Addiction Medicine Made Easy | Fighting back against addiction
Addiction is killing us. Over 100,000 Americans died of drug overdose in the last year, and over 100,000 Americans died from alcohol use in the last year. We need to include addiction medicine as a part of everyone's practice! We take topics in addiction medicine and break them down into digestible nuggets and clinical pearls that you can use at the bedside. We are trying to create an army of health care providers all over the world who want to fight back against addiction - and we hope you will join us.*This podcast was previously the Addiction in Emergency Medicine and Acute Care podcast*
Addiction Medicine Made Easy | Fighting back against addiction
Unmasking Trauma: A Brother's Journey Through Pain, Addiction, and Healing
Have you ever considered the emotional journey of siblings when they discover a loved one's trauma? This episode invites you to explore this often-overlooked perspective with our special guest, Keeper Catran-Whitney, the author of "Helplessness: What Happens To Brothers When We Learn Our Sisters Have Been Molested By Our Parents?." Keeper opens up about the personal journey of grappling with childhood trauma, poverty, and the complex layers of emotions that arise when a brother learns of his sister's abuse. His story sheds light on the shadows often cast by societal norms, where male vulnerability is frequently stifled.
We navigate through the intricate links between trauma and addiction, unpacking how these experiences shape one's path to healing. Keeper eloquently shares the emotional turmoil of disbelief, guilt, and anger, painting a vivid picture of the internal battles faced by siblings who are often left without a voice. The episode underscores the critical lack of support for brothers and the societal taboos that keep them silent. We also reflect on Keeper's personal confrontation with family issues and his journey towards finding happiness and healing through forgiveness and empathy.
Our conversation doesn't shy away from the raw, unfiltered realities of confronting trauma. Keeper reveals how writing became his therapeutic outlet, allowing him to process and express his vulnerability when professional help was unattainable. He emphasizes the transformative power of storytelling and the necessity of addressing unresolved family issues. Join us as we discuss the ongoing journey of healing, the importance of supportive communities, and the courageous steps towards self-compassion and emotional honesty.
Hello, my friends, welcome to the Addiction Medicine Made Easy podcast, where we take topics in addiction medicine and break them down into digestible nuggets and clinical pearls that you can use at the bedside. Dr Casey Grover here as your host once again. All right, everyone, I am so glad to have you join me again today. For anyone who is new to the podcast, as you heard, my name is Casey Grover and I am an addiction medicine doctor working on the Central Coast of California and, if you are one of my podcast regulars, so glad to have you back. I do want to give a quick thank you, before we start, to the Montage Health Foundation for their support of my podcast.
Speaker 1:Now, today's podcast episode is going to be on a difficult topic. We're going to be talking about how trauma emotional, physical and sexual affects us. Now, why this topic? Well, let me give you the easy answer. First, I am always working to improve this podcast and I signed up for a service that helps to link podcast guests and podcast hosts, and today's guest reached out to me through this podcast service that he wanted to work with me. His name is Keeper Katrin Whitney and I reviewed his work on trauma and post-traumatic stress and I thought he would have a lot to share with all of us. Now let me give you a more complicated answer. Addiction and life traumas are closely linked. So many of my patients struggle with physical, emotional and sexual traumas and they often use substances to deal with the negative emotions that come from these traumas. I keep learning more about PTSD and I just want to dig in deeper on how I can help my patients who have been traumatized and suffer from addiction. So I felt that this was the perfect podcast topic for what I'm going to need in clinic seeing patients tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Before we start, a few warnings about this episode. First, it's a really dark topic. We talk about sexual assault and physical assault as well. Second, there are a few usages of adult language. And third, my daughter walked into the room where I was recording at the very end of the episode in a witch costume and Keeper said hi to her in her witch costume. It was going to seem like it came out of left field, so I wanted to explain. With that, let's get to my interview with Keeper Katrin Whitney, all right? Well, like I said, I'm so glad that we connected. I'm so excited to meet you. Tell us who you are and what your work is.
Speaker 2:My name is Kiefer Katrin Whitney. I am the author of the book Helplessness the Emotional Health Challenges Brothers Experience Once we learn our sisters have been sexually abused. I not only explore it, but I also answer the question of what are the traumas that brothers experience, that we keep hidden. How do we navigate our lives, going forward from little kids to adulthood? That's what I do, that's what I talk about, but before we go any further, let me just say thank you for allowing me to spend time on your show. I know you are a very busy man and you could have any number of people come and speak, and I just want to say how appreciative I am that you would take some time to talk to me.
Speaker 1:Well, as you and I were just talking, so many of my patients have been traumatized, whether it's bullying, whether it's sexual assault, whether it's physical assault, whether it's watching their parents get assaulted when they were a child. So it's just like the layers of trauma that my patients experience is just, sometimes it feels, overwhelming. Can you start with how you learned about your own trauma and how you started to try to address it yourself?
Speaker 2:Well, you just touched upon a number of layers. Oftentimes some I don't even get into. My first experience with trauma, and this doesn't even center around my book in a big way. But you talked about a child seeing their parent being abused, either sexually or physically, or emotionally or mentally. I experienced that a lot as a kid, from the time that I can remember being born. I watched my father, my biological father just physically abuse my mother to the point that he almost killed her a couple of times and at one point, when I was about seven years old, I actually saved her life.
