Men on the Path to Love
Relationship coach Bill Simpson offers stories and wisdom, to inspire men be the best version of themselves in relationship and live the life they love.
Men on the Path to Love
BONUS The Black Belt Trauma Coach: Healing Family Trauma with Dr. Ernest Ellender
What happens when a clinical psychologist with a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt tackles the subject of childhood trauma? You get powerful, practical insights that bridge mind and body healing approaches. In this bonus episode, you'll hear my conversation with Dr. Ernest Ellender. He shares how he draws from both his professional expertise and personal journey to offer a refreshing perspective on breaking free from generational trauma patterns.
His innovative approach of combining trauma psychology with martial arts principles allows people to process emotions physically while developing crucial self-regulation skills.
We talk about his book, "This is How We Heal from Painful Childhoods," which provides a systematic approach through accessible rules like "Will versus skill - both are necessary" for healing relationships. Check out the The Black Belt Trauma Coach: Healing Family Trauma with Dr. Ernest Ellender, episode.
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Website: Ernest Ellender, PhD
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Hi and welcome to the man on the Path to Love podcast bonus episode the Black Belt Trauma Coach healing family trauma with Dr Ernest Ellender, a man whose life has been defined by passion, discipline and a relentless pursuit of growth. Ernest holds a PhD in clinical psychology and is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. He's the author of the book this is how we Heal from Painful Childhoods A practical guide to healing past intergenerational stress and trauma.
Bill Simpson:For over 15 years, ernest has run his own martial arts school, while also practicing as a clinical psychologist. Driven by a powerful question how can one child experience so much trauma within a single family environment? Trauma within a single family environment.
Bill Simpson:Today, Ernest focuses on life coaching intensives, blending trauma-informed care with real-world strategies to help people reclaim their lives. We'll talk about his journey, his insights on breaking free from generational pain and how this work can help you and your relationships heal and grow. So stick around, you just might learn something. It's the Men on the Path to Love podcast. Welcome, ernest, to Men on the Path to Love.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Thank you very much for having me I appreciate it.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, great to have you, man. You've done a lot of work around childhood trauma and I want to dive into that. But first I always ask my guests tell me your story, how did you get from there to where you are and your black belt and all this stuff? So enlighten us with your story and take all the time you need. Oh man.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Growing up in South Louisiana running around in the swamps and whatnot hunting, fishing and running around shooting with my friends. It was just kind of Tom Sawyer's type of my image of it. It was just fun like that I love. Growing up here. I had a solid family. They really stressed a lot of education so I went all the way through getting my doctorate in clinical psychology. I came back home as soon as I was done with my degree. When I get back home, back to family, friends and whatnot, to get started here in my career.
Bill Simpson:And I'm curious what led you to psychology and this trauma work.
Dr Ernest Ellender:You know, my parents were very. They really modeled a lot of contributions to the community, either through charitable causes or directly through direct service. My mom worked with United Way for a long time, then the Haven, a domestic violence shelter, and she had a degree in marketing. So she's a smart businesswoman but she used that almost exclusively toward assisting communities. That was what was modeled for us. That's what feels good to me.
Dr Ernest Ellender:So when I was trying to decide what to do, you know, in undergraduate I went and worked at an inpatient clinic and then an outpatient clinic and some people there the other workers were kind of oftentimes had a rough time working there, you know, complaining about the population and whatnot, and to me it just felt like home. It felt very comfortable. I liked being there to do my best to assist people. It's kind of funny because my getting into it, I felt like I was so blessed and fortunate. I was so fortunate to have been raised in south louisiana this day and age with, uh, loving parents. I I definitely had very loving parents and so when I ran into all these people who did not have that were not raised with that, I kind of I felt like I kind of almost wanted to share that with them from a very professional, educated perspective. So you know, I myself in in undergraduate, I was about 19. I had some personal anger issues and my mom offered me to go to my parents, offered me to go to a local therapist here.
Bill Simpson:And.
