The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Heal Your Memories, Change Your Life: Heal Yourself From the Past to Create a Phenomenal Present and Future by Mr. Frank X Healy

Episode Date: August 4, 2024

Heal Your Memories, Change Your Life: Heal Yourself From the Past to Create a Phenomenal Present and Future by Mr. Frank X Healy https://amzn.to/3LP7djM Healyshealing.com Do you ever wish that something in your life had turned out differently? Are there any memories that keep resurfacing in your head? Do you wish that you could remember more? Are you suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder? Is there a painful memory that you can't stop thinking about?Heal Your Memories, Change Your Life takes you on an adventurous journey through your own memories and gives you the tools to heal from past hurts. Frank Healy, Licensed Professional Counselor, remembers every day of his life since he was six years old. He takes you through the past with exercises that help you remember more of your good times and let go of your pain from the past.Who ever said that healing and therapy had to be painful? Heal Your Memories, Change Your Life is written with humor, inspiring stories, and exercises that will leave you feeling free to enjoy your life and more on to a happy and successful future.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. There are at least six of them. It makes it official. Welcome to the big show

As always to Chris Foss Show This family loves you but doesn't judge you And we don't loan you money though So stop asking, please, for the love of God I'm not that rich, I can't get all you people doing For 16 years, 2,000 episodes We've been bringing you all the latest and smartest people In fact we turn 16 next month in August

Or tomorrow in August I think it's somewhere in August Anyway guys, so welcome to the big show, we turn 16 next month in August, or tomorrow in August. I think it's somewhere in August. Anyway, guys, so welcome to the big show. We really appreciate it. As always, for the show to your family, friends, and relatives, go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Chris Foss won the TikTokity and all those crazy places they have on the internet. We have an amazing young man on the show. He's got an extraordinary memory. In fact, his memory is so good he can remember stuff that i can't about my life from 50 years ago that's how good his memory is he can't he's very

good and he has a special skill that we're going to talk about he's written over 20 books so he's a multi-book author so if you have memory problems maybe he can help us but you can also know how to he's also going to advise us on how to help us with trauma and PTSD and other things that he coaches on. One book that we'll be talking about today is called Heal Your Memories. Change your life. Heal yourself from the past to create a phenomenal present and future. February 17th, 2018. Mr. Frank Healy is on the show with us today.

We're going to be talking to him about his stuff. I was going to try and remember his name, but his memory is better than mine. He is a licensed professional counselor and life coach with extraordinary gift, highly superior autobiographical memory, H-S-A-M. He remembers every day of his life since he was six years old, including the day of the week, the weather, personal experiences, and news events. You don't want to owe him money. Because he will remember. I loaned you $10 when we were 10. And with interest in the VIG,

we need about a thousand bucks back. He's now 64 years old and he uses remarkable memory and insights to help countless individuals through his counseling and coaching practice. As an author, he's written over 20 books sharing his wisdom and strategies for a healthier and more successful life. I don't know.

My life is healthier by just forgetting everything. No, I'm just kidding. Don't do that, folks. I know some people that are evil that tend to forget everything and all the awful things they do. So there you go. His notable titles include Heal Your Memories, Change Your Life, and Stress-Free Success. His work focuses on helping people heal from their past, manage stress effectively, and

achieve their personal and professional goals. Welcome to the show, Frank. How are you? I'm good. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to have you as well. Give us your dot coms, any place, social media you want people to look you up on the interwebs. Okay.

I'm on Facebook. It's Frank Healy Page. And I'm also, I have an author central on Amazon because I have so many books. And if you want to go to my website, it's HTTPS, et cetera, Healy's Healing dot com. There you go. There you go. So give us a rundown, a 30,000 overview of your book, Heal Your Memories, Change Your Life. That book came about when I realized the reason I became a therapist and coach was with my memory of every day, including personal episodes and things about it, along with it came the fact that every time a memory pops up in my head, it would pop up

with the same emotional intensity as if it were happening right now. So I thought I wanted to be able to get rid of the emotions from the bad memories because I knew I wasn't going to get rid of the memory. So I thought, but still keep the good feelings from the good memories. So I studied psychology and learned cognitive, how to reframe thoughts. And the book, Heal Your Memories, Change Your Life, is part of a self-help trilogy I wrote called Heal Your Memories. There's also The Ultimate Guide to Healing Your Past and Empower Yourself Through Your Memories. And the idea came to me in a September 2012 writers conference in Philadelphia where somebody mentioned that I have the perfect last name to write a book on healing. Mr. Healy, yeah.

