Feeling The Trauma That Lives In Our Cells With Nick McGowan

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Hello and welcome to the Mindset and Self-Mastery Show. I’m your host, Nick McGowan, and today on the show we’re gonna talk about feeling trauma in ourselves and what to do with it. When you think about trauma or when I think about trauma, and I think most people when they think about trauma, they think about kind of crazy shit like head traumas or something.

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with a car accident where somebody got into a real bad accident and there was a major trauma or like a tragedy where somebody died in the family maybe a very tragic way or somebody had some sort of crazy injury that you are friends with or family members you work with or whatever and there’s some sort of trauma with it there’s also the trauma that a lot of us don’t often talk about but we all actually have it’s the traumas from when we were younger

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traumas of things that maybe have happened recently in your career or in your relationships. A trauma isn’t something crazy and blood-bathy or anything like that. It doesn’t have to be. Really what trauma is, it’s a deeply distressing or disturbing experience. Deeply distressing for some people could be just about anything and that’s not a judgment. That’s just some people are really hypersensitive to things. They’re hyper emotional.

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Or there’s something that has triggered them from the past trauma of something that had happened before and they just Aren’t able to get through that Now if you think of a trauma of something that’s distressing Think about the past 48 hours There’s probably something that was even just slightly distressing. Hopefully there wasn’t anything disturbing Because a disturbing experience is something that can really shake you

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can also really change you in very good ways, but you need to work through that. And if you’ve had one of those disturbing experiences within the past 48 hours, I really hope that you’re talking with somebody about it. You’re not just holding that back and you’re not just keeping it under wraps. I think there’s a lot to be said about processing through internally, but there’s also a lot to be said about just having conversations with people. So not to stand on a pedestal and talk about that.

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preach to have conversations with people. But really, when we think of traumas, for the most part, I think people think about the craziness. So the traumas that you’ve had over the past, let’s say 10, 15, 20, 30 years, whatever it’s been, jump all the way back to childhood. And I’ve had traumas that range all the way back through childhood. There are traumatic experiences that have happened to me over the past even a few years.

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some that have happened in the past six months or 12 months and different things that have really changed me or at least could be categorized as a trauma. And when you think about traumas being in our cells, it’s just like an experience being in our cells. I think something that really might kind of drive this home is like when you smell something. Let’s say you smell apple pie walking into a bakery or a restaurant or whatever.

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might bring you right back to like your grandma’s kitchen or growing up your neighbor’s always baked or something like that. Some experience that’s like that. I hope that you don’t have an experience with apple pie where something really traumatic and disturbing happened and that has just ruined the smell of apple pie for you. That would kind of suck. But there are things that are like that. Having smells or different sight, different visions that you’ve seen, like I’ve…

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I think about going back to the Philadelphia area and every so often just driving around. There’s not only nostalgia with that, but there are things that come back to me mentally, physically, sometimes even spiritually, driving through different areas or being in different spots of the town or different restaurants or what have you. Some that bring great memories and some that remind me of traumatic experiences. So.

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With traumas, for the most part, I think a lot of our stuff that we work through and really the tough shit that we as adults work through are our traumas from when we were children. But that’s not where they all stop. It’s not like you from four to nine, you went through some fucking wacky shit, but after that everything was peachy because there’s still stuff that’s going to happen no matter what. But it’s also how you react to those things that had happened before.

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when you were four to nine, what happened that was traumatic that you have actually worked through and processed through and healed through or that you really haven’t and maybe you don’t want to. And I get it. There’s some really dark shit that happens to a lot of people, a lot of deep traumas that some may even categorize wasn’t a trauma because they don’t know what else to categorize it as.

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But if it was something that was very distressing or disturbing, I think when people really step aside and think about that, there are a lot of traumatic experiences that have shaped the way that we look at things. And sometimes those experiences will come out again through smell or a vision or just a memory, but there are times where it also happens within ourselves. So I think back to when I was a, well, I guess a little boy,

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and my dad had asked me to go get a specific tool, pick a wrench name or whatever the fuck it was. And I didn’t exactly know what it was. I had asked, well, what is this thing? Or, you know, what does it look like or whatever? And I guess being a creative and a little bit quirky at times as a kid, I could look at one thing and feel how it could relate to something else.

