How to Overcome Past Trauma to Perform at Your Best
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“There’s nothing wrong with you, and there’s nothing wrong with your mind.”
This is the first thing Dr. Don Wood says to his clients, people who come to him looking to overcome their trauma. Don is a PhD, author and speaker, as well as the Founder & CEO of the Inspired Performance Institute, where he is the creator of the patented TIPP method, and he recently joined me on the LIFT podcast episode: Overcoming Past Trauma to Perform at Your Best.
After experiencing trauma at an early age, both Don’s wife and daughter were later diagnosed with autoimmune diseases. When he began looking for answers, he learned that there seemed to be some kind of correlation between people who have experienced trauma and people who were prone to autoimmune diseases.?
This inspired Don to research: Why does the body respond this way to trauma? He learned that there is a loop being activated between experiencing trauma and activating the nervous system.?
“If the system gets stressed, it doesn’t do its maintenance.”
When we experience trauma, our brains believe that we are still in danger. We get trapped in a loop, and our bodies are not meant to experience high levels of stress for extended periods of time. He’s even seen that in the wake of Covid, autoimmune diseases are becoming more common.?
If you have experienced trauma and your body thinks you’re still in danger, it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do by attempting to protect you. You have to reset your mind to understand that you are not still in such a high level of danger.?
Don works with many people who have been through what he calls “big T Trauma,” those who have experienced high profile shootings, bombings, combat, or other terrible events. However, many of us have experienced plenty of “small t traumas” or “emotional concussions.” This could be the parent who was overly critical when you were growing up or the teacher who told you that you weren’t very smart. These kinds of concussions can build up and have long term effects like procrastination, a tendency to blame others for your problems, and more.
One of Don’s specialties is helping people who experience panic attacks. He says, “A panic attack is an error message.” Your subconscious mind is signalling danger, but your conscious awareness can’t find it. When your mind is looking for that danger, it starts to prepare for a fight or flight response.?
Don breaks down what happens to our bodies during a panic attack:
Each step of the way, your brain is receiving messages from your body that something is wrong, but you don’t know where the danger is. This causes panic. You feel like it’s coming out of nowhere, but it has actually been building up in your body.?
Don found a study on panic attacks out of Southern Methodist University that had 2000 hours of data on panic attacks. Thirteen people experienced a panic attack during the study. All 13 said that the panic attack came on instantly, but the study showed that signs of the panic attack began in their bodies up to an hour before.
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Don has developed a method that helps people shut down panic attacks before they occur, when those signs are just starting to become evident in the body. He’s working on collaborating with companies like Apple watch to monitor your physical responses, but you don’t need technology to shut a panic attack down.?
Don returns to his reference of the loop. When we experience trauma, our brain records that memory at a high intensity. This is a normal response. Our brains are there to protect us. They’re wired for survival. But when we get stuck in this loop of preparing our bodies for fight or flight based on perceived danger, our bodies are unable to do the regular maintenance of taking care of themselves.
How do you stop that loop?
Don says, if I ask you what you ate for dinner last night, can you tell me what it was? When your brain records mundane events like last night’s dinner, you might look up and picture a tofu scramble like I did. When your brain records high intensity events, it records them at that same high intensity. Don mentions that Hollywood has highly profited off of this knowledge. Think of the latest action movie you watched and how intense it was. It looks real! So if your mind thinks that someone is hurting you, your body will activate itself to either fight or flight. It confuses your memory with the event.?
And because your mind is experiencing pain, it wants to stop it now. “Your subconscious mind has no concept of time. Everything is now.”
This urgency can cause panic, even when there is no immediate threat to your wellbeing. Don works with people to remove the intensity from traumatic memories so that they appear just as mundane as your memory of last night’s dinner.?
What if people believe this isn’t going to work?
I asked Don if, like some of my clients, he ever encounters people who say, “I’m a special case. This isn't going to work for me.”?
He says, “Our minds and bodies are designed to heal.”?
It’s backed up by science. When we address the constant state of stress that trauma puts us under, we will have more energy to lift ourselves and others.
You can learn more about Don and his work at www.inspiredperformanceinstitute.com.
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