Dr Ernest Ellender:I went to him and while I'm talking with them I said, man, this is a real job. You sit here and help people all day. I was like and it put in my head and then you know, 12 years later, that's the path I went down. Cool, I really enjoyed the science of it. I enjoyed the study of it. I enjoyed the advanced studies part of it. I get turned on by the complexity of your concepts and that kind of intellectual pursuits. I like intensity of stuff. The fun childhood stuff was the fun side of stuff. And then the the challenging part of uh growing up in my family we had we, my family has a bit of addiction in it. You know, uh, substance addiction, uh religious addiction and uh different things like that. So in addiction we kind of chase a lot of extremes, a lot of excitement and willing to bet it, all sort of thing. And sure, that's somewhat of the path I took. That's why I enjoy the martial arts. It was such an extreme challenge. You know one of the phd was the most extreme challenge. Yeah, whatever the most extreme challenge was, give it to me, let me see if I can do it. Uh, and that was what drew me to this.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Uh, the topic of childhood trauma. While we were studying all these different things, they have a lot in psychology. There's a lot of like. Here's a symptom and here's something to treat this symptom. Here's a situation. This is how we treat this situation. And in intergenerational trauma, where I got home and when I was working with these different clients for the first time, I had my own clients for long periods of time, like for months and years, and it was really confounding. It was confusing to me how one human being can experience so much trauma in one family in one generation without outside intervention. And sometimes this was back in the day, back in the 60s and 70s, rural Louisiana, where there wasn't a lot of built-up ways to protect children or protect violent what do you call it? Domestic violent? Sure, victims of all?
Dr Ernest Ellender:yeah yeah but even today, even today, a lot of this persists and it persists throughout the everywhere but it was it was confusing me how you know?
Bill Simpson:yeah, well, you mentioned doing inpatient and outpatient. The past 10 years I've worked at as a mind-body educator and integrative therapy practitioner at a health clinic. We're in integrative health services and I work directly with outpatient behavioral health and we are a trauma-informed community and so I'm very much aware of that and we serve the underserved population and when we intake our patients, they get the ACES studies, the Adverse Childhood Experience Study or test, and I'd like for you to share what that is and talk a little bit about what that is and how it determines how you focus.
Dr Ernest Ellender:First off, let me just say I appreciate that that's the field you work in. It's so relieving to know that there are now these growing services that were not there when we were 10, 20, even 20 years ago, much less 34. Oh my goodness.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, when I got this job. I'm semi-retired right now and so I'm working two days a week but I was just pinching myself that I had a full-time job, doing what I do and being able to serve the underserved, so I get that yeah.
Dr Ernest Ellender:That is rare. It's a frustration, it's difficult, you know, if you're not working in, you know, at times oddly, insurance doesn't cover a lot of these things and it's very frustrating to want to serve. That's part of why I, you know, I decided to finally finish my book, because that is at least a way that for me to contribute to the community in a way that is low cost, that people can have access to it, because it's frustrating that in our country we don't have more advanced services for everyone yeah that's.
Dr Ernest Ellender:It's man it. It hurts to know that there are services. We're trained in this. We know that there are services and people don't have access to it, and a little access to it goes a long way, absolutely For me having my own private practice.
Bill Simpson:They couldn't afford to come to me and I couldn't afford to give it all away right to come to me and I couldn't afford to give it all away right and to have this opportunity to have a full-time job with benefits and everything to do this work and support these people has been amazing, just an amazing experience. So thank you for that and thank you for acknowledging that, and I want to get back into the ACEs.
Dr Ernest Ellender:So the ACEs study blew me away when we studied it to begin with. It was just kind of introduced to us and it blew me away. I mean I forget how many 17,000 participants, something like that in this big study on weight loss. But then they found that the people who were dropping out had something in common and that was that they had childhood trauma and so they weren't losing the weight that would make them more healthy and so so well, this is a big obstacle. So let's study this, this dropout rate. Why is that? What's up with this? Uh, what's up with this connection from childhood to adult health measures? And, man, by the time they'd done it for a few years and then a decade, and then I forget when it was it it was like 1990s, you know, and they still following up on it and it is based. It's pretty much conclusive demonstration of the more childhood struggles, the more adult mental health and purely physical health issues someone is likely to have. Can you?
