#13: TRAUMA: Why You Keep Recreating the Same Problems (Part 1)

On this week’s episode of the Capital T, Truth podcast, Larry Yatch and Vicky Giangregorio tackle one of the most misunderstood topics in personal development:

Trauma.

But not in the way you’ve heard it before.

Most people think trauma is the event.

Larry argues that trauma is actually the survival strategy we carry forward after the event is over.

In Part 1 of this special two-part series, Larry shares the origin story behind one of the most powerful concepts in his work: The Sinking Ship.

Through the story of a Coast Guard veteran named Ricardo, you’ll discover how the subconscious mind unconsciously recreates the very environments it learned to survive in—and how those patterns continue to shape relationships, careers, finances, health, and happiness decades later.

In this episode:

• Why trauma is not the event itself
 • The difference between trauma and survival strategies
 • How the subconscious creates familiar suffering
 • Why high performers often don’t realize they’re operating from trauma
 • The origin of Larry’s “Sinking Ship” framework
 • How survival patterns become both your superpower and your kryptonite
 • Why your biggest struggles today may have started long before you realize

This episode will completely change the way you think about trauma, healing, and personal growth.

🎙️ Episode #13

TRAUMA: Why You Keep Recreating the Same Problems (Part 1)
 The Sinking Ship That Runs Your Life

📅 Monday, June 22nd, 2026 • 8AM MT

🎧 Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts.

👉 TRUTHPATHMASTERY.COM/PODCAST

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

This is Capital T Truth. Here we expose the beliefs, patterns, and trauma loops that have kept you limited. I'm Larry Gatch, a former Navy SEAL officer and entrepreneur who learned the hard way that the strategies that create success can also quietly destroy the quality of your life. This work exists to expose that truth. If you're ready for freedom through alignment, you're in the right place. All of my high-performing clients, we're talking professional athletes, very successful executives, entrepreneurs, CEOs, uh surgeons, I mean the full gamut of high-performing people, 98% of them would not identify as having experienced trauma. So as soon as they hear me say trauma, they shut off. This isn't for me, it's for someone else. And when you know my background of uh being in the fields, 10 years of of running combat operations or or healing from those in the hospital, uh, it's very easy for people to point at me and say, Oh, you've had trauma. Like I understand that's part of your life, but me, no, I've I haven't had trauma in my life. And uh I think that's one of the biggest traps that we get into is it's it's a trick. I think a trick, not only based on the fact that in general, I don't believe society has a clear and effective distinction for what trauma is, but more importantly, it's a trick of the subconscious to have you believe that, oh, this doesn't apply to you. What trauma is not is the experience, right? And that's the biggest piece. And the way I describe it is we are always looking under the wrong rock for our trauma. We're looking under the rock of the experience, right? So, Larry, you went off to war and had a massive firefight, uh, therefore you have trauma, right? So trauma's tied to that experience. But the reality is if I went to off the war, had a big firefight, and died in the firefight, would I have any trauma? And that's the all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute. So how could I have the experience of the firefight, but in dying, not have trauma? Right? That doesn't make sense because if trauma's tied to the experience, you have the experience, you should have trauma. And that's where for me, one of the biggest openings I had in my understanding of trauma was that trauma is not tied to the experience, trauma's tied to survival. And as soon as you survive, what happens? You learn something on a subconscious level. Welcome back to another Capital T Truth podcast with Vicky and I. And uh this is gonna be one of those episodes where we deep dive into a topic. And the topic that we're gonna dive into, if you have uh personally worked with me at any point in time, either in our uh large group classes or one-on-one, uh, what you'll hear uh being around that is someone referring to being on the sinking ship. And so we're gonna dedicate this entire episode about really diving into uh what it means to have a sinking ship, uh, the origin story of where it came from, because it really this uh this work or this realization uh produced the processes and the structures that I've been leveraging for uh over seven years now to help uh high-performing people uh both identify and mitigate these survival strategies that they've had in their subconscious in their life. And so uh this is gonna be fun because uh not only is it a story uh of how this came up to, but it's a really good analogy to understand how uh trauma uh creates strategies of survival in our subconscious that not only provide us with our superpowers, but also provide us with the kryptonite that keeps us stuck in life.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Yeah, so definitely, definitely, definitely tune into listening to on the trauma definition of the kryptonite, all the things, because you're gonna need all of that to kind of follow along a little bit today. But um, yeah, so where do you want to start? I think this is a big one.

