How To Find Love as a Trauma Survivor

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[SPEAKER_00]: You're listening to the Think Unbroken Podcast, and I'm your host, Michael and Broken.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm an author, speaker, coach, and advocate for adult survivors of childhood trauma and abuse.

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[SPEAKER_00]: In this podcast, you will learn how to transform your trauma, in the triumph, turn breakdowns into breakthroughs, and go from victim to being the hero of your own story.

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[SPEAKER_00]: You can learn more at Think UnbrokenPonCast.com, and of course, check us out on Apple Podcasts and Spotify at Think Unbroken Podcast.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I have made every mistake that a man can make in a relationship.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Over the course of my life, before I started this journey of choosing myself and walking down the path of discovering what it means to be a healed man, I did every despicable thing that a man could possibly do.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I cheated on women who loved me,

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[SPEAKER_00]: I hooked up with strangers thinking that their physical touch and companionship, whether it be for ten minutes or two hours or two days, would somehow fulfill me.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I had relationships inside of relationships, inside of relationships.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I learned how to navigate people's emotions to get what I wanted and probably the worst part of all of it is I used to tell myself that it's okay, no one loves me, so why does it matter?

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[SPEAKER_00]: And then I walked the path of choosing to become a healed man.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I did not anticipate this path.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I certainly did not ever expect that one day I would wake up and recognize many of the truths that I've shared here to be truths that are not only embarrassing, but earth shattering in a lot of ways, because they all lead down one path.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And that path is prior to becoming a man who is healed, or a person, woman, whomever it is that you are,

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[SPEAKER_00]: Prior to becoming that healed person, I contend that you cannot fully know of.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So where does love start?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, for many of us, love started with parents who were absent, who were neglectful, who were abusive, who were mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, financially and perhaps sexually abusive, were neglectful, or true it, or many of the other things that these parents could be.

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[SPEAKER_00]: For many of us love started the baseline and the foundation of believing that we didn't matter and we're not important.

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[SPEAKER_00]: That no matter how we exist, no matter how much we show up or show out or pretend or capitulate, it does not matter, no matter what it is that we do, we will not be loved.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a sad and fortunate real truth for many, many, many people in the world, myself included.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Growing up with drug addict alcoholic parents, a mother who cut my finger off when I was four years old, a grandmother who was viciously abusive and racist, a stepfather who was unbelievably abusive, physically, mentally and emotionally, and a system and school of peers and copetrients who could probably care less if I killed myself.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I learned at a very young age that I did not matter.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's just a hard sobering truth.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And so if you grow up and you come from a space and time and an experience of feeling like you don't matter, then guess what?

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[SPEAKER_00]: You will live life as a person who believes that they don't matter.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And if you are living life as a person who believes that they don't matter, you will in turn do things that carry no weight.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So what happens when you do the things that carry no weight that integrate into a society that's built around for the most part, people who are taught to care about each other?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, if you're like me, you lie, you cheat, you still, you break hearts, you break up, you find past, you manipulate, you do anything in your power to get what you want except the one thing that arguably you desire more than anything else.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Love.

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[SPEAKER_00]: To be accepted,

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[SPEAKER_00]: to be appreciated, to be acknowledged, to be cared for, and most of all, we reject love.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The very thing that's arguably the most important thing that any human could ever want in the world, because it was stripped from us before we ever understood it's true meaning.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And so, we fight.

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[SPEAKER_00]: against our own intuition, against our own self-narrative, and against our own understanding of the world in pursuit of this idea that we are capable of being loved only to constantly and consistently continually be rejected.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And so what do we do?

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[SPEAKER_00]: We find love in the ways that we believe that we can accommodate our own self narrative.

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[SPEAKER_00]: That love could be drugs, could be alcohol, could be sex, could be many different things.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But mainly, it's about hurting ourselves.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Giving ourselves the very thing that we are taught is acceptable in the way that we look at love.

