The One Change in My Life That Made the Biggest Impact

I got up close and personal with death at the young age of 8.

My grandpa, a hero to me, got brain cancer. My mom thought she had to bear the burden and drop everything in her life to care for him. 

Only she couldn't. As an empath, I could sense her pain and offered to tag along and help her out, and she, drowning from the weight of it all, took the life preserver. We watched night after night my Grandpa inch closer to death. 

Shortly after his passing, I had my first panic attack.

Over the next thirteen years of my life, I'd suffer a thousand more.

I'd get this feeling something wasn't right, and soon It'd feel like I'd fall off the face of the earth. That's not an allegory - I literally felt that gravity would cease, and I would float off the surface, into space, and die - alone and disconnected. 

I had issues.

Then at 20, I became a Hare Krishna monk and meditated my panic attacks away. For the next four years of my life, I'd experience bliss and finally feel comfortable in my skin, no longer afraid of this scary world because I had a spiritual world I could look forward to. 

But life ain't a straight line.

I got pulled into the business world through my music; next thing you know, I was chanting less and working more. The panic attacks came back. My nine-year-old brother died when I was 25. I held his hand as he passed on.

Brain cancer. 

I became rich but carried around a secret, invisible misery with me that I was mainly never aware of. It was happenstance that opened me up to the most profound change in my life that had its biggest impact. 

I was part of GeniusX, a $100,000 per year mastermind founded by Joe Polish. Dr. Daniel Amen was coming as a guest, and because his clinic was near where I lived, Joe arranged to get my brain scanned so we could show it to all the members. 

Part of the process involved an intake form with a space to fill in all the traumatic events that had happened throughout my childhood.

Since I'd gotten good at dampening my emotions, it was easy to complete, like a grocery list:

• eggs

• milk

• sexual abuse from a family friend

• broccoli

• my mom going to prison for dealing crystal meth

• hamburger.

Because I survived it, I thought I was okay.

I didn't understand how trauma worked. When Dr. Amen told me I had a tough childhood, I argued with him, even though he'd seen thousands of patients and was about as qualified as anyone to make such a claim. 

Then he showed me my brain and how it looked just like the brain of a war veteran fresh off the battlefields and diagnosed me with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

I started doing trauma work that same week. Trauma work has made the most significant impact on my life. I didn't realize it, but becoming a monk was my trauma work - the meditation altered how I viewed my memories. 

The problem with trauma is that it traps you.

A mentally healthy person misremembers the past because memories aren't stored pictures in a file cabinet that you can pull out and view. What happens in your present will change how you remember the past, with one big fat exception: trauma. 

Trauma victims tend to have the most accurate representation of a past memory - because it's played on loop repeatedly. Even though it's a past memory, each time it crops up, it feels like it's in the present, happening RIGHT NOW. 

Deep in my trauma was a sense of unworthiness - a child so corrupted his own parents wouldn't love and protect him.

Until that was healed, my emotional development was stunted. That feeling would follow me, and one way I coped with it was to try to prove my value to the world. I built products and businesses that broke records and changed industries and still silently suffered. 

The trauma work freed me to put the past in the past and love myself again. I hope you've never had trauma in your life, but I bet you have. Most people attracted to business building, and personal development often comes from trauma.

Trauma is more common than you think. 

The strongest, most admirable trait is the ability to ask for help.

It's hard to ask because you must admit you have a problem. It's hard to ask because it makes you vulnerable. It's unlikely the first resource you turn to you will work. I find many therapists out there aren't that good at trauma work - even the ones who specialize in it. You'll have to trial-and-error your way through it. 

Trauma work is hard. You open up a wound and rub it with salt. I felt miserable for an entire year while going through trauma work. But at least I felt. Sometimes I questioned if it was worth it - to work so hard and still feel so miserable. But it's worth it. 

Unprocessed trauma will handcuff your soul to despair. Freeing yourself of the burden of trauma can allow you to soar, but at the very least, it doesn't limit you to repeating behaviors that repeatedly bring up the same hurt. 

Humanity is in a tough spot. We've gone through so much change in such a short period. We're on edge. Trauma is heightened. I see no nobler quest than the person willing to start trauma work, even if it's shyly and around the edges.