How To OVERCOME TRAUMA, Find Happiness & Live The Life YOU DESIRE | Lewis Howes & Peter Attia

Louis, man, thank you for making time to sit down. I feel lucky that I'm going to be one of the sort of first people to get to talk with you on the heels of your book coming out because we're recording this in January. Your book is coming out at the beginning of March. So I know that you're going to be talking to a lot of people and I've been thinking about this as I kind of read your book, which is given this is the first time we're speaking, not the first time we're speaking, but the first time I'm having you on my podcast to talk about it. I also want to talk about things that precede this book in particular. And I could think of no better way to start talking about it than to really go kind of more deeply into your story. Because I think your personal story is what is at least the substrate for three of your four books, right? I think your first book was really kind of about optimizing LinkedIn, and we'll probably not get too much into that. given that I don't use LinkedIn too much, but it'll probably come up as part of the other. So remind me, you grew up in, was it Ohio?

Yeah, small town in Ohio near Columbus. But then I bounced around. When I was 13, I left home. I went to a private boarding school in St. Louis, Missouri. I begged my family, my parents to send me away for about two months in the summer. Just because there was a lot of kind of turmoil, inner turmoil and my environment turmoil, and I begged them to send me away. They didn't want to send me away. Most kids get sent away for being bad. I begged my parents to send me away.

Sort of funny, our daughter is half joking and she's in eighth grade saying she wants to go to boarding school for high school. And I'm like, yeah, that's not going to happen. We have the rest of our lives to be away from you. We're not going to do it during high school.

You are going to stay with us. I hear you, man. Yeah, I mean, it was actually like it transformed my life, though, because there was so much discipline, there was so much organization. You had to wake up at 6:00 a.m. It wasn't like a military school, but there was definitely strict rules and guidelines. And that organizational feel gave me structure when I felt like I didn't have structure in my life necessarily. So it was extremely transformational. But if your daughter doesn't want to, you know, if you want to keep your daughter home, then keep her home.

I think she might be wanting to go because she thinks they'll have less stringent rules about phone time or something.

You're right.

So remind me, do you have siblings? I know you have a brother. I have a brother.

Three older, I'm the youngest of four. Older brother, two older sisters.

Okay, and what was the relative differences between ages there?

My brother is 11 and a half years older than me, and then it's kind of a three and a half, four year gap between each one of us.

And so that probably means you didn't play with your brother much growing up.

No. I mean, when I was eight, he went to prison for four and a half years. So, I have a few fond memories from five years old till about eight before he went away of him being essentially like a hero of mine, an older, bigger, older brother, an older teenager who was very gifted and talented. in a lot of different ways, extremely intelligent. He skipped a couple of grades in school because he was so intelligent and gifted. And so, you know, he was kind of like a hero of mine. And when I was eight, he went away to prison.

He was 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 years.

This was for he was caught selling LSD or some he sold LSD, a sheet of LSD to an undercover cop when he was like 18 in college. And it was an unfortunate event because back in the I guess it's the early 90s. It was the war against drugs in America was like the most, they were just cracking down on anything. Yeah. And giving extreme, you know, cases in jail, jail time to make an example for others. And so he got 6 to 25 years. And it was kind of devastating, you know, I never, I didn't grow up thinking knowing anyone that went to jail or going to prison, you know, I grew up in a small town. And it wasn't like there were bullets whizzing by my neighborhood every day. So it wasn't like something I saw unless you saw it in the movies. And you see that in the movies when you're a kid and you're like, oh, these are really bad people. These are people that kill or rape or murder and all these different things. And I was like, that's not my brother. You know, he didn't do those things. You know, he did something illegal at the time, but he didn't do. He wasn't bad like that. So it was very confusing. in a lot of ways, very traumatic for my parents and my siblings. And we had the opportunity to go visit essentially like once a week. There was visiting hours, visiting room. And that was kind of interesting because I don't know many eight-year-olds that go to a prison every single weekend for three to four hours and sit in a room with 40 convicts and their families. So every week we would drive a couple hours to the prison for essentially four years. And it was a wake-up call on just different cultures, different ethnicities, different backgrounds, different experiences. And it was also a wake-up call for me because I had a lot of judgments from, I guess, movies and TV and things like that about convicts. and I actually met a lot of them, and they were extremely friendly, they were kind, a lot of them were with their families reading the Bible, they'd been in there for a long time, and they'd transformed in a lot of ways. Not all of them, but the ones that I were meeting, it felt like, man, these are actually good guys, at least the way it came across. And so it was kind of a dark time in a sense, because our whole family was just overwhelmed by the trauma of it. and the shame and the guilt. And I couldn't really have friends during that time. Being in a small town, everyone knew on our neighborhood. And so none of the parents on my block wanted the kids to hang out with me. So it was just kind of a confusing time for me because I felt lonely and insecure and never really accepted myself. It was just a confusing time.

