I'm gonna show you a technique that my friend showed me about 24 years ago that,
I've been using every day since then, that has incredibly helped me with
anxiety, depression, and the symptoms of PTSD. I had been going through a whole
bunch of really hard stuff in my life I had been attacked on the street, my
mother had just died of cancer, and someone had broken up with me and all of
this happened like within two weeks. And this woman who, she goes to AA I'm
not an alcoholic but she goes to AA, and she said you know "Do you want me to show
you something that could really help?" She had me take out a pen and paper and
showed me how to take a personal inventory. This is a 12-step thing, but it
totally is helpful for anybody whether they're in 12-step recovery or not. What
you do is get out a piece of paper- this is not gonna be a very, it's not
like a precious journal or anything that you're trying to remember it's just a
you're gonna use a scratch piece of paper. And what you're gonna do is write
your fears and your resentments in sort of a random order of however they come
to you. You don't have to go searching to dig them out, you just kind of take the
top layer of what's on your mind that's bothering you. So if I were to
write some right now I might say "I have fear that this video will come out
stupid. Fear..." I could say I have fear I can shorthand it after that and just say
"Fear I didn't prepare well enough. Fear my hair is messy." Then I might notice
that there's kind of like some harsher fears in there you know "Fear everything
I do comes out wrong." And then I might notice that I actually feel resentful
about something, and I've heard people tell me because I've shown a couple
hundred people how to do this over these last years, but sometimes people say
"Well I don't really have any resentment" and everybody has resentment.
So let's say "I'm resentful at the neighbor..." and then before I say why I say
..."because I have fear they knock the fence down." Now let's say the fence is down and
I suspect it's the neighbor but I don't know that, so it's like I'm resentful at
the neighbor because I have fear they knock the fence down. But if I knew that
they knocked the fence down I would still write the same thing "I'm resentful
at the neighbor because I have fear they knock the fence down." So I never just go
in and say why am resentful, I say I'm resentful at this person or this
institution, because I have fear and then the reason, and usually there's like more
fears under that "Fear without a fence
people can get in and break into the house." And maybe it's not like a physical
danger-fear maybe it's a you know just we call it self-centered fear. "Fear
people will think my family's trashy for having a broken fence. Fear I should fix
it. Fear it will cost over a thousand dollars."
I don't know, we don't even have a broken fence I'm just making something up. So
this is just an example of how the fear is just kind of a stream of
consciousness of what you're noticing, and sometimes it's a really harsh
fear, some of the fears like when I really take enough inventory really
what's at the core is "Fear I'll end up alone. Fear I'll die. And fear I'm no good."
Those are kind of the core fears, and sometimes the fears just sound
really trivial there, it could be just that you need to buy something at the
store you know "Fear we ran out of cheese." And then going again hypothetical I
start to think about the cheese and I go "Well who ate the cheese?" You know so you
know "Fear Jim took my cheese." And I'm laughing because there's really
no order of how trivial or how serious it can be. In my life, like the reason I
have PTSD, is because some really serious stuff happened, but I also get resentful
about incredibly small things and I put all of it on paper I don't like rank
order it I don't try to come up with what's a legitimate fear or a resentment.
I just put whatever is on my mind because it's really that little hamster
wheel of thinking about you know what I'm fearful,
what I'm worried about, what I'm angry about, those are the things that keep me
from really being present in the moment. And so I write as much as I need to, I do
this first thing in the morning, I go get my coffee and I take my
inventory for the day and then I do it again in the evening, before dinner is
usually a nice time, and I write for as long as I need to till I just start to
feel pretty good, and even when I feel good I write, at the very least I write
that I have fear that I don't have time to write very much, but I try to write
you know I try to write whatever it is every day, and when something really is
upsetting going on, I'll write 10 pages. And I'll also write, I'll write when I'm
in the middle of the day and something happens and something is upsetting,
I can always like duck into a quiet room, I can go in a public bathroom, I can get
into my car, and I can take inventory. When I've written enough that I've sort
of gotten it out then I write- it's basically a little prayer at the end- and
it goes like this, and you don't really have to be a God person to
do it, I'm gonna say God as a you know the higher power concept that a
prayer is directed towards, but you don't have to believe in God, I would
just suggest that you think about something greater than your own mind
that you've ever turned to that can give you relief, and whether it's nature or
the universe or a group of people who have really helped you, but just so long
as it's not yourself it's something outside yourself but for
practical purposes I'll say God, I'm a God person, so when I've written enough
inventory I write "Thank you God for revealing
and removing these fears." Notice I didn't even have to ask I just you know trusted,
I've done this so many times I can tell you that writing them on paper removes
them. "Thank you God for revealing and removing these fears I ask only for
knowledge of your will for us and the power to carry it out. And put love, Anna."