Speaker 2:So I come from a family of 10, four boys, four girls. I'm the second oldest and, with all the trauma of watching this as the second oldest and the second boy, you don't know how to navigate that sort of trauma at that age. It oftentimes gets to the point where this is expected. This is the norm, this is the way that it's supposed to be. So, watching my mother finally having enough of it, packing all eight of her kids and running away from my father in Portland Oregon, the saying goes from the frying pan into the fire. Yes, that became an even worse situation. So oftentimes, like I said, it's very rare that I even look at the trauma that I experienced as a kid, before we even got into the sexual abuse that took place within my family regarding the sexual abuse that took place within my family, and is there a difference in the trauma you experienced from seeing your mother in that situation versus what you learned later about?
Speaker 2:your sisters? That's a really good question. Once again, it's not something that people ask me because, like I said, it's just very rare that I delve into that and the answer is yes, it's demonstrably different, because to watch your mother get physically beat down and almost killed a couple of times, almost killed a couple of times, you are almost looking at it from a 30,000 foot view, you know, and when you, the concept of it being traumatizing is incredibly foreign to a kid to see that. And so by the time we got to when the sexual abuse started, I was aware of what trauma was and it was very different.
Speaker 2:It was a trauma as a brother learning about my sister being sexually abused, which is another interesting aspect of it when I'm actually telling the story of helplessness, because six years before my sister was sexually abused, my brother and I we were sexually abused by our babysitter. And here's one of the odd for me, but not so uncommon pieces of that here I am, seven years old, being sexually abused by my babysitter almost daily for six months, and I didn't even recognize it was sexual abuse until literally 10 years ago Because, as I said, like watching my mother, it was normal, it was an everyday occurrence, or so it seemed, and so to be thrust into the role of being a sexual abuse victim at that age, and my mother knowing about it and not doing anything about it. It was okay. This is what's going to happen every day, so they are very different, and yet the pain is still the same in many ways.
Speaker 1:Would you name the experience differently? Let me give you an example. So my dad used to always say that Native Americans in Alaska had many different words for snow. In other words, they were so intimately involved with the snow that there were different ways to describe it, whereas in English we just have snow. I guess you could say powder or corn, snow or sleet, but would you almost name the types of trauma or trauma experiences differently, because it sounds like you've had multiple Wow, my goodness, I would say if I were to give some real thought to it, I absolutely would, without question.
Speaker 2:But, as I said, you're asking me questions people rarely ever ask, and so, yeah, they would have to be named differently because they don't need to be treated differently. You know the the type of support that would be needed from a child watching their mother being sexually abused and physically abused is very different than you, as a child, being a sexual abuse victim, and then it's also very different which is what my book is around being a brother and learning about your sister being sexually abused. That's very different as well. So they would all require a different sort of support that needs to be brought into play to help, and so with me, as I said, you're asking things that people never ask me. It's like layers on top of layers.
Speaker 2:It's like how do you sit through all of that? But I imagine, if I'm working with you and I don't know, but I'm just imagining this if I'm working with you, you're trying to peel back all the layers that are impacting me day to day, knowing that there's a trauma of knowing that my wife knows, and how do I handle that? There's a trauma of knowing that my children know, and how do I handle that?
Speaker 2:There's a trauma of knowing I have to deal with my sisters and my brothers. And how do I handle that? How do you peel back the layers and help someone focus to the point that they can become forward, moving every day with a view of I'm looking to be better today than I was yesterday? I don't know how you handle all of it, but you have to come to one central part of it and then work from the inside out.
Speaker 1:That's a great way to think of it. I was thinking in my brain when we deal with addiction let's say somebody's got multiple addictions there's various ways to approach it. You might try to quit everything at once, or you might focus on one or the other. What was your experience with your trauma? You've had clearly more than one. Did you heal generally and then focus on certain aspects, or did you pick one? How did you start the healing process?
Speaker 2:I started with a focus on one thing. I had to understand after, and it wasn't my well, let me back up. The one thing that I focused on was once I learned my sister was sexually abused. How do I, as a brother, going through all the shock and disbelief and the grief and the self-esteem and the anger and the betrayal and the woulda, coulda, shoulda moments, how do I focus on finding who I am without losing my sister? Because part of what happens in order for me to heal, I have to get answers.
Speaker 2:Right, I need to go to someone who could actually help me. And at that time there were no systems in place for brothers. In fact, there still aren't any. My book is the first one of its kind that looks at child sexual abuse and what we experienced after learning about our sisters. It's the very first book of its kind, because brothers are, in this instance, expendable. We are taboo, we are an inconvenient truth, because no one ever asked us what do we need?
Speaker 2:So I had to focus on me. But, as I said, I needed answers. And so where don't, they said, I can go get answers for the people who told me they didn't want to talk to me, which were my, which who? They were my sisters, and so I couldn't very well work off of anything concrete. I had to end up going in my head trying to imagine what they were going through and then work on me from there. And the work on me from there was OK.
Speaker 2:How could I not know what was going on? You know I'm the second oldest of the eight kids, I'm the second boy. It's imperative that brothers not know. Ok, and the other trauma part of it is not just that my stepfather was doing it, that my mother knew and she can don't. She allowed it to happen. And so, as you're talking about the different traumas and that's one that I rarely even think about today is what was the trauma that my mother brought to me and my brother? Like I said, you're really peeling back some stuff here, but it had to be what started with me, absolutely. And so I had to figure out. Okay, what has happened is not my fault. It's hard, your brother. It's really really hard, because how can you miss this stuff?