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even like a wrench, like whatever wrench you want to name, it was, they could all kind of work together. And I remember thinking like, yeah, this one could kind of look like this one, maybe he meant this thing or whatever. And I got a little frazzled as a kid because there was other trauma, other experiences that have happened that led me to that. That wasn’t the first, but the one that I remember is, that comes to mind now, is going to get that wrench.

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and coming back with a different wrench and being like, I think I got it. My dad was like, what is this? And sort of called me an idiot, like, no, that’s the wrong one. You gotta listen, you gotta pay attention. Use your brain. The amount of times I heard think, use your brain, use your brain, use your brain. If I had a penny for every time I heard that, I’d be a gazillionaire at this point. And I remember thinking that as a kid that I messed this up. And that was a traumatic experience.

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It may not be on the level of molestation or witnessing a murder or anything like that. However, that is still a traumatic experience. And the reason why I chose that one, I could talk about some of the other crazy shit, but this is something that I think we all go through probably as a child. Starting off with somebody said, no, this is stupid or that’s stupid or you’re stupid or whatever.

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and that can shift you away from the thing that had happened. Now that experience, I remember being really upset and not feeling like I could talk to my dad about it, not feeling like I really had any right to talk to him at all. I felt shame because of it. And that was a thing that worked its way through for the next handful of years. And there were different moments where I’d be really hesitant to bring something to somebody else.

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or some other family member or friend or what have you. And there’d be times where I would get called out for things, playfully even, that I would get really defensive because of the traumatic experience I had before. And I could feel it well up in me. One that really comes to mind that I joke about often with my partner and with my friends and especially the friend that this happened with. I remember, I don’t know, maybe…

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10th or 11th grade, there was a cover that was done by the Deftones and it was spelled C-H-A-U-F-F-E-R. I thought, benetically, that sounds like Choffer. So I went with Choffer and I remember saying to my friend, like, man, have you heard this new Choffer? This is the best song I’ve heard from this band in the past two years, blah, blah. And he’s looking at me like, fucking what?

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Chauffeur? You mean the chauffeur?

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I remember realizing and letting it sink in and being like, oh yeah, fuck, that’s probably a little bit more accurate, but no, it’s the choffer and like I stuck with it. And I can remember that thinking back now about how I felt it in my body and how I felt shame that I didn’t know that word. And I brought it to my friend, a loved one, let’s say, of-

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This is this thing and I’m so excited about this and I want you to check this out and I was all proud about bringing it to him and being called out I got really defensive I probably cursed him out slightly, you know in a probably D-bag move because I felt such shame and he gracefully just kind of laughed it off and was like dude No, that’s wrong Here, this is the actual word

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And again, I still laugh about it and share the story and I get a kick out of it every time. But it makes me think about how I felt that in my being. Like I could feel it moving through my arms and just the cells within my body. Now, if I go back to that childhood experience with the wrenches and being like, well, I didn’t get you the right wrench and I got scolded and shamed, all of that. I was maybe very emotional with it, but.

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there was a lot of different pieces that tied into that trauma. Then years later, having the chauffeur experience and things that reminded me of a previous trauma. And I hadn’t done any of the work to actually work through it. I don’t even think any of that occurred to me specifically in high school of doing any of that work, going back through any of it at all. Fast forward a few years. I’m in high school or out of high school.

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in business and starting to actually step into entrepreneurialism. And being an entrepreneur, I knew that I had that within side of me since I was a little kid and my dad was, other family members were or are. And I’ve always thought about different ways to be able to help people monetize different things, use different things, different ways.

