3 Proven Methods to Heal Trauma and Rewire Your Nervous System

(ticking clock) (rhythmic clapping) You have tuned in to something incredible today. I've been thinking about the topic that we're going to talk about today for a long time, and that topic is repairing your nervous system and healing trauma from your past. Now, there are three reasons why this topic matters and why I'm so glad that you and I are gonna talk about this today. Reason number one... (rhythmic clapping) Hey, it's Mel, and welcome to what might be one of the most important episodes of the Mel Robbins podcast that I've ever done. Let's do this. I am so glad that you're here with me today, and whether you've been a long time listener or this is your first time tuning in to the Mel Robbins podcast, you have tuned in to something incredible today. And so, I just want to welcome you. My name is Mel Robbins. I'm a New York Times best-selling author, and I am one of the world's most respected experts on change and motivation, and I've been thinking about the topic that we're going to talk about today for a long time. It is something that I've been wanting to talk to you about because it has had the single biggest difference in changing the quality of my day-to-day life, and that topic is repairing your nervous system and healing trauma from your past. Now, there are three reasons why this topic matters and why I'm so glad that you and I are gonna talk about this today. Reason number one, there is so much confusion and misinformation out there about trauma, especially with TikTok and Reels and YouTube Shorts, all that bite-sized, snack-worthy content. Some of it's awesome, but when you sprinkle the word trauma or the phrase nervous system repair around like it's candy, it overwhelms you, and it makes people unsure about what trauma is, how you process it, how you identify it, how you even begin the process of healing it. I am getting so many questions from listeners like this one from Benny.

Hey, Mel. My name is Benny. So I hear all this stuff about healing your nervous system on TikTok and social media, and it's kind of overwhelming. How do you know where to start? How can you even begin to acknowledge something that needs to be healed?

Benny, thank you so much for your question, and I want you to know you are not alone. We get a version of that question over a dozen times a day, and so today's episode is dedicated to answering it. Here's what we're going to do. First of all, we are going to simplify this topic so that you can understand it and so that this episode serves as a resource for you so you can forward this episode to people who you think may be dealing with the issues we're discussing today, because without understanding what trauma is and how we all have trauma from our past and how that trauma impacts your nervous system, you can't acknowledge the reality of what's going on in your body and how and why you need to repair it. But by the end of this episode, you will have a very clear idea of what it is and what to do and why all of this stuff around nervous system repair is going to benefit you. Now, the second reason why I wanted to talk about this topic is because trauma, that's a heavy topic, but addressing it, it doesn't have to be. When you repair your nervous system, holy smokes, it will expand your capacity to feel joy, happiness, and it's going to allow you to let more love into your life. That's exactly what happened to me, it's what happened to my husband, and it is what is happening with people around the world who are applying the simple knowledge and the tools that you're about to learn today. The third reason why you and I are talking about nervous system repair is because it's one of those topics that creates a paradigm shift in the way that you approach your life from this moment forward. That's how powerful our conversation today is, so I'm just thrilled that you're here. Now before we get started, I want to remind you, especially if you're brand new to the Mel Robbins podcast, I'm not a medical doctor, I'm not a licensed therapist, I am not a psychologist or a trained certified trauma specialist. This topic is so big, I am going to have an Ivy League-educated holistic psychologist and trauma specialist, who is going to even dig deeper into this topic with us in the next episode. I wanted the seminal episode that we do on these topics to be personal, because I'm going to tell you, this is a very personal topic for me. Discovering that I struggled with trauma, that my nervous system was in a state of dysregulation and needed repair, and applying absolutely everything that I'm about to share with you today to my life and seeing the results, it's kinda hard to describe in words the change that it has made in my thinking, in my relationships, in the level of success that I've achieved, my ability to enjoy it, my friendships. It's not only a paradigm shift, I'm living a completely different life, because my nervous system is repaired, so today, my goal is crystal clear. I'm going to help you understand the topic of trauma and nervous system repair so that you can experience this life-changing paradigm shift for yourself. And keep in mind, this is all relatively new to me. I mean, I didn't even know until a few years ago that I had experienced past trauma, and that's very common. I get a lot of questions like that one from Benny. "Mel, I see this word a lot. I see these concepts. How do I even know if this applies to me?" Well, for starters, I'm just going to go out on a limb. You and I are friends, and so I'm going to tell it to you friend to friend. You have past trauma.Period. There's not a single human being on the planet that gets to adulthood and doesn't experience