The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – This is How We Heal from Painful Childhoods: A Practical Guide for Healing Past Intergenerational Stress and Trauma by Ernest Ellender PhD

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

This is How We Heal from Painful Childhoods: A Practical Guide for Healing Past Intergenerational Stress and Trauma by Ernest Ellender PhD https://amzn.to/3WiRP3Q Ernestellenderphd.com Many of your adult struggles are likely tied to painful childhood experiences! During prolonged periods of chronic stress, family traumas, or dysfunctional family dynamics, your young brain likely created deeply ingrained physical and mental habits to help you survive. Unfortunately, these habits and core beliefs work against your adult life and relationship goals. Even if you did not directly experience adverse childhood experiences like abuse or neglect, you have likely felt the harmful effects of intergenerational trauma (also known as generational trauma or transgenerational trauma) from your family, which can be inherited as genetic issues or passed along through skills deficits and dysfunctional relationships. When these ancestral issues go unaddressed, we hand them down to the next generation. Natural responses to childhood stress can include: Chronic anxiety symptoms Unhealthy, chaotic, or toxic relationships with self & others Survival-based thinking (short-term, defensive, distrusting) Personal or family substance abuse (or addictions like gambling, sex, work, porn) These perfectly normal reactions to childhood stress do not automatically go away when you grow up! Recovery is challenging but quite possible through focused self-education and therapy as trauma survivors empower themselves with critical new skills. This book presents 20 key concepts for comprehensively thriving past your stressful childhood. Each chapter explains a key concept before offering realistic drills (trauma workbook exercises) to develop healthier mental and physical habits that will help you self heal your past trauma and ultimately thrive! Many trauma recovery workbooks focus on two to three of these issues in depth but leave out many important concepts. Here are just a few of the 20 rules: Trauma lies are just that...LIES We must slow down to speed up Practice treating yourself in a self-loving and self-respecting fashion We are responsible for the decisions that we are aware of It's us against trauma world This encouraging and reality-based guide was authored by Ernest Ellender, PhD, who has worked directly with trauma survivors from all walks of life since 1995. He combined insights from his clinical psychology doctorate education and career with training methods from his martial arts career (Jiu-jitsu black belt instructor) to create this comprehensive and effective curriculum for healing from childhood struggles. Clients benefiting from this curriculum have included those struggling with mental health instability; men and women in codependent and dysfunctional relationships; single parents wanting to do better for their children; divorced parents struggling with healthy co-parenting; clients diagnosed with C-PTSD (complex post traumatic stress disorder), ADHD, bipolar disorder, major depression, or dissociative disorders; clients whose prior therapists were poorly trained in trauma and CPTSD treatments; and parents who want to strengthen their family to prevent or minimize the impact of future traumas. Following the guidelines of this book will lead to... More control, stability, and confidence in yourself A daily life free of toxic shame! Empathic and mature self-care skills Advanced self-advocacy and communication skills Healthier, mutually supportive, and deeply engaged relationships with loved ones The ability to articulate, set, and enforce healthier boundaries with both loved ones and toxic individuals A lifestyle of healing and healthy pursuit of long-term goals

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. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you go, ladies and gentlemen. There are ladies and gentlemen. That makes it official. Welcome to the big show. As always, we've been bringing the show for 16 years, 2,000 episodes, all the greatest people, all the smartest minds, the most brightest people in the world on the show, bringing their stories, their books, everything that you can possibly learn about, and all that good stuff. So be sure to further show your family, friends, and relatives. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com,mas christmas one the tiktokity christmas on youtube and facebook and of course

if you want to buy me a coffee you'll buy me a coffee forward slash christmas today we have an amazing young man on the show we're talking about his hot new book that's come off the presses and this is going to be a helpful show today not only are we talking about trauma which we you seem to talk about a lot on the show over the last few years, especially after COVID, I think we all got trauma from COVID, is it's staying home, I guess, is basically how to fix it, how to heal from it. So we've got a, you know, we've got an upside. We're going to learn some stuff today. His book is the latest that comes out March 15th, 2024. It is called This Is How We heal from painful childhoods a practical guide for healing past intergenerational stress and trauma ernest ellender phd doc is on the show with us today

we're talking about his book and how you can heal yourself from painful childhoods is there anybody who hasn't had a painful childhood i don't know but we'll be talking to him on the show about all his insights and everything that goes into it. Ernest worked in the fields of psychology, life coaching, and martial arts for over 20 years before publishing his first book entitled The Forementioned. With his book, he offers his empowering curriculum to readers across the world who wish to heal from their past and develop the knowledge and skills necessary for success in relationships and life. Nowadays, he continues to operate both his martial arts school and life coaching services,

promoting his new book, and he's here right now. Welcome to the show, Ernest. How are you? Quite well. Thank you so much for having me here today. Thanks for coming. It's wonderful to have you. Give us your dot coms.

Where can people find you on the interwebs? Ah, ErnestEllenderPhD.com is my personal one. It has, what do you call it, life coaching services and things like that. And there's also HealFromChildhood.com, which is predominantly for the book. Also on LinkedIn and what do you call it, Facebook, of course. There you go. It seems like all the sort of things that ail us throughout life all kind of originate from childhood. What's that about?