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always thought, I think outside of the box, and I’d love to be able to run my own company, help people make my own money and do all of that. And I started to do that as a young 20 something and had some really traumatic experiences with that. And some things with business partners that I thought were great friends that really there were some abuse involved.

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No physical abuse really, but there was mental and verbal and traumatic experiences that reminded me of all the way back to childhood, thinking and feeling through all of that within my being. I’d done some of that work, some of the internal work in my early 20s, but I remember a few years after that, and I’d mentioned this in a previous episode, I took a little bit of an off season.

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part of that offseason.

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I didn’t really work on myself, but I remember actually taking steps aside and realizing and becoming aware of certain things. So from that experience in my own business and with partners, there was another experience that happened years later. That was a length of time in a recent company that I had, recent as within the past decade. In that company.

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I had two other partners and one of those partners was verbally and mentally abusive as well. I think there’s a little bit of a pattern there. I had a lot of trauma within my being by being in that company. I remember thinking through, how do I get through this shit? How do I do this the right way? How do I bring the information to this team member? How do I actually…

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get something moving along without having an argument, without getting into some crazy shame fest and without feeling trauma. And at that point I wasn’t considering it trauma because I was in it. I was in the mix and I was working on things. I didn’t actually understand that I had been moving through traumatic experience one by one by one and I kept compounding it onto myself.

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you can probably relate with that at some point in time. You’ve probably had experience after experience after experience that were actually traumas that were stacking upon them. And hopefully you’ve worked your way through them, talked through them. If not, reach out to me and we can talk about things. But if there are things that you have stacked up over the course of time, then it takes a bit more to be able to, let’s say, unstack them and work through them because they’re kind of all sandwiched together. I’ve been going through

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months of that, which almost led me to suicide. And I’m glad that I took that step back, figuratively, physically, all of it. And having that experience, once I got out of that experience, I was aware of that. I talked more about that in my reset button program and that period of time where I needed to actually hit the reset button in life and

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not only worked through my traumas, my past experiences, but I tripled my income and really started down the path that I’m on right now. So if you have questions about that, message me when we talk about the reset button. If that’s what you feel where you are at in life right now, that’s something I would highly suggest being able to actually work through. And the first two pieces of it is what I was going through when I realized that I had those traumatic experiences stacked upon themselves over the course of 25, 30 years.

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And it was being aware of it, and then taking inventory of what’s actually real, and what do I wanna keep on with me for the rest of the journey. But that awareness was the most crucial part of it. Think about it, if you’re not aware of something, how the fuck are you supposed to do anything? If you’re standing in the middle of the road and a car is coming at you, but you have a blindfold on, and headphones, and can’t hear anything or see anything.

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How are you supposed to be aware of that? But if you take those things off and to go along with the rest of this you can see and hear it then you can become aware of it and obviously at that point you’re gonna get out of the way or attempt to move or do something take some sort of action but you can’t do that unless you’re aware of it. So becoming aware of your traumas and the things that you’ve been through and how even they can all stack up

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themselves, you can then start to work through it and figure out where does this shit go back to? What happened? And what led that to this? What led to these things without interpreting what happened, but really understanding the facts of the matter of what it was and how you felt it to be. So when I think back to all the way back to childhood, I remember feeling shame and a lot of discomfort and feeling like

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disappointment and feeling unsafe, unloved, all of that. And then years later, working in different scenarios, feeling those same traumas and feeling them inside my cells, feeling it in my being. There’d be times where I could feel things coming up and it wasn’t just a thought or some sort of inner intuition feeling as much as it was in my…

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body. I guess another way to be able to put this is if you think of somebody that you’ve seen maybe an ex or somebody who physically abused you or you’re arch nemesis or whatever, you can feel it in your body. That’s similar. There’s a trauma there and the traumatic experiences that live in your cells, live in your heart, live in your mind as well and it’s about working through all of those but again being aware of what’s actually happening

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and what the feeling is coming from. I think we all kind of know when we feel anxious at times, even though it’s not always easy to know it right in the moment, being aware of it, but it is knowing that, hey, I feel really anxious right now, even if it’s just been simmering for a little bit. So being aware of those things and being able to work through them are two different parts, but they tie in together. So I’ve shared about a handful of different experiences that have happened and how

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They’ve pretty much stacked upon themselves over the course of time, but how I’ve also been able to look back through them and see how they’ve stacked upon themselves and started to be able to unravel it a bit and understand how the pieces connect. Because then I can actually do something with those pieces. And from those, I can do different things in new situations, which brings me to a new situation I had. So.