SPEAKER_02 4:14

Yeah, I know. That's what I always think about. Uh I think in order to do this justice, we really do need to start with redefining trauma. And like we'll go into uh there, we have a previous episode where we talk about this in depth, right? So uh within that, definitely go back, listen to that one. But I think giving just the the brief uh definition, the brief uh redefinition of what trauma is, because generally, especially when uh people he see Navy SEAL, they think high performance, uh, we do talk about high performance and uh what it means to be high performing in life, in relationships, and business, all that stuff. Uh that is stuff we cover. Uh and what I know to be true, because I've been working with at that intersection between trauma and high performance for a long time now, all of my high-performing clients, we're talking professional athletes, uh very successful executives, entrepreneurs, CEOs, uh surgeons, I mean the full gamut of high-performing people, uh, none of them, or I none is not 100% accurate. 98% of them uh would not identify as having experienced trauma. So as soon as they hear me say trauma, they shut off. This isn't for me, it's for someone else. And when you know my background of uh being in the SEALs, 10 years of of running combat operations or or healing from those in in the hospital, uh it's very easy for people to point at me and say, Oh, you've had trauma. Like I understand that's part of your life, but me, no, I I haven't had trauma in my life. And uh I think that's one of the biggest traps that we get into is it's it's a trick. I think a trick not only based on the fact that in general I don't believe society has a clear and effective distinction for what trauma is, but more importantly, it's a trick of the subconscious to have you believe that, oh, this doesn't apply to you, because the subconscious knows that it's got strategies, it's got rules, an operating system that it it operates in, and that operating system has kept us alive and safe our entire life. And the last thing it wants is change. So for all of you that uh either saw it in the in the description or heard us say trauma here in the first five minutes, and you felt yourself kind of check out, like this is for you. Like this is the time to to really listen because uh this is where the big change happens. And so I think that's where we start, just to kind of redefine those things. I don't know for you, we met after you had experienced a major trauma. So it wasn't uh it wasn't a big step for us to step into that. But when you think earlier in your life, before that, those those big traumas, when you were in that kind of performing at a very high level, would if someone would have come on stage say I'm gonna talk about trauma, what would have been your reaction?

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Um, I would have probably thought the worst of it. You know, this is somebody that maybe um has some serious BTSD or they uh got diagnosed with a terrible disease or they lost a loved one suddenly. Um I would put it in a box and then probably mentally checked out because all the self-developing I've been doing the last 10 years, um, this is unlike any of those. It was more um, I feel um when they say the word trauma, it really did pay tribute to that specific like experience experience, and then it was a bad experience. So, but that's how I came to you. Uh, I was like, I've had trauma, I need you.

SPEAKER_02 7:50

First time, first time, I need you, I've had trauma.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

That's the funny part. But what you've helped me realize is oh no, you've had a lot of those experiences, and um, they don't have to be so big.