Yeah, it's shocking how much it sets us up for life. And in adulthood, whether you're aware of it or not, it's just amazing. 80%, 90% of our successes and fails are set up in childhood. unless we directly try to educate ourselves about it and look at it and unpackage it, repack it, and figure out what from our childhood is still impacting us. So yeah, it's amazing. If you haven't looked into it and really thought about it, it's a worthwhile endeavor to do so. If you haven't looked into it, it's kind of like being that person in the room where you're like, everyone else is stupid.

It might be you. If you haven't looked into into it it might be something you need to look into because you might have a scotoma or a blind spot there and you know the funny thing is most people really don't start looking at their traumas until they're about 40 or 50 and i think we wake up a little bit our brains wake up a little bit by then but by then we've got such a track record you know i remember looking back online going, wow, I've been dragging that for 50 years. That's quite the mess I left behind me. Ernest, give us a 30,000 overview

of what's inside your book. I would just emphasize what you just said, which is most of my clients in the past have been usually in their early 30s. It's kind of the earliest they come in. It's like your young teens and your 20 you're so young and full of fire, they just fight and get through life. And then by the 30s, you start to slow down a little bit and the consequences of all this

stuff starts building up. And usually in the early to mid 30s, that's when people start saying, it might be helpful for me to go do something about this stuff. It could be me. it could be me it could be me is a third marriage or something like that you know and my best clients are usually in their late 30s 40s and 50s and i love it when i get somebody in their 20s come in late 20s come in i'm like wow you're you're actually ahead of the curve getting in here and doing something about it, just learning about the process. But, yeah, that age thing is really – I just wish that we had more education of this in the high school so we could get a heads up about it before it even hits us in the face

going out there into the work world. It would be wonderful, but it's not. I'm a big advocate for – I mean, i didn't need to learn algebra in school like anybody could have looked at me and my school scores and went this kid's an idiot he's going nowhere and he doesn't need to learn algebra too you don't do it we're on your chris voss show no we we have a strict policy against it in fact we're trying to get the legislature in utah to pass a law against algebra but uh show me on the doll where algebra hurt you, Chris. Anyway, that's for another psychological exam with my therapist.

I'll be meeting with him for a few more hours today. Anyway. Yeah, so the book. Yeah. The book, my book is, I consider it like a curriculum. And I went into it a little bit in the book, and I didn't want to go too much into the book directly because a lot of people do not do martial arts themselves. But as a martial artist myself, when you do martial arts, you learn what has to function correctly. You learn what you have to learn to be effective, either works or doesn't.

And so it's a wonderful study that teaches us how to learn and what needs to happen. And that's where my book is built on basically a black belt curriculum. So there are these 20 rules that you have. And on the first day, for example, you might come to class. You go to a jiu-jitsu class. And for the first month, you might learn jiu-jitsu 101. And this is the overview of what you need to learn over the next eight to ten years wow and so you you know from day one oh i need to learn how to defend i need to know how to attack

i need to know how to chain multiple combinations together i need to know how to you know work balance and all these different things cognitively i know how to do those i'm not good at any of them yet i just know how to do them and oftentimes when people read these books self-help books they believe that once they learn it that information is now in their brain and they understand how to do it and so they can just do it and that's not the case yeah it's sometimes people people buy a book and they just figure that I bought the book and so I've assimilated its knowledge that I have to read it

I sometimes make that assumption I have the book put it under your pillow and by osmosis it'll just filter into your brain some people put audiobooks while they sleep so it's reading to them I haven't thought of that I'll do audiobooks on the way to the gym

or whenever I'm driving but I haven't thought of that yeah I'll do audio books on the way to the gym or whenever I'm driving, but I haven't thought of that. Yeah, I just put it on the pillow. Subconscious. And getting the information into the brain so that we understand the abstract concepts is important. It's necessary. One of the chapters is education, training, et cetera, is necessary. The educational component is necessary because if you don't understand why you're in this self-sabotaging loop then it's almost impossible

to get out of it you don't see the blind spot you don't see the cycle but then actually get out of it it's like somebody keeps arm barring me somebody keeps admitting me with the same submission in martial arts and jiu-jitsu first i have to know what's going on. Then once I understand it, then I can start figuring out the moves that I have to practice hundreds and a couple of thousand times. I need one to two thousand repetitions of it before problem-solving, structured, supportive communication style. It takes several thousand repetitions, which is daunting to think of that. on it the sooner you learn the the little skills and start practicing them listen actively summarize acknowledge all those receptive steps before you even say anything back as soon as you start practicing the repetition that your muscles learn it your brain gets into it start to enjoy it but it takes those repetition yeah so maybe think before you speak basically the shorthand of that

but but i like that setup because you know i i practice a lot of stoicism so when people come at me excellent with stuff i tend to lock down i think it's kind of a male thing too that we we lock down we're trying to be responsive at least in a masculine sense but guys who operate their feminine will will respond with emotion. So there you go. We're going to round back in the book, but people like to get to know the author early on too as well. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing, what shaped you,

what made you want to become a psychologist and get into this field? Oh, man. I grew up in South Louisiana, and to me, South Louisiana is just the best. I mean, it's amazing food, and I was in a small town, so I got to go play in the is just the best. I mean, it's amazing food. And it's just, I was in a small town. So I got to go play in the back of the neighborhood. This was back in the late 70s, 80s. So on Saturday morning, the parents would just feed us breakfast and kick us out at 8 a.m. And say, come back before dark.