Speaker 2:You know, we were in the middle of a very vibrant singing career. We were just on the verge of signing the largest new artist contract with Motown Records. We were the group to replace Michael Jackson and Jackson 5 at Motown, and so I grew up in poverty. I went to 11 grade school before I graduated high school. That's traumatizing. I lived in 21 different places before I moved out because we just couldn't eat, we just could not keep a roof over our head. That in and of itself is incredibly traumatizing. So, man, this is deep, this is pretty deep. Normally I'm just talking about the book, but I don't know.
Speaker 1:So I want to pause here. You mentioned a lot of the negative things that you felt, and one of the things I didn't hear was guilt, and I was waiting for you to say that word and I'm curious what made you not put that word guilt in when you were talking about what you felt after you learned about your sister's sexual assault well, I had mentioned that.
Speaker 2:I probably just went through it really, really quick. There's a shock, a disbelief. There's a guilt there, there's a self-blame, there is absolute guilt, without question. It's the one thing that sets it off for brothers, it's the one thing that sets off our anger, it's the one thing that sets off our shame, it sets off our stigma, it sets off our fear and anxiety, because the guilt is how could you not know? How could you not know? You know, and, as I said, because we were in the midst of this incredibly vibrant singing career, my mother and my stepfather made sure that we didn't know.
Speaker 2:But after we found out, the questions from our sisters was could you not know? You know? How could you not see my tears? How could you not hear my weeping? How could you not know? You know, how could you not see my tears? How could you not hear my weeping? How could you not know? And yet they knew that. That was the strategy to make sure me and my brothers did not know. But that did not help them, and so they're now giving me additional grief and my brothers grief that's causing more trauma. So guilt is the thing that sets it off Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Now I'm listening to your story and I'm hearing a couple of interesting strings. So there's the trauma that you individually experienced, but it's a shared trauma within your family and there's different directions of the emotions going when you think about your healing from this particular trauma your sister's sexual assault. How did you think about to start with them or you, or talk to me what that process was like for you?
Speaker 2:I think the process and certainly for me, I think for most people has to begin with you, the individual, because it's my feeling that if I can't be good for me, how can I be good for someone else?
Speaker 1:Makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because to try to be good for someone else and not be in a good place for myself, that is traumatizing, because you start to think, oh my goodness, how am I giving them support?
Speaker 1:or how am I giving them advice?
Speaker 2:when I know I'm screwed up, support, or how am I getting indemnified? When I know I'm screwed up, you know it starts to weigh on you. So it was all about me and what I initially did was I tried to find support tools. This all took place in 1977, when it first kicked off, and even in 1977, I could go into a bookstore, I could speak to a counselor and they could tell me all day long the kind of support that women get.
Speaker 2:It's only been until recently that we're starting to get celebrities and people of status and influence, particularly men, that are talking about their sexual abuse directly. But when you are looking at it from an indirect standpoint, or what I call, there are two sides of the coin. There's the collateral damage and then there's the damage. I happen to be both sides of the coin, right, but for the purposes of this conversation, we're looking at the collateral damage side. There was absolutely nothing, so I couldn't talk to my sisters, my brothers and I because of something that my sister said when we learned about this. It was in a 10-minute span we were hit with 10, in a 10-minute span we were hit with three emotional earthquakes. Where we learned about it. Number one my mother told us that our stepfather had been less than our sister. This was an emotional earthquake. This is the kind of earthquake that an adult couldn't handle. How are atheists going to handle it? And then shortly, a few minutes later, she told us that she knew about it from the very beginning. That's another emotional earthquake. And then, obviously, the earthquake that was the most traumatizing for me and my brother, our oldest sister, telling us we couldn't talk about it because it didn't happen to us, it only happened to us girls. You boys can't talk about it ever, and that locked us out, and so me and my brothers didn't even speak to each other about it for 45 years.
Speaker 2:The navigation of my healing just had to be OK, I can't talk about it, and I, even in the book I mentioned this for me. Years later, I realized it was the coward's way out, but it was the way I need it at that time. The coward's way out, but it was the way I needed at that time, because I was told I couldn't talk about it. I didn't talk about it, which meant I could avoid it. I could avoid all the pain, all the trauma, all the confusion, all the depression, all the isolation, because my sister said you can't talk about it.
Speaker 2:But the problem became so incredibly difficult because I knew I was in pain. But that's how it began, by me stepping back or what you would probably call going into this denial phase. It was blissful, let me tell you. It meant I didn't need to do anything. It's certainly in light of the fact that my mother said she would handle it, but she never did. But it got to be so incredibly dark, knowing that each day I did nothing, I was betraying my sister. It got to be very, very dark.
Speaker 2:And, man, I think there is a lot of talk these days about mental health and I don't believe most of the challenges that we have, that individuals have, is not a mental health challenge. In fact, my book was initially the subtitle the Mental Health Challenges Brothers Experience, until I figured out no, no, no, no, that is not it. It's emotional. The mental comes next. And so, as I was going through trying to figure out what I was going to do, I had to realize my challenge was not a mental health problem, or in fact, we were even calling it mental health problem. It was just you go in the corner you handle it on your own.