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[SPEAKER_00]: We equate and associate pain with love.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And so if you tie these two concepts together pain and love, you will do anything within your power to seek both pain and love, not recognizing you are causing your own suffering.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It is a moral dilemma and a moral quandary that has plagued trauma survivors for their entire lives.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And again, how do I know?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Because I was one of them.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The key word here being was,

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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, people say that once a cheater always a cheater.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm not dead yet, so I can't prove them entirely wrong.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But to this point, once I started the path of becoming a man who was healed and having a few missteps along the line, I can sit here and say in my last couple of relationships, I have exited gracefully with kindness and love, not with painful arguments, breakup, screaming, fighting, cheating lies, and the worst parts of me.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But that didn't come without a tremendous amount of work of willing to sit in the depths of the darkness of the pain of what it feels like to stare yourself in the mirror and recognize that you do not love yourself.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And so as I did that and I realized I don't love myself.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The question then became, well, what does one do to love themselves?

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[SPEAKER_00]: To love themselves enough to build the capacity to be able to shelter the love of another human being.

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[SPEAKER_00]: How do you get to that place?

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[SPEAKER_00]: That's a million dollar question.

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[SPEAKER_00]: How do you get to the place that you can both feel love for who you are because you are simply you and then in turn allow love to coexist with the you that is currently loving themselves?

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a hard question to answer.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's one that I have spent years of my life dedicated to finding the answer to.

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[SPEAKER_00]: See, at the core and the crux to think and broken this thing that I've spent the last ten years working on building, creating, loving,

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[SPEAKER_00]: I've realized that it wasn't just about helping people who had severe trauma overcome it to be able to go and be the hero of their own story.

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[SPEAKER_00]: No, that's simple.

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[SPEAKER_00]: You want to change your life, change your habits, change your life.

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[SPEAKER_00]: That's simple.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But how do you change a habit around love and accepting not only the love for yourself but the other people in the world?

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[SPEAKER_00]: And I've come to discover it's not built around habits.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's instead built around allowance.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So think about allowance, think about the reality of the concept that you would allow someone to love you in return.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Because many of us were really good at giving love.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Many of us are codependent.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Many of us are amazing at giving every ounce of energy to everyone else and putting ourselves last.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I know that I was.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But what if loving yourself and creating a container for others to love you and return started with you doing the things that you knew were necessary to create a self love?

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[SPEAKER_00]: What would that look like?

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[SPEAKER_00]: How would you show up?

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[SPEAKER_00]: How would you talk to yourself?

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[SPEAKER_00]: How would you treat yourself?

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[SPEAKER_00]: I asked myself this question a lot.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Like how would a person who cared about themselves actually at?

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[SPEAKER_00]: How are the person who cared about themselves actually treat themselves?

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[SPEAKER_00]: How would they show up in the world?

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[SPEAKER_00]: How would they commit to their goals on their ambitions?

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[SPEAKER_00]: How would they treat their body?

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[SPEAKER_00]: How would they allow other people to treat them?

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[SPEAKER_00]: What would it look like to love yourself in a way that people should love themselves?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, of course, can text you.

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[SPEAKER_00]: This is at an individual basis and level in which everyone has to do their due diligence to decide what it means to love themselves and it's going to look different.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But ultimately,

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[SPEAKER_00]: It still starts to look the same from far enough away.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And once you establish and you built the internal self-love, how do you also allow other people to love you in return?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, here is one of the things that I will say.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I do not believe that you should be on the journey to self-love and keep that separate than the journey of allowing others to love you in return.

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[SPEAKER_00]: This idea of work on you and tell your whole before you date and fall in love, I do not agree with that.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I think that the thing that you have to do.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, of course, you parse this out.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They're very likely as a period of time you need to be alone.

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[SPEAKER_00]: That is something that is an necessity.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But within that, not confining yourself away from the world and obscuring the opportunity to actually be connected to another human being.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Because I have come to discover

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[SPEAKER_00]: The greatest healing of my journey of love with other humans actually involved other humans.

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[SPEAKER_00]: That's the part people want to skip and leave out of this conversation a lot.

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[SPEAKER_00]: They fail to realize that it does actually require another human being to fill and receive love from them.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And so, we walk this journey, we walk this path, we try to co-create and yet we keep running into the same thing over and over and over again.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Intellideclaration has to be made.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And that declaration is very simple.

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually a declaration that I think will change a lot of people's lives if they would just sit in it for a moment and understand the discomfort of the moment is the very thing that will create change in that life forever.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And that declaration is I am allowed to love and be loved because this all comes to a lot.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Not to fight it, not to push it back, not to sabotage it, not to run from it, not to cower in its presence, but instead to embrace it.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And it is in this deepest sense of embracing and allowing that love can find its way into who you are.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And when you do that, you might find the little piece.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I wish there was a easy solution that I could offer you that would just simply say, allow.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But I know that even hearing that many of you will reject it.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I rejected it for a long time.

