Ok that’s enough about stressing the body so let's move on to the mind.
After spending a lot of time and money on my therapy I’ll never forget the day my counselor diagnosed me with PTSD.
He began our session with “well Travis I have some good news, I’ve figured out what’s going on. You have post traumatic stress disorder or what is otherwise known as PTSD.
As he proceeded to explain exactly what PTSD and some of the things that were going on with my brain all I could hear was that I now had a DISORDER!
I responded with. Ok so your telling me that I now have a DISORDER!
As if going through all this shit wasn’t bad enough already and now I have a freaking DISORDER because of it!
Yes I was angry!
Yes I didn’t think it was fair and I felt like a victim!
But as I came to terms with the fact that I was now labeled a broken person with a disorder, I began to see that this was also very EMPOWERING information. I now had a name for all of these feelings. I had a mission. It was up to me to dig deep and learn everything I could about PTSD. I had to figure out how to heal myself and get control over my mind and emotions again.
PTSD in a nutshell is the damage to the brain and psyche left in the aftermath of trauma.
You lose your ability to think clearly and reason.
You lose control over your emotions at any given moment.
You struggle to say everything going on in your mind and it affects your ability to speak.
You have random panic attacks.
Case and point is that with PTSD, in many ways you no longer feel in control of your own mind and I’m here to tell you that this is one hell of a scary place to be.
In my studies I came across something called NLP or Neural Linguistic Programming.
NLP is basically the programming or reprogramming of the mind using words and language used in the correct way.
I became obsessed with NLP and learning how to reprogram my own thoughts and mind. It was up to me to remove negative programming that I was given from my parents and the religion that I was raised in.
Yep that’s right, I wanted to remove programs from my parents and religion and I’ll explain more.
I grew up in a fundamentalist Mormon family in Utah.
Fundamentalist means my Dad was a polygamist. He had five wives and 34 kids.
Throughout my entire childhood, I was taught that the only way for me to have a chance of going to heaven ‘a place where God supposedly lives’ after I die was to live as a polygamist man here on Earth with multiple wives. This is still taught to polygamist kids today and this lifestyle is the core component of their religion.
But, In my heart I never wanted to be a polygamist and the thought of having multiple wives sounded like hell to me. Throughout my life I had a constant struggle in my mind and if I was wrong I was facing an eternity of damnation. That’s some pretty heavy stuff for a teenage boy to deal with. I’m not going to go into my life story here, I’ll be doing that in my upcoming book, Dying to Live, but I will share one quick story about an event that occurred after I decided to leave the religion I was raised in.
I was 24 years old at the time, had been married for 8 years and I was the father of 4 sons. Yes, you read correctly - I was 24 but had already been married for 8 years. We were married just 4 short weeks before our first son was born. Growing up in a fundamentalist home created many religious traumas, but getting my 18 year old girlfriend pregnant when I was just 16 was a traumatic experience for all of us.
So, picture this, I am a 24 year old, married, father of 4 children. I own a thriving construction business and I’m completely independent from my family. After a lot of discussions, studying praying, my wife and I make the difficult decision to leave the religion we were both raised in.
As you can probably imagine. One does not just leave the polygamist religion. As soon as we stopped attending church and really following our own hearts about the religion and all of the things it entails, the smear campaign began. We were demonized. Our parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends turned on us. Our character was assassinated and our own parents did everything they could to destroy our reputation.
For self preservation I decided to take a break from my parents. They had already made their opinion well known and I was so tired of hearing about how I never measured up. I needed a break from them so I could focus on trying to find my own truth. I needed to follow my heart and try to give my kids a better chance than I had.
When we did not “fall back in line” after weeks of personal attacks and gossiping, my mother and father decided to confront me at my job site, where I couldn’t just walk away from them.
Rather than have this “conversation” in front of all of my employees, I chose to walk out to the street to hear what they had to say. And, oh boy, did they have some things to say. You could almost see the smoke coming out of my dads ears and the smirk on my mom’s face made my stomach turn.