Bill Simpson:give us some examples of what the questionnaire is. I think there's only like 10 questions, I think.
Dr Ernest Ellender:There's only 10 questions and you might think they're all about did you get beaten, did you get physically abused, did you get sexually abused? And they have a couple of those questions. Then there's some of the questions are something like uh, you know, did anyone in your household struggle with uh addiction? And I said, yeah, there was an alcoholic. He sobered when I was 10 and but, but, yeah, that's a yes, that's one for me, you know, uh, did your uh parents divorce? Uh, I, what is it? A third of the population which 50 percent.
Dr Ernest Ellender:That was 50 percent, would check yes to that you know, yeah, yeah, uh, there, uh, did someone put you down consistently over time? Uh, you know. And then they have the questions about your physical or direct abuse. Um, yeah, and you can find it online easily. It's on my I put it on my, um your website, on my website, heal from childhoodcom. Because it's there's this problem that a lot of people think and I I did this on accident to myself, I said I've come from a wonderful family. My clients came from rough families, so I'm focusing all my efforts on them and not applying the same stuff to myself, because my stuff wasn't that bad and the ACEs study just showed us. It doesn't matter how we judge these things, it's just basic fact. To chronic stressful events and stressful situations where you didn't feel safe or it wasn't structured and safe and you didn't have that kind of support to address those struggles in childhood, then there's a natural development of difficulty maintaining feeling safe. So our body stays in chronic, basically survival mode.
Bill Simpson:It's like the baseline every day, not every once in a while, it's like every day.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Every day Fight, flight. And then, important for childhood is the other two, which are freeze and fawn, because most children, when they're in a stressful environment like that, they're not able to. I mean, a child is not able to fight adult world or run away from adult world and therefore they're left with these other two rather miserable options. They're all miserable to be stuck in survival mode. Rather miserable options. They're all miserable to be stuck in a survival mode. But uh, freezing is like uh is where you dissociate and differ, you like separate from reality. So we get a lot of numbing, a lot of dissociation, a lot of derealization shut down the body kind of shuts down.
Dr Ernest Ellender:It separates from the body, separates from the world. And then there's also the, the fawning response, which is there are predators around, there's danger in the environment, so I'm going to shape my world around those people, so I fawn the people around me in order to survive.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Yeah, it's all survival and these things not only do they. The ACEs study showed us that they impact our direct health, which we kind of theorize that it's when our bodies are in a sympathetic nervous system, in survival mode. It reroutes the blood flow through our body. The blood flow goes to our heart to pump, to the muscles that are needed for fight, freeze, all those things, but it pulls it away from our digestive tract. So in moments of danger we're not, our bodies don't need to digest food. But if we're stuck in that mode then our bodies are not digesting food properly and bringing those nutrients and micronutrients to the our extremities to to heal. So we have a slowed healing factor. Has a cumulative effect on our medical bodies, just on our pure bodies, on our anatomy.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, and the whole vagal theory, the vagal system that gets all out of whack because of that.
Dr Ernest Ellender:It's stuck, yeah, and so there's a direct medical, purely medical, but then there's also the impact on our decision making, especially as it relates to your uh topic on the podcast, finding love, yeah, well, if my survival response is to fawn the people around me and I'm going to dis like de-emphasize or de-prioritize my own wants and needs and prioritize the other person and we can only do that for so long before we are basically self-sacrificing, developing resentments, and the other person is kind of tend to pair with takers because we're givers. This was the error that I made my own life. Regardless of how much we study all this stuff, it doesn't make us impervious to the impact of it, true that?
Bill Simpson:true that.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Well, you know.
Bill Simpson:I reflect on myself and I've talked about this on my podcast. You know I haven't said this, but I score like a seven on the aces.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Oh, wow, Okay yeah.
Bill Simpson:A lot of childhood trauma and part of that was my parents were divorced. I went to live with my mom. I was six years old. Eight years old. She gives custody to my dad, who was a functional alcoholic, and thank God. But five years later she dies cardiac arrest and I hadn't seen her in between those five years, never saw her. And so fast forward to my relationships. That whole abandonment issue of I overlapped all my relationships, including my first marriage. I've been divorced three times and it was because you're not going to leave me, I'm going to leave you first. So I always had to have someone. And I'm just saying this and bringing this up again to illustrate how these traumas impact our relationships and I'd like for you to go into some detail around that.
