What to Do When You’re Ready For Total Transformation (4-video compilation)

So much of what we’ve been taught about repairing our lives and resolving old wounds is simply misleading. Have you noticed that? The kind of practical insight a person needs to build a fulfilling life and move beyond past harm has been known in fragments, but over time it’s been scattered, mixed up with competing ideas, and largely lost. I started to see this pattern years ago during the many 12-step meetings I used to attend — thousands of them across the years, sometimes the same meeting week after week. I watched the same faces come and go. It gave me a chance not only to work on my own recovery but to study other people who transformed dramatically in front of me: they shed old problems, rebuilt their days, and became real positive influences in my life. But I also watched many who never made headway. Those contrasts deeply shaped my thinking and eventually formed the core of my approach to healing: what works, what rarely works, and what actively stalls progress. Healing from trauma is not an automatic outcome. Many people ask for help, but only a few genuinely breakthrough and flourish. When I was struggling with what would now be called childhood-based PTSD symptoms, I feared being trapped like so many stuck in the meetings I’d seen. I became determined to be one of those who actually healed. So I paid attention, took notes, and sought mentors beyond 12-step rooms across a few different disciplines. As you explore this channel you’ll notice that my view on recovery is unusually forthright: I teach radical self-honesty, self-direction, and the idea that you should steward your own healing. I bring a lot of plain common sense into the mix, and that makes my outlook countercultural compared with mainstream mental-health assumptions about trauma and recovery. I have a coherent philosophy and a set of techniques that flow from it, and when those ideas are compared with the orthodox approaches, differences become obvious. I’m open to the fact that people respond to different things, but I also see many damaging, limiting myths out there. If those are the only messages you’ve received and you feel stuck or hopeless, I want to offer an alternative that may help you finally break through. I love this work because I spend my days witnessing and supporting people who do get breakthroughs. I firmly believe everyone deserves the chance to recover from trauma, and that belief drives everything I do. For a long time I’ve been fascinated by how people recover from depression and trauma and make meaningful change — information that was hard for me to find when I needed it most. I did reach a turning point, though not in a single instant: my healing arrived in surges. One of the biggest came after I discovered the core techniques I still practice daily. Those tools form the foundation of a free course I offer — you’ll always find it linked in the description beneath my videos — and if you take it you can join biweekly free Zoom calls I lead where we practice together and I answer questions. There was a moment early on when a deep, aching hole in my spirit was healed quickly, and although much remained to work through afterward, I stopped falling into trauma-driven crises the way I used to. When hard times came, I knew how to respond. That’s what I teach in my videos, courses, workshops, and coaching: an alternate, self-directed path to recovery that can help whether you have consistent access to professional care or not. In some ways my outlook is radical. Writing a book has forced me to hold these lessons in one linear, coherent form rather than as the many pointed videos I’ve published. Now I can present the philosophy that underpins everything I teach. Here it is: eight guiding principles. The first principle is this — trauma is an injury, not an identity. We used to treat trauma symptoms as primarily psychological; now we understand they are largely neurological, and by implication physiological. When trauma injures the nervous system, it influences your whole body — your emotions, hormones, immune system, sleep, appetite, and more. That neurological damage helps explain why early trauma raises your risk (not guaranteed, but increased risk) for serious health problems over the years: heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, reproductive and endocrine disorders, weakened immunity, learning and memory issues, and even higher dementia risk. Almost nothing good escapes the negative effects of unhealed trauma, which gives us every reason to heal. Adult symptoms originating from childhood abuse and neglect can derail careers, damage relationships, and fracture families. If you look at certain populations — incarcerated people, people with addiction, those suffering severe psychiatric conditions — trauma is a common, amplifying factor. So there’s a systemic incentive to find better solutions, and though the larger field talks about trauma, it often fails to offer solid fixes. Helping people reduce their symptoms in practical ways has become the center of my work. I’ve experienced dramatic health improvements since I began learning to re-regulate my nervous system and calibrate my daily life using specific tools — my daily practice — and I continue to use those practices every day. Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) isn’t “curable” in the sense of erasing history, but its symptoms can be healed and managed. Think of it like diabetes: the condition remains, but changing your daily rhythms, habits, and supports can greatly reduce or reverse the symptoms. With consistent care you can sustain well-being, and if you let your practices lapse the symptoms can return. Principle two: dysregulation is nearly universal among traumatized people. This isn’t widely discussed, but neurological dysregulation — measurable in brain activity and vital signs — shows up as trouble concentrating, erratic heart rate, clumsiness, sudden emotional overwhelm, or conversely going completely numb after an outburst. Trauma makes people dysregulate more often, more intensely, and makes getting back to baseline harder. That dysregulation explains a lot of the medical and psychological downstream effects of trauma: why wounds heal poorly in stressed bodies, why infections linger, why inflammation persists. I personally experienced severe medical setbacks during an intensely traumatic period until I returned to my calming practices; when I re-engaged my tools, my body began to heal. Physicians familiar with trauma sometimes call this somatization — trauma expressed physically through poor circulation, immune suppression, or repeated infections. Dysregulation also damages cognitive and emotional development: it can blunt social skills, slow emotional learning, and leave people awkward about apologies, dating, asserting boundaries, reading a room, or knowing how to connect. It’s consistent with research and with what I’ve seen in my work. Self-defeating behaviors flow naturally from dysregulation and the neurological injury of trauma, yet they’re seldom addressed head-on enough in therapy. I met many therapists who wanted to discuss what my mother had done to me, but fewer who would clearly call out patterns I continued to enact that were making my life worse. In my experience, roughly 80% of the trauma burden in my life at that point was being generated by my own self-sabotaging responses — the reactions, choices, and attitudes I’d learned that perpetuated drama and suffering. Talking endlessly about feelings and memories sometimes intensified my symptoms rather than relieving them because reliving the stories without tools to calm my nervous system left me stuck in dysregulation. So there’s a trifecta to understand: dysregulation, disconnection, and self-defeating behavior. They feed each other and can spiral you down — or, with the right interventions, be turned around together. At the center of that spiral are triggers, which brings us to principle four: learning to calm your triggers is the essential first step to breaking the cycle. If you keep taking two steps forward and ten back, it’s usually because triggers haven’t been addressed. In trauma terms, a trigger is a stimulus that sets off neurological dysregulation: your heart races, your reasoning diminishes as emotion floods the brain, and you lose access to calm thinking. That’s what being triggered feels like. Trying to make everyone else stop “triggering” you is less effective than learning to calm your own reactions. People will ignore you, criticize you, reject you, or exclude you — that’s part of life — but if you can keep triggers from cascading into dysregulation, disconnection, and destructive choices, you gain enormous flexibility. Calming can often be achieved with simple, self-administered techniques — things people have used for millennia to soothe the nervous system. These should be the first-line interventions: intense exercise, rhythmic bilateral movement (like marching), singing or chanting in groups, grounding sensory shocks such as a cold splash of water, or hand-rubbing — all ways to help the body re-regulate. Practices that combine body movement with group rhythm have been used in every culture for soldiers and communities to steady themselves in crisis. I keep a one-page sheet with ten emergency measures and I recommend everyone keep similar tools close at hand. The ongoing practice to sustain regulation is what I call the daily practice — that link is always in my descriptions below the videos — and I recommend it whether or not you can access a professional. One reason conventional treatments have had limited success with complex PTSD is they rarely prioritize dysregulation the way they should. The evidence for many mainstream approaches, including medications and psychotherapy alone, is modest. Physical exercise has been shown to be at least as effective as pills or therapy in some studies, and when I was in acute PTSD I found intensive movement, hydration, avoiding sugar and alcohol, and focused self-care dramatically reduced my symptoms. Talk therapy often focuses on recounting memories and feeling feelings, but for many trauma survivors talking can itself be a trigger and lead to more dysregulation — making it hard to process anything between sessions. That was my experience: I’d have a session and briefly feel better, then slide back into dysregulation before the next appointment. There is a brain pathway — described by researchers like James Pennebaker and others — where writing about traumatic experiences engages the language centers differently and can allow release without retraumatizing. One practical tool I use is a specific sequence: write down your fearful and resentful thoughts, sit in meditation, and then, if you choose, read the writing aloud to a trusted peer. That sequence can create safe disclosure without activating the same dysregulation triggered by conversational recall. If you join my membership and our private Facebook group, we actually encourage people to “go light” with storytelling about details of what happened; share just enough to say what you’re dealing with now (trust, boundaries, expressing yourself, etc.) and then practice tools together. There’s great healing power in community support when the focus is on tools and present challenges rather than raw retelling. Medication deserves an honest conversation, too. Psychotropics have their place, but they can blunt the nervous system in ways that interfere with your natural ability to re-regulate. Meds are an imprecise tool for C-PTSD; the evidence of benefit is limited and sometimes studies are selected to favor outcomes. In my coaching I often ask clients who struggle to gain traction whether they are medicated; sometimes substances — from alcohol to cannabis to