SPEAKER_02 8:01

Yeah. And so I think, at least for this conversation, instead of going really, really deep into what trauma is, where it comes from all that, uh the big point that I want to get across is that what it is and what it isn't, right? So traditionally, when someone says trauma, what pops into almost everyone's head is some sort of experience. And you mentioned some of them, like loss of a loved one, uh being attacked, big car wreck, uh uh getting some sort of horrible disease, um, going off to war, sexual assault. Uh we always identify trauma as that, right? That thing. And it's easy then for us to hide from our own traumas if we hadn't experienced those things. So a lot of people be like, well, I didn't I've been off to war like Larry, so of course I don't have trauma, he does. Uh I haven't been sexually assaulted. My parents were were pr nice to me. Like I had good parents, I got raised up, raised well. And so it's very easy for those people to immediately like, well, see, I don't have that big experience, I don't have trauma. And I think that's the biggest trick. So what trauma is not is the experience, right? And that's the biggest piece. And the way I describe it is we are always looking under the wrong rock for our trauma. We're looking under the rock of the experience, right? So, Larry, you went off to war and had a massive firefight, uh, therefore you have trauma, right? So trauma's tied to that experience. But the reality is if I went to off to war, had a big firefight, and died in the firefight, would I have any trauma? And that's the all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute. So how could I have the experience of the firefight, but in dying, not have trauma, right? That doesn't make sense because if trauma's tied to the experience, you have the experience, you should have trauma. And that's where for me, one of the biggest openings I had in my understanding of trauma was that trauma is not tied to the experience, trauma is tied to survival. And as soon as you survive, what happens? You learn something on a subconscious level. So trauma is the lesson of survival that you pull forward in surviving some traumatic experience. It really isn't the experience because you could have the traumatic experience, die, not have the trauma. And that's why a lot of times you're you'll hear me say strategy of survival instead of trauma. And the reason I say that is most people check out when they hear trauma, because they don't want to either have to look at the experiences that were traumatic to them, or they'll pretend that they had no experiences that were traumatic.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Right.

SPEAKER_02 10:52

But when you say strategies of survival, if you're alive, you have a strategy of survival. And therefore, uh within that same line, I truly believe and have know that if you're alive, you have trauma.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

Right.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Because you have strategies of survival. And the big piece to uh uh refine that is as a human being, as soon as I get into a perceived loss of control, I get into a neurochemical and physiological state of survival. If I survive, my brain and body doesn't know the difference between if I was really in danger or not in that experience. All it knows is the neurochemicals are in place, and therefore it responds in the same way, creating a lesson for the subconscious as to what to do in the future. And so, within that place, like the fundamental understanding for everyone sitting out there, and you're gonna hear this, at least on this podcast, you're gonna hear this a bunch of times, and we're gonna go, we have gone deep into it, we'll go deep into it again. Uh, trauma's not the experience, trauma is the strategy of survival we take forward from it. And being able to understand that and understand that the very nature of being alive as a as a finite, limited human being, we will experience some time where our perception and controls take it away. And if we survive, and if you're listening to this podcast, you survive. Yes, therefore, your subconscious learns some lesson, and that lesson of survival becomes its operating system. That's all we're talking about here.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

I remember that was one of the first things that we did together in one of our sessions is make a list of all the times in your life that you had a perceived loss of control. And it was funny because I started with you know, now, because it's easy to think, but I had to go all the way back, and when I was able to trace it, I was like, Oh, I'll probably list like one or two things. Oh no. I traced it all the way back to when I was four years old. And I mean it was three pages.

SPEAKER_02 12:47

And the four-year-old one was that life-threatening no. That's the crazy part.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

But I as a four-year-old yeah. As a four-year-old, I thought I was gonna die, yeah, literally. So it was just so interesting to look at it that way. And then the strategy of survival, what came of each one of those experiences? Because if you sit there and you really do the work and see it through a different lens, it's it's it's quite um revealing. It really was. Um, but I I I really think that that's super important, is it didn't have to be the big event like um when we met. It was because I had just lost my husband suddenly. And that was the trauma. I was like, no, Larry, you don't understand. That's my favorite thing I say to Larry. You don't understand, Larry. Um, but I I I have this trauma. And then when you explain that, like you did um with just your your your um example of it, it is so true. I survived and then started having these strategies after that.