And so we go play in the back of the neighborhood in the bayous. We went swimming and hunting and fishing. And, you know, 12 years old, I had my shotgun out there. And we were fixing our own lunch for hunting and fishing and you know 12 years old i had my shotgun out there and it was fixing our own lunch for ourselves out there you know picking wild onions and whatnot it was it was just to me it was a playland and luckily i was fortunate enough to not run into my own personal terrible traumas in that fashion with all that free reign but yeah i just i love south louisiana that was fantastic in my household they they my parents and grandparents were highly valued education and particularly a formal education

so i went through the entire formal education route you know you did very well in school so they ended up i ended up getting to go to j Jesuit high school in New Orleans, which is a really tough school in New Orleans. And then to undergraduate, then after graduate school, got my PhD in clinical psychology. And when I went to go to grad school, I was very glad that one of the professors here at home said, make sure you get out of this area because we're very conservative and traditional in South Louisiana. It's very conservative. So he said, get out of here and think how other people in the country think. Get out of that way of thinking. So I went to the West Coast.

I went to California for my PhD. It ended up taking me eight years. Seven years of it was out in California. And another year out on the East Coast. I went to the East Coast. So I got the South, West Coast, and then the East Coast just to see different you see different cultures see how people think differently and kind of open my mind up to different possibilities and

yeah it's pretty wonderful so now now back home i love like i said i moved back to homer go back to louisiana i probably want to die here but i love going and traveling and seeing things and i was an athlete when i was young swam a lot and then and then got into once i we didn't have wrestling or jiu-jitsu in my hometown we didn't have those grappling martial arts we only had the striking ones like karate and i wasn't into that so it was in college that i was finally exposed to that and i just obsessively dove into it and i just i just love love love martial arts and jiu-jitsu and later on i got in striking also just to be well-rounded but yeah so i came back home with a brown belt in brazilian jiu-jitsu and my phd in clinical psychology and i was just ready

to serve the community and we say what drives me my grandfather was a a doctor in homo he was one of the only two doctors in homo for a while pretty wild and my father was an orthodontist and they were very heavily involved in in community or you got like charity and stuff like that so it just kind of came naturally that what i wanted to do for my my occupation was to help people some way you know just serve people. It feels good when you have contributed. You've made somebody else's life better. Man, you just sleep better at night.

It's pretty awesome. It's awesome to be in that kind of a job. Yeah, knowing that you changed the world for a better place and left a better place behind. Yeah. Makes all the difference in the world i think i think i think there's something biologically built into us or nature human nature built into us that makes that rewarding for us some way i'm a huge fan of mother nature of studying nature i that's part of what drew me to psychology just the study of human thinking and that our very genetics are like optimized for pro-social behaviors with a little bit of training we really optimize that but with some negative things it goes the

other route anti-social behaviors you know so it's important to spend enough time developing the environment so that the younger generation gets the you know that good part of the dna that's naturally tuned to try to help one another that's our natural stasis that's our natural inclination it's kind of what i was i kind of lost track of what i was saying earlier about the algebra thing bi they need to teach psychology in school and stuff so people can learn that now you're uh i think you're are you still a third degree black belt in jiu-jitsu? Yes. Yes.

Third degree black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Yes. So how does that help you? I know that's not, you know, it's not so much physical too, but it's mental as well. How does that help you, you know, maintain psychological presence, I guess? Man, oh man, I could go so much into it. It's so much fun. There is some physical component to it because, like let's say I'm working with a client and the client is just not seeing something or

I want something more for the client than they want for themselves. And I'm feeling the tension in my chest. I feel my own frustration. I want for this person more than they want for themselves. I want them own frustration. I want for this person more than they want for themselves. I want them to succeed. I want them to excel. I want them to thrive. And I feel that physical tension in my martial arts training. In jiu-jitsu, you know, if you're putting all your effort into something that's not working, well, you have to relax, shift, back up, think, and take a different tack. Like you have to change your angles change your effort change your mindset so it's quickly realizing the tension the tension is just the

trigger it pulls a trigger oh and what do we do we we take a quick step back in our mind and breathe relax and meet my client where they're all right there they're just not ready for that next thing that I want. That next thing that I want from them might be two years down the line. Wow. I can be a very impatient person at times, but then it's, oh, no, no, wait. We have to. You cannot skip the belts in martial arts. You can't skip from white belt to black, but you can't do it.

It's impossible. You have to go through white, blue, purple, brown, black. It's the same thing. I want somebody to be a high- communicator but in day one if they can't just breathe and calm themselves down if they don't have that skill it is impossible for them to communicate in a collaborative fashion with their significant other when their significant other has said something that triggers them. It's impossible. So we have to slow down.