prescribed drugs — make self-regulation more difficult. I would never advise someone to stop medication on their own; that must be managed in consultation with a physician. But if you can’t reach a regulated state or your tools aren’t working, medication can be a factor, and that may require a longer-term plan. The standard model of therapy — “talk about what happened, feel your feelings” — can actually deepen dysregulation when someone lacks the ability to reregulate in-session. Insurance models often support a limited package of talking therapy that leaves people crying for weeks with little practical improvement until a clinician suggests medication. I think the system is flawed: expensive, inconsistent, and poorly standardized. Different clinicians diagnose and treat in widely varying ways, which means outcomes are inconsistent. So when you’re seeking help, ask questions, do your own reading and experimenting, and listen to your own experience. Change should feel like real relief — don’t accept an approach that only promises that “healing will come eventually” while you get worse in the meantime. This brings us to another core conviction: conventional trauma narratives often disempower survivors. The true power to heal lies in the present moment, and the only part of trauma we can control reliably is our own responses. If you are currently in a traumatizing situation, yes, external change is needed, but the old therapeutic model that emphasizes passive reliance on professionals and dwelling in the past tends to keep people dependent. You get one hour a week with a clinician; the real work happens in the hours you live your life. Professionals are invaluable guides, but they should augment — not replace — the daily, practical work you do on yourself. Many clinicians and even colleagues refer clients to the ideas I teach because they see the value of peer-led, skill-based recovery. That peer support can feel threatening to some professionals, but survivor-led communities are powerful: we teach each other, read broadly, and hold each other to standards professionals sometimes don’t. Recovery needs both compassionate attention to past hurt and a focused willingness to own current choices that perpetuate harm. The saying “hurt people hurt people” matters: if we don’t heal, we can traumatize others — children, partners, coworkers — simply by living out reactive patterns. Healing matters for your health, your relationships, and your ability to contribute to the world. Yet the emphasis on past events often leaves survivors locked into a victim identity. I insist again: trauma is an injury, not a permanent identity. You were victimized, yes, but if you let victimhood become the story you tell about yourself forever, you hand your power to other people and to your past. The seventh principle is that healing complex PTSD requires reclaiming your power — your agency. Agency is your capacity to act, to make choices, and to lead your life. When you take charge of your healing, you are less dependent on flawed systems and less inclined to accept easy but inadequate explanations for why you keep repeating destructive patterns. For years I heard the refrain that people “recreate their childhoods” by making poor choices — a partial truth used as a blanket explanation for behaviors that are actually driven by dysregulation and attachment wounds. You are not defective. The trauma-shaped responses I describe are normal adaptations to abnormal childhoods. When you own your recovery and experiment courageously with practical changes, your confidence grows. Self-esteem rises as you prove you can change. The old, past-focused model that says “just talk about it and one day you’ll feel better” doesn’t serve many survivors. Others can support you, but they cannot make the healing happen for you — not therapists, not partners, not parents. Don’t wait for apologies; many parents never apologize, and even an apology won’t erase the neurological injury you carry. That’s where the eighth principle comes in: character development is essential to healing — especially the moral and relational skills that let you connect with others. If you struggle with boundaries, lash out, or withdraw, those patterns push people away and stall your recovery. Trauma wounds are fundamentally relational, and while some healing is intrapsychic, much of it resolves by practicing connection. You cannot heal entirely alone. That’s one reason I created a “connection boot camp” — a 30-day system people can use to re-learn how to relate. Most current C-PTSD struggles are maintained not only by the original harm but by ongoing self-defeating behaviors that retraumatize us. Initially it isn’t your fault; you didn’t know. But once you know that certain patterns (clinging, avoidance, self-neglect, sabotage) keep you stuck, you have the opportunity and responsibility to change them. Character work — discerning right from wrong, repairing harm, learning to stop hurting others — is rarely taught in dysfunctional homes, rarely emphasized in school, and often neglected in therapy. Yet moral reckoning is central to long-term recovery. Twelve-step programs illustrate this: recovery is about more than feeling better; it’s about becoming the person you were always meant to be. C-PTSD can suppress your true nature and silence your gifts. If you don’t heal, the world loses the creative, kind, and talented person you could be. Trauma doesn’t have to define you; healing your symptoms lets you accept your history and move beyond it to occupy your full potential. Many remarkable people had traumatic pasts that informed rather than defined them, deepening empathy and fueling meaningful contribution. True happiness depends on developing and using your gifts to serve others and helping create conditions where everyone can develop theirs. If you want practical techniques that helped me move out of deep depression and become the