It's interesting you said you had judgments and stuff about what prison was or wasn't like. I mean, that's actually kind of a remarkable insight, because when I think about what I did or didn't know when I was eight, I can't imagine it was much of anything. So.

Right.

You know, this, this strikes me as a very complicated introduction of factors that. Because, again, I think there's also something you don't understand when you're eight, which is there's a difference between doing something wrong and breaking the law. Like, you know, there are a lot of people who do things that are wrong and awful, but they're not breaking the law. And as a result of that, there's no consequence, right? At least there's no legal consequence. Similarly, there are a lot of things that are against the law that are really not morally particularly wrong, and yet there's an enormous consequence. And I think it's very, I mean, that requires a certain level of maturity that wouldn't be expected of an eight-year-old.

So, well, I just think it was like, you know, you, you hear stories about people in prison and on the news, and you just see that they did horrible things. Right.

Yeah, for sure.

So it's like, oh, wow, okay. My brother, he committed a crime, but I don't feel like he's a bad guy. You know what I mean? He wasn't, like, trying to hurt people intentionally. He was just trying to make money. And as a college kid and someone, you know, asked him for some weed or something, and he. he would sell a little bit here and there on the side to make some extra cash. And then they're like, oh, do you have LSD? And he was like, no. But it was all part of a bigger thing to get a bunch of guys to go to jail. So it was just kind of part of a scheme, an undercover scheme. And it was his first time, and he had six to 25 years on his first offense.

Do you remember what the impact of that was on your parents? I mean, I, I, oh.

It was devastating. It was devastating. Again, my dad was a pretty well respected life insurance salesman in the community. Again, a small town. He was a part of Rotary. We had exchange students living with us since I was five. We had like seven different exchange students live with us from around the world for six months at a time. He was trying to be a part of the community with Rotary. He was giving back to the community. he knew everyone in the community. He was like the life insurance guy in our small town. And so it was kind of devastating. I can imagine the impact it had on him and his business and his reputation. I can imagine like the guilt and shame that my parents had from asking themselves, you know, where did we go wrong? Did we did we do something wrong where he straight away in some ways he was extremely gifted and talented. He was one of the top violinists in the in the country under 17 in national competitions as classical a classical violinist. He was a savant. He was a prodigy. He was like second chair, first chair at 16 in the symphony, in the Columbus Symphony as a 16 year old. And he just did things with the violin classically that people couldn't do. It was, he was a mutant in the violin. And one of the, one of the crazy, you know, the beautiful lessons that came from this. And I think all these different tragedies in our life are challenges and adversities. You know, hindsight is always 20 20 and sometimes it's hard to have future hindsight now. And that's now that I've had so many different challenges in life and I see the meaning of them later, anytime I'm in an adversity now, I try to think about, man, this is going to be so meaningful in my future. It's going to give me so much more power in my future to serve others and more wisdom. When he went to prison, he got sent to a prison with like these special kind of facility that had a prison band. And because he was so gifted in the violin, He got sent to a specific prison that allowed this kind of curriculum. And it's kind of like a Hollywood movie in my mind because he goes to jail. He joins the prison band. He's a classical violinist white kid from Ohio. And he joins the band with everyone who's not white. He's the only white kid. They're all playing hip hop and funk and blues and rap and R&B and jazz. and they all teach him the culture of a different style of music for four years. So he gets a master class from other inmates who are talented and play and sing with their heart and their souls with so much musicality and passion from pain and trauma. And they pour their hearts out in this band. And we got to go watch him actually a few times and it was in It was so inspiring to watch prisoners, inmates perform like they were free men. It was incredibly inspiring to witness every time. And after he got out in four and a half years on good behavior, so he didn't have to serve the full 25. And he, in the last 20 plus years, has completely transformed his life, goes all over the country and all over the world to perform and teach at schools. He was a professor at Berkeley School of Music, one of the most prestigious colleges in the world of music. He played with Les Paul for 10 years in Times Square. He played at Les Paul's funeral. This is like one of the icons of jazz and invented the electric guitar. He again has transformed his life to be of service and find meaning from that experience. And he would have never been the greatest jazz violinist in the world had he not gone through that four years of challenging education of being an inmate in prison?