You see, my dad was an “Apostle of Christ” and one of the many leaders of our church. He had a lot of experience raining down hell fire and damnation on Sundays at church or even on a Wednesday if we back talked our mom. We were raised to believe that as one of the leaders of our church he had the right and duty to speak for God and Jesus. Without his recommendation, we would never make it through Heaven’s gates. That is a lot of heavy programming, which I had been subjected to since birth. It took every ounce of bravado I had, just to walk up to the two of them.
My Dad started the verbal assault with “Trav, I promise you as an apostle of Jesus Christ if you do this, if you take your wife and those kids and leave the Church, God will take your wife and kids and give them to somebody worthy of them and God will destroy you and sentence you to an eternity in Hell.”
Then my Mom chimed in by adding her two bits, “Travis, your wife and kids deserve better than this and they deserve better than what you are doing! Travis if you continue to go where you're going your wife will leave you and find somebody that is worthy of her.”
Now, no matter how much “bravado” I pretended to have at the time, this traumatic experience wrecked me. My parents opinion of me and the religious programming I had lived through since birth told me that denying our church really would destroy my family and lead me straight to Hell. Thats a tough thing to face, especially considering we had to do this with zero support from our friends and family. We were completely alone and facing the devil with our 4 small kids in tow.
But, I didn’t have the tools to deal with all of that at the time, so I just put my head down and went back to work. Their damnations were never far though, they ran through my head several times a day for years. Every fight I had with my wife, I thought - “Is this it? is now the time she’s going to leave and take our kids?” When we struggled financially, I immediately questioned if it was punishment from God. The programming was so deep and I had lived with it for so long that I didn’t even recognize it as trauma. It just “was”. Every misstep and every challenge I faced was God’s punishment for not living the gospel.
It wasn’t until I lost my son that I could truly see how much this religious programming had translated into trauma. I struggled so much with the idea that my son died because of the choices I had made. In my intelligent brain, I knew this wasn’t true. There is no way that God would punish our entire family because we chose not to stay in the polygamist church, right? I had so many doubts, doubts about my self worth, doubts about God, doubts about everything I knew to be really true. I knew then that it was my job to get inside of my own brain and remove the negative programming.
So I started studying. The more I studied PTSD, I learned about something inside of every human beings mind called the Reticular Activating System or RAS for short.
What the RAS does is stay alert at all times and listen to and take orders from your voice.
Yes take orders from YOUR voice not somebody else’s voice.
You can think of the RAS in your mind as similar to a lock or password protection gateway to your subconscious mind and the only key or password that exists to gain access is your own voice.
After my son passed I became an obsessed with mediation and positive affirmations!
I purchased guided meditations from Deepak Chopra, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Wayne Dyer, Louise Hay just to name a few and don’t get me wrong their meditations were great and definitely helped but they were all missing one major component. All of these meditations were recorded in their voice and not mine.
I had heard about trauma survivors recording positive messages about themselves in their own voice and then playing these messages back over and over again until their brains were quite literally, reprogrammed. These survivors took their power back and changed all of those horrible thoughts and feelings. They intentionally installed a new program in their mind to heal and empower themselves using their own RAS.
When I learned about this new way to reprogram my mind it made perfect sense to me so I knew that I had to give it a try.
I looked for a good voice recording app that would store and organize my voice recordings so I could easily play them back to myself but the best thing I could find was the recording app that comes standard with my iPhone.
But the iPhone voice recorder was missing several things that I wanted.
I wanted to be able to make my own playlist with my voice recordings.
I wanted the be able to play these recordings over and over again on auto repeat.
I wanted to be able to play voice recordings in a subliminal way and listen to my music or a youtube meditation and have my voice recording playing at the same time.
I wanted to be able to control my voice recording volume level separately from my phone so I could still use my phone and play my positive voice recording at a the same time.
