Life Beyond PTSD

Here is a story (5-minute video) of a woman who suffered with PTSD for over 20 years before coming across the 3 Principles. Despite years of conventional therapy, once she opened her mind to the 3 Principles, all of her fears drifted away.

PTSD to Confidence and Calm with The 3 Principles Understanding Mary Schiller tells her personal story of 7 years in a very abusive marriage resulting in a diagnosis of PTSD in her late 20s. Despite spending years in ther...

There is nothing like getting out into nature to re-orient your thinking. Surfing takes focus; watching for the waves, currents, trying to catch the waves, and riding them. The positive outcomes are very encouraging.

Riding the waves to better health: Navy studies the therapeutic value of surfing. Researchers examine whether surfing can ease PTSD, depression and sleep problems.

Sometimes less is more. We all have the ability to achieve inner peace from within.

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This article discusses the power of the three principles in treating PTSD. Understanding how the mind works is your first step in leaving your PTSD behind.

Hope for an end to PTSD - Three Principles Living Over the Memorial Day weekend, much of our attention was directed to the plight of returning Veterans who suffer debilitating psychological wounds. Many more servicemen have been lost to su***de than lost in combat. The system is overwhelmed by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). One general inte...

Beyond PTSD - Part 3: Freedom is Possible
By Rolf Evenson June 2018

(If you haven’t already read parts 1 and 2 of “Beyond PTSD”, Part 3 will make MUCH more sense if you do so now before reading Part 3…)

I enjoy public speaking. And when I get in front of a group of people I sometimes ask the audience if they believe that it’s easy or difficult for people to change.

Very few will say change is easy. Most agree that it is difficult.

And given the opportunity, they can easily site examples supporting their case.

Back when I was struggling with PTSD I would have agreed with them. After all, I’d been trying to change my experience for 28 years.

But what we’ve found in our work with clients over the past eighteen years, is that when someone has an insight that changes how they see the world, their world actually changes.

And when their world changes, they start showing up differently.

And when they show up differently, they get results today that seemed impossible yesterday.

So we work with people suffering from PTSD who are ready to leave their suffering behind, so they can create a great life. What we do is we help them realize the power of insight, so they can stop struggling with change and start creating it on demand.

Human insight is the greatest creative force on the planet.

It makes transformational change possible.

I’ll never forget when it hit me. All of my painful experiences, all of the horrific memories, all of what I thought of as ‘my PTSD symptoms’, were not coming from something that happened in the past, they were coming from my thinking in the moment.

Looking at Joe I asked, “Are you fu***ng kidding me? I’ve been doing this to myself for the past 28 years?”

Joe smiled, nodded, and said, “Yea, I’m afraid so.”

Then he added, “But this is really good news, Rolf. You thought you were a victim of circumstance, a victim of your trauma. Now you realize that you are free to create whatever experience you choose. And it can be effortless, just as it was last week when you were enjoying your new friend while a train roared by a few feet away.”

He went on, “You weren’t trying to fix yourself or your ‘condition’. You were simply relaxing and enjoying the moment. That capacity has never left you. It can never be lost.”

“It’s always there, inside of you,” he said, “waiting for you to come home.”

I remember the very first time that I heard an engine blasting it’s air horn in the distance not long after my conversation with Joe.

I laughed. That’s right… I laughed.

That’s what used to trigger my painful memories, my fear of uncontrollable emotions, my belief that something was wrong with me, I thought.

Thank God I don’t have to go down that road again! It simply wouldn’t make any sense to relive that nightmare yet again. Why would I do that?

Now I realize that all along my human operating system was working perfectly.

I was always feeling my thinking, exactly as I was designed to do!

When I fell into old memories and thought about my traumatic experience, I was feeling that thinking.

When I was thinking about my new friend in the car, as the train roared by outside, I felt that thinking.

It reminds me of a dream I used to have on a regular basis. Some kind of shapeless horrible monster would be chasing me through a dark underworld. I would desperately try to escape until, at last, when I was about to be caught and devoured, I would wake up in a cold sweat.

Then I read in a book about dreams that you could ‘wake up’ within your dream and become lucid. And it is was even possible to face the monsters in your dream.

So I decided to try it. The next night I had the dream again, and as I was being chased I realized that I was dreaming. I turned around and faced the monster and screamed for it to leave me the hell alone.

I was shocked to see that what I thought was a terrifying monster, the same monster I’d been running from in my dreams for years, was nothing but smoke. And smoke just drifted away.

I realized then that the power wasn’t in the dream.

The real power was in me, the creator of the dream.

In the decades since then, once I realized where the monster was coming from, I’ve never had that nightmare again. Not once.

The same is true for my experience with PTSD. It had me on the run for 28 years. But once I realized where my symptoms were coming from, my own thinking in the moment, they, like the monster in my dream, completely lost their power and drifted away on the breeze like smoke.