Speaker 2:That's what our therapy was 40 years ago, 45 years ago. It's only been until recently that we're recognizing it as something else. But you go in the corner, because what mental to me means it is logic thinking, it's you're alone, you're in isolation, but something happens first, always something happens first. The emotional trauma always supersedes or I don't know, supersedes would be the word. Yeah, I suppose it always comes before the mental health challenge. Because the emotional challenge means what In order to get help, means what In order to get help? It's feelings, it's a shared experience, it's community driven, which means it's going to require the help of multiple people. Most likely and what I mean, multiple people at some point I would go to someone like you, but at some point I'm going to have to go back to the people that I'm in the midst of this emotional trauma with, which would be my sister and my brother. So now it requires a community-based approach at some point. So we're talking about feelings versus, you know, being alone and being in isolation, which is why I don't think most people who are identified as having a mental health challenge that is not it. It was always emotional. Part of the emotional challenge is this Because it requires a community based approach.
Speaker 2:Most people don't want to help someone who is going through something emotionally, because the emotional challenge means the family needs to get involved. Well, we don't want anyone else to know. The community needs to be involved. We don't want anyone else to know. It could be a larger situation where it's a regional based problem, depending on what it is, and we've seen some pretty horrific things.
Speaker 2:But it means that you require the help of other people when most people are very comfortable with telling you you have a mental health problem because that means I don't have to have any responsibility for you. Emotional support means we are having responsibility for each other, and I did not have that. So I had to try to figure out what am I going to do, and me trying to figure out what I'm going to do. I was lost for years, absolutely lost, until one day I just said to hell with it. The only way I'm going to get help that I need, I need to talk to the people who put me in the box, and that was my sister. But it was incredibly frightening to do that.
Speaker 1:How were you able to be mentally or emotionally prepared to start that conversation? What ground?
Speaker 2:the groundwork started with, I had to be honest with myself. It was that simple honesty meant I need to recognize that I'm in pain, that I'm in trauma, because if I can't do that first, I stand very little chance of healing, if ever. And it took me a long time to do that because I did not want to accept the fact that I'm in pain.
Speaker 2:And a lot of this is due to the social construct of what me, what we, as men, are taught at a very early age, and it goes across the board. It has nothing to do with race, it has nothing to do with religion. It just has to do with this idea that men, who could not be vulnerable back then, we had to be strong. Always we had to. You know, we are the hunter gatherers. We are not to show emotion, and that comes at a cost. That comes at a terrific emotional cost. We're so much better at handing that over to women. You can be emotional about it, which I think gives women a greater emotional strength than men, because women can have this type of emotional conversation with each other and they can also at times in fact I think a lot of times whatever they want, can find the strength to be stronger.
Speaker 2:Now, men, because we don't or aren't willing oftentimes or most times, to admit that we are vulnerable, that we are in pain, we lose the other side, which is the ability to be empathetic with ourselves, to give ourselves some compassion. I miss that, but it wasn't until I figured out that was the only way forward for me. And so, to answer your question, finding the emotional wherewithal To talk to my sister. What I decided to do, which I most people wouldn't do I decided to write a book about it. I decided I needed to put this stuff down on paper so I could read it, so I could go over it and refer back to it. And I figured, okay, if I'm going to put it down on paper, I can write a book that can not only help me, but may very well help other men who are going through the same thing.
Speaker 2:And so I began to use that as my therapy. Writing the book because there was nothing else.
Speaker 2:You know, I call other therapists, I call counselors and tell them this is what I'm dealing with and I'm a brother and I'm dealing with this. And to a person, to a counselor, to a therapist, they all told me they could not help me. And I would ask well, why not? They said well, if you were a woman, if you were a girl, I could help you, but I've never heard of anything like this from a brother. I've never heard of a brother experiencing something like this. It's outside my scope.
Speaker 2:Which was really interesting to me, because if I was driving with my family of 10, and we were in an auto accident and I lost all nine of my family members and I went to a therapist and I said look, can you help me? And when I would give these people that example, they'd say well, of course I could help you. I said well, why? I said because you've lost your whole family and you've got to be in pain and you've got to be in trauma. I said okay, well, let's work from there. I've just lost my family.
Speaker 2:After learning about what happened. Well, they said well, physically, this is a life. Well, physically, yes, but emotionally the trauma is the same. I have just lost everything I believe my family to be. That's probably worse, because they're still alive and they would all tell me, casey, they would say look, I don't know what to do with you. I have no clue. If you were a woman, I could help you. And so I decided okay. My only way forward was to write it down, and people, which I think should write down what they're experiencing, doesn't mean they're going to write a book. Doesn't mean they're going to start a podcast. Doesn't mean they're going to do a blog. Doesn't mean they're going to start a podcast. Doesn't mean they're going to do a blog. Doesn't mean they're going to do all that stuff. But write it down, because in writing it down, you are accepting your reality. It's no more denial. You can't run away from it if you write it down.
Speaker 1:So it's interesting. I just met another author. Her name is Stephanie Whittles-Wax. She wrote a book called Everything is Horrible and Wonderful about her brother's death from a heroin overdose and I had coffee with her a couple of weeks ago and her book was so raw Gosh, it was just really raw. And that was actually how she healed. And I'm curious, it sounds like writing was very cathartic for you with your trauma. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 2:Absolutely my book. Helplessness is book one of a three-book series. It's from helplessness to hopefulness, to happiness. Helplessness, it sounds like it's very much like Stephanie's. It is incredibly raw, it's incredibly gritty, it's very dark and I knew for me I had to go there.
