BN#66: Finding and Healing the Root Cause of Your Anxiety
How Understanding Others' Healing Process Can Lead to Your Own Healing
Summary Points:
Understanding Trauma vs. Traumatic Events
Dr. Gabor Mate differentiates between traumatic events (e.g., sexual assault) and the trauma caused by them (e.g., fear of safety, shame). The focus of healing is on the trauma, not the event.
Primary vs. Secondary Trauma
Primary trauma often stems from relational wounds, like emotional neglect in childhood, leading to disconnection from the True Self.
Secondary trauma is linked to later events (e.g., sexual assault), compounding earlier trauma and creating adaptive behaviors like hypervigilance and people-pleasing.
Symptoms of Trauma Across Domains
Either the PBT 9 Boxes, the IPNB 9 Brain Integrations, or the common everyday language of the 6 key areas:
Spiritual: Disconnection from the True Self, lack of self-compassion.
Mental: Negative beliefs (e.g., "I am alone"), shame, and an inner critic.
Emotional: Anxiety, depression, emotional dysregulation.
Body: Trapped energy, physical ailments (e.g., "The Body Keeps the Score").
Behavior: Adaptive behaviors like hypervigilance or avoidance.
Relations: Insecure attachment and relational struggles.
Healing Trauma Is Multi-Dimensional
Healing involves addressing symptoms across all domains while transforming the traumatic event through witnessing, emotional release, and somatic practices.
Framework for Healing Trauma and Anxiety
Tools like Internal Family Systems (IFS), somatic exercises, and psychological flexibility skills (from ACT and PQ) help address the root causes of trauma.
Finding and Healing Your Anxiety Follows the Same 5 Stages of Healing Your True Self.
Stage 1. Recognizing Your True Self
Stage 2. Building the 6 ACT Skills for Psychological Flexibility and other skills such as Self-Compassion and Emotional Regulation including somatics.
Stage 3. Identifying Your Adaptive Behaviours or Parts/Saboteurs and Shifting back to Your True Self.
Stage 4. Healing the Inner Child and changing the beliefs associated with your adaptive behaviors.
Stage 5. Living from your True Self via Self-Leadership, connected to the universe, and living your life mission with love instead of fear.
Case Study: John’s Healing Journey
John, suffering from anxiety and avoidance, uncovered his primary trauma (childhood neglect) and secondary trauma (bullying).
Through TSMM and techniques like IFS, PQ, and somatic exercises, John achieved emotional regulation, self-leadership, and improved relationships.
Key Interventions In John’s Healing Journey and Outcomes
Spiritual: Self-compassion courses and spiritual readings.
Mental: Addressing shame and negative beliefs through IFS and Clear Beliefs.
Emotional: Anxiety reduced with CBT techniques and mindfulness.
Body: Reconnection through somatic practices and RIM exercises.
Behavioral and Relational: Understanding adaptive behaviors and fostering secure attachment.
TSMM Program and New Initiatives
TSMM offers four intakes in 2025, with personalized and group-based sessions.
A Healing Anxiety Program is launching, combining individual and group sessions with PQ training, priced at $2500 with a sliding scale option.
Finding and Healing the Root Cause of Your Anxiety
https://youtube.com/shorts/VVcYYZyLeDc
Above testimonial from Kate Lukacs on how the TSMM program helped her to find the root cause and eliminate her anxiety.
“Can someone permanently heal from sexual assault?” was the question posed to Dr. Gabor Mate, one of the leaders in trauma and addiction healing, at a workshop I recently attended. His answer was “Yes.” The full explanation was a masterclass in understanding what trauma is and what is being healed. Below are the highlights of the conversation and how this can help people heal from complex, developmental, and relational trauma that is normally the root cause of most people’s anxiety and other issues in life.
Traumatic Event vs. Trauma
Just like in his book The Myth of Normal, Mate distinguishes between healing from sexual assault and healing from the trauma of sexual assault. Sexual assault is the traumatic event. The trauma is internal issues that arise from the traumatic event. He gave the example of someone getting hit with a hammer in the head. The hitting of the head with the hammer is the traumatic event; the resulting concussion is the trauma. We cannot “heal the hitting of the head”—the event—what we can heal is the concussion. We cannot heal “sexual assault,” which is an event; we can heal the trauma resulting from the sexual assault.
While everyone is different, after a sexual assault, the person may (for example) have a fear of safety, a loss of trust, and the deepest wound (according to Gabor Mate) is the shame (e.g., feeling not clean). The sexual assault is the traumatic event. The trauma is the fear of safety, loss of trust, and the shame and other trauma symptoms.
