S2 E1: How trauma impacts relationships - a chat with Adam Mussa

I mean, the fear of seeing a therapist is real. You know, one of the things I am completely against is this idea of reliving trauma. So, what I began to notice is that people who are traumatized, okay, not just that they've gone through trauma, but they still have traumas within them and the effect of it is still there. So, they're traumatized, just to be a little bit more specific. What I noticed is that they would experience opposites, opposites that should be mutually exclusive. I would deal with that by getting rid of this polarity, whereas therapy would deal with that by looking into the problem. And that was Adam Moussa, trauma therapist, New Linguist Programmer, Islamic scholar and my next guest. Welcome to Season 2 of the Healthy Mind Chat, where health, healthcare and health communication intersect. With me, your host, Hasan Ali Khan. And in this episode, we will be discussing how trauma impacts relationships and how my guest helps people towards intimacy. We will be discussing sensitive topics, so listen to discretion is advised. Hello and welcome to a new season, a new episode of the Healthy Mind Chat. With me, Hasan Ali Khan. I am so, so happy to be back recording after a while and interviewing guests, expert guests on topics which are close to my heart and related to health, healthcare and health communication. And without further ado, I really want to go into our topic for today, which is going to be rather, it's the question that I want to get an answer to hopefully, which is how does trauma and things that, events that happened in our past impact how we form relationships, do relating and be intimate with someone. And let me actually kind of share why this question came about in my life at a personal level. A few years ago, I was engaged to get married. Sadly, it didn't work out. And I was emotional, grief stricken. And in order to really understand why I was doing the things I was doing, feeling the things I was feeling, I tried to intellectualize my grief. I went to a local bookshop, found a book and the book was called Loving Bravely by Alexandra Solomon. She happens to be a family therapist who works out of Chicago. And in it, I found amongst many wonderful and great things that I learned from the book, I found this piece of information, which is very, very interesting. And that was that how we love, how we hate, how we form relationships, how we relate to one another and more related to what we're speaking about today, how do we form romantic relationships and become intimate with someone. All of that is based on our experiences as a child and the environment that we grew up in and who we saw, mainly our parents or our guardians, how they related to one another and those around them. Later on, now that I'm studying substance use counseling and I got introduced to the basics of psychology formally and also human development. And then I got introduced to Piaget, Erickson, as well as I think it's Vykotsky. All of them from their work, I think modern ideas of human development is kind of formed from their ideas that the environment and the experiences as children really shape how we then form relationships. And I think, which is very intriguing, very interesting because now that I'm on this journey and trying to find a life partner, I've come across many individuals and many, many different stories. And sadly, some of the realities of the stories are that, yes, there's something that you can identify almost, something that happened in their past that is now starting to manifest as they're trying to form their relationship or they're trying to relate. And I think some of the issues that I've come across is individuals having problems with commitment, individuals being extremely insecure, being afraid about getting into a relationship and this idea of self-defeat. Although I've also come across some very wonderful experiences with those who had wonderful childhood experience that the way they looked at relationships and how they formed relationships was totally different. So that just got me thinking, it got me really intrigued, but more as maybe from also from a clinical side, I was more drawn towards and trying to understand the idea of trauma. And I really want to use the word trauma very carefully because in the clinical world, there may be a slightly more technical definition versus how we may use it in our everyday setting, as often happens when technical language comes into everyday use. So as far as I understand, what I learned is that trauma has a relationship with this idea that one's life or physical health is being impacted by whatever event. And that element of one's life or losing one's life is a key component to that. But I think in everyday language, that may not necessarily be the case. And we may use the word trauma in much more loosely. But that said, I am really, really excited to bring on my guest today who would unpack all of this for us and more, hopefully. One reason I'm also excited is because he happens to be my mentor. I've known him for a while. His name is Adam Moussa. He will correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think he was born in the Middle East. He's Egyptian by background, but he grew up in Scotland. So you will hear that Scottish accent. But now he lives in Birmingham, UK. He started off at university as an engineering student, but life and path took him elsewhere where he was intrigued by the human mind and I guess why people do the things that they do. And it took him to a very interesting track. And I actually want him to explain what that pathway is, which now eventually has led him towards working with individuals who had traumatic experiences in the past and are now finding trouble or issues with forming intimate relationships today. And he has a service which he will then talk about. I think it's called Tranquility. Tranquil.trash.com. That's the one. From the little that I've seen of it and experience of it, it's absolutely amazing. And I really want him to share how he deals with people with trauma, the therapeutic tools that he uses in helping individuals. So I'm really excited for you to listen to this interview and hopefully after that we'll have a quick reflection on what was said. Welcome, Adam. How are you? I'm well, thank you. I'm well. Excited to be here. And it's something that I've been looking forward to ever since you extended the invitation. Brilliant. Glad to hear. It's been a while since we've met or seen each other and hopefully we'll be in each other's presence soon. I know you're a very, very busy person. I don't want to take a lot of your time here and I want to straight get into the topic. So Adam, can you explain to us how is it that an engineering student found himself studying the human mind and got himself into the therapy world? Okay. Okay. So it's quite a small-faceted answer. Lots of factors and variables come into it. But in essence, ever since I was maybe eight or nine, I would always wonder why people do what they do. And I would ask my father, where can I learn about this? My father dissuaded me from learning about psychology. What he knew about psychology was Freud and other similar, in his opinion, twisted, and there is a lot of twisted elements to a lot of what Freud taught, but there's also a lot of benefit. So I did stay away, but it was definitely a question that I kept asking myself. I didn't know what to study in university, but my father was an engineer. He was doing artificial intelligence all the way back, you know, back then for the nineties. And so I decided that I would just do electronic and software engineering. I was good at math. I was good at sciences. It wasn't a passion. And then two years into that, I stumbled across accelerated