Dr Ernest Ellender:We'll take that as a precise example. I appreciate you sharing that with people, because so much of it is man. There's just so much toxic shame involved in our traumas and whatnot that when you have a fear of loss of relationship, so our childhood brains comes up with different rules In order to survive. I need to do this. There are different categories, and my goal is to come up with a format that we can follow to systematically address these things.
Dr Ernest Ellender:That's what your book does a format that we can follow to systematically address these things. That's what your book does. That's what my book seeks to do is to have a holistic approach. So, when it comes to what we're talking about here, what you shared is there are different categories of what we call trauma lies. They're a child's brain subconsciously comes up with in order to survive. So the people who are supposed to love and protect me will do what they will leave me or they will hurt me. That means that the next trauma lie is in order to survive, I must what I must, fight, I must fawn, I must be perfect, I must serve a purpose I must what.
Dr Ernest Ellender:I must be a good boy, and when you're not a good boy, you better hide that stuff and I better leave before you leave me, right?
Dr Ernest Ellender:so if there's that subconscious, the person who's supposed to love me my first wife or second one is going to hurt me, and it, I mean it makes absolute, perfect sense. Yeah to to be the one to leave. I mean you'd be stupid not to. And that's where we we slow down. We think about the traumas for a moment. Pull that out of the subconscious. Okay, well, these are the lies of my my childhood brain is trying to guide me for to success in adult life, and they want to have something to replace that with some kind of life truth, like there are people who will hurt me and there are people who will not. There are people who are stable and healthy enough to be there for me and I can learn to be there for others.
Bill Simpson:And I can see somebody hearing that, and myself included. I hear it intellectually. I hear that, yes, this is true that there are bad people. There's also good people. Yet I keep going to that they're bad people I'm going to get, yet I keep going to that there are bad people I'm going to get hurt. How does someone overcome that, that deep subconscious wound? It is a complex process right so. Not to laugh at it.
Dr Ernest Ellender:But yes, yeah, yeah. Well, it's very good to keep humor and understand. We want to have a lifelong process, so we can't make it all serious and intense all the time. Right, we want to have this. Okay, it becomes a normal thing. My book is structured in terms of rules. It's just a little easier to remember and apply rules in the moment. So a starting point here would be something like rule 18, which is will versus skill. Both are necessary in a relationship. If I want to have a thriving, stable, healthy relationship, both people have to have both the will to be, to be that, and the skills to do it right. I can really want to be healthy but not have control of my own fight response. So when you do something that makes me fear rejection, I fight back, I attack, I counterattack, even though he didn't attack me, but I counterattack that defensive reaction Right. So I don't have the skill to recognize what I'm doing or the skill to recognize what you're doing. That's sabotaging this.
Bill Simpson:Or even to take feedback that you're being that way.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Precisely. So you know, we have this little scale all the way from at the very bottom, somebody who's really toxic, all the way to at the top, really thriving, and if we look in the cognitive, behavioral and emotional realms of functioning, there are just a bunch of micro skills that are involved. So, like the first 11 rules are kind of focusing on self, like how do I control myself, how do I get to know myself? How do I control my autonomic nervous system better? We learn how to self-soothe so that I'm not jumping into somebody's case. I learn how to teach my primal and learning brain to differentiate between real danger and fake danger. Somebody commenting that I did something wrong is not life-threatening, so I don't need to go into full-blown aggressive survival response mode. I have to get that control over myself first.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, and I think about how us men have been conditioned, you know, and I think it's more challenging for men to do this and I know for me, you know, going through three divorces and doing a lot of work, therapy and all kinds of stuff and trainings and to get to where I am today self-compassion and that you said self-soothing, and that self-compassion, like having that compassion for yourself, is one of the hardest things for us to do, and especially us men absolutely, absolutely.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Rule number eight is practice treating yourself in a self-loving and self-respecting fashion. There you go when I present that, when oftentimes guys like, ah, I know what, are you going to teach me how to self-parent myself and cuddle my child, inner child, and all this kind of and like, yeah, I know it's fun, we can in macho way kind of joke about it, but we really need to do this if I don't know how to just take my own vulnerabilities and my own fear seriously and not just do the toughen up your little whatever, your little whim. That is not constructive. It doesn't actually work well to move up the ladder.