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I’m in a business with my partner and there’s a lot of merging that has been happening within our businesses but also a lot of changes for me personally and looking at things differently than I had in the past. Understanding how my winning strategy ties into everything that I’ve done and realizing everything that I’ve done in the past working in corporate America and running my own companies, how they have shaped.

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who I am today, but how I do things today doesn’t have to be shaped by what I’d done before. So I’m really hyper aware of all that. And I’ve been working on that for the past few months. Specifically over the past, I’d say 45, maybe 60 days or so. I’ve really, I’ve committed to myself that I know that I’m very emotional. If you’re familiar with the Enneagram.

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I’m a four with a wing three, and I know that I’m hyper emotional at times. And that there are times where I have really pushed away my emotions and stepped as far back from them as I could, almost repelling from them, because I didn’t want to actually go through what I thought was against my winning strategy. Before I thought my winning strategy, if I had thought about that, I would have thought that was a great thing, because that helped me win.

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but I understand that it’s actually held me back. I will get into more about winning strategy over the course of the episodes, but this recent experience that happened with me feeling how I’m feeling, I’ve told myself that I’m going to allow all my emotions to come up when they happen, but I’m going to control them. Not going to let them control me. I’m gonna do everything in my power to not let them spew out or even really show their face.

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in a sense, on my being, but how traumas live in ourselves, sometimes that’s really hard to do. So this experience that happened recently was something where I had a business situation that tied in myself, my business partner, my team members, and there was a lot of time crunching and just…

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scheduling that needed to be done and movement of things and a lot that was going on all at once And for the most part, I feel like I’m pretty good at being able to handle things quickly and understanding how the pieces can work But there are times where based on traumas and even ptsd That my brain just feels like mush like there’s so much going on But I can typically separate those things and work through them. However, when the trauma is involved with it coupled along with

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that monkey brain being mush in with feeling insecure and feeling unsafe and feeling like I needed to have all the information and all the answers like that, just immediately.

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I could tell there was some stress there no matter what, within my heart and within my mind, and I could feel it. Like I even feel now as I talk about it, there’s a bit of an energy going through my body. Part of the energy is, I get hyped doing these podcast episodes, but you know, I’m just on. But some of this is also subconsciously reliving what that was and what those other situations were and how the traumas kind of stacked upon themselves.

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So being aware that something was off was kind of the first part of that. My partner’s great at being able to be empathetic and understanding and intuitive where she can sense when something’s off in advance, way in advance from when I can. She can just sense that. Some of that comes from her traumas as well where she’s had to really grow into that superhuman

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sort of intuition tapping to be able to understand that was a way to keep her safe and for me there are times where it was easier for me to just kind of deflect or bypass things, especially as I got older and it was really painful to go back and work through those traumas and think about those and live in those traumas and be really aware of those and be present in those moments, but with the situation that happened and the stress that was going on I knew

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in my mind that it really wasn’t that crazy. Things needed to be put together and that I was having a hard time piecing all the pieces together. But I also knew that I had a partner and other team members and everything else that was going on that could all just fit in place. But the traumas from before almost rendered me useless. There were a few times where I was like, I don’t know what to do. And I was just really

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frustrated and Shaky and I could feel it in me. I Remember thinking All right. This is actually infecting Infecting the way that I’m doing Anything for the situation it’s stopping me from being able to think clearly and it’s stopping me from being able to understand what is real and what isn’t real and take inventory of everything and Compartmentalize or even just kind of piece it all together

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because I had these feelings that were coming up and literally living at my cellular level. It took me a bit to be able to understand that though, because sometimes it’s easy for us to be able to just put our minds and our hearts and our body all together and just say I’m stressed, or I’m anxious, or I’m whatever. So being able to understand what’s actually happening and how it all ties together, how it all relates and how it all flows.