So it's this awareness from the martial arts because it's such a physical thing in the martial arts. I see. I keep trying this thing and it doesn't work. It's obvious. It doesn't work because somebody keeps choking me. I keep losing. I keep tapping. I keep almost going unconscious gosh it's obvious and so i know that i have to calm down slow down take a break learn this other thing and then come back to it and that's how it helps me to

in the moment meet my client where they are slow down and get them excited about slowing down and learning this new thing because this new this new skill just being able to breathe and calm ourselves and regulate our own emotions in the midst of anxiety or fear just just that skill is it changes your life it's amazing it it opens the door to a hundred other skills that were closed that you cannot learn until you got that one down so it that's it's it's on a daily a daily basis is i'm aware of how my martial art training has positively impacted and informed my style of life coaching and the writing in the book the 20 rules you know these are 20 like techniques or 10 20 concepts it's a curriculum and each one of them takes years to develop to advance proficiency there you go and you my martial arts just informed my entire process there you go i know i know it's

such a mental game that's one of the reasons i go to the gym. Oh, yeah. It's not really about lifting weights. It's about discipline. There's a lot of things that go into it, but it's more it's not about getting muscles and i mean that's kind of a byproduct but really having the discipline to show up every day push yourself to new levels you know even when you don't want to show up you show up and all that sort of stuff how much do you go through spells where you lift regularly or you work out regularly and then you take a month or two off i don't take a month or two off unless i get hurt unless i get right injury but it's an injury sometimes i'll take a week off like i think recently i took a week off just wasn't feeling it and my sleep schedule was mucked up and i have to sleep while the lift but for the most part i stick to it it's every other day and i do my legs and arms and stuff. And sometimes I have to take a day off because I'll get cramps or something.

I got to make sure my potassium is up or else. And I'm 56. It's a constant fight with potassium and magnesium to keep everything oiled up. But part of it is too is I was low on testosterone up until November. And then I started testosterone therapy. And that's made a difference in me being able to bulk muscle up. But yeah, I try to stay on it. So let's tease out some different things that you address in the book.

You talk about chronic anxiety symptoms, unhealthy, chaotic, toxic relationships, survival-based thinking. That's kind of interesting. We haven't talked a lot about that on the show, survival-based thinking, personal and family substance abuse. What are the 20 key concepts you have talking about different things that you want to tease out? I'll let you have the floor. I'm even just starting with the survival based thinking. That's a fascinating one. For example, I kind of get some of the 20 mixed up. It's who we are in sympathetic is not who we are in parasympathetic. That's the name of chapter two where we just understand when I am in a fear-based survival mode, I'm not the same person as when I feel safe and I'm comfortable.

When I feel safe and comfortable, I might be a very pro-social, friendly, creative, or whatever you know a very giving loving guy but when I'm panicked in a moment we do crazy things sometimes we just lash out we hurt people we like run and hide our head or or we just fight instinctively and hurt people that we love who we are in survival mode is not who we are in in safety, in rest and digest mode. So once we understand that, then the next step is figuring out what is your particular style of survival? So we have fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. These are the four different survival responses we have as human beings. and animals have much of the same right but so fight that's obvious i fight that thing that's in front of me as soon as something goes

puts me in a survival mode and panic mode whatever the situation i start fighting whatever's in front of me there's fight flight as soon as something happens and my instinct might be to just run away get away hide isolate a third is freeze this is just numb out and freeze you know in the wild those who froze some predators only see their prey by motion so that people just froze they survived you know and then fawn is one that's much less understood oftentimes a lot of people say fight or flight and some people add fight flight freeze the fourth one is fawn and fawn is when you cater to the the more dangerous person in the room the predator in the room you fawn you do what they want you do what they say so that they'll let you survive.

And it's a really important one when it comes to childhood trauma because in childhood, I mean, a five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old, they can't fight the adults and they can't run away. There's no way to run away to. They live in the house. Like, they can't imagine being elsewhere. And then numbing out is, so they're kind of left with freeze or fawn yeah and some people when they go into the freeze mode they'll often get into like dissociation and like they just kind of go numb and then the fawn is like getting into a heavy like people pleasing and deferring to the more important other person in the room as a means of survival wow so as an adult

everybody can do all four of them by the way we all do every human can do all four of them different dangers trigger all four of them for us but you're going to generally rank order them in a certain style you know like you you know if yeah just out of those four which one makes the most sense for you are you a do you naturally combatively fight or take off or just numb out the other person when i when i when my trauma wasn't healed i was very reactionary so you set me off if you gaslit me if i sensed i was being abused and that's really what i was coming down to so then i was very actuary now i i tend to hold a lot of you described earlier in the show the the mental pattern that where you where you slow stuff down or you you stop and you listen you you try and

focus and you go what's going on i need to focus more on my breathing too but for the most part you know i you try and slow things down. And if someone's coming at you, no matter how hard they're coming at you, you will sit and try and get control. Unless it's an emergency situation, of course. Someone's going to hit you with a knife. You're going to react a little differently. But yeah, I usually try and read the situation. If it's overwhelming and someone is being beyond reasonable, then I'll remove myself from the situation without saying a thing.

And then I'll come back when they are calm. But I'm really good about walking away these days. And setting boundaries, of course, is a big important thing too as well. We're never doing that again. So it sounds like you shifted a little bit from recognizing you're a reactionary fight. And in our modern world, that doesn't often work too well. When you talk about a life-threatening immediate situation of a gun or knife being pulled, then yes, fight is survival response for certain i mean that's how my martial arts training is at but 99.9 percent of the time that's not what we're talking about we're talking about my significant other saying something that triggers me and angers me or upsets me that these are words that trigger my fear of

rejection or what have you and the response is to fight like that that doesn't that's not fitting the situation so you learned how to subdue that calm and regulate it and then decide on the flight one flight momentarily until everybody's cooled off and then you come back to it. And that's an entire skill set that takes many people at least six months, a year, two years to develop, to really enhance. There's a lot to my value. I don't know. There might be a bit of dark triad, narcissistic, psychopathy, Machiavellian thing.

