Dr. John A. King describes a sudden flood of suppressed childhood memories that hit him on a March morning in 2008, forcing him to rebuild his identity from what he calls "John 1.0" to "John 2.0." The involuntary flashback triggered complex trauma and left him asking who he really was.
Well, for me, it started on a beautiful March Texas spring morning. Blue sky, clouds, white puffy clouds, blue sky like a Simpsons opening. And I walked out of my shed and I saw daffodils and I thought, wow, they're beautiful. And then it hit me. It was like, I think it was 2008, Thursday at about 10:45. I had decades of suppressed memories come back to me. Um, you know, I thought my childhood was normal. I thought it was okay to watch your caregivers bathe together. I thought it was okay to You know, watch pornography and then have sex with female dinner guests. And so up to that point, I'd had these little memories of things I'd done and things that had been done to me, like little 8mm films floating around in my brain. And then when this recall happened, it strung together like a movie and playing over and over and over in my head for seven years. Sometimes it still does. So at that moment, that's the point that I called John again and recall of all this stuff that happens. And as a result of it and complex post-traumatic stress, John 1.0 was left behind. There was a clear division. John 1.0 was an executive, incredibly outwardly successful, and after his brain vomited over his pristine life, he ended up being neurologically John 2.0. And that was when I had to— I was forced into a situation to ask myself Who am I and what do I like to do? Because I didn't even desire to do what John 1.0 did anymore. I really wanted to discover this guy and find out who he was. So it was something forced upon me.
