FREE, Decode your trauma, live, Jan 5th - 9th, 2026 with Alex Howard

[Blueberry]

https://www.alexhoward.com/decodeyourtrauma/live

[Chart]

This looks great, thanks BB! Although I think I'm gonna be tied up at work this week...

[Blueberry]

Register anyway! There are often replays.

[Blueberry]

This looks great, thanks BB! Although I think I'm gonna be tied up at work this week...

Each day's recording become available free-of-charge as of the end of the day's session and remains free until the end of the 5 days, so certainly worth signing up for! imo + ime these things are even worth joining to listen to even one of the week's recordings. Last time I listened to one of Alex Howard's presentations, there was unfortunately a bit too much time spent on advertising the follow-up presentation that was going to last 6 weeks and needed to be paid for of course. So I hope he doesn't spend so much time on that this time, but if he does, I can always leave the session and go do something useful, or listen with half an ear. Even so, it was worth signing up for the freebie sessions - I think that one was about ADHD, rather than trauma.

[Blueberry]

As always: These types of conferences and summits are free during the conference. Once you sign up, you'll get a fair number of emails suggesting you pay for permanent access. That's really not necessary. The material gets recycled - it'll come up in another conference/summit in a few months!

+ see my post here for additional general info: https://www.cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=16458.0

[Chart]

I listened to tye replay last night. Kinda unenthusiastic at the beginning, but I did get two ideas out of the whole thing that I find very valuable.

One is the definition of Trauma. I'm gonna explore that a bit.

The second were the core needs of children: Love, Safety and Boundaries. It was very good for me to hear this explicitly.

Anyway, thanks again BB!

[Blueberry]

The second were the core needs of children: Love, Safety and Boundaries. It was very good for me to hear this explicitly.

Yes, I've heard this before from Alex Howard, and it's huge for me. In fact, I've taken notes on it before, here they are: https://www.cptsd.org/forum/index.php?msg=139726

This time it struck me too how A.H. says that our emotional needs are just as important as physical needs, like oxygen I think was his example.

A.H. emphasises how not receiving these needs as children doesn't mean we have to be without them for life since as adults we can learn to give ourselves these things, but he does say one of the consequences of not being taught boundaries is we don't learn boundaries towards ourselves (or other people of course.) In therapy I've mostly worked on boundaries towards other people, at least consciously. When we don't learn boundaries towards ourselves, it's a lot harder to say "Yes" to ourselves in the sense of nudging ourselves to do what is good and healthy for ourselves. This speaks a lot to me because I have trouble following through, especially doing things regularly.

I listened to tye replay last night. Kinda unenthusiastic at the beginning, but I did get two ideas out of the whole thing that I find very valuable.

Well yes, now that these types of things are run as a live Zoom the first minutes are usually spent listing all the countries or cities people are from, a bit of a waste of time to my mind. Plus he might just not be your type of speaker.

His main point is I think that you can heal and in his opinion the best way to do that is by settling your nervous system down, by meditating or similar daily. I think you are doing that anyway, Chart. Me, not so much. Going back to: it's hard for me to follow through and do things regularly. I tend to jump all over the place, which in A.H.'s scheme of things is being in a tired or wired state, which is Fight or Flight a stage between Shutdown and Safe-and-Social. Safe and Social is the state we should be trying to get our nervous system into more regularly because this is where we can heal from. From his descriptions, I would say that at least during part of my zoom group, I'm in Safe and Social. I suppose I need to look for more of that in my day-to-day. It's kind of complicated though. Somebody with (presumably) cptsd asked about what happens when things are a bit more complex, like you start trying to process some old emotion and that kicks up anxiety and then something else rears its ugly head and then how do you know what to work on... A.H. said - practise more meditation and thru that become more able to connect to your body etc etc 

Many roads lead to Rome. Last summer when I was at a healing retreat with trauma-trained therapists, I realised that the exercises they put us through in a group were achieving what people with cptsd attribute to taking whatever drug it is you can now be prescribed (Ketamine?) and then all of us were able to process some of our trauma or anxiety or whatever everybody had. I think that what we were achieving was what A.H. wants us to achieve through regular meditation.

Decode your trauma: Trauma seems to mean something different to A.H. than it might to us. He seemed to imply that there's trauma and then there's ptsd, and then presumably cptsd. I don't know   I assumed that if you 'have trauma' to the degree that your nervous system is consistently dysregulated, then you're likely to have ptsd or cptsd.

Two years ago, I actually signed up for A.H.'s 12 week course on Regulating your dysregulated nervous system and pulled through daily meditation plus the listenings plus homework exercises and then I suddenly stopped. I managed to re-start months later, then stopped again. Yesterday I re-started, but haven't done anything today. Fortunately you get life-time access! I have noticed this before - I have trouble following through, some of which may be because I do have trouble sitting 'in' my body, with myself. It's easier to distract myself, part of which I do by intellectualising, which is something A.H. mentions too.

Anyway, enough on that. Might help somebody else, might not.