How To Motivate Yourself & Move Forward After Trauma

We’ve all had challenges and traumas in the past, whether they’re either psychological or physical and it’s hard to move forward from these traumas.

Today, I’m going to discuss how to motivate yourself and move forward after a trauma.

I wasn’t going to do a video on this topic today and you know, my wonderful wife, Christine, last week, she had just mentioned to me the significance of the anniversary last week. And, you know, usually I remember it, but she got reminded by a Facebook post on somebody’s wedding anniversary. It was her friend’s 25th wedding anniversary out in Minnesota. She went to undergraduate in Minnesota at St. Olaf’s college. There’s a shout out to you guys. And she was at their wedding.

And while she was at their wedding, I was involved in a life-threatening serious car accident back home in New York, on long island. 

She had to fly home, not knowing if I was going to make it and how serious the accident was.

It’s the 25th anniversary of my car accident that changed my life and changed it for the better.

So I decided to talk a little bit about it and what it meant to me and how I move past my past trauma and was able to move forward for the better.

So I’m going to tell you a little bit about my story and if you’ve heard this before, I apologize. And, if you haven’t heard it before, this will be the first time for you.

So about 25 years ago, I was in a friend’s car;  I was in the passenger seat and he made a turn across traffic. And at the same time somebody was going too fast in the opposite direction and “T-boned” the car right where I was sitting. And unfortunately what happened was the car folded up on top of me.

And I woke up two days later in the hospital and never knew what happened.

Now, after the fact that I had found out that, um, the car had pinned me and folded up, uh, with me inside it. 

The fire department had to cut me out. And because of my head wound that I had, they weren’t sure if I was going to make it. So the helicopter media to the local trauma hospital and thank goodness they did. And within that same day, I’d had a nine hour surgery where one doctor was fixing the head wound that I had and other orthopedic doctors were fixing my leg.

Now, my right leg, was shattered in eight places.  I had shattered my hip in two places.  My lower two leg bones, the tibia and fibula, in six different places.

The Surgeons put long rods down the length of my thighbone and down the length of my lower leg. Also six screws, four cables and a plate.

So, okay. So here it was, I spent a week and a half the hospital.  I subsequently spent, let’s say a couple of weeks in a wheelchair. I was using a Walker for about a month. I didn’t walk without crutches for five months. I was out of work for almost a year.

While I had, significant damage to my leg, I had severe nerve damage to my other leg, where that took about six months to a year to recover from.

Again, after being out of work for almost a year now, I had a second surgery to remove some of the hardware, but most of the hardware is still in my right leg, hopefully, for the duration until I pass away when I’m a hundred years old. 

Now what happened was, after that accident, I had healed well as per all the doctors would say.  I had also fractured my spine at the L4 level that had left some significant dysfunction as well.

But after that year, when the doctors said that I was all healed and recovered, what happened was, I was still left with some significant pain.

Now, anybody who’s been through some traumatic accidents, and I know a lot of people have been through some significant traumas that were much worse than what mine was. And, and for anybody who’s listening to this or sees this video, and they’ve been through a significant trauma themselves, or love somebody who is, or have had some, some kind of physical or psychological trauma in the past, I’m sorry that you had to go through that.

But, as you know, I had had severe, significant chronic pain, that had lasted for quite some time. And probably for over five to seven years, I’d had bad chronic pain that had stopped me and stopped my function from doing daily activities.

And for those of you who know me, I’m also a physical therapist that I specialize in manual therapy in the orthopedic field. And there was very often times when I was probably in, and had more significant pain, than some of the people that I was treating.

And so this had gone on for quite some time.  But there were times when I would be limited in what I could do, normally, through my activities of daily living and work. And I had to miss days of work for it.

And this went on for about five to seven years, but you know, you go to the doctor and the doctor says you’re healed and, their job is done and that the surgery went well.

And it’s usually at this point, that your options are either pain management, where the choices are injections or medication. And that’s a difficult route to go.

And so I finally, one day this was the kind of…

the aha moment for me or, should I say,

the bottom of the barrel or…

the straw that broke the camel’s back, however you want to put it.

And, I got into a point one morning when I was getting into my car… and it had a tough morning, where I woke up with back pain and woke up with leg pain, was getting in the car to go to work.

And my back had seized up from the pain that I’d had for no particular reason at all. And I couldn’t move.

And fortunately, my wonderful wife came out to the car and helped me back into the house. And I had to call in sick for work. And for those of you who know me, …I don’t call in sick for work.