Since my insight over thirty years ago, I haven’t had a single PTSD episode.

Not one.

And I haven’t expended an ounce of effort to make that happen.

That’s the power of insight.

Once I realized how the system works and how my experience is being created, including my nightmares and ‘daymares’, the system has taken care of the rest.

It turns out that sanity, resilience, insight, joy, confidence, common sense and wisdom are all built into the system, the human operating system.

As Sydney Banks said, “We are never further than one thought away from freedom. We just need to find that one thought.”

Which is another way of seeing we need to look for an insight that changes how we see the world.

Whatever trauma you have experienced, however damaged you may feel, change is possible.

Change is always possible, because insight is possible.

Insight is the heartbeat of transformation.

It can be the heartbeat of your transformation if you let it.

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If you're ready to discover a revolutionary approach for moving beyond your PTSD so you can stop 'managing symptoms' and start living free again, click the button below to learn more.

Innate Health - Eliminating Stress & Creating a Healthy Community #3

Beyond PTSD - Part 2: The Great Misunderstanding
By Rolf Evenson June 2018

Before I came across the work of Sydney Banks, I believed the following three things to be true about my PTSD:
That my PTSD symptoms were caused by a traumatic event that happened in the past.
That the traumatic experience had left me broken, and that I might never fully recover.
That changing a person’s psychology is complex and difficult at best, often requiring a great deal of patience, time and effort.

Belief #1: My PTSD symptoms were caused by trauma that occured in the past.
Here’s what made sense to me back then.

I had suffered a serious traumatic event at a young age. Somehow that traumatic experience had taken root in my psyche. And given the mind-body connection, it had also taken up residence in my body as well in some mysterious way.

Sometimes I thought of it as something broken in me. Sometimes I thought of it as a monster lying dormant. Either way, something was definitely wrong with me.

The sound of a train a whistle would awaken the monster of my brokenness, and my mind/body would be off to the races reliving the horror in vivid three-dimensional color.

When I heard a train engine whistle, or encountered a train at a railroad crossing, I assumed that whatever symptoms of anxiety I experienced were generated, at least indirectly, by the trauma that had occured years earlier.

In other words, I believed that there was a logical cause and effect relationship between what had happened to me at age six and the feelings of anxiety I was having in my twenties and thirties.

It’s not hard to see the logic of this line of thinking.

Something bad happens to you.

Then you suffer the traumatic effects of what happened (nightmares, hallucinations, anxiety attacks, depression, etc.)

You must have some condition right? And if the symptoms are still plaguing you years later, you must still have that condition.

Then somewhere along the way, you realize that LOTS of people have traumatic experiences, but they seem to get over them at some point. The fact that you are STILL suffering symptoms is clear proof that something is wrong with you.

You can’t help but think, “I’m clearly broken! Somehow the trauma damaged me more than most people. The evidence proves it!”

And all the experts seem to agree.

So you believe that you ARE damaged goods.

Joseph Bailey was a the first person to tell me this was not true.

He told me about the work of a man named Sydney Banks. Joe told me that my beliefs about my PTSD and the beliefs of all the professionals that had in good faith tried to help me were based on a misunderstanding.

A misunderstanding of how the mind actually works.

Essentially it’s a misunderstanding about where our human experience comes from.

Most of the world believes our feelings are caused by external circumstances, events and the people around us.

In this understanding life happens to us and then we feel what just happened.

Our boss yells at us and we react.

We see a beautiful child come into the world and we feel love and infinite possibility.

We are late for a meeting and we feel guilty.

This is an outside-in understanding. Stuff happens around us and that stuff explains how and why we feel what we feel.

We are literally feeling the people, circumstances and events (or trauma) happening to us.

At first glance, this seems perfectly logical. And mass popular opinion worldwide would agree.

However, this logic starts to fall apart when we look a little closer.

If there was a cause-and-effect relationship between what happens to us and our psychological experience, anyone going through the same circumstances would have the same experience.

But we know this isn’t true.

Take, for example, 10 people caught in a huge traffic jam on their way home from work. They are all caught in the same traffic jamb, right? They should all be having the same experience.

But check this out…

One person notices the traffic and decides to take it as an opportunity for listening to some music so they can relax on the way home. They smile when they think about how much more present they’ll be with their kids after this unexpected opportunity to ‘chill’. They feel thankful and blessed.

The person in the next car is moderately upset, but decides to make the best of it by listening to a work-related podcast. They feel agitated but relieved that at least they won’t be wasting their time.

A few cars back a woman is losing it. Why now? Why me, she thinks. This is the last thing I needed right now! She feels angry thinking about the personal time she is giving up for a stupid traffic jam.