learning, hypnotherapy, NLP, cognitive sciences, and I was just blown away. So I negotiated to take a year off studying. And pretty simple, it happened. Being of Egyptian descent, one must have a degree, a master's and then a PhD on top of that. So taking that year out was a big deal. And I just never went back, is the reality. It sounds like it's the opposite spectrum, but we live, and this is what I mean by multifaceted, we live in an age right now where software and engineering is used as a metaphor to describe the mind. So we say, you know, change your programming, change your, you know, rewire your brain, et cetera. Metaphors that are used. Not that I don't agree with them much anymore, but they're definitely there, they're used. And so bridging that gap between the non-conscious hardware and between the mind and that human consciousness wasn't too much of a big leap because of the metaphors that were being used and programming, you know, people's programming, et cetera. There was lots of metaphors that were being used. So it was a nice little jump. That was back in the year 2000. And since then I've studied different modalities, not just to do with cognitive psychology, not just to do with hypnotherapy or NLP, but also to do with other semantic modalities as well as somatic modalities to do with how the brain and the body interact with each other and how the brain maps onto the body and et cetera, as well as I've done, I've studied energy, the use of energy for healing, how emotions affect energy, how energy affects emotions as much as possible, wherever there's anything to do with how human beings work. I'm very interested in that, including martial arts, including any endeavor that has a bit of exoticness maybe, but also something to do with very high functioning excellence of human beings. I'm just intrigued. Well, brilliant. There's a few things that you said there and you've introduced the modalities element and different, I think, paths in how we may approach the human mind. You mentioned the therapies, somatic, semantic therapies. For the layperson, would you be able to give us a deep understanding of what those are and why you believe those modalities are effective versus, and clearly you've had a very alternative way of studying this, the traditional way is go to a bachelor's, go to university, study all the Freudian or jazz that we're studying and then only to be told that all of that is being taken away, deleted, and there's new ideas that are built on over it or not necessarily on top of it. Then there's a clinical way of doing things, which is, and the attempt is to take something which is intangible, which is the mind per se, and trying to capture it into boxes and there are ways, there are certain benefits to that, but clearly there are also disadvantages of doing that. Limitations. Limitations to it as well. So, yes, could you explain some of those modalities and why those pathways that you've taken seem slightly superior? In essence, we do not know where the mind begins and where it ends. We don't know where the body begins and where it ends. We don't know where the soul begins, or whatever you want to call it, and where it ends. And so this idea that there is a mind, this is a conceptual, like it's a metaphor that we're using. I'm saying this because it's important first of all to know, well, I've never seen, unless the person's dead, there's no line separating mind from body, right? There's no line separating emotions from thoughts. There's no line separating, you know, these things are so intertwined that for me it didn't make sense the way that they were categorized. You know, you've got medicine and it's for the body, you've got meditation or you've got these things and it's for the soul, and then you've got stuff to do with the mind, which is visualization, psychology, treatment of phobias, anxieties, etc. It just doesn't work that way. I mean, the way that you stand affects your mood, right? And you can change your mood by changing your posture. It's a quick fix. It's not a permanent fix, but it's definitely there. Music, just colors around you, you know, being in nature. So it never made sense to segment everything the way that we may do in a non-holistic, traditional Western sense. The more Eastern approach made sense to me, and so hence why I started to study energy, hence why I started to study the somatic links between mind and body, because there are actual treatments to trauma. They don't eradicate trauma as such, but they do help that are somatic, whether it's dance, whether it's movement. There are whole modalities that deal just with that, and they do release suppressed tension. You don't get rid of the trauma, because I define trauma very differently than other people do, and you have to keep doing them in order to keep seeing results. So it's more of a coping and managing mechanism than it is a healing or a therapeutic approach. But therapy in and of itself, I really don't believe is even geared towards working with trauma. So I was just meeting a doctor today who went through trauma, and he was talking about how he was going through therapy and it helped him. I said, what do you mean by help? He said, well, I understand what's going on, and when I'm triggered, I can either stop or after I've done it, I can look back and analyze. I said, yeah, but that's coping and managing. You shouldn't be triggered in the first place. So in my experience, and this is my experience working with thousands of survivors of trauma and abuse, whether it's physical, emotional, sexual, or combination, or all of the above, therapy is not really geared towards working with trauma. And 35% of the people I work with are therapists themselves, EMDR specialists, counselors, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, EMDR specialists, CBT specialists, the whole hypnotherapists, I can't tell you how many hypnotherapists I've worked with. So this whole idea that it's in the body, it's not true. I've worked with people that do yoga. If it was in the body, they would have stretched it all off. It's in the mind, well, I've worked with hypnotherapists. So if it's in the subconscious, they can hypnotize themselves all day every day using self-hypnosis and they should have solved the issue. But not 20 years on, it's still there. So we need to really reconfigure our understanding of trauma and hence why. And there's even, you know, trauma is used very loosely. There's a traumatic event and then there's trauma as in traumatized. Now someone might go through a traumatic event and not be traumatized. Whereas another person might be traumatized without even going through a traumatic event based upon how they perceive the event to have been. For them it may have been traumatic, but in actual fact, according to the median or the standard, it's not traumatic. So these are all things that are used very loosely. You get simple trauma, you get complex trauma. What does that actually mean? Where's the line between simple and complex? So I don't find it very useful the way the things have been set up right now. It's not very pragmatic. It's not results-oriented, it's not outcome-oriented. It is more theory-based. And, you know, we think this and so therefore if we do that we should get a result. That's the hypothesis. And the hypothesis has turned into fact, whereas it's never been proven or validated or verified as fact. So maybe I'm talking very, very out of the box right now. And you'll have to forgive me. I was going to say there'd be a lot of clinicians out there who've dedicated their lives in a certain pathway. Sure. And, and... Which I respect. And it's not, it's not to, you know, I've met many people, I've worked with many people. Many of them are clinicians. And the current understanding of therapy has stopped many people from committing