I owned my practice for years. And so I had to call in and cancel all my patients for a couple of days.

And this is where the point that I finally said…

“enough is enough. I can’t take this anymore. I’ve got to do something about it”

… and what this did, was get me to the point where I had the awareness that I couldn’t continue at this level.

I couldn’t continue at this pace where I was stuck in this negative cycle.

The Awareness Stage:

And so that for me,  The Awareness Stage, was this first stage where I realized I had to do something to change this.

Because as per the doctors, I was healed.  I had this traumatic car accident, which everybody would say,… Hey, you have a reason to have all this pain and dysfunction, but the doctors would say you’re healed and their surgeries are done.

So where do you go from here? So this is my awareness phase where I said enough is enough.

The Search Phase

And then for me came The Search Phase. I said, there’s gotta be some way that I can change this.  It did help being a physical therapist. I already had a background of wellness and wanting to seek out wellness and different things that I could do to improve my state.

I started searching.  I researched things from pain management, psychology of pain,  personal development. I read everything from Lao Tse Zung to Buddha, to the Bible, to Norman Vincent Peale, Tony Robbins, Brendan Bouchard, James Allen; anything you can think of that would help me improve my state or allow me to see things differently.

And then I came to the point where I was getting more and more information and the more information I researched and knowledge on the mind and the psychology of pain and just psychology, In general, I finally got to a realization point an aha moment.

The Realization Phase:

I couldn’t tell you exactly where it was, where I was standing, but the aha moment was when things started to change for me.

Things started to change for me when I realized it’s was my mindset that made the most difference of all.

And my mindset was the most important aspect and the fact that

I am in control.

And so, what I am saying is that… you are in control!

And it’s your mindset that is most important.

I have a saying that I developed about five years ago and the saying is,

“Awaken Your Mind And See Clearly

The Path That Leads To

The Accomplishment Of Your Goals.” 

…Mark

So again, it’s awakening your mind. It’s becoming aware that what you’re going through after this past traumatic event, whether it’s psychological or physic physical, that you can’t go through it anymore, or you’re not happy with where you are at the moment, but if we awaken your mind and you become aware of this, that’s when you can make the choice and start to see a difference in your life.

So, for me, after my trauma, what changed for me was my focus and my mindset.

So here it was, I didn’t get any different treatment. Now I had wonderful therapies. Over the years, I had wonderful therapist that worked with me and my wife worked on me. She’s a physical therapist as well.

I always had temporary improvement, but I always came back to that chronic pain level.

But what changed for me the most was not any PT program or any exercise program or any specific mechanical treatment. What made the most difference in my life, after seven years of chronic pain was my mindset, and that was all the difference in the world.

When I started going through the search phase to probably three to six months that now I didn’t have chronic pain. Now, now that’s not to say I did. I had it didn’t have any pain. Anybody who tells you, they have no pain after an accident like that. All the dysfunction that they may have from that is usually not telling the complete truth. I have pain just like any other person, but the difference is, is not having chronic pain anymore and not having the chronic pain Pyne, excuse me, chronic pain mindset. See the difference is, is now when I get pain, it’s attached to something that I’ve either done physically, like let’s say, hike, a mountain, which I do often, or a do exercise or work in the backyard, or do landscaping. That’s beyond the capability of what I would normally do. Let’s say, instead of doing an hour, I did four, six hours then sure.

I get pain. I get a flare up of the dysfunctions that I have in my hip or my back. Um, and nobody’s saying it’s in my mind or in your mind, because I have practically a hardware store in my right leg. So that’s a mechanical thing that’s going on with me, that limits my hip limits, my knee. I have weakness in there. I probably have some early degenerative arthritis. That’s all there. I’m not denying that. That’s there. What I am saying is my mindset of seeing that there’s a reason for my pain and that if, depending on how I treat it, that pain will go away. And then what happens is I have a flare up, the flare up, goes away, and I got back to my status quo, which is, is feeling no pain or fear feeling the normal pain that you may have from dysfunction that you have.

And then it’s my job or your job or month. Let’s say, my job of we’re talking about me at this point is in doing the things and improve my level of wellness. That’s going to keep me in what I call the sweet spot of where I need to be. And that sweet spot allows me to live the way with a level of wellness that keeps me feeling well and being well and not being in that chronic pain mindset. See, so now let’s talk about how do you motivate, how do you motivate yourself and move forward from a past trauma? Now, your motivation depends on what you’re focusing on. And so very often, if you’re focusing and trapped in a negative mindset cycle, let’s say, I call it a negative mindset loop. You’re focusing on that past traumatic event and focusing on your pain and problems.