The last example is a young man who isn’t losing it. He’s already lost it. He’s screaming at the cars around him, desperate to move up a spot or two in the endless line of traffic. He feels rage at the unfairness of it all and the stupidity of all the people around him.

Four people caught in the same traffic jam. Four very different experiences.

Clearly their experiences are NOT coming from the circumstances - in this case the traffic jam.

In his book, The Missing Link, Sydney Banks points out that the missing link in our logic is thought.

The reason the four people stuck in the same traffic jam are having completely different experiences is because their experiences are not coming from the situation, they are coming from what they are thinking in the moment.

It turns out that we don’t feel our circumstances. We feel our thinking. Period.

As I was trying to get my head around this, Joe Bailey asked me an interesting question.

“So you believe there’s a cause and effect relationship between the train crash and the anxiety you feel at train crossing today, right?” Joe asked.

“Yes, that’s right.” I answered.

“So, if that’s true then you should always experience anxiety whenever you are in that situation, right?”

“Yea, that makes sense,” I said.

“Can you think of a time when this wasn’t the case,” he asked?

I thought about it and then remembered something that hadn’t previously occurred to me.

“Yes, actually, now I remember a situation that happened just last week. I was sitting in my car first in line at railroad crossing and I felt no reaction at all!”

“Really,” Joe said. “What was going on?”

“Well, I was having a wonderful conversation with a beautiful woman. Someone I was attracted to. All I was thinking about was her.”

Smiling, Joe asked, “And what were you feeling?”

“Nothing but the joy of being with this new friend,” I said.

“And what was going on outside the car?” Joe asked.

Smiling with my own realization, I said, “The crossing lights were flashing and the train, with air horn blaring, was roaring by some 30 feet away.”

And then it hit me. I had a life-changing insight.

If I wasn’t thinking about the trauma, my PTSD literally didn’t exist because I wasn’t creating.

It didn’t exist unless I brought it life by thinking about it.

Whatever I was experiencing at any given railroad crossing, was NOT coming from the past, traumatic or otherwise. It was being created fresh in that moment from my thinking in that moment.

Sydney Banks was right. Thought IS the missing link.

Human feeling and experience is NOT created from the outside-in. In fact, it’s created from the inside-out via thought in the moment.

Life doesn’t happen to us. It happens through us.

Belief #2: Something in me was broken
When we have a powerful insight that changes how we see the world, the insight often carries with it powerful implications.

When I realized where my experience was coming from, when I realized that I no longer had to be a victim of something that happened years earlier, I also realized something equally profound.

I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t damaged goods.

I thought back to when I was sitting in the car with my new friend, the train roaring by a few feet away, I was not having to work at being with her. I wasn’t having to work at enjoying myself.

I wasn’t having to work at anything.

Because I wasn’t thinking about painful memories, or about how screwed up or broken I was, all I was experiencing was her.

And the joy of being me with her.

In that moment, there was nothing to work on, nothing to fix, nothing to overcome.

I realized that Sydney Banks was right. The ONLY thing that could separate me from my own natural wellbeing and happiness was my personal thinking.

Once that dropped away, what was left was the real me.

Wholehearted, healthy, happy, confident and capable of love and connection.

Me, unbroken.

I was not damaged goods. And I was not the victim of painful circumstances. I was finally free to change. To create something new.

Free to build a wonderful life.

To find out how, please read Beyond PTSD - Part 3: Freedom is Possible

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If you're ready to discover a revolutionary approach for moving beyond PTSD so you can stop 'managing symptoms' and start living free again, go to http://www.rolfevenson.com

Beyond PTSD - Part 1: My Story of Hope
By Rolf Evenson June 2018

Many of us have had traumatic experiences. This was mine...

Our family car was hit by a freight train when I was 6 years old. We were on vacation in northern Minnesota. Friends of my parents had loaned us their cabin on beautiful Lake Kabekona.

My father, a Lutheran minister, had taken my brother, Erik, and me to the tiny general store in the north woods to get some groceries for the following week, while my mother stayed at the cabin with my two-year-old sister, Solveig, and our infant brother, Mark.

Heading back to the cabin, driving through the north woods on a beautiful sunny day, Erik and I proudly wore the white sailor hats that dad had just bought for us at the store.

As we burst out of the woods to cross the railroad tracks, my father saw and heard the train too late. He slammed on the brakes stopping our car directly on the tracks.

Startled, I looked to my left, past my father, as the train slammed into our car.

The massive crash exploded all around me. I heard the sound of tearing metal, falling glass. Looking through the broken windshield after the car came to rest some distance away, I saw a cloud of dust swirling and settling in the sunlight.

Crawling through a broken window, I saw my father’s legs sticking out from under the car. Erik was there too and I pulled him out from under the car.

No need for the gory details, but I watched my father dying that day.

It’s no surprise that the emotional trauma of that day left its mark. I had nightmares for years. The sounds and sights of trains and train crossings unnerved me.