some form of trauma. Every single human being that you know, including you, has experienced traumatic situations, and those past experiences are still recorded in your nervous system, and they are playing out right now in your day-to-day life. And when you start to recognize that and you go to work in repairing it, that's the paradigm shift. Now, I first started researching the topic of trauma and nervous system repair just a few years ago. Um, let's see. Let me do the math. It was 2019, so almost four, or is that five? Five years? Four years ago. Okay, I'm actually really good at math, but I'm not that great at simple subtraction. So four years ago, in 2019, we did a project for Audible, and by we, I mean my production studios, 143 Studios. We do a ton of work with Audible, creating original audiobooks for them, and this particular one was an audiobook called Take Control of Your Life, and it's a project I am so proud of. Actually, my team is... Wait, what? (laughs) You're kidding. They're, they're telling me right now that Take Control of Your Life is the number one selling Audible original audiobook that they've ever done. I mean, that's pretty cool because it was a project that we produced where it was a series of coaching sessions that we did on trauma and nervous system regulation, and it was a really life-changing project for me because it was in researching the issue and topics of trauma and anxiety and how trauma and anxiety get trapped and stored in your nervous system and in your body, it was during that project that it occurred to me for the very first time, "Holy shit. I have trauma." And that may happen to you today as you listen to this episode. This is why I know that you're gonna wanna share this with a lot of people, because this is a complex topic, and when I start to just really peel back the layers on this and I explain it very simply, you have an awakening. For the purposes of our conversation today, you and I are gonna define trauma as this. It's just the lasting emotional response that comes from living through a stressful, distressing, scary, or life-threatening event. I'm gonna say that again. It is the lasting emotional response that comes from you living through a stressful, distressing, scary, or life-threatening event. That's why I say we all have trauma, because every last one of us has lived through many stressful, distressing, scary, or life-threatening events. And what I learned during that project and all of the extensive research that we did on trauma is that trauma can present in endless ways. For example, researchers describe these fairly common feelings and reactions as signs that past trauma may be triggering your nervous system to go on edge. So as I list these off, I want you to just consider, do any of these feel familiar to you? Are you on edge all the time? Do you have trouble managing your emotions? You feel overwhelmed by life. You snap easily. You get super frustrated about stupid things, or you're constantly taking things too personally. Or maybe it's the opposite. You don't explode. You shut down. You feel unseen, unacknowledged. You feel taken advantage of or left out, that your needs just don't matter, and you have real big problem asking for what you need. Do you have trouble focusing or making decisions because somewhere in the back of your mind you feel like there's something you forgot or there's some other shoe that's about to drop? Other signs that trauma may be at play, addiction or feeling disconnected from others or the tendency to just go up into your mind and leave the room that you're in. Now, you might recognize yourself in this list, check, check, check, check, and then go, "Yeah, I have trouble focusing. Yeah, I feel like the other shoe's about to drop. Yeah, I'm easily triggered. But I don't have trauma, Mel. I mean, it's not like I was a veteran and I saw combat." That was my reaction too just four years ago. And then we dug into the research. And it was really hard, but it was a turning point for me to have the courage to admit to myself, "Wow, there were past experiences in my life that had a lasting impact on me, and it's impacted my ability to tolerate difficult situations. It's impacted my ability to manage my emotions. I'm in the category of snapping at people and getting super frustrated or feeling on edge all the time, and it also makes it difficult for me to manage uncomfortable emotional sensations." I started to think to myself, "You know, that sexual abuse that you survived, Mel, that's trauma." And it was hard and confronting to admit that to myself, to realize that, oh my God, there's a reason why your nervous system feels like you're a car whose engine is revving, but you're sitting at a stoplight. There's a reason why you're always on the go, go, go, always busy, busy, busy Mel. And in researching all of this stuff for this project, all of these behaviors and this feeling on edge and the snapping at the kids, it made me track it all right back to trauma, and it also pointed a spotlight on the fact that the solution was repairing my nervous system. It became undeniable to me that there was a profound connection between my nervous system always feeling like something was wrong or that I was about to get in trouble......and the anxiety that I experienced, the control issues that I had, the toxic behavior and relationships that I engaged in. These were all coping mechanisms that I had developed out of traumatic situations, and I had to come to Jesus with myself. "Mel, you are dealing with unhealed trauma. You are not a freak. You are not a bad person. In fact, you're a really good person that has experienced some traumatic things, and that trauma is trapped in your body, and it's been