But I have a pretty high value of myself and so when people come at me there's kind of a mode i'll go into that's very evaluative and and and i'll stop and by it's kind of what you guys do i think in jiu-jitsu isn't jiu-jitsu the part of the thing where when people come at you they you take their power and use it against them is that the form yeah absolutely that is the concept the reality of it is often significantly more challenging than that yeah so i'll just shut it down like i'll once somebody comes at me with a response they're not getting a response from me because i'm sitting there going into command mode of the situation and mentally and physically and i'm a very dominating person at six two and i'm sitting there going into command mode of the situation and mentally and physically and i'm a very dominating person at six two and i'm a very big person so it becomes apparent very

quickly to people that chris is going into a whole different mode and he's very aware of what's going on but he's not being reactionary he's not saying anything either and you know i'm taking the data in and that becomes offsetting to people that are coming at me at a certain point because they're like this isn't working yeah i was about to say when you when you start railing against some some person some man or woman and they just respond to this chaos and this aggression with nothing opposed a poised yeah confident stare yeah be very aware of what you who you're talking to because that's all i am putting like i have that resting bitch face i can look at you like i'm probably gonna tear an arm off of you but yeah i will go into that mood

and i will just you know i some some women shame it and they call it you're shutting down from me but you're not you're you're basically going into command mode and part of it is leadership too you know as as a leader you know i've written books about leadership as a leader you're you're gonna have to deal with these kind of people in your world and you've got to take some choices to how you're going to lead that person to the promised land out of whatever they're in and so part of it's going into a leadership mode so when i say you know narcissism psychopathy machiavellianism there's a bit of king in me that starts taking over and going okay i see the battle we're in

we've got to somehow figure out how to get you through this other side and get you calmed down without me sending you to the gals yes yeah yeah and yeah and so that's usually my thing if it's extraneous where you know i've had i've had women come up start hitting me i had an alcoholic girl from one time you know come up and hitting me me. I had an alcoholic girlfriend one time come up and hitting me, and I have to fold my arms and protect myself, and at some point I have to exit the room. So I've had that situation where you need to exit at that point. Usually, if I shut down and go quiet enough,

people will start to calm down because they'll just rage themselves out. Yes, yeah. to calm down because they'll just rage themselves out yes yeah that yeah when you when aggression comes at you and you you're presented with this post that doesn't speak and doesn't move yeah you got eventually the the silence of what nothing being returned doesn't instigate and this is a great example of what was talking about as far as the curriculum learning in different layers on you know this concept of oh and in the martial arts and aikido and jiu-jitsu and we use the attacker's momentum against us in judo yeah yeah so somebody comes at me and I twist and turn and make them fall on their head okay on day one that works well and that's a on day one that's

what you learn and so that's great as soon as you go with somebody who's athletic or too strong or more manipulative than you that initial concept doesn't work because they don't like for me to use your momentum against you you have to really come at me hard. But when somebody comes at me not super hard because they're trained and they're not going to overextend themselves, they're not going to offer you that unbridled aggression. They come in in a more calculated fashion. Now, I need to make you give me more momentum by doing different things. So now I need to learn misdirection in martial arts. Now I need to learn, now I need to physically exercise. It would be wonderful if I could just learn the martial arts so well that I can make you do flips by just moving

my hands like in the movies, but it doesn't work that way. i have to be physically strong enough to encourage you in this fashion so now i need to go and lift weights and become a physically strong person and this other thing there you go so maybe the maybe the analogy of this or whatever is that you need to do that psychologically or mentally in your head to deal with that with with absolutely people when they come at you you know so when we have two people who are coming from dysfunctional backgrounds who both come from very combative communication backgrounds that that's how their families both functioned and they and so of course they we marry into we pair with what is familiar to us it feels comfortable so that so i yell and so i marry a yeller. And so, suddenly,

we realize eight years into the marriage, either we have to change this or we got to split. So, we go for therapy and we're trying to learn, okay, when the person comes at me yelling, first, I have to be able to not respond. Respond with that, like you're talking about, with that like you're talking about with that blank or that strong but not reactive thing that's the first part and then what's the next skill that i have to be able to practice i have to be able to practice like a one of the one techniques like a broken record technique where i just said the same thing over and over that doesn't work for me that doesn't work for me. That doesn't work for me. I'd like you to take two steps back, please. Take two steps back.

And you just repeat the same thing until that happens. And when your partner is really lost in their rage, in their triggered rage, you might have to say that 20, 30 times. Wow. But you don't move on until that one is successful. Yeah. So that's another skill. That's a boundary setting skill ah boundaries and then after i can keep myself calm and not get pulled into yeah because once once you start responding to aggression with chill then the person who is really good so they ramp it up they come at you with more aggression like wait no we've been

fighting we've been fighting we've been fighting you need to fight back what are you a wimp you gotta fight back what are you not what are you they find different manipulative not on purpose accidentally more manipulative ways to draw you into the fight come here and fight with me no wait we gotta develop a dozen different skills with a bunch of repositions for each one to be able to shift from combative communication to collaborative. Yeah. Takes a long time, man. Yeah, I bet.