Speaker 2:And many people who read it they come back and they say, kiefer, this is an incredibly powerful book, but do you do not give us a chance to breathe? I mean, it is like bam bam, bam. There's so much that happened to you. I said, well, why should I give you a chance to breathe when I know my sisters weren't getting a chance to breathe? I mean, if I'm going to tell you the story, this is not going to be a People Magazine article and that being raw, being real about it, was my tipping point for healing, because there were times when I wrote it it took me 10 years because it could be so incredibly dark, but I had to go through that. That was me accepting because the trauma you know, and I'm really curious what you think about this.
Speaker 2:I think trauma is like DNA and that it is self-replicating and like DNA which can self-replicate in ways we have absolutely no idea. I mean it's just going through the body doing what it's doing, we know very little about what's happening. Trauma, I think, is the same way and I think we approach it from that standpoint, especially when we're not getting any help or any sort of conversation or any kind of support. It's replicating in ways we have no idea and certainly for a young man or a young boy like I was. It impacts how I communicate in school, how I communicated with my family, how I communicated with my brothers and sisters, but more importantly, it informed how I was going to communicate with me and if I could not be honest with me I was in trouble.
Speaker 2:But in order for me to even recognize how I was dealing with other people, that self-replication of things I don't know why I'm responding a certain way, I just know that I am, it's just happening that really informed me. That's how bad trauma untreated, or addiction untreated, because I have to say, you know, talking to you, I'm looking at that nine years, from 77 to 86, when I did nothing, as addiction. I think it could be argued very easily, at least from my perspective. I'm not doing anything. Granted, I was told by my mother she would handle it. Granted, I was told by my mother she would handle it, but recognizing that I was in pain and I did nothing about it, I would argue could be viewed that way, and so I'm really curious what you think about it.
Speaker 1:So my patients use drugs and alcohol for a reason and the best question I ask as an addiction medicine doctor is what does the drug or alcohol do for you? And they tell me, like I can't sleep, I'm anxious, I'm triggered, whatever it's going to be. I was very interested in that same point in your life because many of my patient stories are trauma followed by substance use. To numb, to just, I don't want to deal with it. I had one young lady in the emergency department and she was about 30 years old and I asked her what are you like sober? And she said I don't know. The last time I was sober is when I was 15. It was the day I got sexually assaulted and she'd hidden or, excuse me, she'd run away and tried to hide from her addiction with substances. And I was going to ask you how were you able to be in that state of denial? Your brain has to do something with that negative energy, right? That's kind of what trauma is. It's unmanaged negative energy. What did your brain do? How did you manage?
Speaker 2:My brain handed it over to my mother. Oh, so you displaced it Absolutely, because there were a couple of things that took place. Our sister said you can't talk about it. It didn't happen to you, boy. Well, of course it happened to us, even if we didn't know about it. If it's happening to one member of the family, it's happening to the other family. Granted from their perspective, I'm collateral damage. I'm not direct. But the odd thing for my sisters is they didn't know that me and my older brother were sexually abused by a babysitter six years before them. So I understood to a degree. But, as you say, displacing my trauma, handing it over to someone else, is what made it easy, because what made it easy was my sister's granted permission. No, they ordered it to be that way and I happily obliged.
Speaker 2:Interesting Outwardly, but inwardly I knew every day it was fucked up. Yeah, I was a mess. I was an absolute mess, and it took me to a very dark place, which was in 1986. My wife of 38 years, we were to be married Three months before the wedding I was just drowning in the emotional trauma of. I was just drowning in the emotional trauma of how could I possibly get married, knowing my mother is still seeing this guy and he could be around my sister Knowing that if anyone was going to do anything to help them because aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, managers they wouldn't do anything Because there was a gravy train potentially happening for them.
Speaker 2:I started losing weight, I stopped sleeping and I recognized, ok, this is getting dark, because the darkness was I needed to kill him. I would, I needed to kill him and so, a few weeks before I got married, I told my fiance look, I've got to go to the house, I've got to handle something. And this is part of going to the mental place now, because the emotional support never came, it never arrived. So I'm in this mental place, I'm in this logic thinking, which means, logically, I've got to take this step, this step, this step. There's the only way. There's no other way.
Speaker 1:This is the only way to get out of it, I could kill it.
Speaker 2:So I'm alone, I'm in isolation, and I tell my fiance. I said, look, I have to go to the house, I've got to handle something. And she could tell, by the way I said it, that something was wrong. So she said can you tell me what it is? And I said nope, which is very common. You know, you don't want to tell anybody, right, Because you want to try to maintain some sense of control of what you think is control. And so I said I will be back tomorrow. This is on a Friday.
Speaker 2:So I went to my mom's house my mom still kept the room for me and, long story short, I waited in the bedroom for two hours to hear my stepfather who my mother had gone back to see him come out of the bedroom. And I confronted him in the middle of the hallway after he came out of the bedroom and I told him I give you 24 hours to leave this house. If you are still here by this time tomorrow, you will be dead, because I will have killed you. And I had the instrument of his death in my bedroom waiting to finish the job. But I was in such a dark place because the trauma had. Well, at this point I wouldn't even call it trauma. It was just the pain of knowing I did nothing. I didn't handle it. I was not the brother they needed me to be, that was eating at me, that I decided he had 24 hours to leave the house. So I told him that and then I left.