So, you mentioned a moment ago that from as young as when you were five, your parents and your family would have exchanged students. I know you wrote about this in, I believe your second book, that you had a really traumatic event occur when you were five, something that remained a secret for at least 20 years. Five years, yeah. Was that related to someone that came as an exchange student or was that unrelated?

It was unrelated, yeah. When I was five, I was sexually abused by a babysitter's son. It was probably like 16 or 17. And I would go, both my parents were working and they'd work till five, six, seven or whatever. Because when I was younger, they didn't really have the financial abundance until maybe I got to be like 16. My dad finally started to get commissions coming in that were more than just kind of scrapping by month to month. So both my parents were working while they had four kids and they sent us to babysitters after school. And so that was an unfortunate event that for 25 years left me feeling with a lot of pain, a lot of insecurity, a lot of shame, because I didn't think this ever happened to any other boy. I didn't know of anyone other boy. I never heard of a man that I watched on TV or an athlete talking about sexual abuse growing up in the 80s and 90s. No one ever spoke about it. You heard about it from women in some cases, but I never heard about it from a male perspective. And so I thought I was, for 25 years, that I was the only one who'd been sexually abused in the world, essentially. I was uneducated and unaware, and I was left with a lot of Shame. and self-doubt that caused me to put on and project a certain personality type that I wasn't, an inauthenticity of me to protect myself. So I wore many different masks to try to fit in, to feel accepted, to feel like I belonged in my peer group. And I remember just always kind of feeling like angry, triggered, reactive. When I felt like I was being taken advantage of or abused in life, whether it was actually happening or not, when I felt like it was happening, I was on the defenses. And in some ways, that drove me to accomplish goals and generate some success in sports and then eventually in business. But I remember I would have these big goals in athletics. You know, I wanted to be an All-American athlete. I was a two-sport All-American athlete. I wanted to be a professional athlete. I made Arena Football League and was a pro athlete. I wanted to go to the Olympics, and I was on the USA handball team for almost nine years. We never qualified, but I played against a lot of Olympic teams. And I remember accomplishing all these sports goals and still not feeling fulfilled and joyful and happy inside. It was kind of like, all right, I succeeded, but I never felt like it was enough, so I needed to go bigger. I did the same thing in business for many years. I would accomplish goals. I would make money, I would get the accolades and things like that, and it still didn't feel like it was enough. And it wasn't until I was 30 years old, a decade ago now, when I started to have multiple breakdowns in my life. I was driven and fueled to prove people wrong, to look good, to win, and to get acknowledged. and to be kind of the one standing on top. That's what was fueled by, 'cause I thought that would bring joy, peace and fulfillment. And it just left me feeling more and more angry and upset, the more successful I got. And it wasn't until I was 30, I had multiple, let's call it breakdowns in life and an intimate relationship, a business partnership. And then I was also just kind of reactive in life. When I'd play sports, I got into a bad fight one time on a basketball court. kind of all these things came together at once where my, my best friend said, I don't want to hang out with you anymore if you're going to keep reacting like this. This is a guy that I played college football with and knew for a decade at that time. He was like, I don't like the way you're reacting. It's not, it's not fun anymore. You know, it doesn't. What are you doing? Why are you getting so triggered? And that was a big wake-up call where I thought I didn't need additional coaching or support. I thought I kind of had all the answers at the time. I had a massive ego thinking that, you know, what else can I learn? You know, I'm in the personal development space. I've made money in