suicide. You know, that ability to cope and manage and become highly functioning, even if you do keep your trauma, is not to be undermined. I'm not undermining it. What I'm saying to you is that is not the eradication of trauma. I mean, when I do outreach on Facebook, I can't tell you how many therapists and clinicians will tell me this is ridiculous. You can't get rid of trauma. I mean, the irony is that they are admitting defeat. Right. But they're projecting that on me by saying, this can't be possible. But it is possible. I mean, the results speak for themselves. So that's a very, very interesting. So firstly, you mentioned that in terms of what our understanding of trauma in terms of from the clinical side, and as well as from how we perceive it from the layperson side, they're not necessarily matching. And then what you're also saying is that both or either could also are not necessarily capturing the realities of what trauma is. There may be usefulness to it. But something what you just said right now is that there's an idea of belief, maybe in the clinical world, that trauma cannot be taken away. Whereas you are saying that no, that is possible. And that's I mean, anything, anything that I mean, by definition, if you just think about it logically, anything that can be given can be taken away. Anything that can be made worse should you know, if we're going to go forward, we should also be able to go back. The fact that we can move is what's important. Right? So if you know, if I can make, to give another analogy, if I can make someone's phobia worse, if I can actually make it worse, then that means I know the variables and the factors that if I reversed would make it better in theory, right? In theory, so you know, and the results speak for themselves as well. But this idea that it's a permanent destruction of something, or a permanent rewiring, first of all, no one's ever opened someone's brain and found wires. Right? You know, and the other thing is, there's a lot of evidence of a plasticity and just learning and recreating of cells and neurons and everything else. It's a projection of the feet, it's a denial of the feet. So, and I think you just kind of hinted on is language. Yes. And I think at the end of the day, in order to make things intangible, tangible, ultimately we have to express it and it comes in the form of, a complete form is language. You can make an art, you can make a dance, you can sing a song, but ultimately, or music rather, language is the thing that we're using in order to capture whatever internal experience, external experiences that we're having. And obviously within the therapy world, there's things called, generally called talk therapy, CBT and so on and so forth. And they have their certain ways of using language to confront or even manage their patient. Could you speak more about that and how you look at language and maybe even speak more about something you mentioned earlier as well, neuro-linguistic programming. What are those things? How do you perceive language? How do you then use the language in order to help individuals or that come to you? So I've kind of grown, the work that I do now has grown beyond that. Beyond. So language is more of a tool as opposed to the enveloping structure that I use. If you permit me, I would like to first give you my definition of trauma, because then that will allow you to see how things are different from a more, you know, the shift of part of them. So what I began to notice is that people who are traumatized, okay, not just that they've gone through trauma but they still have traumas within them and the effect of it is still there. So they're traumatized. Just to be a little bit more specific. What I noticed is that they would experience opposites. Opposites that should be mutually exclusive. So for example, I would come across people who loved their parents but hated their parents at the same time. Now love and hate are mutually exclusive, at least logically. But emotionally they were doing both of those things at the same time. They would trust and distrust the same person or themselves at the same time or in a very, very short proximity, time proximity. Or they would want to live and want to die at the same time. Or they'd want to kill someone and want to save them and nurture them at the same time. Or they'd want to be in complete control but at the same time create complete chaos at the same time. And what I began noticing is that these, and I call them polarities because you get two opposites happening at the same time. So one of those opposites is a polarity. And sometimes the polarities aren't the obvious ones like I want to live, I want to die. It could be I want to live, I want to hate. That could be a polarity. They're set up emotionally or neurologically, not logically. So that's a little beyond the scope maybe of what we're talking about. But just for anyone that might help a little bit, just throw that there. So my definition of trauma is that people who have these opposites, and the average trauma survivor who is still traumatized has between 300 and 400 of these opposites all happening at the same time. I call that the trauma matrix because they meet. So wanting to trust, wanting to distrust, that meets itself but also meets wanting control and wanting chaos. So if you want control but you also distrust someone, that's going to create symptoms. Because you're trying to control but you're also distrusting. So that's going to create symptoms such as possessiveness, jealousy. Now I call them symptoms whereas therapy calls them problems or issues. Because for me trauma is that structure that creates these symptoms. Whereas for them trauma is the collection of these symptoms and the collection of these problems. It's seen differently. So for example, if you want control and you want chaos at the same time, you will procrastinate. Because you want to control so you think about something again and again and again but you're creating chaos by not doing anything. So procrastination is the perfect solution to wanting control and wanting chaos. I would deal with that by getting rid of this polarity, whereas therapy would deal with that by looking into the problem of procrastination. I see procrastination as a symptom, they see it as the root. The problem with trauma is you can get rid, you can work on procrastination as a problem but it will come back later. So you can work on self-loathing and self, you know, I love me, I hate me, that's a polarity. If I can get rid of that polarity so that they're not doing it at the same time, they no longer have suicidal feelings. Whereas if we just work on the suicidal feelings we can get rid of them temporarily but it will come back because the structure that's creating them is still intact. So for me trauma is the existence of that trauma matrix. Whereas in therapy, loosely speaking, depending upon the modalities, trauma is, you know, this person has so many issues, they must be traumatized. Because you can't really define, I mean, when you look, what is trauma? When you look at a therapeutic approach, there's kind of two definitions. They define it by what causes it. Okay, so for example, you know, looking here, trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, crime or natural disaster. But a phobia could be the same as that, anxiety could be the same as that, depression could be, you know. So it's not inclusive of what its factors are and it's not exclusive of what it's not. It's a very, very loose thing. That's not really a definition, therefore. That's what caused the thing. But what is the thing? Then there's another definition which is, well, trauma then means that you can or can't, that this happens or that happens. Again, what is the thing? So one is talking about the cause and one is talking about the