person I am now, try the daily practice. Childhood trauma often teaches people to give away power through people-pleasing, flight from conflict and intimacy, and other self-destructive habits. To heal you need your power back. What do I mean by power? Not dominance over others, but an inner resource: the life force that gives you energy, focus, and the capacity to take the next right action — to shower, to brush your teeth, to earn a living, to leave a toxic situation, to learn something new, or to hold your ground while staying regulated. Power grows when you do consistent, concrete actions that strengthen your competence and dignity, and it is also preserved by avoiding power-draining habits. C-PTSD often drains power in predictable ways. Here is a long list of common ways trauma survivors leak or lose power, followed by how to reclaim it. You may recognize some and not others; the point is to identify what feels true for you and start changing it. 1) Believing someone else will come rescue you. That hope can keep you dependent. When no one came in childhood, you may still unconsciously expect a savior. The strongest route is to accept that, while others can help at times, the main work of changing your life will fall to you. 2) Insisting that someone must apologize before you can heal. Holding out for that apology gives away your agency. It’s lovely if it happens, but you don’t need it to recover. 3) Chasing approval from people who are unkind or indifferent. Dancing for their approval drains your power. Begin to approve of yourself first. 4) Avoiding conflict completely. While avoiding some fights is practical, never speaking up will erode your voice and power. Learn to pick your moments and prepare yourself to hold boundaries. 5) Fighting everyone. The opposite extreme — perpetual combativeness — is also exhausting and ineffective. There’s a middle way: speak up when needed, but avoid turning everything into warfare. 6) Self-medicating with intoxicants. Alcohol, cannabis, or other substances can feel like regulation in the short term but usually interfere with real re-regulation in the long run. If substances are a central coping tool for you, find healthier reregulation practices alongside any medical support you need. 7) Putting yourself down constantly. Chronic self-disparagement and fawning undercut confidence and reinforce being overlooked. Learn to stop pre-emptively diminishing yourself. 8) Overspending and debt. Financial instability reduces options and autonomy. Budgeting, tracking expenses, and joining supportive groups (like Debtors Anonymous) can help lift this burden. 9) Underspending and neglect. The opposite also drains power: not caring for basic needs, wearing shabby clothes you hide, or deliberately devaluing your own environment signals low self-worth. Appropriate self-care — decent underwear, bedding, shoes, and hygiene — is power-preserving. 10) Avoiding intellectual growth. Refusing to learn or grow leaves you stuck. Learning energizes the mind and expands opportunities. 11) Staying friends with energy-draining people. Relationships that consistently diminish you take power from your life. Either confront those patterns, set boundaries, or let such ties fade. 12) Dating people who won’t commit. Pouring your love into unavailable partners drains the most precious energy you have. Save your capacity for those who reciprocate. 13) Neglecting basic self-care: health, hygiene, and appearance. Small routines — walks, dental checkups, nutritious meals — are the scaffolding of empowerment. Start with a list of ten small acts of care and do at least one every day. 14) Over-functioning: doing too much. Constantly rescuing others until you burn out is disempowering. 15) Under-functioning: paralysis and procrastination. If you’re stuck in inaction, break the ice with one small pleasurable task to start momentum. 16) Blaming others for everything. While others have harmed you, obsessively blaming keeps you off the path of pragmatic problem-solving. Ask: what can I do now to reduce this problem? 17) Cutting people out rather than repairing relationships when repair is possible. Practice staying and doing the work when relationships matter; reserve cutting contact for cases where boundary-setting and repair have failed. 18) Staying too busy to heal. Using constant busyness as avoidance keeps you from confronting what needs tending. Make quiet time for the inner work. 19) Being consumed with other people’s problems. Caring for someone in crisis is noble, but if their problems become your life and prevent you from attending to your own healing, you will lose your power. How do we reclaim power from these drains? First, acknowledge that you must save yourself in practical ways: become the manager of your life, make lists, keep budgets, and do the ordinary work of responsibility. Release the expectation that someone else’s apology or intervention will do the work for you. If you crave approval from people who won’t give it, let them go — release that elastic band of expectation and turn your attention inward. When avoiding conflict, learn to bring concerns to conversations in a measured way — imagine speaking on your “front porch,” where you listen, consider, and then decide whether to invite the matter “into the house” of your heart. If you’ve been fighting everyone, practice staying regulated so you can speak rather than battle. Replace intoxicants with reregulation tools: the daily practice, focused exercise, grounding techniques, and writing techniques are far more effective long term. Rather than self-abasement, practice self-respect: do the steady work that gives you reasons to be proud. For financial drains, create simple tracking systems, make a plan, and consider community supports like debt groups; small consistent steps compound quickly. If you’re underspending, pick one modest investment in yourself — a decent item of clothing, better