SPEAKER_02 13:44

And the the worst part about this, at least from our experience of life, is all of those strategies are run on the subconscious level, which by the nature of being subconscious is below our surface of awareness. So by the very nature of the strategy being subconscious, we can't be aware of it. Right. We don't get to pick it. And that's where we start to see suffering, right? Where when my subconscious need for survival is different than my conscious desires for my life, that separation is where suffering lives, uh, where stress lives.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

And where the subconscious need for survival, we're talking about for us to ultimately be safe, feel safe.

SPEAKER_02 14:29

Yes and no, okay, right? Uh it is it isn't about actual safety, it's about the subconscious having a perception of control. Because what drove the trauma or the lesson, the strategy of survival in the first place was a perceived loss of the control. So all the subconscious wants is to have a perception of control. Now, that perception of control does not necessarily equate to safety. The example that that I'll give, one of my core fundamental strategies of survival, my traumas, uh, the other thing, you know, capital T truth we talk about, my untruths. Like what was true for me in my old state of being traumatized and living in these strategies, that's no longer true, my untruth, is that everything's gonna go to shit. And uh as a SEAL, that was true. Like it was true that you know, mortars come in, boats sink, helicopters crash, like that's just Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, right? Like it wasn't abnormal to be in an environment where everything was about to go to crap. And many people would look at my experiences as a SEAL and say, that's what drove my trauma. And again, we're gonna I'm gonna do say this over and over again. When I say trauma, you should immediately hear strategy of survival. So people think that my experiences as a SEAL drove my strategies of survival. The opposite is actually true. My strategies of survival were built at eight years old, and the SEALs were just an environment that supported them. Because the strategy of survival of everything's gonna go to crap started at eight years old, and I need my environment to match it. So I needed the seals and environment where everything was about to go to crap to be there in my life to support the strategy because my subconscious knows if everything's about to go to crap, then we know what to do.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Right.

SPEAKER_02 16:33

And so we need environments where everything's gonna go to crap. Hence SEALs, hence entrepreneurship, startups, one after another.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

Right.

SPEAKER_02 16:41

All those are environments that support my strategies of survival from eight years old, not my conscious desires for my life today.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

So obviously not everybody's a SEAL out there. So for the people that are listening that could have maybe um uh put put themselves in in well, you put yourselves in somebody else's shoes. Who is somebody that you've worked with like as a child and you've heard this story, and it's maybe a repetitive story, so therefore they have they have uh produced this strategy of survival. And it all came from whatever, being locked in a closet or being bullied, or uh just uh uh my my father leaving at a very young age and never coming back. Um, so the abandonment, uh any anything that we hear so commonly from just all the places.

SPEAKER_02 17:27

Well, like I again uh you just did what I was talking about, was saying that my strategies people can't necessarily identify the strategy because they weren't a SEAL, but my strategy was developed at eight when I wasn't a SEAL. So I can just share my like how did I build the same strategy if everything's gonna go to shit. Uh and for me, that was uh growing up undiagnosed autistic, right? Asperger's in the city in Pittsburgh as a little kid that was uh if it had a baller team, I was useless at it. And because of the autism, uh I interact with humans and experience humans different. And that being undiagnosed made it so that I felt like I was always under attack because I was always doing the wrong thing, right? I was saying the wrong thing, I was acting in the wrong way, and it seemed like no one really wanted to be around me. But what's interesting is did people want to be around me? Yes, the autism created a world where I couldn't feel if they did or didn't. So I made up the whole story that people were dangerous, right? And so the story that I made up was I was bullied, but I don't think I was. If anything, I was probably just an annoying kid, right? Didn't understand how to interact with people, and so but in that environment, I had to make up some story. So at eight years old, I made up the story that everything's gonna go bad, right? People I care about are gonna get hurt. That was me expressing myself in my autistic way that hurt people's feelings because my facts don't care about your feelings. It's like whatever I see as true, I'll speak with no concept that that might hurt your feelings. So I would hurt people's feelings, and then it was all my fault because see, I did I said the wrong thing again, and so that strategy of everything's gonna go to crap, everyone I care about is gonna get hurt, it's all my fault, got built at eight years old. And then all of a sudden, as a SEAL, super useful, right? Because in the SEAL's world, everything is gonna go to crap, which made me really good at contingency planning. And if one tiny thing goes wrong, you die. Like it is you can't you don't just miss quarterly reports like someone dies if you forget something. So I never forgot anything. And then I chose to be an officer. I chose to be an officer, so I could be at fault for everything. So showing up in the community in the SEAL community was a result of my trauma, not the cause of it, which is crazy to think about. And so the firefights just reinforce what I learned getting picked on at the the playground, and even that, like, even that's not true. Like acting like a weirdo on the playground is the truth.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