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[SPEAKER_00]: recently because this is the nature of who I am.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I was on Facebook and I looked up my ex something I have not done in a very very long time.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Part of it was because I hadn't talked to her and so long and part of it was because to tell you the truth I was just curious if she was alive.

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[SPEAKER_00]: which is like a weird thought that I had, but it's just the truth.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I looked her up.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And the universe is such a funny friend.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Because as I looked her up, and there she was on her Facebook, a live and well mind you, which was nice.

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[SPEAKER_00]: That very day, her boyfriend just proposed to her.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And my very first thought was the reason that's happening is because of my decisions.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Because you see, that's the woman likely.

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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, contextually, as I look back in reverse, of course, because hindsight is everything.

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[SPEAKER_00]: As I look back, I just think to myself, oh, that should have been me.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But because I was still a very unhealed man, living deep in trauma, living deep in the lack of the acceptance of love, the thing that happened is someone else took my spot.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And instead of being riving with anger, which I think for many can be a reasonable response, my first thought was simply, I hope he takes better care of her than I did.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So long time ago that that journey happened at the end of that relationship.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of it's changed in my personal life and my emotional life and my spiritual life since that experience.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And all of that has led to this place where I had to realize that the love that we so desperately seek, we often will push away just so we can go back and live in our emotional home.

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[SPEAKER_00]: The emotional home that place where we exist of deep sense of comfort around the idea of who it is that we're supposed to be and what we are supposed to expect feels comfortable.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And it is not until we leave that comfort that we can slowly understand what it means to have someone else love us and to fill it and accept that love to be true.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So I look at this photo, I look at this moment, myself on the internet, on Facebook, doing something I haven't done in a very long time and coming down to one simple conclusion.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Damn, I'm so happy I've been doing this work.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And I know that my future and my love and whatever is meant to be will come to me because I believe that and tell you the truth, I feel pretty lucky.

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[SPEAKER_00]: feel pretty like I know my person is out here.

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[SPEAKER_00]: That I do truly believe.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And what I will tell you in regard to all of the experiences of all the times that we push people away, all the times that we sabotage, all the times that we take for granted, all the times that we give too much of ourselves, the journey only changes when we allow ourselves to be loved by ourselves.

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[SPEAKER_00]: and by others.

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[SPEAKER_00]: We all have these moments in these experiences where we recognize that there's a situation, a relationship, a friendship, something that should have been that is not because of our decisions.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And if you take those moments in those decisions and you learn from them, as opposed to continually do the same thing over and over and over again, your life will change.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So people often ask me, well, how do you love yourself?

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[SPEAKER_00]: It's very simple.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Do the thing that you know that you're supposed to do.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And everything will be different.

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[SPEAKER_00]: How do I know?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Because here I am.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Life is very different than life was before.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Because of the allowance, because of the acceptance.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And most importantly, because of the alignment of myself with the vision of who it is that I am today with who it is that I want to be tomorrow.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not always easy and I'm certainly not perfect.

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[SPEAKER_00]: But I can tell you this dating today as a almost forty-year-old man isn't highly different than when I was thirty or twenty.

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[SPEAKER_00]: For one unequivocal reason.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing else compares.

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[SPEAKER_00]: There's no comparison to this one reason.

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[SPEAKER_00]: For one reason is it different because I made a decision to allow people to love me.

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[SPEAKER_00]: when it hurts, when it's ugly, when it's gross, when it's unsatisfying, when it's fulfilling and happy and joyful and full of experience.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And all of the great things that love has to offer, a made a decision to let it exist.

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[SPEAKER_00]: So my friend, very simply, I will ask you this question.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Can you just allow yourself to be loved?

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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for listening to Think Unbroken.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Please share this episode with someone who could use it and help us move forward in our mission of ending generational trauma in our lifetime.

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[SPEAKER_00]: If you would please take five seconds to pop on iTunes or Spotify, hit that five star, leave a review, and you can also reach out to us on social, at Michael Unbroken, or at Think Unbroken.

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[SPEAKER_00]: And of course you can check out our YouTube channel at Think Unbroken.

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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for being a part of Unbroken Nation, my friends, and until next time, be Unbroken.