Speaker 2:I came back the next day, fully expecting to walk in the house and have in his silver 38 pointed in my face. Luckily he was gone. But the crazy part of it this If I killed him I was going to be put to death because the death penalty in California at that time and I was so okay with it. But if he killed me he would also be convicted of murder. So I was okay with it. But I was going to leave so many other people in pain because I didn OK with it. But I was going to leave so many other people in pain Because I didn't tell anybody. I didn't tell my sister that I was going to do.
Speaker 2:I didn't tell my brothers what I was going to do I didn't tell my fiance and my whole process is getting all caught up in the darkness, in the trauma, in the pain, was, at least he's gone. At least he's gone. But that was only going to make the situation worse for my sisters, because then they were going to say we never should have said anything, we should have just let it keep happening. And so I'm playing all of these scenarios in my head and it's like, man, I'm in a bad place. I'm in a bad place even though I was ready to kill for them. But the killing for them was going to be me, recapturing my self-esteem and my self-worth. It was. I think about it and I think and how Could you have gotten so low that you were going to throw away everything For him? Because I wanted my sisters back, but I was about to ruin their lives even more. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Talk to me about the role forgiveness has played in your life since this all happened.
Speaker 2:Well, you asked a very interesting question Forgiveness. I'm not a big guy on forgiveness and I will tell you why. I think oftentimes we're instructed certainly from a philosophical or religious standpoint you need to forgive in order to move forward. I don't think so, Because oftentimes, particularly in my situation, I believe there needs to be some sort of restitution, there needs to be some effort put forward by the person who committed the crime, Otherwise they're not having to answer for anything that they did. And so why am I forgiving me? I didn't do anything wrong, I'm innocent in this process, and I think oftentimes we are asked okay, you need to forgive to go forward? And I'll say it again, I don't think so, Because forgiveness without any effort on the part of the person who committed the crime is empty. So I didn't need to forgive myself. You know the one thing that I would say?
Speaker 2:I look at some of the woulda coulda moments with my sisters and instead of forgiving, I decided to go handle it. I decided to go talk to them, and if they wanted to forgive me, that was their choice, and so I found the strength to go and talk to them. It was the scariest thing I have ever done in my life, but I knew it had to be done if I was going to have any chance of healing it. Really, it was the one thing that I avoided, as I said earlier, because I was told not to and I was more than happy to just wrap my arms around that thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't need to do anything, but it was eating at me, and so the book presented the opportunity that I needed, the book. I looked at it like this OK, I'm going to write this book, but I can't write the book and not tell my sisters about it.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask you about that, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I could not do it and I knew that was the step. I know what's the step, so I had to figure out OK, how am I going to write the book to make it, hopefully, palatable for my sisters, because I know they're already mad at me. So what I decided to do, knowing that that was my way forward. There's a book by Dr Susan Jeffers called Feel the Fear, do it Anyway, my Way Forward. There's a book by Dr Susan Jeffers called Feel the Fear, do it Anyway. I embrace that book and that's one of the the concepts that gets me going Feel it the fear anyway, and do that, and do it anyway. And let the chips fall where they may. So I call my sisters.
Speaker 2:One of my sisters said look, I want to write a book about what happened from a brother's perspective so other men could learn about what brothers go through and their trauma and their loneliness and their pain that they're carrying in darkness and in silence. I want to write this book. So I'm not asking for permission because I want to do it anyway. But I want you to know and this was the greatest healing moment for me when I told this particular sister and, by the way, three of my sisters contribute to my book, which is amazing. I don't know how that ever came about, but they contribute to it, so you get a full family view. I'm waiting for her to explode and bring down the wrath of hell on me. How dare you write this book? Who do you think you are? It didn't happen to you, boy, like I said it did. But time has a way of softening. Time has a way of bringing perspective and causing an evolution. If you will, we can evolve over time. And knowing that I was going to do that and was prepared to accept the consequences of her being angry, she said simply this consequences of her being angry. She said simply this of course you should write a book. All you boys should write a book. It's not a girl's story, it's a boy's story, but you should write a book.
Speaker 2:And, casey, I was ready for the other part and that totally disarmed me. I just broke down in tears in front of her. I couldn't believe it because I told her. I said our family story does not have to end in tragedy. It can be used to help other families by living through our family story, possibly learn, live through us, experience through us and possibly, you know, figure out a way to do their trauma around this kind of thing. And then I went to a couple other sisters and surprisingly they said yeah, if one said you could never talk about it. That was the culmination of my healing Hitting the problem head on. As I said, I sought out therapists and counselors many and they told me they couldn't help me. So I was left to my, trying to figure it out on my own. And that's what I did, and it has been amazing. It has brought me to people like you who have helped me understand more and more and more and know this. After we're done with this, you've left me with a lot to think about.
Speaker 1:Would you consider yourself all the way healed from this particular trauma around your sisters?
Speaker 2:No, no, no, no, absolutely not, no, no, I'm at a place where I'm happy. That's why, on the three book series, it's from helplessness to hopefulness to happiness. It takes me to the very dark place of being helpless. Helplessness to hopefulness to happiness. It takes me to the very dark place of being helpless. And now I'm writing hopefulness, which is how do you get to a place where you can be hopeful? And you know, you find those people, places and things that are anchors in your life and you latch on to those and you build from there. And then happiness is where I'm at right now.