Second Trauma vs. Primary Trauma
Where this became a masterclass with deep learning was the next step. Gabor asked if there was anyone who had experienced sexual assault. He then asked them one after another if there was anyone who the assaulted person could speak to about the assault at that age. After several “no’s,” i.e., there was no one they could speak to, he stopped and explained. Most “sexual predators” are able to hone in on the ones that are most vulnerable. These are generally the ones who have already experienced a primary trauma.
The primary trauma is often a relational trauma, where the person’s caregivers were either not around or were emotionally or physically abusive. In order to survive, the child disconnected from their true self and was left without a connection to their gut feelings to detect danger or the ability to fight or flight. This is often the primary and the biggest trauma (trauma, not traumatic event). So the primary traumatic event could have been emotional neglect in early childhood, and the trauma symptoms would have been dissociation (or some say disconnection) from their true self. This is often accompanied by not being able to properly feel their emotions or body sensations.
In both the primary and secondary trauma, the person will adopt various “protective” or adaptive behaviors (Saboteurs in PQ language) to help. So to help to be safe—the secondary trauma—the person could become hypervigilant (anxiety) and be worrying, stressed, and anxious and also become controlling (i.e., a controller). That same person could also be a pleaser as a strategy to be loved.
The symptoms of trauma could be:
Spiritual—dissociation from True Self; I am not connected to God/universe; lack of self-compassion, lack of awareness.
Mental—I am alone, I am not safe, I am not loved, I am not enough, shame, etc.; development of the Judge/Inner Critic and
Emotional—emotional dysregulation—anxiety, depression, and other issues
Body—the Body Keeps the Score—holding trapped energy leading to disease (the Myth of Normal)
Behavior—Adaptive Behaviors or Saboteur from both the secondary and primary trauma—e.g., hypervigilant, pleaser; exiling of inner child parts
Relations—Insecure attachment and relational issues.
Skills—lack of development of 6 skills of psychological flexibility and other skills like self-compassion, social, emotional, and somatic.
I have also noted that in addition to these traditional symptoms of trauma, the person has lacked many developmental skills associated with these areas of trauma. In both Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT), there is an emphasis on skills development.
I have used the spiritual, mental, emotional, body, behavior, and relational as 6 categories in a framework most people are familiar with to categorize the symptoms. However, in Processed Based Therapy, which was organized to try to bring all therapies under a common framework, there are essentially 9 “boxes” of symptoms.
Healing From Trauma is Complex
What makes healing from trauma so difficult is that there are a range of “symptoms” in various categories that need to be healed in addition to the event itself.
In the case of the person who needed to heal from sexual trauma, we need to heal a range of symptoms from both the secondary trauma and the primary trauma: The following are some examples of what 1 person could be dealing with:
Spiritual: dissociation, disconnection from self—lack of self-compassion,
Mental: Shame, loss of trust, loss of safety (secondary trauma), I am alone, I am not loved (primary trauma)
Emotional: Anxiety, Depression, Lack of Motivation, and Other Emotional Dysregulation
Body: Trapped “Energy,” disconnection from the body
Behaviors (examples): hypervigilant, controller (from the secondary trauma), pleaser (from primary trauma), addiction or eating disorder
Relational: insecure attachment from the body
Skills: Low Scores in 6 Skills of Psychological Flexibility.
Healing Around the Traumatic Event
In order to heal, a person needs to address all these symptoms in addition to transforming the event of the trauma. This involves 3 things:
Witness on all levels mental, emotional, and body sensations of the person “releasing” the energy of how and what they felt.
Giving the person what they needed and could not receive from the traumatic event, e.g., love they needed in the case of the primary trauma, removing them from the traumatic scene in the case of the secondary trauma.
Releasing the energy associated with the trauma that is trapped in the body, e.g., somatic “shaking” or “running,” yoga; acting out a “redo”; or taking the negative belief “energy” out of the body and releasing it into fire, or “cleansing” in a bath of light water, etc.
Discovering and Healing Your True Self: A Journey Through Five Stages
Discovering and Healing Your True Self is the most important journey one will take in one’s lifetime. Generally, the process will start when we become awakened or conscious. However, the process can also be started when you begin healing your anxiety and you discover that the root cause of your anxiety is trauma. Healing trauma often leads to accessing and healing your True Self.
I have noticed that there are 5 stages to healing and living life from your True Self. Each stage offers tools and practices to help you connect more deeply with your authentic self, heal past wounds, and live a life of purpose and joy.
Stage 1. Recognizing Your True Self
Stage 2. Building the 6 ACT Skills for Psychological Flexibility and other skills such as Self-Compassion and Emotional Regulation including somatics.
Stage 3. Identifying Your Adaptive Behaviours or Parts/Saboteurs and Shifting back to Your True Self.