And the brain is an amazing tool. The brain is amazing in that. It will continue to give you back whatever you focus on most during your day. So if you’re focusing on pain and problems, your brain will give you more pain and problems. Now, if you’re focusing on that past traumatic event, guess what your brain is going to focus on that past traumatic event and all of the negative things that come from that past traumatic event. Now, this happens to me. You’ll be surprised how many times this happened to me as a physical therapist over my career. And I’ve been a therapist for 25 years. Now, you notice the confluence of the 25 years being a therapist and the 25 years since my accident, I did not become a physical therapist because of my accent. Although that would have been a good story too. I became a physical therapist and in two years, two days after my last clinical rotation, as a physical therapy student, I got in my accident.

I actually went to my physical therapy graduation with 150 staples still in my body and using a Walker. And the school was nice enough to give me a sheds lounge to lay in during my, um, post-graduate, um, uh, graduation ceremony. So, although, so as physical therapist, let me get back to the story there. So as a physical therapist, many times in my career, I’d have a patient come in and the person would say, mark, uh, somebody gave me your name and said that I’d have a chance to feel better with you. And, but I’m going to tell you, it’s all been since this day when I had this accident and I’ve always had pain since then, I have pain now. And I’m pretty sure I’m always going to have pain in the future. Now that sounds stark when you’re listening to it, right? And you can see that as an issue of what that person’s mindset is, but that person literally will come out.

Let’s call him Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones comes to me and says, I’m always had pain since this traumatic accident. I have pain now, and I’m always going to have pain. And I say, you know what? Mr. Jones, you’re absolutely right. Because if that person has told their brain that they’re always going to have pain, and they’re always going to dysfunction, have this function, that’s what your brain gives you. It gives you more of what you focus on. That person is telling their brain that they are always going to have chronic pain. So it see what their focus is on the pain and the problems and the traumatic accident. So therefore they’re locked in that negative mindset loop and they can’t break it. So how do you improve? How do you enhance or how do you motivate yourself and move forward if you’re stuck in this cycle?

Cool. Now what you really need to do do is change your mindset and change what your focus is. Okay? So the first I’m actually going to talk a little bit about time travel too. Now, my wife had laughed at that because she says I’m obsessed with time. And that may be a little true, but we’re going to, we’re going to talk about psychological time. Now. Physical time is like analog time. I’m looking at my watch. That’s how we schedule our appointments every day. That’s how we kind of run our lives. I have to be here at one. I have to be here at three. I have to be this place at four. I wake up at this time, we’re going to talk about psychological time, which is what psychological time has passed, present future, right? So now if your mind is stuck at a past traumatic event, and this made such a huge difference for me, this was one of the things that made the most difference for me from going a state of chronic pain, to a state of not having pain.

If you’re stuck, if your mind is stuck in the past at your traumatic event, for me, it was my motor vehicle accident. Then what happens is me, my mind being stuck in the past, takes my mind away from my present self. And so all of that trauma of the past now makes me smaller and the presence or giving me less presence in the moment. So that takes away. And very often that same person who’s got their mind stuck in that past event, that past traumatic event. And can’t let go of that. They also worry about the future and what’s going to happen in the future because of that traumatic event. They’ve that they’ve gone through very often. Now, I’m talking to, in my example, this was a physical, traumatic motor accident. Other people that may be a psychological event or an emotional event, or a combination of both, or you may have been an accident yourself.

And we worried about the future of what’s going to happen in the future because of this event that I’ve gone through. And guess what, if your mind is stuck worrying about the future, and guess what? That takes away from me again, it takes away my presence. So in the presence I become, I’m going to shrink a little bit. I become smaller and smaller and smaller, but what happens is if we can change our focus and let go, oh, of the past traumatic event. And that doesn’t mean forget the past traumatic. Yeah. We’re going to use that past traumatic event. We don’t forget it, but we let know ourselves go. We let our shells detach from the emotional negative component of that past traumatic event. And guess what that does. That brings me more present in the moment. And now what would we, what do we do?

What about future worry? Because we’re worrying about a path future that hasn’t happened. Yeah. And that’s negative worry. So if we can let go of that negative worry and how we improve the future is creating a future by setting goals, setting our Fision creating our vision for what the future will hold. This makes us again, stronger in the present. So again, rather than being stuck in a negative cycle mindset loop and being stuck in the past and taking away from our present self away from our present self and worrying about a future that hasn’t happened yet, making us smaller and smaller and smaller, we’d let go of that past traumatic event. Remember not forgetting it, but using it as well. You said goals for the future, from what we will become and how to create our future self, which makes us stronger in the present and allows us to make decisions that will help us reach those goals in the future.