effect. But what is the actual thing itself? Like what is trauma? That hasn't been defined. Whereas I define it as that matrix of opposite polarities. Now, how is the polarity created? Because that's the next, you know, the next line or question in line. Let's take the example of sexual abuse. So with sexual abuse, there are elements of love. Okay, in this context, they're not love, they're twisted, but they are innately love. So there's, you know, compliments, the physical, the biological pleasure that comes from physical touch, the compliments, gifts, being singled out, the attention, all of these are innately loving things in this context. No, but they are innately, you know, often soft loving things. At the same time, there's the shame, there's a threat, there's being abandoned after being used. All of that is hateful. So you've got the love and the hate happening at the same time. And so it becomes one thing, these two things become one thing. And that's how the polarity is created. And so now the person has that polarity, if ever they experience love, they expect it to come with hate, because it always has. And that's why intimacy becomes a problem. Because if you show them love, they have to then expect hate. And if it doesn't come with it, they'll create it. They'll doubt you, they'll think you're trying to use them. They'll just have hateful feelings because it has to, these two things are now one, one cannot exist without the other. And if you show them hate, ironically, they will have to create love. And so you could be very, very hateful to someone who's traumatized, and they will make up excuse after excuse after excuse for you. Right? Whereas if you show them love, they will actually start doubting your love, they will create the hate. Because both have to exist at the same time. And obviously you can't give them love and hate at the same time. So you know that that is an issue. We can't deal with that by getting them to iterate, I love myself, I love myself, I love myself, that's not going to do it. Because with love comes hate, and with hate comes love. We have to first discharge these two opposites from each other, separate them from each other. And now that we've separated them, they know what love is, they know what hate is. So I can't tell you how many survivors of trauma will tell me, love and hate feel the same. If love feels the same as hate, how do you know whether you love someone or hate them? And how do you know whether they love you or hate you? And so the correlation between the attraction of narcissists with trauma survivors is through the roof. It's through the roof because they have no idea. He hates me, therefore there's love there. He loves me, therefore there's hate there. It's kind of comic, but at the same time it's tragic. Wow. Just listening to that, Adam, one thing you said earlier was that an individual can have 300 polarities within them? Three or four hundred. That's average, sometimes six, seven hundred. Just thinking about that, and how I perceived that was that they're living with these many levels or many different types of paradoxes, and going in between, just thinking about it is tiring. And many, many survivors of trauma suffer from chronic fatigue. And you can understand why any individual who has these polarities come almost not just confused and tired, it's just almost submitted and defeated to it. And so easy to, then therefore what you were saying earlier about the language of defeat and just, you can only, trauma is what it is and you just have to live with it. It's such an easy way to fall into that simply because the complexity of it all. And I remind as well, the phenomenon of the wounded healer. So lots of therapists, the reality is they study psychology and they go into the whole field in order to uncover answers for themselves. And it doesn't work, but they're already on that track and they might as well make money from it and save other people's lives. And maybe possibly if they can figure out how to help other people, then they'll figure out how to help themselves in the meanwhile. So this is, again, not to undermine or to demean anyone's journey. I'm not saying that. Again, therapy saves lives. Okay. That coping and managing saves lives. At least having, like without helping anyone, giving them any story or ideology upon which to pin their problem does create a sense of relief. It's like, okay, well, at least I understand. So when I explain this to people without working with them, without actually getting rid of any of the polarities, just explaining this to them creates a sense of relief. I can't tell you how many people just cry with relief. They still have their issue, but it's like, I'm not crazy anymore. I know what's happening. Right. There's a validation of what they're experiencing and that and of the self knowing that something is within me and it's not. And it's this differentiation between the thing and me and there's not one. It's very important. Welcome to the halfway point of the podcast. Thank you for listening so far. And I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank those who have supported the recording of this episode. The Oakton Education Foundation, through its innovation and excellence grant, has very generously donated money and has bought all the equipment that was used today for recording the episode. The Oakton Community College Education Foundation proudly supports the mission and vision of the college by raising funds for student scholarships, academic programs, teaching excellence and capital improvements that enhance the quality of education at Oakton. To make your own donation to the educational foundation, please visit oakton.edu forward slash giving. That's oakton.edu forward slash giving. Now back to the episode on how trauma impacts relationships, our conversation with Adam Musa. The box ticking. But as you were saying, I think many more therapists and counselors are now using this idea that knowing that individuals live with these paradoxes as they've created. And it's not just about dealing with what they're saying, what's the story behind the story? Moreover, is the story, can it be rewritten, changed, deleted? So here's the thing. It's not so much a story, but it's a structure. So once we eradicate the structure, all of the symptoms and all of the boxes that housed the symptoms are no longer there. And so the symptoms go, but also the mechanism that was creating the symptoms is gone. So it's not a case of affirmations or belief change work or anything like that. They don't even need to know how this works. They don't know how trauma works. I mean, no one's explained beforehand. No one gives you a textbook saying, I'm going to do this, this, this, this, that to you. And it's going to result in you living in this way for the rest of your life. No one does that. So this idea that you need to explain to people and have them consciously aware in order for them to change is a fallacy because they wouldn't otherwise lay people couldn't traumatize. I mean, it's such a huge result. Traumatizing someone is an achievement, really, if you think about it. It's a negative achievement. I know that comes with positive connotations usually when we say achievement, but it is a result that there's a huge change that happens in someone's life when once they're traumatized and a lay person can do that. And the lay person themselves doesn't even know how the brain works. They might not even know the result and the ramification and the consequences and the torture, the hell that they're about to put someone through for the next 50, 60, 70 years. They have no idea. To them, they're just touching or pushing or shaming or whatever it is that they're doing. So the practitioner of trauma doesn't even need to know what they're doing in order for it to