Why You Abandon Your Inner Child (You’re Not Actually Broken)

In This Episode, Josh Trent Uncovers:

[01:15] The Healing Journey

• How one of Josh’s earliest memories is watching his mother get carried out of the house on a stretcher somewhere between age nine and eleven, and how that single somatic imprint shaped the next twenty years of his life.
• Why mental health is not the absence of suffering but a sound and grounded mind that is integrated in a way that emotional patterns and unconscious beliefs no longer hold us hostage.
• How the journey through life has been layer after layer of three fundamental questions: who am I, who am I not, and can I give myself permission to celebrate the authentic self that remains.
• Why so many people are in a mental health crisis right now simply because they are living someone else’s story while holding a mask that their biceps eventually cannot keep up.
• Why the mental stories we create about our lives, other people, God, and society are really just packets of emotional information that keep recycling until we make them conscious.
• How becoming a cycle breaker is not about fighting the past or blaming anyone but about putting a hand up like Neo in the Matrix and letting the bullets fall.

Resources:

• Greg Schmaus

[09:10] The Exile Nobody Talks About in IFS

• How Josh had a significant breakthrough in a live IFS session with Dick Schwartz on his own podcast and realized that the exile, not the firefighter or protector, is where the deepest healing lives.
• Why most branches of talk therapy and CBT focus on the symptom or the behavior rather than the part of the psyche that has been in exile since childhood.
• How the quality of a person’s life is ultimately dictated by the authenticity of their being, and why inauthenticity and inner peace cannot coexist.
• How the ego speaks in one language which is fear, and how something can feel unconsciously and somatically true even when it is consciously false.
• Why everything from IFS to Bessel van der Kolk to the smooth muscle theory is pointing at the same thing.

[14:45] Emotional Epigenetics and the Spider Webs of Our Lineage

• How the epigenome sits on top of the genome like a set of dials that can turn the volume up or down on a gene’s expression, and how emotions, unconscious beliefs, and environmental expression are what operate those dials.
• Why every single relationship Josh had ever been in, the way he treated his mother, father, brother, and most importantly himself, turned out to be a fabricated story built on coping mechanisms he watched his parents enact.
• How being born at four pounds eleven and a half ounces and spending the first two weeks of life in an incubator meant that the neural system came into the world already deprived of the mother’s nervous system and the father’s presence.
• Why going back to excavate the past is not about blame but about understanding what happened, not why it happened, because why is a fool’s game.
• How our grandparents’ unprocessed experiences have a biological address in the body.
• Why until you make the unconscious conscious it will rule your life and you will call it fate, and why that is simply Jung’s version of what we now call emotional epigenetics.

[24:10] Children and Spouses Are the Ultimate Report Card

• How the deepest impact of becoming a father has been a continuous revelation of exactly where Josh is still not free, where the emotional patterns are still running, and where the integration is still unfinished.
• Why his children are the most crystal clear mirror into the truth of who he is, because they cannot be managed, edited, or avoided the way the outside world can.
• How there is no greater report card on the planet than whether your children and your spouse genuinely enjoy being around you.
• Why the most dangerous place to be on a healing journey is when someone says out loud that they are fully healed and projection-free, because that is exactly when the ego is gearing up to project again.
• How the podcast was called Wellness Force Radio and started during a period of a pornography addiction.
• Why in 2022 Josh shifted to Wellness + Wisdom because he was done being forceful and done taking things by force, having learned from Hawkins that any force creates immediate resentment.
• How it took another three years after that shift for the wisdom that was knocking on the door to actually get integrated, and why he is glad it took that long.

[31:50] The Difference Between Knowledge and Wisdom

• How Napoleon Hill in Outwitting the Devil defined wisdom as the ability to relate yourself to nature’s laws so as to make them serve you, and to relate yourself to other people so as to gain their willing cooperation.
• Why time is nature’s seasoning experience through which the human experience can be ripened into wisdom, which is why wisdom cannot be inherited, imported, or rushed.
• How wisdom only comes to those who have formed positive thought habits as a dominating force in their lives.
• Why accumulated knowledge is not wisdom.
• How Rudolf Steiner wrote that when a student has a pure heart and a pure intention to seek wisdom, the master who holds that wisdom cannot not share it with them.
• Why the same dynamic plays out when science becomes a god that people outsource their safety to without their own discernment.

[37:05] What We Lost When We Lost True Elders

• How a true elder has to balance three things simultaneously: knowing themselves, knowing what they have learned, and knowing what the world most needs right now.
• Why many people who present themselves as elders are actually wounded men or women who are preaching from the wound rather than from the integrated self.
• How the best elders know exactly who they are and share their wisdom only with students who have a pureness of heart.
• Why many of us with deep father wounds unconsciously seek out other wounded men who are good at speaking and marketing and mistake their polished presentation for eldership.
• How we have been culturally trained to look for quick wins, fast relief from pain, and dopamine hits, and why social media feeds that hungry ghost with more and more speed.
• Why our attention is now officially shorter than a goldfish’s attention span at seven seconds.
• How a true elder enters a space and their presence alone begins to clean the slate, creating the felt sense of being fully seen without performance.

[44:55] The WE in Wellness

• How there are two definitions of wellness: the holistic and scientific one.
• Why on a personal level wellness for Josh is the moment he becomes focused on the WE instead of the I.
• How the word illness starts with the letter I, and how the victim story, the life is against me, the he did this to me narrative all promote illness.
• Why the highest form of wellness is when all the parts of the self have been integrated enough that one can show up authentically, and why celebrating the authentic self gives permission for everyone watching to do the same.
• How bills, responsibilities, projections, children, friendships, and business do not pause for the healing work to be done.
• Why unless we make wellness a passion and a hobby and something we love learning about, our attention will be monetized by whatever is sitting there drooling, waiting to exploit our insecurities.
• How society is ready at every moment with a GLP-1 injection for someone who does not love their body, or a facelift for someone who thinks they are ugly.

[50:30] Curiosity and the Beliefs We Were Taught to Carry

• How curiosity is the energy of the child’s heart and mind that Jesus placed in the front row of his sermons.
• Why a curious heart is there only for the observation and the learning, while a certain heart is fixed on knowing the outcome and protecting the story.
• How growing up between zero and seven years old the neurology is essentially on drugs with hemispheres open.
• Why the word “lie” is inside the word belief, and why beliefs are not truths but stories we accumulated as coping strategies.
• How an embodied belief is one that a person can state clearly without being triggered and without trying to make someone else believe the same thing.
• Why when someone demands with a clenched fist that another person believe exactly what they believe, the energy underneath is almost always unprocessed trauma seeking to make others responsible for the relief of that trauma.
• How the drama triangle of victim, villain, and hero plays out in every ideological conflict.

[01:01:15] The Liberation Loop

• How the liberation loop begins with the BTFA model, which stands for belief, thought, feeling, and action, the sequence through which every life pattern is manufactured.
• Why the path to healing runs that sequence in reverse as AFTB.
• How when Josh traced his pornography addiction backwards where the root belief was simply that this is all he is worthy of.
• Why those root beliefs sit at the lowest vibrational states on the Hawkins scale, in shame and grief.
• Why the moment of turning the belief back around onto the self is the most important and most avoided step.
• How the new paradigm is new belief multiplied by trust multiplied by faith multiplied by action.
• Why walking a new path through the field of grass is exactly how neuroplasticity works.
• How your old identity is testing the new one.
• Why tools without community are incomplete because we were wounded in relationship and we heal in relationship.

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All Resources From This Episode

• Greg Schmaus