I mean, I'm not sure I could do the move two inches back. I mean, I'll use that. Because that's the other thing they do is you say they'll ramp up. They'll also get closer to you in your face. And then you start feeling more of that fight or flight danger. But for me, what I've learned over time, and this comes to masculinity and it also works in dating, is signaling value. And so a lot of what I do is knowing, number one, my value, which is really important. I think people maybe that have been through trauma and damage, you know, they need to heal their trauma, but they also need to figure out their value. And I wield my value.

And so when people come at me, you know, I can, you know, if I'm just in a relaxed setting, we're just having fun and hanging out and stuff, you know, my guard's down. And I'm a relaxed person, but as soon as those sort of crazy things start happening, I start not really shutting down. I'm actually building up. And so you're going to get the pull, but it's this wall that you're going to hit with me. But you're also going to have me looking at you and holding myself taller, more powerful, in a powerful stance. And in a way that signals that I'm high value and you are acting very low value right now. And, you know, so I'm not coming, I'm not being weak by not being baited into your stupid

shit. I'm, I'm actually very powerful right now mentally and i'm above you and you know one of the things that a lot of women will try and do is they'll use some of this stuff as shit tests right and so they'll come at you with this stuff to see how you respond and see if you're if you're still in your masculine if you're still holding frame and so it's really important in how you respond to that where she's not going to see you as weak. And so I've gotten very good at it where I can go into that state. And it's like I become more powerful and I stand taller and I just become this almost king that's sitting there at the throne going, really? In my court, this?

And people can feel it, think because i changed physiologically into it and and it becomes a very powerful stance it's almost a it's almost like a battle stance without being in battle kind of maybe i don't know you take a defensive stance in jiu-jitsu to show that you know you're you can come at me but maybe you shouldn't yes and i that the scenario you're describing would would correspond with a couple of the rules for example rule number eight is practice treating yourself in a self-loving self-respecting fashion yeah so as you develop these kinds of skills as you as you develop that insight and that awareness self-awareness and these you of interaction in these difficult scenarios, you learn how to not accept disrespectful behaviors. You learn how to set your own boundaries more comfortably.

I'm just not going to absorb this because I love myself. I respect myself too much so on the one level there's some degree of that as well as these different skills from learning how to stay in calm mode when the other person is losing their their their stuff you know so on the one hand we're practicing some of those skills and on the other side and i am i've done this many many many times, all right? If I find myself being successful in showing that I am more kingly than the person in front of me, I have to slow down and ask myself, why do I keep putting myself in a situation where I'm coupling with somebody who I have to put in their place or something like that? So, who am I picking? Rule number, I think, 19 is will versus skill. Both are necessary.

And when we look at each other, you know, if I go into any environment, any individual either has a bunch of skill sets or they don't. And then they have either desire or ambition to improve those or not. So to be in a high level, mutually supportive, mutually collaborative, mutually wonderful relationship, both individuals have to have the skills and the desire to apply those skills to the relationship. Definitely. to apply those skills to the relationship definitely so if i am defending myself against one girlfriend after the next man why do i keep picking people who are attacking me yeah wait a minute i need to respect myself enough and hold myself to a different standard of okay if i believe i have this much to to bring to a relationship i have these skills i'm going to push myself to to select a partner who also has these kinds of skills, which is kind of scary. You know, when we talk about, you know, a lot of times as men, it feels better to come into a relationship where you kind of have the upper hand.

It just feels more manly but what happens when you come in relationship with a a true equal when it comes to relationship skills or yeah relationship skills mainly but also you know maybe like the work world is very successful doctor woman or partner what have you there's a whole nother level of applying these things yeah why do i keep fighting what's going on here yeah it's it's the the thing i realized with my trauma and and you tell me if this is true but part of the reasons people get triggered and reactionary over things like you know being like one of my things was i didn't like being gaslit i don't like hypocrisy I don't like being gaslit and I had some real problems in 2016 when someone was elected to office that does a lot of

gaslighting and I found it very consuming and hard to deal with mentally for me and and so what I what I surmised and this is my, is that when we feel like we're being triggered, when we're reacting emotionally very quickly to something because we feel that we're being whatever, it's because we feel like we're being re-victimized again from whatever that happened, that trauma was from childhood. Is that true? Yes, absolutely. from childhood is that true yes absolutely we can go one further and say that so that's the part of it we call re-experiencing so there's two main clusters of symptoms when it comes to post-traumatic stress disorder or you know childhood trauma stuff one is the re-experiencing

of it and if we want to understand it from a very natural survival perspective, our primal brain and the base of our brain is in charge of keeping us safe. And if it encountered something dangerous in childhood and then just forgot about it, you'd be doing a terrible job because it would not protect you from that situation recurring. So, it holds on to it. It memorizes it crystal and it keeps bringing it up for you in memories and emotions and smells and thoughts and it keeps repeating it.