be an effective trauma. And a person being traumatized definitely doesn't know what's going on at age of 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7, or 12. So this whole idea that somehow conscious understanding needs to be brought into change is just a fallacy. It's just a fallacy. It's happened. The fact that they're traumatized means that they have changed because they weren't traumatized before that, were they? Then the thing happened and now they're traumatized. So that happened without any conscious understanding. That change happened without any conscious understanding. To then stipulate that to step backwards, you have to have conscious understanding. It doesn't make sense. Maybe use a working example. So if there's, say, a case study, someone wants to walk into your office or cleaning room, what would they typically come with? And then how would you then step by step take them through that journey of where they started and then ending with no trauma? Okay, so they come into the virtual metaphoric office and they will have post-COVID. So they will have trauma effects. So there are five milestones of liberation. Five milestones that I've coined to allow people to know that they're going in the right direction. How do you know you're moving in the right direction? Just like when you're on the highway or the motorway, you're seeing the signs, you know that you're going south, you're going north, you're going east, west, you're going towards where it is that you're hoping to attend. So those five milestones are as follows. The expansion of the comfort zone. Are they feeling more and more comfortable in more and more scenarios? Because you asked me how, first of all, before we get to how, where is it that we're going, right? Where is it that we're going? So number one, they're more and more comfortable, that expansion of the comfort zone. Number two, there's a unified feeling. They feel integrated, they feel whole, as opposed to separated and that partially they're fighting each other. So that internal war ends. Number three, their ability to separate the past from the present. Okay, you mentioned about how people run their relationships based upon their parents, modeling their parents, or trying to actually resist their parents as well, which kind of leads to the same thing. That means that they are, the past is sabotaging the present and the future. So we need to separate the past from the present so that they can deal with the past as it presents itself. Sorry, the present as it presents itself. The past is outside the window. They can learn from it, but they're not superimposing it on everything as they proceed. Number four is then their ability to be sure of themselves. Because you can imagine if you're having three or 400 opposite feelings at the same time, that's going to create a lot of stuff that way. Well, what do I feel? Do I feel this way or do I feel that way? And then number five is their ability for them then to flourish, to ascend in life. So that's where we're going. So what's the opposite of that? Well, the opposite of that is that people are uncomfortable, they're anxious, right? They're hypervigilant. The opposite of being unified and integrated is that there's this internal war and there's lots of pieces and they don't know which one to listen to. The opposite of separating the past from the present is having the past hounding you and being triggered with flashbacks and emotional triggers. The opposite of that self-trust and that sureness is self-doubt, second-guessing yourself, which is, and, you know, tangent to that, something like CBT, where you're asking someone to analyze their own thoughts, that's just more self-doubt. That's more second-guessing. And sometimes, I can't tell you how many times people come to me and say, I feel like I'm falling apart and I feel so much more confused and CBT has made me more anxious. It's because they're already second-guessing themselves and CBT is the process of really doing more of that. You know, you're analyzing your own thoughts. And what's opposite of ascending and flourishing is surviving. So that then affects elements of your life. It affects your relationships, it affects your health, it affects how you perceive time, and it affects your ability to earn wealth and to keep those four quadrants, right? Which is something I took from coaching, just as a way to categorize elements of your life. You know, there's nothing special about it, it's just a way to categorize. So if you are constantly hypervigilant and scared and uncomfortable, how is that going to affect your relationships? How is that going to affect your health? How is that going to affect your perception of time? People wake up in the morning wishing they hadn't. Okay, how is that going to affect your wealth? Shopping therapy, self-medication, you know, not being able to stay in a job because they get overwhelmed too easily. All of this just comes from that first milestone, okay, of being uncomfortable. Now popular psychology will tell you you need to step outside of your comfort zone in order to grow. But traumatized people are by definition uncomfortable. So if we're going to get them to step even further outside of their comfort zone, that's not the right direction. Which is why I created these milestones. The milestone is expand, expand your comfort zone. That's the right direction. Just something to relate to, that people may be familiar with. Is there something close to motivational interviewing where they say, roll with the resistance? That's a way of dealing with it. That's a way of dealing with it. But when you have three or four hundred things that you're rolling with, you're literally, you know, remember those cartoons where you're like, you know, you've got five hundred people punching you and all you see is like a cloud of fists. That's what it feels like. That mindfulness approach when you have polarities, it feels like you're just condoning being abused by three or four hundred different emotions and thoughts and self-doubt and whatnot. And if you take the second milestone, you know, that inner war again, how's that going to affect your relationships? Who wants to be with someone who's literally internally warring with themselves? How can you show love when you on the inside feel like you're falling apart? So these five milestones affect these four quadrants of your life. And when someone comes to me, I'm listening. Through language, I can hear what their polarities are. Through what they're saying, I know what must be there in terms of polarities. I do this very intuitively. I haven't figured out how to teach this yet. But it's something where I can hear what they're saying and then I know, okay, this person wants control and hate or control and love at the same time. Can you give us an example of that? Yeah. So I was speaking to a lady two days ago. I spoke to thousands, I mean, I've worked with thousands of people and this lady was one of the most overbearing in terms of her questions and her emails and her expectation that I respond within like an hour. I never set those expectations. I don't know where they came from. I never had someone like this from thousands of people that I've worked with. So what she's doing is that there's a combination of polarities. One of them is I want to succeed. I want to fail. She wants everything to be perfect. So I've had six calls with her and she's still asking me, are you going to send me the Zoom link or are we going to have a call? And it's like six times in a row now we've had the Zoom link. So, but there's this, I want success and I want failure. She's so afraid of being wrong and she's so demanding of success that it's just overbearing. It's like over the top. That's one polarity that comes with that. Another polarity is that she will