Yeah, so I thought, and by the end of that, in the next month or two, ideas came to me about how to write a book about that. So what each of these three books are about is I interviewed 12 to 15 people for each book who had some real nasty trauma in the past, but were now happy and thriving. Such things as school or workplace bullying, an injury that made them have to change their career plans for someone who wanted to be a police officer. I interviewed a lady who's almost 91 years old now, grew up in World War II, torn Europe and all the trauma that that caused, and somebody who was raped on the streets of Chicago. Oh, no. All these. And so all these people and the requirements had to be that you had some horrific thing happen to you, but you are now happy and thriving and overcame it. So that's part of the books. is meditation-like exercises to help you heal the feelings from past traumas so that if the traumatic event popped up in your head again,

you'd just be like, so what? So what? It happened without strong emotion behind it. Yeah, it seems like a lot of the body tends to hold a lot of stuff, either physically or mentally, with that emotional reaction that someone has the trauma or damage or just about anything love i suppose and and so it kind of imprints itself and it's hard to get rid of right yeah that's it i mean memories can be felt all over the body it's

like sometimes and even massage therapists understand this. Like sometimes if they're giving a massage and they touch some person's body part, it'll suddenly trigger a bad memory. So that can happen. So that can happen too. And if you think of the way that people hold their tension in different places, some tighten up in the jaw, some get a knee jerk reaction, and some clench fists or get anxious in the stomach. So it can be held in all kinds of places. And no matter how long ago the memory happened, you can still feel as if it were happening right now. And that's not necessarily dissociating. It's disassociating, although that does happen

with some people and they need professional help get over it but you know but even even people who've just had a few bad things happen to them the memory will pop up they might suddenly get angry or sad or anxious and so helping them to release those feelings and yeah we tend to store things in the body, huh? I definitely remember the last time I hurt my back. That feeling's stored. Oh, yeah. It seems to come back fairly often if I, as long as I'm a good boy and don't keep my muscles tight and everything, it seems to stick with me.

But yeah. What were you going to say? good boy and don't keep my muscles tight and everything it seems to stick with me but yeah what were you going to say i was saying that one of the exercises in here among many and heal your memories change your life is you first you start out think of two memories one that was really good and pleasant and satisfying and another one that was nasty and traumatic. Then you get into a deep meditative state. And what you're going to do then is you alternate. First, you think of the good memory with as much detail as possible. The sights, the sounds, if there were any scents and smells and how your body felt, many tastes.

So then you do that for about two minutes and then then you fade it out, and then switch to the bad memory for maybe a half a minute to a minute, and then switch back to the good. And you keep going back and forth with the good memory longer than the bad. And after about, yeah, it's really neat. And after about 10 minutes of doing that, the good memory, the feelings from that will overshadow the feelings from the bad memory, and you'll be neutralized from it, and it won't bother you so much. There you go. You disassociate it, basically, feeling-wise. You start replacing it with a different feeling.

That's pretty amazing, and I've seen and heard stuff like this before, but I mean, imagine people need to walk through it and a coach like yourself because, you know, it's usually they're being triggered when they're experiencing those memories and they're having a reactionary sort of emotional and usually combined with physical. Like you said, sometimes you'll clench your muscles. I remember when I would go into an anxiety state, a high anxiety state from my ADHD,

the first thing I started noticing was my stomach would clench. It was like a muscle in my stomach somewhere that would clench and go hard, and then everything else would just start clenching up my chest and my muscles, and I'd start just overreacting muscle-wise. And once I learned what that start point was, could see i could see it coming and i could start learning to stop it i'm like oh crap i just clenched my stomach let's breathe and you know i was i was having anxiety attacks that way there you go so it goes in your book goes into it now a lot of the you've written 20 books and then let's we want to flesh out this thing too but

before i get to your memory thing, let's talk about your upbringing. How were you raised? When did you first notice you had these certain gifts of memory? It started when I was homesick from kindergarten, end of February, beginning of March 1966. And I was too sick to even be up playing with toys. And it happened that my Uncle Billy down street i had just given me a calendar for that year from this business and i so that i spent the week looking at the calendar and i'd look at each block of a day and picture what would be on prime time tv that night and play the coming