Stage 4. Healing the Inner Child and changing the beliefs associated with your adaptive behaviors.
Stage 5. Living from your True Self via Self-Leadership, connected to the universe, and living your life mission with love instead of fear.
BN #45: The 9 Integrations You Need to Create Your Better Mind and Brain
The Journey of being Your True Self means also Transforming your Brain. This was written about in BN#45. If you are to heal from all these complex-Trauma symptoms, then you will need to have a healthy brain. There are 9 integrations for a healthy brain and it is these 9 Integrations that we “healing” or getting healthy. The Next Section is reprinted on these 9 Integrations. For a more complete explanation, please visit here:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-39844473?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
“Transforming Your Mind Means Transforming Your Brain
Research has proven that various functions of the “mind” are reflected in the brain. With neuroscience, you can see that when having various thoughts, different parts of the brain will light up. That is how we have been able to map sounds, sights, and smells to specific parts of the brain.
Similarly, if our sight is impaired, we will notice that the corresponding part of our brain does not work properly. Following this course of thought, complex psychological issues can be mapped to the brain not working properly. What is even more important, when you are able to change the brain (neuroplasticity, the brain is always growing new neurons and connections) and return to “healthy” or normal function, the psychological issue will be “cured”.
This was proven first with OCD. With OCD, they were able to take before and after pictures of the brain and also compared them to a normal brain. They showed that first, people with OCD’s brain operated differently than a normal brain (see picture below). However, with cognitive behavior therapy, one could manage the issue i.e. a mental condition, and that was reflected in the physical brain that was changed and returned to normal. So when our minds are psychologically not mentally healthy, then we have issues in our brains not working properly.
Integration Issues in the Brain Results in Method to Diagnose and Treat Mental Health Issues
Integration is the term that is given when all parts of the system work together. The brain is a very complex system that needs all the parts of the brain to work together. Dr. Siegal called these brain problems “integration issues”. When we have integration issues, the brain which flows information of the mind like a river, then we have the river hitting either the left brain bank of rigidity (e.g. anxiety i.e. controlling) or the right brain bank of chaos (e.g. helplessness i.e. emotionally flooded). Siegal in his practice has identified 9 main groups of integration issues.
“When a person, dyad, family, group, organization, or community experiences chaos and/or rigidity, then we know that integration is impaired. The key to moving the system toward well-being is to identify which elements are not differentiated and/or linked. This search and integrate process is helped by categorizing a set of “domains of integration” that can be the focus of the effort to bring health to a system. The following nine domains are important areas for energy and information to flow in an integrated way to create well-being, as described in various ways within this book’s nine chapters. These domains are also areas in which integration can be blocked. They provide a reasonable way to describe the terrain of differentiation and linkage.” From an article by Dr. Siegal, A Framework For Integration.
The 9 Integrations
The easy way to think about integration is to examine each of the parts of the brain. Do the individual parts work? Do the parts work together? So, this is one way to view integration and what is occurring. The first is whether the neo-cortex is working properly. This is called conscious integration and the first of the integration measures. The second integration or horizontal integration is whether the left and right brain are coordinated, often called whole-brain thinking. The third integration or vertical integration would be the coordination between the 3 brains i.e. the integration of the neocortex, the limbic, and the brain stem. The fourth integration or memory integration would be the working of the limbic brain, how well do the amygdala and hippocampus works together to coordinate implicit and explicit memory.
The fifth integration or narrative integration is the integration of the limbic and the neo-cortex. How well is the prefrontal cortex interpreting the memory of the events and sensory images that are occurring? The 6th integration or states integration is the interpretation of the prefrontal cortex of the limbic and brain stem. The first 6 integrations relate to “me”.
The 7th integration or interpersonal integration is the part of our brain that interprets interpersonal information between ourselves and others in relationships. The 8th temporal is how the brain interprets time and meaning in the universe. The last or 9th integration called transpirational or identity integration is the integration between all the various parts of integration.”
How Can This Help You Heal?
There are several takeaways that we can learn.
Healing trauma is complex and also can be done.
We need to determine if there is a preceding trauma. Often sexual assault, bullying, intense grief, or other events are the secondary or tertiary trauma. Quite often, there are previous relational or complex trauma that preceded the traumatic event we are initially looking at.
In addition to the symptoms in the 9 boxes of the PBT framework or the 9 Brain Integrations, we also need to look at the skills that were not developed and also heal the traumatic event itself.
Healing anxiety caused by trauma has the same 5 stages of accessing and healing your True Self.
Applying This Framework to Finding and Healing the Root Cause of Your Anxiety
Anxiety is a combination of stress (the physiological activity) and worrying (the mental activity). Let us use John (names and identifying details have been altered for confidentiality purposes), who came to me for his inability to make and follow up on prospects. He had anxiety every time he thought about making the calls.