expect very high standards of herself and from others, but at the same time she expects very low standards because if she didn't expect low standards from me, she wouldn't be asking me. I mean, it's such a simple thing. I'm going to send you a link as I have all the last six weeks. Such a simple thing. But because she expects in her mind for it to go wrong, she then tries to balance that off by wanting it to go a hundred percent right, a thousand percent right. So there's, you know, things are going to go wrong, things are going to go good. I expect failure, I expect success. So just from what she was, and then there was success and being a good person. Success, I love me. Right? If I'm successful, I love me. If I'm a failure, I hate me. Again, another polarity. And that's one a lot of people have, but I define trauma as when you have many of these polarities. So yeah, people might notice one or two parties in themselves, seven, eight, nine, that's fine. But that's a big, big polarity where literally if I didn't get back to her within three hours, she was having a hissy fit. She was melting down. It was like an existential problem. Do you understand? It was an existential problem. So that's an example of two or three polarities that are there based upon the presenting symptoms and what she's saying to me. That's kind of how I figure out. I don't know if that makes sense or not. I think that makes sense. And as you were mentioning and talking us through the example, thought that came to my mind was if this is not addressed and an individual then does go into relationship, whatever that relationship is, the one that now is receiving that, could you speak on that element, on what happens, the experience of the one receiving all of that? Yeah. So I have created this term called Narcissist Creation Protocol, okay, NCP. So imagine another scenario where I'm trying to train a horse to jump. Okay. So I go on the horse and he's already been trained a little bit. So the horse runs and then we get to the jump and he does a perfect jump and we land. And the horse looks at me and says, right, what do you think? That was a good jump, right? So the horse is showing me love and he's expecting me to give him love back. But because I have this love-hate thing going on, because he's showing me love, I have to show him hate. So I slap the horse because I feel like he comes with hate and so I have to create it. So the horse is thinking, I thought that was a good jump. I mean, based upon all my previous trainers, that was a good jump. Maybe I didn't try hard enough. So the horse goes around again and we're running, running, running, we get there and we jump. And it's even better than the last time. The horse lands and he looks at me and says, come on, that was amazing, right? And I hit him just as hard or harder. The horse is really confused. This happens three or four times. Now guess what's going to happen? The horse doesn't want to run anymore. It doesn't want to run towards the jump. So I hit him to get him to run. Okay. So now the horse is escaping by running. But he knows that the second he gets to the jump and he makes it, he's going to experience even more pain. So the horse is like, if I show you love, you punish me. And if I show you hate by not running in the first place, you punish me. So now guess what the horse is going to do? The horse is going to run, run, run, run, run. The second he gets to the jump, he's going to put his head down and you're going to go flying on top over the thing. Right? The horse doesn't want to jump because he's going to get beat. And he doesn't want to stay still because he's going to get beat. I take that as a metaphor and I just make that analogy to it. You're in a relationship with someone and she loves you and she goes out of her way to buy you a beautiful gift. And you, she gives you that gift. You don't feel comfortable. You feel like it comes with strings attached. There's a catch, something not quite right about it. So you reject the gift. You know, someone who's, you know, when you've gone to all that effort and someone rejects your gift, that's like being slapped. That's the horse being slapped. It feels bad. That's pain, not pleasure, not rejection. So you walk away like maybe the gift wasn't good enough. This time I'll spend three months buying a gift as opposed to one. And I'll really think about it. It's the thought that counts and all of that rubbish. Okay. So you go away, you come back with an amazing gift. She rejects you again. Another slap. This happens three or four times. Now you no longer want to get her a gift. You wish you could, but you don't want to be slapped. You don't want to be rejected. Okay. Maybe she fights with you. I told you not to get me a gift. But now she's thinking, how come he doesn't get me gifts anymore? Cause you not love me. She's not going to say that to you. And if she does say that to you, you say, well, last time I got you a gift, you slapped me. But this isn't a logical conscious conversation. She or he, they're reacting on a neurological level. So now they slap you. You don't get me gifts anymore. Jump. Do you understand? So now you're literally, you're put in this corner where you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, but either way you're damned and no one wants to be damned. So then what happens is the person's either going to leave or ironically, if they love you, they want to stay. But in order to stay within that, that context of being damned either way, they now have to become aggressive. They have to become narcissists in terms of my way or the highway, because they can't please you anyway. Do you understand? So I'm going to the restaurant, you're coming or not, right? I'm getting you this gift. You like it, you don't like it. Do you understand? They change. The traumatized person is creating these narcissistic characteristics. Now, you know, they split up after a while and that narcissist goes to another person and they're not like that anymore. Yeah. Cause the context has changed. They're no longer damned if they do, damned if they don't. They're being cornered into a plaza. And the only way to protect themselves from that polarity is just to go all out warfare. And that's not to say that everyone that ends up with a narcissist created that narcissist. I'm not saying that. Yeah. There is a correlation between trauma survivors attracting narcissists who are always narcissists. And they're usually trauma survivors as well, by the way. That's not the point. And the reason why they attract them is because it's the love hate thing. He's showing me, Hey, oh, there must be love there as well. There's love underneath that, that veneer of cruelty. I will be the one to fix her. I will be the one to fix him. I'll be the one to fix the bad boy or to finally melt the ice queen. They want the love that comes with the hate. Does that make sense? That makes absolute sense. And it's interesting because I've heard some conversations about narcissism and identifying the narcissist and whether or not you're living with a narcissist. Often the conversation doesn't speak about the environment that produces a narcissist and that, and this, this whole thing of getting lay people, and I don't mean that in a, in a, in a superior and inferior kind of a dynamic, but this idea of, you know, if you don't do what I want, you're a narcissist. All right. You know, if you decide to go out with your friends instead of, you know, help me clean the room for the seventh time today, then you're a narcissist. That's another topic completely outside the scope of this, but I just want to throw that in there because it's wanting control and wanting chaos. Can you see how like so many things come into it? It's wanting to succeed, wanting to fail. It's wanting to be loved and wanting to be