Bill Simpson:It can even make it worse depending on how hard you are on yourself. And one of the things that saved me was a therapist who told me to get a little boy doll and I've told this story, too, on my podcast and you know it took me two years to find this doll. First of all, trying to find a boy doll a male doll was like almost impossible. I was in an old Toys R Us store with my daughter she was like eight at the time and I see this patch like doll. He's got a hawaiian shirt and jeans and sneakers and a mohawk and I'm like I don't know he had blue eyes. I'm like something about this guy.
Bill Simpson:I bought him and so I went and got some markers from the mohawk, I put in some brown for his hair and then I gave him eyebrows and I colored his eyes brown, from blue to brown, and I got all choked up. I'm like, damn, I just found eight years old. You know my mom left at eight, so I call him eight and the guys laugh and think it's crazy. But it was the most amazing metaphor for self-compassion I've ever experienced, because I could tangibly hold that doll. I I could cry, I could get angry and really be the dad, the mom to this little thing, you know, and it was amazing, fantastic.
Dr Ernest Ellender:And it's one of the things that we're learning is that a lot of trauma in childhood is experienced in a very physical way, and then, as adults, we try to sit in a chair across from each other and talk our ways out of it. So a lot of the new, really wonderful treatments are much more, uh, physically involved, their activities, these external objects that we're able to interact with, and it has a much more experiential yeah physically experiential, it's just those kind of things can unlock a lot of things.
Dr Ernest Ellender:A lot of the newest therapies are really wonderful like that.
Bill Simpson:It's very efficient, very impactful yeah, it absolutely changed me, and I, of course, I pick it forward, I share it with my clients and they resist at first, you know, and yet when they find a man, it's's a game changer. So that's just one example.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Yeah, I've been enjoying recently. I've been enjoying experimenting with martial arts as a means of addressing some of these things.
Bill Simpson:Yeah, tell us more about that. I'm a master instructor in Tai Chi, which is a martial art. Oh, fantastic, and that changed. That was a big life changer for me too did a whole episode on that on, uh, what martial arts taught me about relationships you know, so share how martial arts helped you with what you do and and with trauma.
Dr Ernest Ellender:The martial arts journey for myself started out very selfishly. I was so drawn to it, I was really obsessed with it. I grew up in a very macho area. I had a feeling like I just didn't know what to do if anybody ever punched me or anything In an area where there's a lot of physical intimidation, a lot of physical, just macho. By the time I was training for three or four years and grappling, and you know, you accidentally get bumped up and all, and after a while you just kind of toughen up, so it it stopped being at all about that. I was just obsessed with gaining this knowledge. But then that path that led to a type of confidence that I'd never experienced. At that point it infiltrated my dreams, man, I stopped having these recurring dreams where I was powerless. It was about three years into it. I realized, man, I haven't had one of those dreams in like a year and I just haven't had any since. So I mean, it had that kind of an impact on me.
Dr Ernest Ellender:It wasn't until a little bit later when I said, wow, I think I've learned enough out in California for me to open my own gym here and continue to pursue at Black Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, nice and when I started offering it to other people, I realized, when it comes to trauma recovery, there's a bunch of things involved in it and it is gym specific. You can't just go to an MMA gym or boxing gym where the environment is kind of chaotic or it's not really controlled. When you get into, like like tai chi and karate and things where there's uh ages old, the traditional martial arts where they emphasize a lot of discipline, form, uh, respect for the teacher, respect for the art, respect for one another, when we get into those environments that are professional and focused on those traditional things and we perpetuated that environment at our. I have two black belts who opened their schools here, so we have a little network of schools Nice. So when somebody comes in with a history, I like to clarify number one this is a wonderful place. This is a bunch of really truly I mean really tough guys and gals. They can really handle that business and you wouldn't know it because they're so friendly and humble. We need one another to be really advanced in martial arts and we don't want to injure each other. We don't want to injure ourselves, so we need to practice safe training other and we don't want to injure ourselves. So we need to practice safe training, and so there's a bunch of rules that are, you know, really healing. For somebody who came from childhood where there weren't rules and there weren't people who were respectful, there weren't safeguards in place. I clarify when somebody discloses to me that they had a trauma history, I say, okay, well, that does not stop it from training. There's a wonderful environment for that Right.
