When Life Is Overwhelming...Do This

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. How do you move past trauma and get it in your rearview mirror as fast as is healthy? I like to think of it not in terms of getting past it as much as I'm just going to start taking action. If you lose a child, that will be with you forever. If your spouse walks in after 25 years and says, I got a girlfriend, that will embed itself in your nervous system. You'll be on guard for that for the rest of your life. My goal in that moment is I don't want to pass that on to my kids. I get to decide, and this is honestly where a group of people, this is where a community, this is where a good group of friends, a good group of family members, even a therapist, if you have to call somebody, or a minister, this is where when you can't carry it on your own, people will walk alongside you and help carry the load. But I have to start taking the next right action. What I'll find is after two months, after four months, after six months, this thing may still be on me, but I'm going to be stronger and I'm going to have moved down the road a little bit. It's when you just stop and it surrounds you like a fog and there's no one to help lift that fog, there's no one to shine a light in there, and there's no action taken moving forward that you wake up two years, three years, seven years, 20 years, and it's as though it just happened to you because you haven't taken that step to start moving towards a new thing. And I don't know where this process happens in the brain, and I'd be interested to your take on this, but the Bible says, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. And so what I have noticed is, is the language that we use is an indicator as to whether we're taking action and moving forward or whether we're sitting in the acid. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Because the language acts like I'm still there and it was six years ago, right? The language sounds fresh and the words you use. So do you consciously say, I'm going to choose different words or do you just choose a different stance, a different posture and the words then change? Probably a little bit of both. I mean, it's a cocktail of genetics and life experience, et cetera. I think that's the beauty of a show like this is what you've been doing for so long is some people don't have people in their life to speak those words. Some people don't have wise counsel. Some people don't have a hand that can reach out and pick them up. And some people don't. I have a close friend of mine, when she was pregnant with her third kid, her husband just up and said, I'm out, left. And I remember saying a few years later, I don't know how you did that, how she had to get on. She was on welfare for a while. Now she's this many years later, she's got a great career. She's crushing it. She's remarried. Her new husband's awesome. But I said, I don't know how you did that. And she said something that stuck with me. She said, I had to. And I think there is a gap between, I have to, I got three mouths to feed. I've got to do something. And there's this gap and culturally that gap has gotten wider and wider. I don't have to have to have to, right? I can continue to stay complacent. I'm just not going to pay. I'm just not going to do this. I'm going to let these things go to collections and I'll get this judgment against me. You'll pay the piper at some point. Someday you're going to have to, but our cultures allowed that there to be a bigger and bigger space. And it, what happens is used in a basting, a literal survival. I have to, we don't have literal survival anymore. Yeah. The way that we're struggling with. I mean, that's how I felt when we went bankrupt. That was a life-changing tragedy experience. I lost everything. I've got a brand new baby, Rachel, a toddler, Denise, a marriage hanging on by a thread. And people were like, so how did you get up and go to work? I had to, I have to, there's no, especially back at 30 years, 40 years ago, there wasn't a programs or wasn't like, I have to write this second. There had to be money. There was a baby that wanted milk, right? You know, there was a, I'm wanting formula. There was diapers. There was an electricity that had been cut off and didn't need to be cut off again. I had to go to work that day. Yeah. I didn't file bankruptcy and then take a week off and mourn the tragedy that I'd been through for the last two and a half years prior to that. I didn't PTSD. I didn't have time for it. Couldn't spell. Well, and I think that the bigger thing is wherever you find yourself, most of us believe in, and again, it's another cultural lives, the air we breathe that in the right time or when things feel right, then I'm going to go, I need to get my confidence back and then I'll go do X, Y, or Z. And the fallacy there is your body gains confidence through action. You begin to go look for... You don't think your way into confidence. You can't. You don't think your way into being well. Confidence comes from competence. From doing. You begin acting well and your body starts to stand up taller and you start to be able to breathe a little deeper. You don't sit in your house and say, I just want to, when I can breathe better, then I'll go. I'm going to start, I'm going to download an app and start doing breathing exercises in my living room because that's what I got to do right now. Right. And you begin taking tiny, tiny, tiny actions. And, um, man, you look up six months, seven months later. Some of those things will never be in your rear view mirror, but they're not going to be so suffocating. They'll be with you. Uh, but you'll be taking action, moving through it. Now there's always going to be a tender spot where that scar is. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, I was 28 years old, so that's almost 40 years ago and I can hear someone's voice here on the air and it takes me, my body back to there. I can feel it. My throat starts tightening. Oh yeah. I mean, I remember that. I talked to any number of parents who lost a child 10 years ago, 20 years ago, within 30 seconds, they'll be in tears again. That will be with you, but I'm gonna take the next right action. I actually like what our buddy Jaco says. We're talking about, um, service members that were under his care that he lost. I got two, I got two lives to live now. I got three lives worth of laughter, three lives worth of adventure, three lives worth of giving and generosity to live now. But it's taking that responsibility and saying, I'm going to, I'm going to hit the answer to the overall thing is action is action instead of paralysis, take action. And if you can't take action, get someone to reach out and pull your, like take somebody's hand and let them pull you into action. 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