hated at the same time. There's so many things that come into it. Right. And then just from my little experience of trying to develop an intimate relationship, it's often I have found people like they've got this guard up and it's like they, and it like half of my job or more than half of my job is to get you to put them, get the guards to put down so that I can actually recognize who you really are and I'm fighting against the history of this person that they had. Half of that is a defense mechanism. Right. But the other half of it can sometimes be if you truly love me, you would swim through as much crap as I give you. Right. And that would prove your love for me. So I'm giving you hate and you got to balance all for the love. Now, if that were true and all I had to do was swim through your crap once and pass the test, maybe I could, I could, I could maybe work with that. But if this is going to be an everlasting dynamic where you're expecting me to swim through a new river of muck every day or five times a day or 20 times a day, that's, that's when there's the polarity now. Right. Well, I think I really want to focus as we try to come towards the end of the show is firstly, how does an individual recognize within themselves that they should come speak to an individual like yourself? Because I bet, and you know this more than I do, a lot of people may live in certain type of denial or that they have an issue or they don't want to recognize that there's an issue or they're just scared of the whole idea of seeing a therapist, a trauma therapist. I mean, the fear of seeing a therapist is real. One of the things I'm completely against is this idea of reliving trauma, having to go past to, you know, to an age, whether it's hypnotic regression or whether it's just CBT or counseling, you know, you kind of stand there naked, bare yourself to ultimately a stranger who you don't know and tell them about what happened to you and what didn't happen to you or should have happened to you and what could have happened to you, but never. And you know, all this shoulda, woulda, coulda, the issue with that is it is re-traumatizing. It is. I mean, if I get you right now to imagine your mother crossing the road and a truck hitting her, if you were to actually imagine that, you would feel pain. Okay. And that has never happened because your mother's still alive. I know this about your mother. Right. So imagine now that that did happen to your mother and I got you to imagine it again and again and again. So it hurts even though it didn't happen. Imagine how much more it would hurt now that it has happened or if it has happened. So going back and reliving trauma the way that many modalities actually believe is a obligatory component of healing actually makes it worse because this idea of separating past and present, if you're reliving it again and again, how will you separate past and present? It's the opposite direction in terms of the milestones, complete opposite direction. So I empathize and I actually agree with them. If you don't feel comfortable doing therapy where you're going to have to revisit your trauma, then don't. Right. And even if you feel comfortable, I would also strongly recommend that you see someone who isn't asking you to relive your trauma because it re-triggers and it condones the structures that make them worse, not better. That's the first thing in terms of how will they know, how will they not know? If someone listening to this and it relates to them, they will know. If someone isn't listening to them, it's pointless to give an answer. But not only is it pointless, it's actually very difficult. It has to resonate. When someone calls me up on behalf of their son or daughter or partner, there's not much I can do because it hasn't resonated. And also, you may think they're traumatized, but that's the whole layman approach to just putting someone in a box, pigeonholing them and that's it. Trauma is the new schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is the tag that you used to get when psychologist doesn't know what to do with you. We don't know what to do with this guy. We don't know what's wrong with him. He's a schizophrenic. Now, we know a lot of the issues and the problems, but we can't really get rid of them. Therefore, it's trauma. It's that label that you've given when they just want to put their hands up and say, we tried, we're still trying, but this is your label. At least you get yourself a label. It's your certified label. Take that to the bank. So yeah, if someone resonates with this, then most likely they've gone through some form of trauma. And it doesn't have to be a shameful thing. And a lot of the people that actually get untraumatized are very happy to share their videos and their games. And the reason for that is it's no longer a problem. There's nothing left for them to be ashamed of and it doesn't represent them. There's a separation. Trauma is an identity for lots of people. I am a survivor. I am a warrior. Well, if trauma becomes, and many people ask me, but what will I do without the trauma? It's comic, but it's again, tragic. Because it's like, there's so much out there that is not trauma that you could be and do. And I mean, whatever you've achieved with your 400 apps running in the background, imagine what you can achieve when there are no apps running in the background and your mobile phone is completely and utterly just this one app that is focused on and all the process are doing just that. You very interestingly, as you've mentioned before, you've had as your clients, therapists themselves, could you shed a light on why a therapist will go to you specifically? And they've been through the whole traditional route. And that's why, I mean, you just answered it because they've been through the traditional route because they've had 20 years of different types of mortality and nothing is working. Yeah. They know and they can see with their own clients as well. I have videos of testimony for this. You know, they're helping them cope, they're helping them manage it, but they wish they could see. But then there comes this imposter syndrome as well. There's no way out. I can't even help myself and I'm not really helping them. I'm just helping them cope and manage. That comes with a lot of guilt and a lot of, it's problematic for sure. It's problematic. So 15, 20 years, I think we just get to a point where I can't do this anymore and I don't really care how it works so long as it works because all these other things that supposedly should have worked, that I knew how they should have worked, didn't. So I don't care anymore. I just want the result. That's where they get to usually. But when I do work with a therapist, I always have the verbal contract beforehand. I make it very clear. I don't explain things as we go along. I'm not going to entertain that either. You know, this isn't going to be push and pull. We're not going to have debates or like academic adventures. We're not going to do that. You come, I discharge your polarities and that's it. I'm sorry if you want more than that, but that's not the process of I'm traumatizing. You're to un-traumatize, you liberate your trauma and that's it. We're done. I usually do that within six weeks after which you'd be surprised. People don't really care. You don't really care because here's the thing. If you're not going to have a problem anymore, why would you want to understand it? Right. And then from a clinical point of view as well, my objective is I want my patient to be healthy and healthy. Actually, one of my instructors just said that I don't believe the AA, for example, the Alcoholic Anonymous has anything worthwhile in it. However, if my client comes to me and says it works for me, go for it. Whether it's placebo or whether it's just that community