Dr Ernest Ellender:It needs you to understand a few things. Number one speak up when you're struggling with anything. Make sure that you verbalize that. Don't keep it in and just try to tough it out, because there will be advanced belts or people, instructors who can help guide you through the way. Instructors who can help guide you through the way. It can help. You see, uh, you know squabbles or chaos or any kind of whatever. We deal with that verbally. We deal with it directly. You know we need to be able to train safely and respect with one another, so don't speak up. Advocate for yourself, speak up and we will tend to it, and all of our instructors do so. They get the experience of this structured environment that is safe. It's very challenging, so it evokes a lot of emotions.
Bill Simpson:Sure.
Dr Ernest Ellender:You know of failure and fear and all these things, and it's normalized in a healthy fashion. They level and they skill level up. They can do things every one year. They can do things that they absolutely couldn't do a year before. So there's that awareness of self-improvement over time. And then there's this community all different walks of life, but we're drawn together by this really challenging thing that we all love and we unite on that.
Bill Simpson:Well, this is just a great metaphor for life with the martial arts. I've always been drawn to it that way and I know for me, you know, it's had numerous effects, building confidence. You know, I'm a small guy and even though Tai Chi is a slow moving martial art, I know all the martial applications, so I feel confident around some big dude like I know I can handle myself. And then there's handling myself, and then there's handling life and handling relationship and all those things.
Dr Ernest Ellender:So that's, that's a great combination to work with yes, and it doesn't always immediately apply, but when we think about it you really love it, and that's what you do for a long time, sure you know, with the flow of things and problem solving, it was a larger person.
Dr Ernest Ellender:So what do these movements do? You just see this, this concept of harmony and flowing with things, that's that we can apply to our relationships and we can apply to our work status and these conflicts that come in the rest of our life it's another way to do the work.
Bill Simpson:You you know. And healing, it's just a different avenue.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Absolutely, absolutely, yep. And so when we get kind of tied back to where we left off with the will versus skill, both are necessary.
Bill Simpson:Right.
Dr Ernest Ellender:We have to have all the skills to be able to function in a high-level training environment and we have to want to apply them. I have to want to be part of the team and I have to have the skills of flow, training and being smooth and finesse so that I'm part of the team. And that's when you can eventually you move up the belts and then you can hang with the black belts. You can compete and hang with them safely and respectfully and they want to train with you. You want to train with them. That's the same thing in our relationships. We're coming from this background of a lack of micro skills problem solving of self-soothing skills, self-mature self-love and self-respect skills, collaborative problem solving, conflict resolution, delayed gratification, conflict resolution, delayed gratification all these little micro skills and macro skills come together to move up that scale of how capable am I of being a healthy part of a relationship and am I going to select someone who is also capable or am I selecting somebody who is not capable?
Bill Simpson:Then we go back to the influence of our intergenerational traumas. Yes, do I?
Dr Ernest Ellender:deserve someone whose quality I wasn't worthy of my parents to square themselves away and intend to me. So I'm not worthy of a good woman who has her head on her shoulders. So it's a selection problem.