The annoying kid. Nobody wants to be around the annoying kid. Exactly. But it didn't it didn't mean you were being bullied.

SPEAKER_02 20:28

No, right, I wasn't being attacked, but I made that up. Right, right? That strategy created an environment that was inevitable I was gonna be a SEAL because at some point I chose, well, if I'm tough, then I'll be safe. But think of how silly that is, what environments the seals work in, the environments where people try to kill them.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:48

So the tougher I got, the better seal I got, the worse environments I got put into, which just reinforced the lessons I learned at eight years old. And so these concepts of understanding that what's ruling your life today, we think is our mature, evolved, conscious mind. But in reality, what's ruling our world is my eight-year-old strategies from the playground of Pittsburgh.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

That's it. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 21:16

So our eight-year-olds, our five-year-olds build our world, right? And it and when they don't match, is where we feel stress, post-traumatic stress. And within that piece, this all started from the conversation of to keep us safe. So my strategy of everything's gotta go to crap, if something goes wrong, the people I love are gonna get hurt, it's all my fault. Those strategies have to stay in my life. Because if I'm not using those, I don't know what to do. And so I recreated that through the seals, but then I got hurt, and I got hurt and couldn't be a seal anymore. And so what did I choose next? Well, startups, right? Like That's a good idea. I have general engineering degree, right, from the Naval Academy. I'm not a any business stuff, never worked in any business, never had a job into the SEALs. Oh, let's start a company. Yeah. Right. So it's right into what's what's start, you know this, what's startup life? Everything's gonna go to crap, everyone's at risk, it's all your fault.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 22:21

Right? So I chose that. And then getting back to the original point or question, right? Is that make me safer or not? As soon as I get out of SEALs, uh at that point, it was six or seven surgeries to get put back together again, right? The surgeons like said you're not gonna walk without a cane. Uh and what's the first thing I do is join a professional skydiving team.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

That makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 22:48

Oh absolutely not, right? So the choice to join a professional skydiving team, is that bringing safety into my life? The the answer is absolutely not. Like being in a professional skydiving team, we're we're connecting ourselves together with cables at uh 2,000 feet and landing in a stadium. It's the most dangerous thing you can possibly do in the air. The reason I chose that was not because it allowed me to be safe, it allowed my subconscious to have a perception that it controlled my environment. Why? Because what environment is the skydiving environment? Everything could go to shit in a second. Right. We're literally cabling ourselves to another skydiver. If I make a mistake, he dies, and uh, it gets to be all my fault. And so my subconscious doesn't really care about my safety, cares about perceiving that it has control. How does it how does it get a perception of control? It creates the same environment in which it learned its lessons in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 23:52

Right. Wow. So hilarious.

SPEAKER_02 23:57

I just always laugh because it's so funny.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

The the But the reason you did it is because you know how to do that. Like you know how to perform in those uh in those environments in which you are unsafe. So therefore, that's why you chose it.

SPEAKER_02 24:10

That's why my subconscious chose it.