on tune in my head so that i realized by the end of the week, I knew what day of the week every day of that year was going to be or was. And like I know, okay, Christmas will be a Sunday this year and Thanksgiving will be on the 24th. So then every day since then, all day long, I would make mental notes with everything that happened to me or everything I noticed or heard. I'd say it in my head what date it was. And it was a few months later when the fall of that year when somebody, I was telling this man how, oh yes, it was on Thursday, August 4th. We were on vacation at the shore and my dad took my brother and I rowing out in the boat and and the man said you know you realize that not everyone remembers as well as you i don't know what i did on august 4th yeah i don't

what did i have for lunch yesterday i have to figure out i think i know broccoli broccoli and some things that started my intermittent fasting diet but i probably can't remember what happened two days before that but that's good i mean being able to change the weather tell us about what this this term is is the highly superior autobiographical i can't even spell it that's how amazing it is autobiographical hsam so how did you first discover you had this, like, clinically, where you diagnosed? And, I mean, this is quite extraordinary. You can remember the day of the week, the weather, personal experiences. This sounds a bit like, you know, I'll see, like, people that are on the spectrum, autistic people that are savants, and they can do stuff like this. Do you fit into

that sort of area? You know, I wondered about that in late 1988 when December 29th was the night I saw the movie Rain Man. And I remember then I thought I should start publicizing this. But I knew that, you know, I wasn't exactly like the character of Ray Babbitt played by Dustin Hoffman because I'm not socially compromised or anything. Okay. You know, and I still, I mean, I am a therapist, so I can empathize and read facial expressions. So it's probably even, so an advanced form of autism, maybe even in something separate from Asperger's. But, you know, so I realized that I was different then.

And when I was 14 years old, we were having a talent show on the penultimate day of school, the day before the last. And I thought, this is all people who either sing, play the guitar, or do magic. I could do something different. I could show off my memory. And I tried out, and they liked it. But the day before the show, the vice principal came up to me while I was practicing on the stage,

wowing some kids. And he said, you know, I think that it's an amazing gift, but I'm afraid some of these kids at the school wouldn't understand it. And they might give you a hard time while you're up there. So even though I was kicked out of the talent show, I

was still glad that my memory had now gone public. You can at least remember that he said that. Yeah, that's right. But you know, maybe you would have gotten some catcalling or some, what do they call that when you're a comedian on stage? You know, get some trolling there. Sometimes that can happen. Catcalling or back in those days, kids would shoot paper. Oh, yeah. Rubber bands. They're just vicious.

They are. I think they're still vicious from my own understanding of the school. Yeah, I see enough kids in my practice that, yeah, kids can still be really vicious. Yeah, I think it's a pecking order thing. I think it's a hazing thing that kids do when they're growing up. And I think it helps them grow more and develop moxie. I don't know. They're domination, one of the two.

But I think it's an interesting sort of pattern of behavior when you study human nature and how it develops and how we run tribes. So, Frank, talk to us about what services you offer on your website for coaching and how how that whole thing works different maybe courses or programs you have how do you have it set up you can contact me for you know for personal life coaching through the website or through my email which is h-e-a-l-y-s then you repeat h-e-a-l then the number one at msn.com. So he always see a one at msn.com and I'll set something up with you. And you know, for my, for, for my counsel, for coaching, I can coach you from anywhere. I mean,

I've coached people in Australia before, but yeah, but for, for my counseling, even if we were going to do telehealth, you would need to be physically in New Jersey where I live for insurance purposes. But coaching, I could do from anywhere. I'll set up a PayPal account so you can pay me for the sessions. There you go. That was the next question I had for you. Can you, I know being a coach instead of a therapist, I know with your therapy therapy, you have to work on the place, state your license in.

But I think as a coach, you can work across probably the world, right? Yes, I can coach anybody in the world. Like I've coached people from Canada and from Australia, you know, really anywhere. Those Canadians need some help. No, they don't. They're good people. We love Canadians. We love them, eh?

Trailer Park Boys and Rush. There you go. Big fans. Second City, too. Great comedy. Tell us about, do you normally do telehealth? I mean, that's so great now that people can just do things over the phone. Yeah, that's so great now that people can just do things over the phone. Yeah, that all developed.

