Sounds like your ex had a shit experience (not great for you either).
It’s all about how you explain childhood factors and how you get the person to think about it. Going over the trauma repeatedly doesn’t usually help. I use what I’ve learned from Healing The Shame That Binds You, my personal and my professional experience to explain how certain childhood factors lead to the adult emotions/ mind, but adapt for the person I’m dealing with. Where appropriate, I’m honest about my own story with patients and use that to help them see a way of managing things.
Repressing past ‘shit’ leads to poor mental and physical health (due to hormonal stress response). Dealing with it properly, in a way that suits the individual, grieving any ‘lost’ childhood, learning to let the ‘shit’ go and then ‘parent’ your own emotions to allow them to mature is a good way of living a happier and calmer life. The problem is the majority of ‘therapy’ is too general and doesn’t cater for enough adaptation for the individual patients. There is often too much emphasis on a medical model and of the use of medications which often don’t help, which is how I was trained (but don’t practice it).
Since my journey through addiction, rehab, recovery, neurodiversity (ADHD diagnosis) and the learning I have gained, I find I can get 90% of mental health patients to see things in a different way to help them get themselves better. The other 10% are too far gone or just don’t wish to engage with any discussion.
For me, learning that I am the only person that can make me angry, anxious, sad or happy was one of the key points to being truly happy. I am the one that chooses how to react to an external stimulus, and can’t blame factors I can’t control for my own reaction. Therefore, with that in mind, I’ve learned to let ‘shit’ go and not hold on to it. I’ve also learned to observe my minds emotional responses rather than always feel and act upon them. My mind says “for fucks sake” a lot. I used to feel a tension and then say it out loud. I now (most of the time) let my mind say “for fucks sake”, appreciate it is trying to help me, smile and not react.
I sometimes consider different stories for the triggers, like when someone cut me up driving the other day I chose to imagine they had a sick kid in the car as the children’s hospital was up the road. They drove past it so I laughed but then they pulled into the cancer hospital a little further along the road which could have explained their erratic driving. My mind initially screamed all sorts of shit at the driver 😂, but not reacting and making up the story kept me calm.
I got that idea from this amazing speech, which I strongly recommend giving a listen…
Big thanks to @Racist Bastard for starting this thread. Honestly, you have done an amazing thing here and I hope the ongoing conversation helps, it’s a positive help for me!