Anxiety, as we know, is actually a symptom of trauma. He also had his part of him, who we called the Avoider, who then prevented him from “having anxiety” by stopping him from making the calls. No calls, no anxiety. I started out with Internal Family System (IFS) interviewing his Avoider, which led us to a younger part of him, who at age 11 used to be bullied (the secondary trauma); he rationalized he was bullied because he was alone and not enough (I am not strong). It turns out the person also felt lonely (I am alone) from ages 5 to 7, when his parents were always arguing, and he felt alone and scared when they argued (primary complex trauma—emotional neglect). His Pleaser developed as a way of getting love, and his hyper-rational, or cynical, part developed as a way of explaining everything.
John was disconnected from his emotions and body; he was disconnected/dissociated from his true self. His judge was hypercritical, and he had low self-compassion. He also had an insecure avoidant attachment. John also scored low in all 6 psychological flexibility skills. If we had to summarize, we would see the following:
Spiritual: disconnected from True Self; lack of awareness; lack of self-compassion
Mental: Negative Beliefs: “I am alone” (primary trauma) and “I am not strong” (secondary trauma); shame.
Emotional: Anxiety
Body: Disconnected from body sensations and emotions; lack of awareness of the autonomic nervous system (ANS)
Behavior: Avoider, Pleaser, Hyper-Rational, and Judge (Inner Child)
Relations: Insecure Avoidant
Skills: low skills in all psychological flexibility skills, except for high values skills
How John Healed His Anxiety
John was part of the True Self Mind Mastery Program and, like most people, was unaware that he suffered from complex and relational trauma and that was at the root of his issue. He began with the Positive Intelligence app-based course, which began to increase his awareness and start to change his neuroplasticity. He went through IFS sessions catered to understanding his Judge, Avoider, Pleaser, and Hyper-Rational and discovered his primary and secondary trauma and the symptoms described above.
As part of the IFS sessions, we went back and “rescued” his inner child and did specific work around healing the trauma and his core wounded beliefs (I am alone; I am not strong). We also focused on specific things to address each “symptom.” The activities to heal are listed below.
Spiritual: IFS, reading Michael Singer’s Untethered Soul, PQ course, Kristen' Neff’s self-compassion course.
Mental: Shame was healed through IFS and Rescue the Inner Child play. Negative beliefs were reworked via IFS, the Clear Beliefs process, and Regenerating Images in Memory sessions.
Emotional: Anxiety was dissolved mostly by dissolving the root issues; learned to be present via PQ reps and also did some cognitive behavior skills for anxiety, i.e., probability estimation and worst case
Body: Disconnected from body sensations and emotions; lack of awareness of autonomic nervous system (ANS). Somatic-Based Exercises, RIM, IFS, and Clear Beliefs.
Behavior: Avoider, Pleaser, Hyper-Rational, and Judge (Inner Child)—IFS, PQ, RIM, and Clear Beliefs Sessions.
Relations: Insecure Avoidant—IFS and Self-compassion
Skills: PQ to increase all 6 skills, plus all individual sessions, e.g., IFS increase awareness.
Results
John was able to reduce his anxious feelings from a 6 to 7 on a scale every day to a 1 or 2. When he did feel his level at 6 or 7, he was able to calm himself and go about doing what needed to be done, even though he was sometimes anxious.
John took more time than the usual 10 sessions as part of the TSMM program. However, through his courage to do the work and diligence, John is now living more daily from his true self. He has a high level of inner peace; his judge is much, much quieter, and he has a high level of self-compassion; he has self-leadership (he is the driver on the bus of all his parts); he is aligned with his mission in life, working with joy, flow, and ease; and his relationships are vastly improved. He is more resilient and psychologically flexible.
Next Intake of the TSMM and an Inaugural Healing Anxiety Program
The TSMM Program, which follows the 5 Stages of Healing Your True Self, will have 4 intakes for 2025 for 5 people per quarter:
January 18, 2025
April 19, 2025
June 21, 2025
September 20, 205.
Inaugural Healing Anxiety Program
I am starting an inaugural healing anxiety program (Zoom-based). It will follow the same format as the TSMM program. It will be a combination of 5 individual sessions (7.5 hours) and 10 30-minute group sessions and also include the PQ program. The cost is likely to be $2500 per person, with a sliding scale for those who cannot afford the full fee.
For the TSMM or Healing Anxiety Program, please call or write me at Mark@trueselfmindmastery.com or 1-437-262-5518.
Happy Thanksgiving to Those Celebrating This Week. I wish you health, peace, joy, love and abundance!
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