And the message to me is just, don't forget, don't forget, don't forget. They're going to get you. They're going to get you. Don't forget. If you let your guard down, they're going to get. So much so

that one version of re-experiencing it is me subconsciously, not knowingly, but accidentally repeating the process. Yeah. Like repeating, like me putting myself back in these dangerous scenarios so that but this time the brain is saying yeah but it's on my terms now i'm practicing i'm practicing to survive it so not only do we re-experience it from the body from the brain reminding us of it but it draws us back to these situations now the other the oddly you know oddly the other cluster of symptoms is avoidance. When it's obvious, I'm going to try to avoid it. I dated an alcoholic, so I am never going to date another alcoholic. I'm going to avoid that. I'm going to run away from it. So, I ended up dating a heroin addict

or something like that, but it's not an alcoholic. I'm accidentally drawn to something that's the same, but it doesn't look the same. Just get out of addicts totally, damn it. Yeah. And then, okay, I'm no more substance abusers. And then I accidentally marry a workaholic. Ah, I didn't think about workaholism or sexaholic. Oh, man.

So there's the re-experiencing, the draw to it, the re-experiencing of it, and then there's the avoidance of it. And those are very confusing. It's very confusing until we learn those patterns, learn the natural course of it so we can see it a little bit better, and then spend the time and repetition to develop the skills to enable us to exit that and kind of learn a new reality. What's it like to date somebody who has no addictive, I don't know, never done it. What's it like?

Does everyone have addictive personality addictions technically? No, but it's weird when I run into them. When I run into people who do not have the personality characteristics for addictive behaviors, it's almost confusing to me because in the House of Louisiana, man. I don't have them. It's nice to not have them. But, you know, I lived in Vegas for 20 plus years now. And you want to talk about meeting people who have addictive issues.

There's a lot of them here, man. And you have to really work hard to avoid them. I think in the Luxor Pyramid, there's an electromagnet for addictive personalities. Just bring them to Vegas. That's probably what that thing is about. So there's something that you touched on that I wanted to go back to. And I think I lost track of it. But we're pretty deep in the show. Let's talk about

what your services are that you offer on your website so we can get a plug in here for those. How can people work with you? I notice there's a book online, there's different services. Tell us about some of the stuff you do on the website. So they have individual coaching sessions, or they have these cluster of sessions, maybe six or eight sessions or a full day of working on individual concepts. Okay, let's get an overview of what it's like to go from combative to collaborative communication, or what does it mean to start the process of learning how to exit our survival mode and get into the calm mode. So those are kind of individual concepts. So we can either function, work on individual concepts,

individual skill sets, kind of really focus on that skill set. And it's a set curriculum. It's like taking a little mini course on how to do pottery or something like that. So there's that kind of thing where we focus on individual skill. And there's also, I really enjoy when somebody has done kind of a lot of the basics. They've already worked with a mental health professional, somebody who's like the local therapist to be able to calm themselves and maintain parasympathetic, those types of basics.

And then they're trying to apply the more advanced concepts, the 20 rules in increasingly complex scenarios. That's really my favorite. So it's people who are struggling in their family, like trying to find the right balance of interacting with toxic individuals, but then minimizing it. Yeah, how do you… Not to choke your family members at Thanksgiving. Yes. yeah how do you not to choke your family members at thanksgiving yes how do we do that and how do we have interaction and have relationship but do it in a safe and self-respecting fashion

just the higher level the real intricacies of fine-tuning these things how do we optimize the marriage how do we optimize relationship how do i not react to conflict at work in this aggressive fashion how do i these kinds of fine-tuning things, what I really enjoy in the life coaching. And that's just, I kind of follow the lead of my clients. They call up, hey, this is specifically what I would like. I'm very targeted. Oh, that's the finish line?

Let's see how fast we can get there. There you go. So I see several different programs and courses that are on your website. You've got couples and marriage coaching, so that's probably good. Probably a lot of stop hitting each other. No, I'm just kidding. That's kind of two-parter. A lot of times with that, you have two people who are coming from kind of rough backgrounds.

So some of that is just the educational component to where they start arguing pause start breathing calm down and let's learn a little bit about the science of what's going on you're not angry at her you're angry at your parent and this is what's being repeated this is a clearly a cycle that you've you're aware of but you forgot about it in this moment and so there's an educational component to it, and then there's a, now let's practice this new skill. Let's follow this communication cheat sheet strictly. Later on we can free flow, but right now we're going to learn it strictly. So there's some educational component,

and then some skills training component to it. And that's a lot of the relationship stuff. You know, the thing that really helps me is understanding a potential partner in dating. So on the first date, I'm going to roundabout. I don't ask directly. I'm not dumb. But I'm going to find out for a woman what her relationship was with her father now and in the past. I'm going to find out if he set a blueprint of

being a good healthy masculine male in her life or if he was in her life you know and that's important too because i found that women don't have that blueprint to grow up without the father without that blueprint i i don't think there's just a recoverable position in my opinion i don't know i would i would say there is a recoverable position you know in this because there's just a recoverable position, in my opinion. I would say there is a recoverable position. Because there's a second part to it. I do the same thing now. I dated some women who had the rough background, did not have that set up. I figured, oh, I can handle all this.

But that's not the case. It was disastrous. So someone can have a terrible history and they it's kind of i don't want to hold it against them in the sense that they didn't have that modeling they didn't have that experience but the second absolute like major question is have they done something specific about it yeah have they gone to some therapy? Do they have the insight? Are they aware of that? Are they aware that the anger that they start to feel at me is not really for me?