bedding — and allow that to communicate that you matter. Build learning into your life: courses, reading, and new skills make you more valuable and interesting. Evaluate friendships: either have honest conversations about how they make you feel or let them fade and make room for people who match your growth. If romantic patterns repeat, get clear about what genuinely nourishes you and take steps to leave relationships that chronically harm you. When you’re neglecting basic self-care, write a list of ten practical actions and do one daily — make an appointment, go for a walk, cook a healthy meal. For overfunctioning, set boundaries and ask for reciprocity; for underfunctioning, break the inertia with something small that gives pleasure. If you blame others obsessively, practice detaching the problem from the person who caused it and ask what you can do now. If you cut people instead of attempting repair, aim to have the tools and courage to try to talk and reconcile where safe and appropriate; only then use separation as a last resort. If busyness is avoidance, allow yourself to do less so you can reflect and heal. If you’re consumed by someone else’s crisis, find ways to step back and re-center your own life, even if that means getting outside help. The practical core of reclaiming your power is consistent, courageous experimentation. Try changes, observe what happens, and adjust. I encourage people to learn the daily practice — writing fears and resentments, meditating, and using specific reregulation tools — because it builds that muscle of calm and clarity. In my experience, people who do the work consistently start to make better choices, stop repeating the same relationship errors, and develop the inner steadiness to handle life’s inevitable shocks. A story here about my own life: I have complex PTSD, rooted in a chaotic childhood shaped largely by my mother’s severe alcoholism. I first noticed symptoms around age nine when my mother moved us away from my father, isolating me and severing my support system. Things worsened in my teens when sexuality and heartbreak complicated my emotional landscape. In my late twenties I endured multiple painful events in quick succession — heartbreaks, a violent crime, and the death of my mother — and it became clear something was deeply wrong. Mainstream therapy at that time didn’t help and sometimes felt counterproductive; the constant talking exacerbated my symptoms rather than calming them. I felt uniquely broken, judged by clinicians who lacked an understanding of complex trauma. Over time, through the daily practice and other interventions, I changed my life. One of the pivotal shifts involved reclaiming my power and doing the tedious footwork of recovery. I also had a significant struggle with heavy smoking that I finally overcame in a way I can only describe as miraculous. I had smoked for sixteen years up to two packs a day, tried countless quit attempts, and believed quitting was beyond me. Yet after a weeklong silent retreat in which I wrote, meditated, and prayed, I stopped smoking and never returned to it. I wore nicotine patches for a while and continued the practice of writing down fears and resentments and then meditating on them; I stopped drinking alcohol for a time because it had been a smoking trigger. Over the subsequent months and years my life shifted: I paid off debt, started a family, and came out of a long pattern of self-destruction. That process convinced me two things: practical techniques matter tremendously, and for some people spiritual experience or surrender can be a catalytic element in recovery. Whether or not you accept the spiritual angle, the methods of writing, releasing, and calming the nervous system are practicable and powerful on their own. The bigger point is that trauma-driven beliefs are sticky and often block recovery. These are the pessimistic assumptions that keep people stuck: “I only attract unavailable people,” “sex will tell me if I’m compatible,” “I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be,” “they’re damaged so I have to fix them,” “my friendships are just platonic even though I’m longing for more,” “I need closure,” “people are just toxic,” “there are no decent partners,” and so on. These beliefs protect you from risk but also keep you from connection and growth. Healing begins when you decide to question those trauma-fueled narratives and experiment with new, healthier rules for relating. When I stopped living by the old, failing scripts and started using practical guardrails — structured dating, saying no to unavailable people, prioritizing regulation — my relational life changed. Friends began asking how I did it, and I started teaching these methods to others. Over time a community grew around these practices: a blog, a YouTube channel, courses, coaching, and an online membership where people learn to shed trauma-driven beliefs, reregulate their nervous systems, and reprogram destructive habits. Recovery is about deprogramming and reprogramming: you identify the beliefs that came from your past, test them, and replace them with new, life-enhancing habits. That deprogramming often feels countercultural and even radical at first, but it works. If you want to begin, the daily practice course is a practical place to start; it teaches two specific techniques that calm emotions and clear fearful and resentful thinking so you can take sensible, self-supporting actions. As you begin to quiet your symptoms and re-learn how to connect, your relationships will become healthier and more sustaining. Recovery is not a promise of a perfect life, but it is an invitation to become the person you were meant to be: someone who can accept the past, use the lessons it taught, and still bring your gifts — kindness, creativity, competence — into the world. That’s a life worth having, and it’s within reach if you’re willing to do the work a little at a time.