There, and that's what it looks like, it just looks like a bunch of writing. I
deliberately write sloppy because I don't want people around the house to
read my inventory because sometimes it's about them, I get resentful at them and
there's no need for me to take that up with them, I just you know I'm just
getting it on paper so I can not take it out on them. Then what I like
to do is follow it with meditation and my friend who showed me how to do this
suggested if I was really gonna write this two times a day that it would help
me if I would go learn Vedic meditation, which is the kind of meditation also
known as transcendental meditation, but Vedic meditation is the generic word for
it. And it's just a very old and simple form of meditating which uses
a mantra. So I found that taking a class and being trained was really helpful, but
if you're not able to do that today you can give yourself a mantra, and a word
that you could try is the word "this" because I'm just looking for a word
there that doesn't really mean a lot it just helps me be in the present, or I've
seen somebody teach some meditation on YouTube where they used the word
"release" and so just a word that doesn't mean a lot, you close your eyes for 20
minutes, and you just kind of focus on that word, saying it silently to yourself.
"This... this." The results are amazing actually, I started when I started doing
this I was in a terrible mental state I was so... I didn't know it at the time
but I had PTSD, and because of the recent attack I was really scattered brained and
my focus was so bad I could barely dial the telephone, and as soon as I went
and learned how to meditate and take an inventory and follow it with
meditation, as soon as I did that I mean within like
the first day I was able to get my focus back and within a couple of weeks, all
that anxiety and depression had left me. And it's not like writing and meditation
make life perfect, but they get you into a neutral zone where you
can kind of start to solve some problems and just like have a day. And day after
day that starts adding up to a much happier life. The other thing is since
I've been doing some research on PTSD it turns out, you know for a long time PTSD
has been really misunderstood and I got it in early childhood, and so it affects
your brain, it affects your ability to kind of stay present and focus when
you're under stress among other things. And so I didn't really know what was
different about me, I knew that I had kind of a rough childhood but
I didn't really know what was going on or why I had certain symptoms, like a lot
of difficulty focusing or a tendency to kind of emotionally over react to things
or a tendency to kind of like check out when like when something would be very
very upsetting to me I get very upset and then just kind of blank out I would
just be sort of like a zombie and I didn't know what that was and now I know
what it is, it's complex or childhood PTSD. So I found out, after I
had been writing and meditating for 12 years, what I was like when I didn't
write and meditate, I just stopped for a while, no good reason really
I just, you know decided to try life without it, and very quickly the symptoms
of PTSD came back where I couldn't focus and my emotions were kind of like you
know over reactive and under reactive to things. And that's when I found out
that's what I had was PTSD and I started reading about it and
it turns out that for a person who has a certain kind of like early trauma
talking about the trauma can actually just make it worse, can make you more
upset and that was always my experience like trying therapy like psychotherapy,
so it'd just be very upsetting and I would leave completely upset and with
not really making any progress on problems the way I heard other people
describe therapy. But that writing is a way of getting at what's bothering you
that uses a different part of your brain than talking about it, and that sometimes
for people with PTSD whether it's the adult onset kind that maybe like a
combat veteran has or the type that people get in early childhood from abuse
or neglect, both kinds respond really well to writing. And then everybody
responds well to meditating and most people you know I say that to people
and they go- I hear this all the time- "I can't meditate my mind is too active" but
that's why you write first. So the fears and the resentments is the
act of mind that makes meditation difficult and by writing it down you can
kind of just like bring it down a little bit, and then if your meditation is full
of thinking and kind of talking to yourself it's okay, the results are still
there it still benefits you. So writing an inventory followed by meditation,
twice a day, very simple, it's free and it really really helps with anxiety,
depression, and PTSD.