Dear Alex Hormozi – Not Only Are Your Thoughts on Trauma Irrelevant, But They Are Also Dangerous
- Brainz Magazine
- Sep 7
- 6 min read
Written by Amy Booth, Transformation Coach
Amy is a transformation coach, having undergone her own transformation from a post-toxic-relationship single mother to now living with her dream partner and child.
I saw a reel on Instagram last week that absolutely made my blood boil. It was a clip of Alex Hormozi saying that 200 years ago, a 40-year-old sleeping with a 15-year-old wasn’t traumatic. If we simply change the way we look at it in today’s world, there would be no trauma. I specifically haven’t assigned genders to the ages, as back then, the genders and positions were interchangeable.
What made my blood boil is that a white man (in a relative position of strength in Western modern-day society), who is listened to by many for business purposes and has a huge mass of followers, was essentially telling people that their trauma doesn’t matter. That they can change their trauma by the way they look at it. The number one point in this opinion piece is to stay in your lane. The internet is great for many things. Giving people a platform to talk about topics they know nothing about is not one of them.
Trauma is an event that has caused such deep emotional difficulty that it changes your perspective of the world. Fundamentally, your psyche has been changed by the event. What causes this varies greatly from person to person. As someone who has been through many difficult events, I would guess that my propensity for dealing with trauma is higher than that of people who haven’t been through my experiences. There are others who have faced more difficult events and can deal with trauma better than I do, and there are people who have had very few traumatic events, which means they are less able or more likely to experience trauma from events that others find commonplace.
It isn’t a competition.
Trauma is trauma. I don’t care why you found something traumatic. I care that it impacted you. Trauma is not something we compare.
What is important when you want to talk about your trauma is that you don’t have people sitting there telling you to “simply change your relationship to it.” Believe me, if I could have changed my relationship to my trauma, I would have done so. It would have made my life easier. So would everyone who has experienced trauma.
What makes this line of thought dangerous is that trauma survivors will be less likely to speak about their trauma, thinking that it isn’t important enough to be spoken about (as if we needed another reason not to say anything). It also encourages the people around the trauma survivor to be more dismissive. It is saying that your trauma doesn’t matter to the rest of the world. The rest of the world doesn’t need to be considerate because you have mental scarring.
I have two main memories of traumatic experiences that I know changed the way I see the world. In those two memories, something snapped in my brain. Imagine an elastic band snapping at its furthest point of stretch. That is the only way I can describe it. It took years of figuring out what that “snap” meant and years of acknowledging the small things that disproved that “snap.” The second one was the moment that my (now ex) husband was holding my daughter and refused to give her back to me. We had just had a huge argument that he had instigated, my daughter was days old, and I was exhausted as I was barely sleeping. After the argument, he rang the police and told them I wanted the baby back, but he wasn’t going to give her back to me because I was dangerous. In reality, I was in a toxic relationship and had been pushed to my absolute limit, mentally and physically.
The “snap” at this point was the undeniable recognition that no matter what I did, I would never be free of this (to me) hideous human being. That small person I had spent the last 10 days adoring and looking after to the absolute best of my ability was connecting me to him. Forever. And that became a threat to my sanity. There was no longer a quick, easy exit. Please, Alex Hormozi, tell me how you changed your relationship to that in a quick, simple, and easy way.
It must be considered how this man has become so prominent in the business world. We have seen it with the likes of Trump, who has filed for bankruptcy multiple times, yet somehow keeps making his way back into business. A business needs to be forward-thinking, evolving, constantly moving, and innovating to survive. How can someone with such backward and regressive thinking be a thought leader in the business world? One must also consider the potential use of the platform Skool under these thought patterns. Are there groups on there that would fall under the “dark web” definition? Is a blind eye being turned because Alex Hormozi thinks that simply changing your opinion on someone else’s trauma makes it not trauma?
Then we move on to the longer-term effects of the traumatic event, the overreaction to anything that even slightly resembles the event. It might look nothing like it from the outside. Sometimes, it doesn’t even make sense to me. It is there, though, and it rears its head. Over time, it has reduced. The overreactions are less frequent, and the extent of the overreaction is not as extreme. Let’s be clear, though, I had to go through over 25 weeks of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) to reach this point.
Now, if Alex Hormozi would like to make a change in the world regarding trauma, perhaps he could fund DBT for people, maybe even for children in schools.
The go-to modality that I was pushed towards for a long time was Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. When you have PTSD, CBT just doesn’t cut the mustard. You need to learn how to moderate those extreme feelings of fear or anger. You need to practice these enough for them to become habitual, for these coping strategies to become so ingrained in your life that you do them without thinking. CBT isn’t going to cut it because the feelings that come up for you when you have PTSD are overwhelming. You need to repetitively stop the overwhelm in its tracks until becoming overwhelmed is the anomaly. Until your normal state of being is much more even. Then you can move on to things like CBT. Whilst you are becoming overwhelmed every day, it is impossible to talk yourself through a situation logically.
PTSD doesn’t feel logical. The overwhelming feelings are not logical to what is in front of you at the time. They are logical, given your history. Your brain can’t separate the two. It sees what is happening in front of you, and it puts you back into your traumatic event. It is like the two events are happening at the same time. If you think about it like that, the overwhelming feelings make sense. You still need to do something about it, because it is impacting your life day to day. But you also need to stop beating yourself up for something that is a protective mechanism to help you survive.
Alex Hormozi and his ilk need to stop making out that changing your habits and rewiring your brain after trauma is easy.
If you are struggling after a traumatic event, you aren’t alone. In moments of deep distress, please call the Samaritans to have someone help you reduce your overwhelm. If you want to learn some tools and techniques to help, reach out to Amy.
Amy Booth, Transformation Coach
Amy has transformed her life from severe post-partum depression compunded by major depressive disorder and PTSD after toxic relationships, to now living the life of her dreams with her dream partner and child. Having done this the hard way, Amy is now helping other women find themselves and discover the lives they want to live. Amy has used exercise as a tool to help with mental health, and offers a holistic approach to all of her clients.