Since there was nothing available on the market that could do all of those things, I decided to build my own App. Here we are 3 years later and I’m happy to say that you can now download my App, Empower on the AppStore today!
The Empower app is a FREE app that you can use to start creating your own personally empowering affirmations to begin programming your mind for HEALING from trauma and PTSD.
Now at this point your probably thinking that sounds great but what do I say when I record?
What words and mantras can I use and say to empower and rewire my thoughts rolling through my mind?.
These are great questions!
We took care of that issue inside of the Empower app recording process!
When you are creating a new voice recording I give you two different recording options.
Blank recorder, or I like to refer to this as freestyle. The recorder page is blank and you can type in your own words and thoughts to read as you record, or you can just start recording with no text to read, so you just speak directly from your heart.
I give you another way to record called +MANTRAS on the recorder button, when you select +MANTRAS you go to the EMPOWER App mantra library where you have free access to HUNDREDS of different mantras and affirmations separated into 5 different categories for you to use when you create your own empowering recordings.
Heres a link to the Empower App website for you to learn more.
And for those of you on iPhone here’s a link to the Empower AppStore page.
For those of you on Android I apologize, but as of the time I am writing this we are still working on completing the Android side of the Empower App, but we should have it available in GooglePlay in the next few months.
Honestly I would recommend another or similar App for you to use, but like I said there was nothing available on the market that does what the Empower App does so that is exactly why I’m building the Empower App.
If you are on Android but know that you need the Empower App today you can buy a used iPhone or iPad to create and play your Empowered voice recordings but unfortunately this is the only way you can use the Empower App today.
Ok so I’m going to get back to the verbal abuse I received from my parents and why I had to work through this after my son passed and exactly how my new voice recording app Empower helped me heal.
At the time my son passed I was in the mental battle of my life with this thing called God!
Truth be told I hated God in many ways because of the way I had been raised and because my parents used God as something that was ready to condemn and destroy me if I didn’t do what they wanted and share their close-minded beliefs.
When my son passed I was just a few months into the beginning of a horrible divorce ending my marriage of 16 years.
Things were so bad between me and my soon to be ex-wife that we were way beyond civil communication. I needed to pick up my truck from the house we had once shared, but to avoid another horrible confrontation I asked my 16 year old son to to pull my truck out to the street. He got busy, as 16 year olds do, and forgot until he saw my friend drop me off at the end of the driveway. So, he hopped in the truck and began pulling it down our private driveway.
Just as he started moving, my 3 year old and youngest child DJ, was riding his scooter out of the garage and he rode right under the front tire of my truck. I was only about 40 feet away and completely powerless as I watched DJ leave this world.
The moment DJ went under my truck I saw the brightest ball of light exit his little body, and the ball of light came from his chest where his heart is.
At the same moment I was witnessing DJ leave I heard a voice that said “DJ is fine and he is with me, Travis. You have to focus on the spiritual life you have just witnessed.”
Now, don’t get me wrong it’s not like I was fine because I saw a light and heard a voice speaking to me.
These events jacked me up on so many levels and for a while it felt like trauma and PTSD were a lifetime prison sentence!
But I had a lot of shit to sort through.
I had the broken record from my parents playing in my head “God will take your family and destroy you”
And the truth was that I was getting divorced. And now I had buried my youngest son. Maybe my parent’s were right. God must hate me. After all, I had made the call that started the entire chain of events that lead up to DJ dying. And now I have fucked up my 16 your old’s life because he was the one driving when it happened. Of course God hates me. Everyone should hate me. It was all my fault. Everything wrong in my life and the life of my kids led back to my choices. I endangered them and destroyed any chance of happiness because of my decisions.
All of my parent’s predictions had come true. And not just theirs, but so many people that I thought loved me. I heard things like, “this is what happens to a person when they turn away from the church” or “the only person who can save Travis from an eternity of Hell is Jesus Christ himself”.