Bill Simpson:It's more than likely subconscious. It's not a conscious decision, it's just oh, I'm familiar with this dynamic here, so this must be right. But no, it's not necessarily good for me.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Yeah a lot of these are hidden things and until we read and study a little bit, they're hidden. Yeah, you know some of these behaviors that you know if you grew up in a chaotic environment with parents who didn't practice healthy boundaries, you just don't understand what healthy boundaries are. Rule number 14, boundaries are confusing. So keep practicing better boundaries. Notice we say don't follow perfect boundaries because they're very confusing at times. Co-parenting things like that prevent challenging obstacles. So we're just going to practice better boundaries. But if you haven't studied it and even understand it you came from a place with terrible boundaries. Then when you're dating someone and they're engaging in crazy boundaries, they just don't come across as crazy Like, oh, that's normal, that's just how it is. Here in Louisiana. We drink all the time, man.
Dr Ernest Ellender:We party all the time that's totally normal to have before, during, after work, whatever it's like. Oh, that's not normal man. No, it's not, that's a red flag.
Bill Simpson:That's your norm, that you're conditioned to accept.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Yeah, a family of origin yeah, yeah, absolutely Well, ernest.
Bill Simpson:I really appreciate you taking the time to share some of your book with us. Before we wrap up, I just want to ask you what would you say to men out here, listening to what you're saying, that have been through trauma and may be struggling with it and doing it silently, where they're just not ready to step up. What would you say to these men in order to heal from their past trauma?
Dr Ernest Ellender:You know, if you're not ready to do the big step of reaching out to a trauma-informed therapist or life coach, if you're not ready to do that kind of work, then there's lots of free stuff on YouTube and books about it, lots of books being written now about it. There are a lot of these resources like this. You talked earlier about working in that environment and we didn't mention that you happen to have a podcast that puts it out for free to people to listen to. There's lots of free information to start the process of educating ourselves. And to guys who are thinking about this look up complex PTSD, even if you don't think you have PTSD I never thought I don't have PTSD but when studying this stuff, realize there are a lot of these components.
Dr Ernest Ellender:When you raise in challenging childhoods, there are going to be a lot of these components that you can just educate yourself about. And as you start learning these little confusing things, you know like, oh, you don't just tough it out, that doesn't actually work really well. We educate ourselves, develop a little discipline here and that opens doors to us so that when we study it a little bit, you know for very low cost books, free podcasts, free YouTube videos find these guys who are really on that topic and we just flood ourselves with that kind of information. Make it normal. Make it normal to listen to it for several hours a week at least.
Bill Simpson:And do it a lot. Repeat it over and over, so your brain will take it in.
Dr Ernest Ellender:I talked to my clients that basically in childhood they were brainwashed, either verbally or experientially, in these negative ways and we want to counter that with positive brainwashing. We've got to flush out these old, really toxic messaging and flood our brains with intelligent, empathic, healing, reality-based information. Like the ACE study informs us about All the good stuff. Let's brainwash ourselves with this kind of podcast, right? Absolutely.
Bill Simpson:Well, if my listeners want to get a copy of your book or know more about your life coaching, how can they get in touch with you?
Dr Ernest Ellender:I have a website, healfromchildhoodcom, which really focuses on the book which is called this is how we Heal from Painful Childhoods Practical Guide for Healing Past, intergenerational Stress and Trauma. And then I also have my website ErnestEllenderPhDcom for my life coaching and trauma coaching services that I offer Very good.
Bill Simpson:Well, I'll make sure I have all that information in the show notes as well, for those who need it.
Dr Ernest Ellender:Thank you so much and again appreciate you doing the great work for people you know on all the different levels in these three different formats that you're doing. You know it's yeah, your work, podcast, personal life it's awesome.
Bill Simpson:I'm on a love mission, man, so I'm trying to just spread the love. You know what I mean. So outstanding, all right, man. Well, thanks so much for taking the time again. I wish you much success with your practice and your book and hopefully we can chat again sometime.
Dr Ernest Ellender:I do hope so. Thank you so much, Bill,
Bill Simpson:And that will do it for this bonus episode of the Men on the Path to Love podcast, the Black Belt Trauma Coach Healing Family Trauma with Dr Ernest Ellender. I'm Bill Simpson, your host. Thank you for listening and thanks again to my guest, dr Ernest Ellender. You'll find links to his contact information in the show notes and if you got something out of listening to this episode, then please share the link to this podcast and share the love. And until next time, keep your heart open and stay on the path to love.