business. You know, I feel like I've got the answers. People just need to understand it, accept me. And I started to take the advice from him and other friends and I went to therapy, I went to a lot of different emotional intelligence workshops, and I've been in the journey of trying and testing lots of different healing modalities over the last decade that have been extremely powerful and inspiring. And in one of these workshops I took 10 years ago, I opened up for the first time about being sexually abused, and that was the catalyst for me starting the journey of reflecting back on just all the little T and big T traumas that I had faced, whether I thought they were a big deal or not, just allowing myself to reflect back on the different psychological stages of my life that wounded me, that created a scar that created a type of open wounds. And it was extremely healing, terrifying at the same time, but extremely healing when I started to open up about this in this workshop and then went through a process of telling my family one by one and close friends one by one. And then eventually about a year later, opening up about it publicly on my podcast. And that was about nine years ago when I opened up about it. And I remember thinking to myself before I did this kind of episode talking about sexual abuse as a man, I remember thinking, my life is over. My career is over. My business is over. No one's gonna buy anything from me ever again, you know? everyone's going to make fun of me publicly and I'm going to be shamed. But I just felt like it needed to come out of me. And if it could help a few men who had been through something similar, then it was worth, you know, losing my credibility and my business and everything. And what happened afterwards was an extremely beautiful experience for me. For weeks, I just got essays from men opening up about for the first time about the traumas that they went through through sexual abuse. And it was kind of like an emotional hangover reading these essays from men because I didn't realize how much trauma men go through in their childhoods. And the stats are one in six men have been sexually abused. It's one in four women. But the challenge for men is there has never really been a safe space until really the last few years for men to be able to open up and talk about it. Again, it's traumatic no matter your man, woman, who you are. But there's been more of a availability to talk about it for women over the last, you know, decades. And I just never felt like there was a space for men. And I think more men are opening up and talking about it. More people are talking about mental health in general and just healing trauma, and it's been It's been a beautiful journey over the last 10 years to continue to heal, to continue to grow, and reconnect and reparent that five-year-old version of myself, the 10-year-old version of myself, the 18-year-old version of myself, and talk to myself in a meditative psychological state of how proud I am of that five-year-old. for overcoming this, for how proud I am of the eight to 12 year old who didn't have friends for four and a half years because, you know, he was facing challenges with my brother in prison. And for all the different stages of life that I felt like I was unsure, uncertain, unclear, and being able to go back and have those conversations has been extremely healing experience.

What do you think it was, Louis, that created that crescendo when you were 30. It's not an unusual scenario, right? Which is these traumatic events occur very early in life, but they don't sort of the maladaptive side, because I sort of describe what you've explained is there were positive and negative adaptations to that experience. The positive adaptations were the things that actually gave you discipline and gave you drive and probably enabled you to reach a lot of your potential. But unfortunately, it came with these negative adaptations that we'll call maladaptations. And that's what increased your temper and probably created emotional distance between you and others and an inability to connect with people. But the story that sort of the thing that I find interesting is it took 25 years for that volcano to erupt. what do you think that was about? Why do you think you were able to enjoy relative successes until you weren't? It was sustainable until it wasn't.