And are they able to monitor and check it themselves? That's a whole different story. So somebody who's been, who, you know, was an addict and they're now six years sober, but they never go into a day of therapy in their life, that's just to dry a drunk. That's dangerous. For somebody who's seven years into their treatment, they can function on a level that your normie can't even function on because they have so much into the sight in themselves. They've got so much practice at working on themselves that when things come up in the relationship, oh, let's do one of these things together and let's let's work on this yeah and so that's a two-parter for me there you go do you have that history and what have you

done about it there you go so yeah i'm gonna start asking dates to show up with a letter from their psychologist therapist yeah therapist the coach and bring it bring your own bring your own to show up with a letter from their psychologist. From the therapist? Yeah, therapist, their coach. And bring your own. Bring your own credentials, right? What? You mean I have to heal too? Oh, man. I love going to therapy.

I love it. I love it. Yeah. In fact, probably just, I think I joke one time that I was going to start holding first dates at a therapist's office. We're not doing coffee or dinner, honey. just meeting a doc and a head doc intimate little setting yeah but the one thing i've found and i don't know i guess it's worked backwards for me because i'm still single but the one thing i've found is knowing what my partner's trauma is in

childhood blueprints are is everything i need to know if it's big t trauma like sexual trauma uh i need to know if it's little t trauma because i mean to me they're very different sexual trauma is very big t trauma and knowing those different patterns of what their traumas were even if they have them healed can really help me because i mean women deal in emotion so a lot of times they'll reaction and they'll go back to stuff without not realizing and you've got to be able to see through it and go wait this is from your childhood i see exactly where this is coming from but having that understanding is really important and i was thinking about that when you were talking about the couples coaching that you do that there's probably a lot of people that don't really

understand the childhood of either people that are married no they certainly don't connect because it's it is confusing because let's say there was not sexual abuse and therefore you just don't understand in adulthood why one partner is having you know it's very asexual it doesn't can't get into it or what have you. I don't understand it. But that person may have been severely neglected, emotionally neglected. And that neglect is a significant trigger and they cannot be vulnerable in the physical context of sexual interaction. So, it can be really confusing. And so, I say, one of the chapters is called Secrets Destroy.

The secrets that we keep, especially shame, what we consider shameful or toxic secrets, part of the problem with it is it just doesn't get aired out. It doesn't get resolved. It doesn't get attended to. She said, if I do want to know my partner's traumas, and on top of that, I want to know what's the healthiest way that I can be supportive of that. And what is the stuff that it's not my job, it's my partner's job for them to take care of. And it's really helpful to know that. And that's, again, partly knowing what would happen but then almost more importantly knowing what do we do about it when that gets triggered do i you know that do i need to encourage you to push through it or do i need to take a step back and breathe with you and just practice calming down like you said earlier when you walk away from the situation come come back to it. Oftentimes, that's what we end up doing is let's first, let's take care of ourself first.

I'll help you calm down. I'll calm myself down. And then tomorrow, we'll come back to it. I will put that, we'll bring that to the therapist or what have you. You know, it depends. There you go. Thanks for Petunia for I Need the Link. We put the links to his book and his website in the things.

There'll also be a link on the Chris Vaughn Show. What else do we have here? Sounds way too practical. Therapist first dates. Somebody's loving that. And some different things. So there you go. Thanks, Matthew, for your comments on the show. Lots of good stuff here. We could probably talk for hours and hours. Oh, man. Yeah. I'm enjoying this. I love it. Charged by the hour. so there you go but you know people believe by the book they need to get into therapy you know i i one of the things i rail against is these people will do alternative methods of therapy that are highly questionable

like crystals or you know i just need to manifest i don't know being healthy mindset some people read a book like you mentioned earlier and think that that's just fine. You really need to get into therapy if you have damage. It really is important. Yes, yes. Crystals, for example, in probably two or three different chapters, they can be a wonderful part of calming down. They can be a wonderful part of calming down. They can be a wonderful part of the therapy, but when somebody chooses that as their sole method of trying to tend to a lifetime of dysfunctional family dynamics,

it's just not. There are 20 variables here, and I'm sure there are more that I'm positive there are more that I have not spoken to. There are 20 variables here. And I'm sure there are more that I'm positive there are more that I have not spoken to. There are 20 variables here. If you don't have an answer to every single one of those, it's hard to be successful. Definitely. Definitely. So people should pick up your book, wherever fine books are sold. Give us your dot coms and pitch out to people to pick up your book as we go out.

Yes. It's ErnestEllenderPhD.com. It's my website for my coaching services. HealFromChildhood.com is the website for the book. It's also available on Amazon on the Amazon bookstore. This is how we heal from painful childhoods. Practical Guide for Healing Past

Intergenerational Stress and Trauma. And I'm also on Facebook and LinkedIn. There you go. Thank you very much, Ernest, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me chris really appreciate it lots of fun and very serious chat so hopefully some people learn some stuff pick up the book folks wherever fine books are sold it's entitled this is how we heal from painful childhoods a practical guide for healing past intergenerational stress and traumauma out March 15, 2024.

Go to goodreads.com, fortuneschrisfoss, linkedin.com, fortuneschrisfoss, chrisfoss1 on the TikTokity, chrisfossfacebook.com, and all those crazy places on the internet. You can buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com, fortuneschrisfoss. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.