not wanting to let other people down. Another thing from trauma is me and you. They don't actually know how to separate me from you. Me and you is together. Remember, they were coerced to do things for others and made to feel that if they did that, that made them better. And if they didn't do that, they'd be given guilt trips or shame or threats or whatever else. And so this separation between me and other doesn't exist. That's a polarity as well. You can teach them boundaries until you blow in the face. Underpinning boundaries and presupposing boundaries is there is me and there is you. If there isn't me and you and it's just black, then what boundaries? Boundaries mean that there are one country or another. I mean, how can you have boundaries within a country? Do you understand? So you need to separate that first. So there are lots of things that help people to cope and manage. AA has stopped people from suicide. A hat's off. We have to admit that. But if you're an AA for 40 years and you fear that leaving AA tomorrow will mean that you're going to go back to drinking, then it's arguable that you haven't actually healed. You're not drinking, you're sober, you're achieving the outcome. But it's this endless coping and managing. I can't tell you how many people suddenly just stopped smoking marijuana or just stopped getting drunk or just stopped overeating or just stopped self-harming or cutting themselves or whatever else. We dealt with those things as if they were problems. But remember, they're not problems, they're symptoms. So once we get rid of the actual polarities and that trauma matrix, the symptoms doesn't arise anymore. I never dealt with that. There are people who later told me I stopped this or I stopped that. And I didn't know they were doing that. And I didn't need to know either. I really don't care what the symptoms are. Imagine right now that you're in charge of making sure that the water is pure in your village or in your city. If it's not pure, it can create lead cancer, it could lead poisoning, it can create infertility problems, it can create all of these things. But you really don't care about that because you're not a medical doctor. You know that it causes problems if it's impure and those problems go away once the water is pure. That's it. So my job is not to know what the symptoms are. I gave up doing that long ago. It was just a waste of time. My job is to see the water and to purify it. Right. So Adam, how does one reach you? Where do they go? You've mentioned some of the elements of the programs that you have. So could you explain to us how anyone can get some help? What I usually do is I run a workshop, usually every Sunday at 6 or 7pm UK time, depending upon what's most convenient. And people can register for that. Obviously, when they register, they know what time it will be. I don't want to get stranded and throw their time off the wall. But the time does change and I'll let you know beforehand before you register. www.tranquilandcherished.com is the homepage and where you can also register if you are interested in joining one of those workshops. Within the workshop, I go deeper into a lot of what we've discussed today. Inevitably, I do get asked by people how they can work with me and join the program, etc. And if I do, then I explain on the workshop in the after party, so to speak, about what the options are. And anyone that wants to proceed, they can. There are different options based upon severity of trauma, based upon how much actual physical hands-on, so to speak, help they want from me or interaction with me, and also based upon affordability and time and how quick they want the results. So yeah, that's all explained, if need be, on the workshops, if people are interested in that. But it's www.tranquilandcherished.com and you can register there. Is there anything else that you would want to share about this topic? With regards to trauma, it's so insidious and such an energy sucker, because you can understand three or four hundred things are happening at the same time. It's going to create fatigue, it's going to create confusion, it's going to, you know, fibromyalgia. I've never ever ever met someone who has fibromyalgia who didn't go through trauma. I have yet to meet someone who has fibromyalgia who did not go through trauma. So there are many symptoms. I mean, I have videos of people saying, my hip pain has gone, my hernia has gone, and you had it for 20 years, you know, it's so insidious that it creates these issues that you just couldn't explain. I mean, I can't tell you that trauma creates hip pain, but once someone's gone through a program and they no longer have hip pain, there was a correlation. It's pretty obvious, the cause and effect there. So it's more of a message of hope. ME, unexplainable chronic pains, all of these things are part and partial of the symptoms created by trauma. And the good news is that almost all of that disappears. And ADHD, I mean, if you've got three or four hundred things that you're focusing on, someone on the other side might think you're lacking attention. But the reality is you're not. You're looking at three or four hundred different things. You're focusing on three or four hundred different things. That's not to say everyone with ADHD and trauma, ADHD is a misdiagnosis, but in many cases it is. Bipolar, personality disorders. Again, if someone's having to go from polarity to polarity to polarity, it's going to look like you've got multiple characteristics, you know, that they've got this personality disorder. Again, many times it's a diagnosis. So yeah, I think that's it. Just by way of hope, just to let people know that there's a way out. And a lot of these symptoms are just symptoms, they're not problems. That's a brilliant note, I think. End on. Thank you so much, Adam. It's again been great to speak to you, see you, albeit virtually, and hope to see you soon. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and sharing about ideas on trauma, relationships and yeah, just a nice little hope that this can be dealt with and dealt with very well. Absolutely. Thank you. My pleasure. As I said, I've known him for a while, but every time I sit with Adam, I learn so much. It made me reflect on my past and how that can potentially contribute towards my journey in trying to find an intimate partner. I think my little message for anyone who's taking the time to listen to this episode is, number one, it is brave to seek help and to know that going to a therapist can be useful. And it's not necessarily someone has to say, as we were discussing, label oneself as having a problem. It's simply sometimes asking, how can I be better and how can I improve? And speaking to counselors and therapists like Adam Musa can be really, really interesting because you have these outside perspective on your own behaviors and allow us to see things in a very different way and with a fresh pair of eyes. But I think those of us who have been thinking about our relationships, how to improve our relationships, how to be better partners or just trying to form relationships and to do away relationship related issues. And they may think maybe because of traumatic experience in the past or any other reason you may think, I think going to a therapist is important. I will be putting Adam Musa's website link if you're watching on YouTube in the description. If you're listening to on some other platform, in a podcast form, it will be in the description there as well. Please do subscribe to the Healthy Mind Chat YouTube channel and wherever you're listening to the podcast, do subscribe to us. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you for listening and I hope to catch you in the next episode. Until then, take care of yourself and don't forget to say I love you to those who you love.