When I got my drivers licence ten years later, I remember being the first car in line at a crossing as a train barreled down the track. Suddenly, I ‘saw’ the train jumping the tracks and heading straight for my car.

Hallucinations like this one were rare. Anxiety attacks happened more often. And I could seldom shake a sense of unease, of impending doom.

It was embarrassing and aggravating to be experiencing these symptoms decades after the crash.

Over time, I became convinced that something had broken in me on that fateful day. It was the only rational explanation I could come up with for the fact that I was still having symptoms 28 years after the event occured.

I didn’t think of it as PTSD back then, but that’s what it was.

I sought help multiple times. Once in my teens. Twice more in my twenties. I was tired of having feelings I couldn’t control. Tired of having railroad crossings being a ‘thing’ in my life.

The therapeutic approaches I encountered back then (this was the 70’s to mid 80’s) don’t sound unfamiliar today.

In the first case, the therapist used a behavioral approach. When I saw a potential situation coming up, I was encouraged to drive around the block to make sure I wouldn’t be first in line at the crossing.

Another therapist used an approach that sounds a lot like neo-cognitive therapy today. She encouraged me to think of a time when I had a happy experience around trains. This was easy to do since my family had taken a long and pleasant trip by train some years after the accident. She encouraged me, when I found myself encountering a train at a railroad crossing, to replace my traumatic memories with pleasant memories from our family trip. Falling asleep to the sound of train wheels clicking on the tracks and the distant engine’s air horn as we traveled through the night.

The idea was to replace the ‘bad’ thoughts with the ‘good’ thoughts.

Later in my twenties, I participated in an emotive therapy group at the world-famous Johnson Institute in Minneapolis MN. In this therapy I was encouraged to pound the floor with a padded club to get into my rage at God for putting me through this horrible experience at such a young and vulnerable age.

While their approaches for helping me varied, the good professional people who did their best to help me overcome my PTSD symptoms had one thing in common. Once they heard my story, they ALL responded along the these lines….

“Oh my goodness, you had THAT happen to you! No wonder you are experiencing these symptoms. You may very well be dealing with them for the rest of your life. Let’s see if we can help you do a better job of managing your symptoms…”

They believed, as I did, that external events as horrible as the one I had experienced at age six would inevitably leave anyone traumatized. And in some cases, such as mine, the aftermath symptoms could go on indefinitely.

Experiences as traumatic as this, my therapists and I believed, could leave someone so broken psychologically that they could easily spend the rest of their lives picking up the pieces.

Essentially, we believed that as human beings we all live in an ‘outside-in world’ where things happen in our lives (people, circumstances & events) which logically resulted in our feeling a certain way.

So if ‘good’ things happened, a promotion, a new lover, or a big contract, then we logically felt good.

If ‘bad’ things happened to us, our boss yelled at us, a contract fell through, our relationship ended, then we logically felt bad.

And if really traumatic things happened, the symptoms we now associate with PTSD could go on for a long long time.

Made sense to me.

In fact, I had 28 years of evidence to prove it!

But then something magical happened.

I learned something that changed everything.

My friend and colleague, Joseph Bailey, told me about the work of Sydney Banks. It was a profound new understanding of the mind, a sort of cracking the code of the human operating system.

Through reading Banks’ books and my conversations with Joe, I realized there is a massive misunderstanding in the world about where our experience comes from.

The implications of this new understanding were staggering, especially in the way that I saw my PTSD.

For starters, I realized that I wasn’t broken, that PTSD was not at all what I thought it was, nor did it come from where I thought it came from.

To find out more, please read Beyond PTSD - Part 2: The Great Misunderstanding

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If you're ready to discover a revolutionary way of thinking about and moving beyond your PTSD so you can stop 'managing symptoms' and start living free again, please go to http://www.RolfEvenson.com

Outstanding conversation with Dr. Bill Pettit about PTSD and Trauma. He brings a revolutionary and highly effective perspective. A must watch.

PTSD & Trauma - Dr Bill Pettit Dr Bill Pettit returns to Real Change LIVE - a FREE live webinar series. The focus will be on: PTSD & Trauma

Dr. Bill William Pettit Jr. is a psychiatrist who approaches PTSD through the lens of the Three Principles. He is always worth listening to.

[Dr Bill Pettit] How to deal with panic attacks, anxiety and negative thinking http://socialanxietyinsideout.com Register for our FREE live hangouts and much more... Snippet from Social Anxiety Inside Out Hangout #4 with Dr Bill Pettit....

Most of who have struggled with PTSD have wondered, 'What's wrong with me?" If this is you, I encourage you to read this article for a completely new take!

What's Wrong With Me - Judy Sedgman - 3PGC Blog What's Wrong With Me? - Judy Sedgman