Matt Brown grew up in domestic violence refuges in New Zealand and left home at 15. He now uses barbering to talk with men about trauma, and has written a book sharing tools for resilience. The conversation covers shame, internalized blame, and how he healed through therapy and re-parenting himself.
The work that you do is so important. We look at what's happening here in Aotearoa, New Zealand, with our statistics around child mortality, domestic violence, teen suicide. And to me, you are a leader and you're leading the way with changing the narrative, raising awareness and actually giving people tools. You're not just simply raising awareness, you're giving people tools. And in the book, you know, I read through and could take away five or six things while, wow, I could apply that to my mindset, to my toolkit. So let's start from the start. What inspired you as Little Matt? If you go back to Little Matt, where did this all begin for you?
This will be obviously my story. My story of my upbringing. Witnessing domestic violence from as young as three. From what I remember.
It was a normal part of my upbringing. You know, by the age of 10, we had lived in every woman's refuge home here in Otahi. My father, throughout my whole entire childhood, was incarcerated in and out constantly due to domestic violence. And so, yeah, I just had a need.
By the age of 15, I moved out of home, wanted to get away because home was a war zone, a constant war zone. I mean, I remember waking up at 3 o' clock in the morning to my mum, my mum being pulled down the hallway by her here, and I looked over to my little brother who slept across the room from me, and he just said, oh, mum, did I edit again? And we would just turn back around and go back to sleep because it was just so. We just knew that our mum would survive this.
But then that left a heavy impression on me as a kid and then around my neighbourhood where I grew up, Hornby and Aranui. I moved into Aranoi when I was 15. A lot of my close friends.
You know, were dealing drugs, incarcerated, joining gangs, heavy addictions, and I lost a few close friends to suicide. And it was from then on, at a young age, where I realized I didn't want to follow that narrative.
Because it was just destroying us. And I knew why. I knew why. It was because the trauma that so many of us grew up around, you know, we just internalized it. And when you suppress it for so long, it. Pain demands to be felt and how it's going to be felt, it manifests itself into all sorts of things. So, yeah, decided to go on my own hikoi, my own journey of healing, doing the work myself. And when I say healing, my journey of healing wasn't butterflies and rainbows and unicorns, it was a lot of tears, a lot of therapy. And just talking about my own pain. And so when I discovered barbering, which I am now a barber.
Holding space for men to talk, I soon learnt from the men that sat in my chair was that we were all more alike than we are different. That shame, pain, trauma doesn't discriminate. No matter where you come from or what status you hold or where you are in the wealth status, all of us are more alike.
Which then lead on to writing a.
Book, an incredible book, I'll put at that.
Thank you, bro.
And trauma is an interesting thing. So I love that you address the fact that it doesn't matter where you come from, who you are, what age, stage, wealth you're at. We all carry some form of trauma and many of us find ways to keep it at bay in the short term. For me, that was alcohol for a long time and I normalized that. I socialized that it was a couple of beers or half a bottle of wine or a bottle of wine a day, that was normal. But it's not normal. It leads to poor decisions, poor health, poor mental health. So for the person that's listening right now, that has got trauma, I guess we've got tiny T's and big T's. So the tiny traumas, missing out on a sports team and being laughed at, tiny trau, seeing a parent be physically abused or someone yourself being sexually abused, big T, big trauma. Where do people start in terms of going into the healing journey?
Well, I like to start from. The best description of trauma I've ever heard comes from a guru that I admire who goes by the name of Gaba Mate. And he says trauma is what happens inside of you as a result of what happened to you. And so when I come from that foundation of knowing what's the experiences that we've had, especially as a child witnessing violence or even experiencing sexual abuse.
That'S traumatic. And so for me, in my healing journey, what I had to do, one of the tools I had to teach myself was re parenting myself, going back to that situation and speaking life to little Matt, giving life to little Matt, giving him some hope.
And help him reinterpret those events. Because for a lot of children we have two options, especially if you're growing up in violence. Option one is we blame our caregivers, it's their fault.
Or option two is we blame ourselves. And for most kids, we're not going to blame our caregivers because, you know, they put food on the table. They need to be our nurturers. And kids, you know, super superheroes so we internalize and we blame ourselves. For most kids, we'll blame ourselves. You know, maybe I'm doing something wrong or it's my fault while Mum and dad are arguing, or my fault while dad is stressing or mum is stressing. And then that lives within us, you know, as adults. And so I've had to go. And I used to believe that, you know, shame ruled my life for so many years. You know, I was worthless. You know, I'm not good for anyone. I'm ugly. All those things I told myself. And then as a man, you know, it really affected me. You know, it affected my relationships, it affected how I interacted with people. And so I've had to really, for me, doing the work was going back and reinterpreting to little Matt that your childhood trauma wasn't your fault. You know, what's happened to you was not your fault. But your healing now as an adult is so your responsibility.
I love that you call it that. It's your responsibility as an adult to heal your own trauma as opposed to looking for external ways to express that. And for some, that's through addiction. For some, that's through violence, crime. The statistics would say what you have suffered, you probably most people would not have written a book. They wouldn't be traveling around New Zealand and the world spreading the message that you spread. You know, that's truly incredible what you've done.
Thank you very.
Yeah, it's phenomenal.