there since you were in the fourth grade." And, you know, I'll tell you what happened without getting into the details, and we'll put a, we'll put a warning on this, but basically, my family was at a, um, like a... You know, like, when you go away with a bunch of families? So a bunch of families went away together, and we were all skiing together, and we were in this house that somebody rented, and all the kids were in this massive bunk room. And I woke up in the middle of the night as a fourth-grader on the bottom bunk, and an older kid was on top of me. That's what happened. And this is going to sound like a weird thing to say, but it's not even like it was a scary thing. It was more that it was, like, confusing. I mean, here I am like this little fourth-grader. I don't know what the hell is going on. I wake up, somebody's on top of me, and I immediately have this flood of adrenaline. This alarm went off in my body. "Something's wrong, something's wrong, something's wrong." And I rolled over on my right, and I did what experts call opossuming. I left my body. I don't even know how it ended. Like, I wasn't even in my body. That was my response to this situation. And so, the next morning, I woke up, and I hid underneath the sheets, and, you know, in my little fourth-grade brain, I couldn't, like, really process what had happened 'cause it was really confusing. It was like... Was that like a g-... Like, I don't know what happened. I just know that it was bad, but, like, I, I... da-da-da-da-da," you know? And, and immediately when something like that happens, when you're little, you do not have the ability to go, "That person screwed up." You basically aim it back at you and go, "I must've screwed up." And so, I hide under the sheets, and I wait for all the kids to, you know, clomp, clomp, clomp downstairs, and I think everybody has left to head off to ski, and I can hear some of the moms downstairs, so I'm like, "Okay, coast is clear." And I throw the blankets off, and I go scampering downstairs, and I immediately see my mom, and she was standing there cooking pancakes, and she had a spatula in her hand. I'll never forget this. (clears throat) And she goes, "How'd you sleep?" And I was about to tell her. I was literally about to blurt it out, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the older kid who did it. And keep in mind, I didn't even really know what it was, because I had so blocked it out. And I felt another wave of anxiety and alarm, and panic hit me, and I left my body again. Like, I just peaced out, out of the body. "I'm not going to be here when this..." 'Cause I, I knew what my mother would do. My mom is awesome, and she's a farm gal. She would have taken that spatula and hit that kid into next week. I mean, there would have been some major you-know-what that went down. But I didn't know what the kid was going to do, and so as I feel the alarm in my body go off, standing there in that kitchen, I am desperate to tell my mom what happened, but my nervous system fired up, and I froze, and I lied. I just said, I said, "Fine," and in that moment, nothing bad happened. See, that's the thing about our responses to trauma. I was just trying to protect myself from something bad happening. The alarm goes off. I don't know what's going to happen, and so I just did the first thing that I felt like doing, which was lying, keeping the peace. But at that point forward, that's when I got locked into a trauma pattern, right there. That's when the wiring inside of me started to flicker. That moment. See, trauma, as you now know, is any single experience that triggers the emotional alarm system to go off inside your body. So let me unpack this. For example, when I woke up as a fourth-grader and found the older kid on top of me, of course, the alarm system rang in my body. That right there is a trauma experience. I also experienced trauma a second time standing in the kitchen, because when my mom turned around and asked me, "How'd you sleep, honey?" that wasn't traumatic. It was when I saw the kid in the room. Whoo! The alarm sounded inside my body again. "Danger, danger, danger." And that's what trauma is. It is any single experience that you live through in life, big, small, whatever, that creates a lasting emotional experience inside of your nervous system. I didn't realize until I was 49 years old and doing this project for Audible that one of the reasons why I have woken up every single morning since that morning in fourth grade when this happened, every single morning, I have woken up with this feeling that something's wrong. I have lived with this. That is because of the trauma. It has had a lasting impact. One incident, a lasting impact, emotionally, in my experience in life. I didn't realize that it was due to the trauma. I just thought that there was something weird about me, that I always woke up and felt like something was wrong. No, this is an example of my nervous system remembering a situation......and reliving it over and over and over again, and the example that I ge- just gave you, I mean, it is a pretty big situation, but it wasn't until four years ago that I understood that that is an example of trauma. And I think it's really important for you to hear that because trauma could be anything. You could have trauma from being bit by a dog or being left home alone after school as a kid. It could be something that happened to you once, like the incident that happened to me in fourth grade, or it could be something that happens hundreds of times. It's in your day-to-day life. It's the discrimination that you're facing. It's the poverty that you're facing. It's the silent treatment in your house. See, trauma is very personal. It's a personal experience