Yeah. I love we're having this conversation because I don't really talk about this as much. Most people don't ask me this stuff, so I'm glad we're talking about it because I was really good at putting on a mask of the athlete mask, of the know-it-all mask. I've got it all figured out. I can take care of this. kind of the success mask of like using success as a mask to protect myself. And I think it's really hard to transform when things are good and when things are bad. Like we get familiar with good, we get familiar with bad or low level stress, it becomes familiar. It's really hard to transform unless some type of event occurs. Maybe it's someone close to you has a near-death experience, maybe you go through a divorce or breakup or business bankruptcy or you lose your job, whatever it might be, you get really sick, something happens, you lose a grandparent that you're close with and you start asking yourself, like, why am I doing the things I'm doing when there's not enough time left? You start looking at life differently. And I think for me, it was kind of a perfect storm of events that occurred. My business partnership broke up. Like, I almost got in a fight with my business partner at one point in the middle of Times Square. I felt like I was gonna punch him because we were just not able to communicate. And it was kind of like months and months of fustration and resentment and all these things. And again, I was immature and had a big ego.

And if I remember correctly from the book, this was a business partner. This was a 50-50 partnership where you were doing 80% of the work.

That was my perspective, at least. Yeah, I was bringing in the revenue. I was the one doing the sales. So I felt like the only reason we're generating revenue is because I'm doing the work, right? That work.

And so it wasn't that you didn't have a legitimate concern. The problem was you weren't able to effectively say to your partner, Hey, listen, maybe this doesn't feel equitable to me. How does it feel to you? Should we reconsider things?

Exactly. I didn't have the emotional tools to communicate maturely, really, is what it came down to. I didn't have the tools to communicate my frustrations peacefully and with gratitude. And it's funny because after I went through this, transformational workshop and started practicing these tools and learning them and practicing them and integrating the healing. I then later went back to this business partner that I didn't speak to for months and had a meeting with him and just thanked him. I just said, Hey, I'm so grateful for you. I appreciate you. And I was able to sit with him for a couple hours and find peace and actually then sell the business to him in a peaceful way. But I didn't have the emotional tools on how to communicate effectively before then. And afterwards he was like, what happened to you? Like, how did you communicate like this? Like, I was so relieved because I thought you were to come here and, you know, get arguing and all these things. And I had the perfect storm of events. I was in an. An emotional up and down, intimate relationship. I was in an emotional up and down business relationship partnership, and I was using the. The frustration as an outlet with basketball and. And sports. and I would kind of take all that aggression out on others in sports. That's what I knew. That's what I did in football. You take all your anger out on someone else. You inflict as much pain on them as possible, but in a, you know, a legal activity. Right. But you just Spear them in their chest, in their head as hard as you could. You could hit people on the head back then head to head, and there was no foul. so you just head to head as hard as you can, which probably caused a lot more brain trauma. I mean, that I needed. And at that time, I was like, I can only do this through basketball. And for me, just, I kept getting in more and more, like, kind of tiffs and shoving matches.

And eventually, and this is literally just playing pickup basketball.

Pick up basketball in a freaking Beverly Hills. It's not like we're in the mean streets of Compton where there's bullets whizzing around or something. This is just hanging out, having fun with a bunch of, you know, 20 something year olds. play and pick up ball on probably one of the nicest looking pick up basketball courts you can find. And for whatever reason, when I felt like someone would give me a little elbow to the side or they'd say something to me, I felt like they were abusing me. It felt like I was five years old. The psychological child in me felt like this is an act of abuse and they could take it farther and farther and I could do everything in my power to protect myself. physically, emotionally, psychologically. Because I never want that feeling of being powerless again. I never want the feeling of being taken advantage of again. And so it was a pattern that would repeat in different scenarios. And Ian, like you said, that fuel of needing to look good, wanting to be right, proving people wrong, like building myself up to protect myself, allowed me to be so consistent, so driven, willing to work unlimited hours to get results, but it left me feeling extremely empty, lonely, insecure, and not free inside. I still felt like a prisoner internally. And so all these events came to a head around the same kind of few months, and that was the wake-up call. I don't think I would have woken up if just one thing happened or, you know, But it was all of that.

So really it's these big three things, right? It's your best friend saying, you shouldn't be playing basketball with us anymore.

Business partnership.

Your business partnership and the blow up with your girlfriend. So when you finally confront this harsh reality, how do you then take the action? How did you even figure out what this workshop was? Did someone recommend it to you?

A few people recommended it to me kind of before this and I was like, nah, I'm good.