So, you know, how do we motivate ourselves? How do we move forward again? Like what’s the steps. So first of all, it’s becoming aware just what I had talked about. It’s becoming aware and allowing yourself to see that way your are, is in a negative cycle. And that first step is awareness. It’s almost always the first step in most things that we need to change about ourselves. So the first thing is that awareness and making the choice to see things differently and to focus on different things, into focus, start to focus on the positive aspects of what you want and what your goals are for the future. So once you’re making that choice, then we need to, and, uh, once we make the choice and we say, you know what, I’m going to decide to let go of that past traumatic event. Again, it doesn’t mean that that negative event did not happen.

We all know that that posture, we, that past traumatic event happened, but we need to now use that. Let go of the negative aspects of it. Cause we can’t change the fact that that negative thing happened. But what we can do is change our response to what we’re going to do about it and move forward, knowing that we can set goals for what we want to happen in the future. We need to reframe our thoughts about our current mindset. Because if we stay in that negative mindset loop, we’re not going to see any changes because we’ll say, yes, I know I need to change. But what happens is if we don’t change that focus, we just keep going in the same path that we’re going. One of my favorite quotes is, and it’s attributed to many people, whether it’s, uh, mark Twain, um, Henry Ford, a lot of different people, but then never, never one person was, uh, was quoted as saying it is, if you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always be what you’ve always been.

Now. Think about that. If you always do what you’ve always done now, then you’ll always be what you’ve always been. So if you want to see different results than what you’ve been doing, getting, you have to do things differently than how you’ve been doing them. So we need to, if we want to make changes from where we are now and break this negative mindset loop, we need to first have the awareness. And if you watching this video and listening to this and continuing to listen to me through this, then you’re already recognizing that. Then you make the choice to, to set goals for yourself and to focus on the more positive aspects of what you want to focus on. And by setting goals for the future and being specific about your goals and how you want to live your life and what you want your level of wellness to be.

Then your brain starts to focus on solutions to challenges rather than pain and problems and traumatic events. Remember, if you focus on pain and problems, you get more pain and problems. You focus on solutions to challenges. Your brain will start to focus on solutions. So how do I become more? Well, instead of why do I have all this pain? Because you’ve Roddy says, why do I have all this pain? Your brain is going to tell you to say, I’ll tell you why you have all this. And you had all this pain because you had this past traumatic event. And that gives you the right to have all this pain. You have all this pain because you have all this hardware on your leg, or you herniated a disc or your neck went out or you were in a car accident or you fell down a flight of stairs.

Whatever that traumatic event is is that’s your brain telling you, you have reason for this, but what we need to do say, okay, we’re not going to focus on the pain and a traumatic event. We’re going to focus on how do I begin? Well, same thing. How do I want to lose weight? Okay. So a person, if they say, why can’t I lose weight? Or why am I so big? Or why can’t I get, why can’t I exercise more? Your brain is going to tell you as well, you’re not losing weight because you’re eating this, this and this, or you’re not exercising enough and you’re not losing weight because you’re not doing this, this, and this more importantly, say to yourself, I am losing weight or I become, or I weighed this much by doing this, this and this. And that gives your brain, its marching orders to start focusing on the things that you know, you need to do to get yourself where you want to go.

So first setting goals, then making plans out to how, how are you going to reach those goals and then scheduling out, how are you going to do the specific things that you need to do to help yourself and reach those goals? So again, if you’re in that mega negative mindset loop, now it can be a tough place to be in. I was there and it is daily work to work on yourself, to try to prevent yourself from staying in that negative negative mindset loop. I work on this stuff all day. I love working on mindset and motivation and how to improve people’s state of mind and, um, to enhance what we focus on. And I still have challenges with getting caught in a negative mindset loop. So it’s not one of those things where you can just do at one time and say, oh, this stuff doesn’t work.

You need to work on motivation. You need to work on mindset. Every single day. Somebody had a funny quote where they say, I recommend motivation, just like showering. You should do it every day because it wears off. So that’s, that’s the funny kind of statement to say, but it’s so true. You can’t just do one and done. Continue to work on yourself, continue to work on your own personal growth and development and break that negative cycle because how to let go of those past negative traumas and motivate yourself. You need to motivate yourself by focusing on the positive.

Be Positive, Be Motivated, Be Focused and Be Well,

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