For therapy, that developed in 2020 with the pandemic when nobody wanted to be near anybody else. So it was the only way to keep going. I'm still that way. Have you seen people lately? Yeah, and I can do Zoom for coaching if you're far away. And really, my coaching is not that specialized. If you just need help setting your goals and like my book, Stress-Free Success, if you're working towards your goals but need to learn some stress management while you're doing it. I imagine a lot of executives need help with stress. I used to experience so much stress when I had all of our companies that needed employees

or brick and mortar. I had to go get a massage for two hours every weekend. And if I didn't go get that unwinding process of getting a massage every weekend, my employees the next week, they would just be like, you didn't get your massage this weekend, did you? And I'm like, why? Because you're just a bear. You're just mean man wow you know stress is a big deal when you're executive or just anybody really i mean parents go through stress i mean there's a you don't you don't have

to do much to get stressed in this world it kind of comes with the territory evidently you know learning to deal with stress learning to maybe dissociate from it or not let it affect you as much emotionally i guess yeah that's a big part of it a lot of i've read where bill gates and some of and some big big ceos they do their morning meditations and things i know tony robbins is big on that and they do you know when i get up in the morning i'll i'll do a meditation and then I'll write in my journal and then I'm pretty much ready to face the day. You know, so it's important no matter who you are and what your role is to take time for yourself. It's kind of like I use the metaphor of your cell phone needs charging. You do too.

That's true. I like that metaphor. That's a great analogy. You need recharging just like your cell phone does. In fact, I need sometimes my battery just to be turned back on and off again. But they don't offer that option without permanent decline or permanent. They'll disconnect my service if I turn the battery all the way off. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Gee, imagine. It would be nice if you could just kind of go hibernate somewhere for a while and, you know, basically do what they do in those alien movies or whatever. You go in a high rock chamber, you take a break, and you're just like, I'm just going to come back when everything's better.

Come back in 20 years. Of course, it might not there might not be anything left so you never know you'll end up like charlton heston and playing apes where you're landing you wake up oh man wait it's monkeys now damn it can't go back there you go you filthy apes anyway which is what i say on Facebook every day. So let's see. What have we covered that people should know about you, what you do, and your coaching services? I think I pretty much explained how I can help you with achieving your goals.

I can help you. And I also coach people with disabilities, helping them make the most of themselves and helping them deal with stress in a world where having a disability is not exactly the admired norm. So helping them feel, accept and feel good about themselves as well as help find their niche. There you go. And so how can they reach out with you, work with you, find out if it's a good fit, talk to you, handshake, all that good stuff? If you inform me, first I might do a 15-minute to a half-hour pre-interview to see if it's the right fit before I take any money.

You got to make sure it is the right fit for you and how you feel about me. Yeah, that's always important. So give us dot coms as we go out so people can find you on the interwebs okay my website website is changing over but currently i'm opening up and i'm going to transfer everything from my old website over it's a healieshealing.com heal healing.com. Yes. And I would say, mnemonically, that should be easy to remember. It's silly and repetitive.

Memories, everything. So that's right. There you go. Do you ever feel cursed having that sort of memory? For a lot of years, it was kind of a, kind of double edged.

It was great to be able to remember all the good times. And when people first meet me and learn about what I can do, many of them think, oh, that would be so cool. But the dark side was remembering, you know, sure, it's great to remember fun with friends and dates and on vacations and stuff. And starring in the school play one a couple of years and all the good stuff. But then the bad stuff, bad days at school, bad days at work, a couple years and all the good stuff but then the bad stuff bad days at school bad days at work romantic breakups and all so that's why i wanted to learn how to kind of like i said let go of the emotions from the bad memories since i won't forget the episodes so i've made it i would say growing up and it was about 50-50, like half and half, good and bad.

I'd say that I've learned and worked on myself enough so that now I'd say it's more 90-10, 90% good, 10% not good. There you go. With that much memory, you've got to make sure everything you remember is kind of good, or at least put some disassociation on it so that you can at least look at it you know in a good light you know like there's there's tragedies that have happened in my life and now i can kind of look back and they always say you're gonna look back on this someday and laugh and you're just like are you serious this is horrible what i'm going through but you know death of family members death of dogs and stuff i never thought that i would be

able to look back and smile on those things but now i can and so having those good feelings where you you can be far enough away and sometimes it takes time you know time heals all wounds they say and you know just being down that road thank you very much frank for coming on the show we really appreciate it yeah so it was a pleasure thank you and thanks for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortunes chris foss linkedin.com fortress Fortunes of Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortunes of Chris Foss, Chris Foss 1, the Tick Tockity, all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.