Think about how there are diseases that are out there where your body will start

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shutting down different pieces of its work to keep you alive. And that is based on not just your body itself, but what’s actually happening in the brain to be able to turn those switches on and off to say, Hey, right now we need to put all of our energy to this. So if you have weak fingernails or if you have poor eyesight, that’s fine for now because we’re trying to keep this body alive and we’re trying to keep this person alive.

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And from the prefrontal cortex, that’s really involved in your self-awareness and your self-regulation. And when you have trauma, you can have a really hard time just regulating fear and even other emotions. And you can jump into a fear state that some people may think that just looks ridiculous from the outside because they don’t understand the trauma that you’ve had before.

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It may be something that just pulled it all up for you. Like I’ve had people that I’ve worked with where they’ve gotten really, really emotional in the middle of a meeting. And you could see that they’re starting to freak out a bit because there’s a trauma that had happened to them before. I’ve even had this where I’ve had this with my partner in business based on past business experiences with either other partners I’ve had or

14:23
even employees that I’ve had or businesses that I’ve worked within and other employees that I’ve worked with and how they’ve handled things because I’ve had traumas and I tie those things together. So I see how all of that can work, but only in the moments where I get to see it. So again, it’s taking the context of everything and understanding that it’s not just about managing your mindset. It’s not just about positive thinking your way through it.

14:53
That’s not how it all works. It’s a piece of it. But it’s not the entirety of the pie. It’s about being able to understand the context, what you’ve been through trauma wise, and how your brain affects all of that going forward. Now, I’d mentioned the book, The Body Keeps the Score. If you haven’t read that, if you haven’t even heard of it, please go look it up. It has been absolutely incredible. I’m not all the way through it right now.

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maybe eight chapters into it, but this is one of those books that I know that I’m gonna reread multiple times. And there’s a lot that’s in there, because I truly do believe that the body does keep the score, because I’ve felt that. I’ve watched it come up. I’ve watched it happen. I’ve even thought back through it after situations have happened and went, wow, why did I react that way? Or being in a moment and feeling things welling up. And consciously I go, what the fuck?

15:52
Where is this coming from? Why am I feeling that way? What do I do differently? How do I handle this? And understanding that we can handle it the best that we can, but that it’s based on the traumas that have happened before. And if we just try to manage our mindset through it, you’re gonna fuck it up. And I say that because I have, because I’ve thought if I just can manage my mindset and I can manage the days through it, great.

16:22
I wanted to make this episode because there’s a lot when it comes to managing our mindset that is outside of just our mindset. Again, it’s about trauma and it’s about understanding where the trauma comes from and how traumas show back up. We can work through those. We can really tackle those the best that we can. And I suggest doing process work, which is going through and figuring out where that trauma lives.

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and how you can repattern that and how you can change that story. But understanding in those moments when you start to react a certain way, you do get to manage your mindset. You do get to figure out, all right, how do I want to handle this right now? But it’s not entirely in your control based on the traumas that you’ve been through. So when you think about traumas that you’ve had, and I want you to remove

17:18
The perception of, your trauma may be different than somebody else’s. That doesn’t really matter as much when it comes to you. And it doesn’t matter as much when it comes to me, because I’ve thought about that before. Think about the traumas that you’ve had and how you react in situations now. It may help for you to think about the situations that have happened recently. Have you freaked out on your partner? Have you…

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gotten really, really, really frustrated over what seemed like a small thing to other people.

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have you really lost your sense of drive and purpose? That probably comes from trauma. Now there’s a lot more that you can get into and a lot deeper that you can go with all of this, but that trauma has affected you. And if you just try to manage your mindset through it.

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it’s not gonna help. That’s just a piece of it. You have to understand where the trauma has come from and how the trauma affects you and how the triggers affect you. So when you think about traumas and your mindset, I want you to keep in mind that all the triggers that happen based on the traumas that you’ve had in the past,

18:44
do get to manage your mindset and you can be positive in the way that you think about things. You can be logical in the way that you think about things. You can be hyper emotional in the way that you think about things or that you handle experiences. But please understand that trauma affects the way that you handle situations. It also affects the way that you can manage your mindset. So again, if you go back through and listen to the episodes previously to this one,

19:13
you’ll hear me ask, how did you manage your mindset in that time? And the question that I’m asking is, how did you actually do the work in that exact moment? And something I haven’t brought up a lot is how did the trauma affect you to be able to manage your mindset in those moments? So if you want to be able to understand more about this, I’d suggest that you do some research or that you and I hop on a call and we go through a clarity session.

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There’s a lot that I’ve learned of how to be able to manage my mindset in those moments based on the traumas that I’ve had in the past and how to actually work through my own traumas. And there are things that you can do to be able to help you understand what your purpose is and how your traumas have affected you in that and how that you can manage your mindset in the day to day to be able to actually lead your life toward your purpose. So if you have questions, please reach out. If you

20:12
want to hear more about this, please reach out. If you have somebody you can talk to about this and you’ve got traumas that you know, even just listening to this that you’re like, I haven’t really talked to anybody about that. Please reach out, talk to somebody about it. And at worst, at the simplest, I guess I could say, please understand that traumas affect the way that you handle situations. You can do everything you can positive thinking wise and mental

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fitness wise and managing your mindset, you’d need to understand that the traumas do affect the way that you handle those things, no matter what. So I appreciate you being with me today. I hope that you have enjoyed this episode. If you have, let me know. ah If you would like to hear more on this topic, please let me know and please check out the other episodes that we go through how people have managed their mindset in tough times and in trivial times and times that they have experienced traumas.

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and how they’ve gone through that, that may really help you. So again, thank you so much for being with me today.