Speaker 2:And so am I completely healed? No, I don't think you ever completely healed. I'm at a place when I am happy with me and because I'm happy with me, I can be better for my children. I could be a better husband for my wife. I can ultimately be better for me. Oftentimes people say well, where, where, where does your faith fit in the middle of all of this? You know, where would you put your faith if it's you, your family and your faith? I said well, for me. It's quite simple. I said for me, and this is not for everyone, but this is part of my healing process.
Speaker 2:This is what I need. It goes in this order. It goes me. Family faith that's the order for me, Because I cannot be good for my family if I'm not good, so I got to take care of me first. I cannot be good with my faith if I'm not good for me, If I'm all screwed up.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to accept what faith has to offer in its entirety. I may play around with it, I may look at it as oh, that's nice, oh yeah, I like that, and it's almost like motivation to me. Motivation is short lived. You know you can have a personal trainer. That person can motivate you and get you going for an hour or two or maybe a day or a week. But at some point you have to motivate yourself, and oftentimes I think, certainly from a faith standpoint. In my family we are multiracial, multidiverse, we're LGBTQ and just the five of us and we are multi-religious. We're just my nuclear family, and so the faith part of it for each of us is kind of like the second or third thing We've all understood. We've got to be the best we could be before we could be better for someone else, and if we could do that, then we're more apt to accept the part of where faith fits in for us.
Speaker 1:So I was going to ask you if you think you'll ever be completely healed in your ideal world. What's the place you want to get to? So right now you're happy, you're in the process of healing. Do you feel like you'll ever get to a spot where I've done all the work I can do, and what would that look like?
Speaker 2:No, I don't think I'd ever get to the place where I could do all the work that I could do, because that means I've now put a cap, I've now put a limit on my growth. And why would I do that on my growth? And why would I do that? There's always something. Yeah, there's always something to learn. I was speaking with a person the other day while doing an interview and I've, over the past seven months I've been on, I've done 125 podcasts, I've been a guest on 125 podcasts and they have all been incredibly educational for me. They've been cathartic in so many ways.
Speaker 2:But what I've learned is this I will never be or want to say that I am completely ill, that all my work is done and I've just been introduced to the Buddhist way of thinking, something I never thought I would ever do. But there's beauty in something that I've never learned about before. So there's always something to gather, something awesome to glom onto. If you're willing to say, ok, let me explore this because it might make me better, or there's a good chance it will make me better. So I'm never completely healed. There's always something to learn. I just had my first grandchild, my grandson, seven months ago. That's healing, it is healing. I never understood, until I had my first grandchild, what that does for you, and so it's just a different lesson. And so it's healing. It's changing me, it's making me better. So now I'm not completely healed and I'm open to any number of ways of exploring how I can be a better person.
Speaker 1:Well said. So let's say, somebody reads your book and I just put it in my Amazon cart so I'm excited to read your book. I've read some of the articles about you and listened to some podcasts about you. But somebody reads your book and they reach out to the author and say your book really resonated with me. I have traumas. How do I start? How do I start the healing process? What advice would you give them?
Speaker 2:Oh, I would say the very first part is recognition, and if they're calling me and saying that they already have trauma, they already recognize that they have trauma. I think that's usually the hardest part for someone is to say it's me, it's my reality, and so kudos to that person. The next step is looking at okay, what type of help do I need? There are plenty of resources out there. There's certain, there's, you know, counseling, there's therapy. What I needed to do, before I even got there, I had to find someone that I could talk to. That was so hard. That was incredibly hard because, once again, it meant admitting not only to myself that I'm in pain. But now I got to open up. I got to tell somebody I'm in pain. I'm not saying I'm telling someone I need your help, I'm telling someone I need to be able to talk. Will you allow me to just tell you what I'm dealing with? I'm not looking for with, I'm not looking for advice, I'm not looking for feedback, I just want someone to hear me, and that could be an individual, that could be a group, that could be someone like you, that could be some sort of therapist. But I think that is the biggest step and it's the scariest step, because until you get there, you're in a mental health. You've got to find your way back to the emotional place, which meant it's now a shared experience. That's what did it for me. So that's what I encourage someone to do. You've got to find someone to listen to. So that's what I would encourage someone to do. You've got to find someone to listen to. And one of the things that makes it really hard is one of the things that I found. Even my sisters would tell me that, even though you boys can talk you know a couple of guy friends and I do it I would have manned up, I would have done this. Oh, that's noise, it's noise, it doesn't help. You've got to be really careful about who you can talk to. Luckily for me, it was my wife and I. Part of the challenge In keeping silent was really brought into sharp relief by my father, who passed away four years ago.
Speaker 2:I'll quickly tell the story. My father-in-law passed away at 95. Great guy, he and I. We grew up so diametrically opposed. He's white, I'm black, he's Jewish, I'm not. He comes from New York, brooklyn. I come from LA. He comes from a well-to-do, you know, middle-class family. We're poor. I didn't, you know, I barely got out of high school. I got to one year of junior college because we needed money, just so we were so different. But one day, casey, he calls me After the book comes out.
Speaker 2:He said you should come over, I'm going to talk to you. I said, ok, dad, I'm coming over. I get to the house and he said sit down at the dining room table. Said sit down at the dining room table. I said okay, is everything okay? He just said sit down, I want to talk to you. He says I want you to know. I understand. Keep in mind he's 95 years old. He starts patting the book in front of me, but I have no idea what the book is I'm looking at it.