SPEAKER_00 24:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 24:14

That's the crazy part. Yes. Like, because the conscious mind, really looking at it of starting a family, being a CEO of a company, like taking off from my startup and going to jump out of an airplane for 50 bucks a day, where I had a very high likelihood of dying, is not a good choice on any front. And consciously, if I was allowed to make a conscious choice, there would be six reasons I'd say no to that.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 24:41

But what's driving my choices is not the conscious, it's the subconscious need for a perception of control, regardless if it kept me safe or not.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 24:49

And so it is it is that environment, like where we bring this kind of back to where we're starting, is the concept that this mechanism of existing in this world is the is a human mechanism. Like by being human, you have this playing in your life. Like there, there is no one that can sit there and say, I have no subconscious strategies of survival.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

I'm sitting here, actually, while you're talking, I'm sitting here thinking of all the times that I've had that perceived loss of control, and then my decisions after that, circling back to my survivor strategy.

SPEAKER_02 25:26

Recreating them again.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

Yes, over and over and over again. Which is that how we wind up um today.

SPEAKER_02 25:36

Well, that's funny because it's it when we refer to being on the ship, what does that mean? That means when I'm on my ship, because when I'm using my subconscious strategies of survival, as long as I'm using them in a different environment in which they were created, and that's an important piece, right? If I created this strategy in an abusive household where my my father abused me because he was drunk often, as long as I'm in an environment with a with a drunk abuser in which I have no power, right? Because as a small child in an abusive household, I have no power. As long as I'm in that same environment, well, my strategies are good because they worked. But being an adult, even if I find myself in an abusive relationship, I now have power. So my strategies from five years old don't aren't applicable anymore because the environment changed. So as long as the environment changed, these strategies don't work anymore. They're no longer true, they're untrue. And that's what we refer to as being on a ship. Being on the ship is when our subconscious strategies of survival are ruling our decisions in an environment that is not the same in which they were created.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

Right.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

And in that all we do is create suffering, uh, disconnection. And the whole sinking ship uh analogy actually came from the uh it was the first time I helped someone else uh identify, work through their trauma. Like I went through a significant process of one getting some hope that life could be better, these kind of traumas, uh the post-traumatic stress could be put away, not put away, could be lessened, and then uh did a lot of work on myself in it. And the downside to the autistic brain is that I'm the annoying kid on the playground. The the plus side is I can't help but see fundamental patterns in everything. And so by being around one so intently and consciously working through my own healing, and then being around a lot of other people that were doing the same, I couldn't help but see patterns in it. And it was in looking at these patterns, specifically patterns of language, that started to give me uh tools to support my own healing, and then I had the opportunity to help someone else, and that was the the start of it.

SPEAKER_00 28:22

And who did you help?

SPEAKER_02 28:24

Uh a guy named Ricardo.

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 28:26

So uh throughout my journey, uh I did what most people do, which is bury their traumas, their strategies in the corner under as much as they can. And for me, that was in businesses, right? Starting companies, because it was created the opportunity to not have to pay attention to it and um just let it sit there. And then eventually it got bad enough. And what I would say is bad enough because my my core strategy, my core tool is to suffer. So uh that suffering meant that I would have lived in this uh these untruths, this stress, this uh suffering forever. Like I would have never changed. Um I think it was those that loved me, that were around me, were getting to the point of being unwilling to stand by my suffering, which was weird. It's a it's an interesting thing to see of saying, I will no longer be witness to you torturing yourself, to you suffering uh anymore, which then led me to have to face it, all these people I love and care about are gonna be gone. And that to me was really a turning point to say, oh, it's worth trying to do something. Before if it wasn't for what's really weird could that could be taken as an abandonment, right? Uh, if it wasn't for what could be seen as an abandonment, I would have never had the ambition to change, to even try. Thanks for listening to Capital T Truth. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode. As you know, the work doesn't stop when the episode ends. For more, visit the website at capitalteetruth.org to submit a question to be answered live on a future podcast. We also invite listeners onto the podcast to work directly with me, where we dive into your personal strategies for Bible and we solve them live. Until next time, live in Capital Teach.