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within itself is very important. Sometimes it’s really hard to decipher though and be able to understand which is which and which one do you need to work on first. I’d worked through that and once I understood that it was more of a cellular thing, it hit me almost like an aha moment of how many other traumas and experiences live in ourselves and how they come up and come out.

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And with the commitment I made to myself that I’m going to feel through all of my emotions and be able to work through all of them but not spew them out, then it was something that I knew had to come up and get to the edge and even be able to teeter over that edge for me to actually be able to work through it. Being able to have the support that I have is crucial. And being able to have the love that I have is crucial.

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in being in a safe space to be able to talk through this. So if you don’t feel like you have a safe space and you’re in a spot that’s like this, reach out. We can absolutely help. If you’re working through any sort of situation that you know I have these traumas that infect the way that I handle these sort of situations either at work or with family or whatever, then it’s being able to separate from those pieces and understanding what’s in your mind, what’s in your heart and what’s in your cells, what’s in your body. And you…

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be able to feel when those things are happening. Even if you work through the mind and the heart pieces of it, you still may have it in yourselves just like what I’ve had. And as I’ve worked through this situation over the past few days working through it and understanding everything that’s happening within myself, it starts to help me release them and kind of break them apart and be able to understand what’s going through it. So

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the situation that happened recently, when I became aware of the traumas living in my cells, I was able to actually do something about them. But it took me being aware of it, and then being able to take an inventory of what’s real, what’s going on, separating from the situation that was actually happening to the situation I thought was happening or I felt was happening, and being able to work through and unpack each piece of that. So, as you work through

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any of your traumas or all of your traumas and you even think through what was considered a trauma, something that was distressing or a disturbing experience. And you can put different levels if you want, like somebody knocked over my coffee, maybe that’s a one, somebody killed a family member in front of me, maybe that’s a 10. And you know, kind of having those levels to it, that’s totally fine, whatever helps you with it.

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being able to understand what is a trauma and as you think through it or feel through it feel if it’s happening in your body and what happens to your body when that happens. I’m sure I could have an entire episode about how actually being able to work through each and every piece of that but we could also talk if you need to be able to have specific one-on-one time with me let me know and we can talk about that but there’s a lot that goes into

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how you actually work through your traumas, but you have to be aware of it first. So it took me being aware of what was happening, what was real, what wasn’t, what was living in my cells and what was living in the rest of my body or my mind or my heart, and being able to work through that. But understanding no matter what, when you feel that in your body, you can do what you need to do with it. Sometimes it’s just a matter of

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taking that next step and saying I can feel this in my body but my intuition is telling me move on this then that can help you to break through that and be able to continue to build upon that muscle where you can set new neural pathways and create new experiences and get rid of the old experience but you need to know that it’s there to be able to do it so I really appreciate you spending the time with me today and

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not only listening to the stories, but being able to think about your own trauma and how traumas live within yourselves and what happens when those traumas come up, what you do with them and how you move about them. Even if the biggest thing and the only thing you take away from this episode is just being aware of when you are in a traumatic experience or when you’re being triggered by a previous traumatic experience, that is crucial.

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If that’s the only takeaway you get from this, then beautiful. Start to implement that as quickly as you can. Because once you’re aware of that, you have the power to do something with it. You can crumble and you can totally cry and shit yourself in the corner or whatever you need to do. Or you can be empowered and do something with it. Or you can do something right in the middle and be weird and awkward and like just work through it like everybody else is. But you have the power to be able to do that at that point.

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So again, thank you for spending the time with me today. And if you’ve enjoyed the show, give us a five star review. It helps us be found and helps others be healed. And I really appreciate you being with us today.