Speaker 2:He says I want you to know. I understand. I said, okay, dad is everything okay. He says what I'm about to tell you, you can't tell anybody until I pass away. Now, my father-in-law was the strongest dude I have ever known as a father figure. Hands down. We became great friends. He had no son, so I was like a son to him, which I never thought would happen, coming from South Central LA. Oh no, no, no, that that that's never going to work. But here we are. You can't tell anyone until I pass away, OK. And he continues to pack the book. And then I noticed the book he's padding. It's my book, OK, what are you about to tell me? Okay, what are you about to tell me?
Speaker 2:The only person I've ever told is your mother-in-law. I've never told my daughters, including your wife. Okay, no-transcript. One day my mother or father sends me upstairs to go get something I don't know eggs, bread, whatever and I go upstairs and I walk into the apartment and no one's there. But then I hear a sound coming from the bedroom and I open the bedroom door and the father is molesting my sister. I go downstairs In case I see he's starting to cry. He said I went downstairs, I didn't say a word. When my older sister came downstairs, we looked at each other, we didn't say a word, but she knew I saw her because she saw me if she was on the bed. We didn't say anything. Two months later it happened again and now my father in law Ninety five years old, Well to do, has been an incredible businessman, incredibly successful is in full on tears.
Speaker 2:His pain has not been resolved. He had no one to talk to and he says I want you to know, I understand and I'm like what. He has been carrying this for almost 80 years. He knows he's dying, but he wants someone to hear him. He wants someone to see him. At 95 years old, he is sitting in front of me, His black center lawn says hear me, I want you to see me. He did not tell his white Jewish son-in-law. He did not tell his white Greek Catholic son-in-law. He's sitting in front of me, his black son-in-law, because we are brothers in pain together. Wow, and at 95, he wants someone to understand. But here's the thing he doesn't want me to tell anyone because he's afraid of the stigma that will accompany him once it comes out. He's afraid his daughters are going to come ask him questions. He's afraid his grandchildren are going to ask him questions. He's afraid of his knees to the neck and so he's saying don't tell anyone.
Speaker 2:And so Trauma can cross when we're talking about people communicating with other. Healing can cross race, religion, politics, education, social economics, wealth. It crosses borders. It crosses waters. There's not a living person on the planet who has never experienced, who has not experienced pain. We're all carrying something, and a lot of times we are carrying a lot of it in silence. So my father-in-law at the end, which kind of goes to your question, my father-in-law at the end decides now is the time for me to talk to somebody, but I still need someone to hear me. And that's what it was for me. I needed someone to hear me. It ended up all people being my three sisters, who told me they wanted nothing to do with me, but they embraced me. They showed me nothing but love and compassion years later, and I could not have had that reaction from them. Reaction years later Now.
Speaker 1:I could not have had that reaction from them, say five years after or 10 years after, but 45 years. They were ready for me and I was ready for them because we were the only people that we could go to for our healing. The hour flew by. This has been an incredibly insightful conversation. I feel like we have both learned as we discuss this A lot of my patients listen to my podcast Any advice you'd give them if they're learning about their own traumas and how they might start addressing them.
Speaker 2:As I said, I think the best way is be honest with yourself, be truthful with yourself, be willing to accept that it is what it is, because without that reality it's denial. And, as I told you, I went through denial for a long time and they almost murdered someone behind it. So it's OK. In most cases your trauma is not your fault. It's caused by another action of someone else or another action of something else, and it's not always easy to accept that you're in pain, but that is the first step on the path to healing acceptance.
Speaker 2:After that, you got to do the hardest part you got to talk to somebody. I have never found a way around that part of it. I don't think there is, and it goes back to the emotional health versus the mental health. If you don't talk to someone, that's mental. You're making up reasons and excuses for why you don't need to, or you think you're better than you are when, like for me, I wasn't. So I realized I needed community help, and that was talking to people, and that's the hardest part. So be willing to talk to someone after that. Then you are on your road, because after that, then it's my suggestion that you begin to seek out therapy, or you begin to seek out some sort of counseling, someone who could help you dissect and break down everything that you're going through. But you have to be very careful. It's not always the easy thing for me to look at, because part of how I look at it well, the person I'm talking to, what are?
Speaker 2:they going with, or what are they bringing into the conversation? And so you've got to be really, really careful about the type of people that you're talking to and, obviously, the person that you're talking to. To me, those are the big steps Acceptance, talking and then seeking support.
Speaker 1:I have to say I have learned so much. I can't wait to read your book and I just really appreciate you taking the time to teach me and my colleagues and my patients about your life experiences and how we can help our patients from what you've learned.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for having me and tell the witch behind you that I said hi.
Speaker 1:Will do All right. Thanks so much. Bye, and that is the end of this podcast episode. A few take-home points First, trauma affects us in profound ways. Keeper spoke a lot about the emotions that he felt and how dark things got. Second, trauma is complicated. Keeper had multiple different types of trauma and experienced trauma in multiple ways. And third, we have to confront the trauma to heal. Keeper had to talk about his trauma and write about it to start the healing process. I hope you found this episode enlightening, as I sure did. Thank you for listening and thank you for what you do. And don't forget treating addiction saves lives.