Really, i have just lived through one of the unarguably most devastating thing any parent could survive and my family and friends were laying all of the blame at my feet. I could go on and on about the jacked up stuff my own family was saying and spreading about me but that’s not the point.
The point for me was that I was at a mental crossroad with God.
For years, part of me hated God and part of me questioned if God was even real?
Finally, I made the choice that if God was real I was going to give him everything!
No I’m not talking give my heart to Jesus, go to church, or read some 2000 year old books.
I mean it was time to tell God everything I felt inside about him!
I thought to myself, if I hate God this much then there must be some reality to God so here goes.
In a fit of rage I unleashed a verbal assault on God releasing fury of hatred and pain that I had been holding inside of me for years!
“F**k you God! You think my life is some game? You thinks DJ’s life was some f**king joke?”
I let everything out like like I was an atomic bomb going!
“I hate you for that bullshit Mormon religion, I hate you for judging me all the time, if I’m so worthless to you God what is the point to living at all?”
When I was finishing my rant of hatred towards God that’s when it happened.
The best way I can describe it was it felt like my body was being wrapped in more love than I can even describe. I felt this same love for a few minutes after DJ died but that was a few years ago and I hadn’t felt it since then.
As my body and soul were being bathed in this invisible healing force, I heard the same voice I experienced at DJ’s death downloading into my mind saying. “Nice Travis, I’m proud of you for being honest with me and now we have the truth to work with. Travis the light you witnessed leaving DJ’s body is part of me and you have this same light inside of your heart. Travis I have never judged you and I have never left you, how can you be separate from me when I am the source that is powering life through your heart?”
Needless to say this experience shifted my relationship with God and this has also completely changed the way I view and experience myself and humanity as a whole because I now see this light in myself and I see this light in every human being.
And if you're wondering if you have this same light and power within you? Yes, and as long as you have a heart beating in your chest that is all the proof I need.
I like to look at every human being as if they have this God internet signal being beamed into them, so really everybody is just a piece of God in my eyes.
So now back to the Empower app and how I use it to help, even though I have had these powerful experiences I still have had negative programs I was playing in my mind so here’s an example of the voice recordings I created to rewire my brain and thoughts.
“I understand that every person including myself is important and loved by the Universe and Creator.”
“I forgive myself for poor choices I have made in the past. I choose to learn and grow from all of my mistakes.”
“I feel healing and peace when I am true to my own thoughts and feelings.”
I then played these recordings back to myself over and over again.
There is a saying that goes “repetition is the key to success”
So that’s exactly what I did with my new recordings, I played them on my Empower App over and over again! I played my recordings in subliminal mode at night while I slept and during they day when I listened to music, when I meditated, when I watched youtube and when I spent time on social media, when I exercised and after a few weeks I really felt better. I had successfully changed my neural programming and thoughts about God.
So I’ll sum up this section with listing the benefits of recording your voice and playing it back to yourself.
When you play back your voice you are connecting or syncing to the Reticular Activating System in your mind.
When your RAS takes orders from your voice it will help quickly build new thought patterns inside of your mind.
You can easily install empowering programs into your mind for healing and success using just your voice.
Ok so enough about that I now I’m going to give you a few more mind healing tools you can use to rebuild and challenge the mind and body.
1. Try to eat with your non dominant hand, so if your left handed start holding the fork or spoon in your right hand to eat.
Again you might be thinking, what in the hell how does this help me?
It actually does a lot to help you, when you do this you actually cause both sides of your brain to fire and start working together as one master brain.
When you do this you challenge the brain by challenging your body’s motor skills and this simple action causes the two sides of your brain to fire together to process the task and this builds new neural networks in you brain and new neural networks can then process and handle things like stress and trauma in different way.
2. Try to brush your teeth with your non dominant hand just like when you eat.
Really I would recommend trying to perform normal everyday tasks with your non dominant hand, like I said before this will challenge the mind and body in a very safe way.