And what was it called?

It's called Mastery and Transformational Training and it's an emotional intelligence workshop in Los Angeles. And there's a bunch of different these workshops out there. They're kind of like five-day workshops that essentially have a bunch of different scenarios, games and exercises to go back to show you how you react in life. They're essentially designed to see how you are and create a mirror of real world scenarios in a small group setting with games, activities, one-to-one dyads, meditations, and all these different things. So you go back into the different events that caused pain, stress, overwhelm, the things that keep you from being your most joyful, authentic self now. What is holding you back from giving your fullest self, from being the most loving human being you can be, from being your childlike joy as an adult? What robbed you of your joy? What took your joy away from you? You know, who hurt you essentially is what it's learning about. And everyone goes through their own journey and their own experience. But for me, it was extremely powerful.

Well, actually, that's kind of interesting, Louis. That's a bit counterintuitive. I can totally understand why for you, that was the journey. Was that the explicit journey for anybody who joined that? In other words, was anybody who came to that workshop also put through a framework of anything that today is not happening for you that should be is probably tied to some, for lack of a better word, contamination of your true self as a child? Or was that kind of more your journey?

Some type of belief. I think Everyone goes through the same exercises and some of them didn't resonate with me. I was like, okay, I got nothing out of it. But for other people, it was like the biggest eye-opening experience. And then other exercises, I was like, oh my gosh, this really impacted me in a big way. And it was a big breakthrough. And they're all designed to show you how you show up in life currently, what's working for you, what's not working for you, and what are tools that you can use moving forward. to be a better version of yourself. It's essentially what it is through leadership training, through emotional intelligence, language, things like that. And I got a lot out of it because, again, I think I had so much pain I was holding on to for 25 years.

And did you talk about it there for the first time?

I talked about it there for the first time. And I remember, like, no girlfriend in the past knew. My family didn't know. I didn't tell any friends because I thought if people knew this about me, no one would love me. No one would accept me. No one would be my friend. And that was one of my biggest fears was people not accepting me. But really, what happened was I never fully accepted myself. I wasn't able to forgive, you know, find meaning in that experience and lots of different experience that occurred in my childhood. And so I was just filled with so much shame about these things. and I thought if any of my buddies knew these things about me, my college football teammates or high school basketball teammates knew this, they wouldn't want me on the team. And all I wanted to do was learn how to fit in and belong. But I never learned how to belong to myself. And I think that's something a lot of people over the last 10 years of me doing the research I'm doing and you doing the research you're doing, a lot of people from my experience, don't know how to fully love and accept themselves with all the mess and all the stress and all the things they've been through. And I'm not saying you need to be proud of the things you've done. There's many things in my past that I'm not proud of, but I can find meaning and accept and have compassion for the 11 year old that would steal candy bars, you know, almost every day for a year and a half and be like, okay, I I was that's where I was in my life. I'm not proud of it, but I can have compassion for the tools that I had, the stress I was going through, and that I stopped it and I transformed in a certain way. So I. I love that person, and I heal that. That person inside of me so that I am not in shame of all these different stages of my life. Because I don't think shame supports us in. In service. It doesn't help us serve and give to the people we care about closest to us. to our communities, to our platforms, whatever we're creating in the world, it holds us back. And for many years, I couldn't sleep at night. I would just sit up at night for about an hour, hour and a half, just ruminating. And it was until after I started the healing journey where I was able to fall asleep within minutes. And it's been, you know, it hasn't been a perfect journey over the last 10 years, but it's been a powerful.

Journey of constantly healing.

Do you remember what it was?

In the moment you were about to talk about this that gave you the comfort that said, In this moment, I can do something that has seemed so taboo. Was it in part Lewis because they were strangers? Did that make it a little easier in that moment?