because it's not about what's happening outside of you, it's about how you and your body experience what happened. I have another example that I want to share with you before we go further because it will really highlight how even simple experiences that you think that you've gotten over can last with you forever. When I was growing up in Western Michigan, we would often drive up to, um, the pat- the Petoskey area of mis- of Michigan to ski at Boyne Highlands or Boyne Mountain. And I remember there was this one night where we were driving on a Friday night, it was, like, three and a half hours from Muskegon up to pe- Petoskey, and my dad and my brother were in the car ahead of us, and I was driving in, uh... Remember those old Wagoneers with the wood paneling down the side? We were in one of those suckers, and my mom and I were in that, and we had our dog, Spreckels, in it, and I'll never forget this. We were listening to the radio as we were driving, and we were coming into Kalkaska. And Kalkaska I always remembered because that's where the McDonald's was. We would stop there to go to the bathroom and to get a burger. That was, like, sort of two, two hours into the drive, and so the radio comes on, and the person on the radio warned about the fact that due to the weather conditions you needed to be very careful because it was icy out there, and there was a lot of black ice on the road. And at that moment, somebody came up the left-hand side on a two-lane road to try to pass us, and as they tried to pass us, all of a sudden this truck comes up over the hill, and this person swerves in front of us and cuts us off, and we go careening off the side of the road, and it was a wild experience. What happened in that moment is the car rolled several times. I remember it like it was yesterday. The car rolls several times, and the experience was like... It felt like I was sitting still in the car and I was inside, like, a dryer, and everything was tumbling around me. Like, you know, paper went somewhere, the McDonald's cup went somewhere, our dog went from the front all the way to the back, but I felt like I was sitting still. I can't even imagine what it was like for my father and my brother because my dad saw this whole thing play out in the rear-view mirror. So he's watching his wife and his daughter roll off the side of the road down a hill. Now, luckily we were fine. Little shaken up, but we were fine. We had our seat belts on. The dog was freaked out because Spreckels got thrown all the way into the back. But let me tell you something. If I am ever in a situation where I'm walking across crunchy snow. You know the sound of crunchy snow? The kind of wet snow where it's like (makes squeaking noises) it kind of squeaks? If I walk to my mailbox after a wet, crunchy snow and I hear that crunching snow sound, I immediately feel the sensation of being in that car. My brain immediately pulls forward one of the photographs of everything spinning around me. I can immediately sense my mom because the car ended up with me down and her strapped up high because we were on the side, and her making, you know, like, "Are you okay?" I c- I- I'm back there. Why? Because my body just absorbed every aspect of that situation, and it happened to attach the sound of crunching snow to that car rolling. Now what's interesting, and this gets back to the point of trauma being personal, my mom was in the same car. She can walk across crunchy snow, she doesn't think about anything, but if somebody says the words, "It's icy," or, "Black ice," she immediately goes on edge. That's her trigger. That's what her body remembered. And so it's important for you to understand that trauma is an experience stored in your body, and it's stored in a way that is designed for your body to recall it. And the problem with trauma is that it jumps out at you in your adult life when you least expect it because all of a sudden you're, you know (singing) , going through life, and you're walking to the mailbox, and now you're all, like, on edge because the sound of crunching snow puts you on edge. Your body remembers. The alarm goes off. Somebody says, "Black ice," your body remembers, the alarm goes off. Now, I wanted to give you this example because you'll hear the experts talk about capital T Trauma, which are big events like natural disasters, diseases, physical and sexual abuse, witnessing somebody die, witnessing abuse, experiencing neglect, veterans in combat experience this kind of PTSD.But I think every one of us has what the experts call small T trauma, and these are the experiences that I've just described for you that you might not remember, but your nervous system sure does. Let me give you a few examples of these. If you've ever been the only person of a particular race or religion in your classroom, that can cause trauma 'cause it puts you on edge. If you're called worthless, if you have to be quiet 'cause dad's coming home, or you have people constantly commenting on what your body looks like or how tall you are or the freckles on your face, feeling like you don't belong. Now, we're gonna dig into the psychology of this, and in particular, the small T traumas that make you feel unseen and unworthy in the next episode with our expert. But I'm telling you, something happened to you that made you feel unsafe, unseen, or unloved, and that situation that you lived through, it was real. It happened. Hold on a minute, guys. Uh, you know, we don't normally do this, but Jessie's kind of waving her hand over here, and she's, uh, she's one of the producers on the show, and she also manages video production. So if you're watching this on YouTube, thank you, Jessie. Um, but you had a, you had a question, Jessie?