It was part of it. Yeah, it was part of it. This workshop was like two weekend workshops. So I did a four-day workshop. that kind of gave you some basic tools and understanding. So we're kind of all on the same page of understanding, like the language and tools and leadership distinctions of accountability, responsibility, ownership of your life, things like that. It wasn't until the second weekend, which was like a week and a half later, where it got extremely intense. I mean, people are opening up and extremely vulnerable and crying and really sharing different things that had occurred. So once other people started to share how messed up their life was, it gave me permission to be like, oh, wow, other people go through stuff too. And way worse scenarios than I've gone through in certain areas. And I remember this was probably like the halfway mark of this weekend workshop. And the first couple days of it, the trainer, the facilitator of the workshop said, okay, we've gone back and addressed a lot of the different things that have caused you to guard your heart, that have caused you to be more analytical in your mind and be less peaceful and not own your peace and own your love and give your love generously to others. A lot of people just guard themselves, right? he said, now we've addressed these different scenarios. We've addressed your, your mom, your dad, different scenarios from childhood. We've done these different exercises in the games. Then we have reflection and journaling time kind of to, to start integrating these things. And he said, now we're not going to go back into the past anymore. We've done enough. We're going to start creating a vision of the future you want to create, the who you want to be. how you want to show up in the world, what you want to create, the type of relationship you want to have, the type of dreams you want to manifest. And we're going to start building tools into developing how to create that and getting clear on the vision you want for your life. And he said, but before we do, if there's anyone who has yet to clear of their past and talk about or address the thing, something they need to talk about, It's kind of like now is the time or forever hold your peace because we're moving forward. We're not going back anymore. Let's go on with our lives and start creating a powerful vision we can live into. And the room is kind of silent. And I remember just thinking to myself, man, I feel like I've been going all in on this workshop. Like I went all in talking about like challenges with my parents that I had about, you know, my brother going to prison and what that felt like about being dyslexic my entire childhood and being in special needs classes. until I finished college, you know, just like being picked on, being picked last in sports, all these things that were just kind of the painful memory. But why have I still not talked about this one thing? Like, why have I yet to talk about it? And for whatever reason, I go, it just kind of hit me. I go, I don't, I don't know. If I don't talk about this now, I'll probably never speak about it in my life. I'll probably keep it to my grave. And I think it was just the the environment, the setting, again, other people were opening up before then, it gave me the courage in that moment. And I don't think I would have ever had the courage to speak to, you know, my future wife, my, you know, my parents, I don't think I would have told anyone because I didn't have the courage emotionally. And I remember standing up, there's probably 40 people in the room. I remember standing up, and kind of walking to the front of the room. I didn't even raise my hand. I just stood up and walked to the room. And this is what I remember. I remember looking down at the carpet and walking through this story for the first time, reliving it like I was in the bathroom being sexually abused by this man. And it's almost like I could go to the scene 25 years prior. I could see the room, the mirror, the bathroom. I could smell. I could. I could. I went back there, and I was so ashamed that I couldn't look up at anyone's eyes. So I just stared down at the carpet, and I walked through this kind of story step by step, and I just said the whole thing. And I remember walking back to my seat, sitting down, and just erupting with tears. I just started. bawling. And I didn't really cry that much. You know, you're, I was conditioned not to cry as an athlete and as a, you know, a man. And I just bawled. I was bawling so much. And it was so beautiful because there was two women on the sides of me. They're crying. They're both hugging me and embracing me. The whole room is like starting to cry. And I'm just like, my life is over. That's what I thought. And so I run out of the room. I get so scared. I ran out of the room and I left. I left the event. I went outside to the, you know, out of this kind of hotel conference room and I went outside this kind of back alley of this hotel. And I'm putting my head and my hands on the wall in this back alley, just like sobbing. And I was just like, I'm never going back in there. I'm done. I'm going home. Like, my life is over. And one of the most beautiful things that happened in my life, a memory of mine that I that I'm it was a beautiful moment was I felt this tap on my shoulder as I'm kind of like crying and on this wall. And I turn around and it's probably a 55, 60 year old man, big guy. And he's looking at me in my eyes. He's probably my same height, eye to eye, staring at me crying. He said, you're my hero, I will follow you anywhere. I remember this vividly. He said, you,'re my hero, I will follow you anywhere. And I had everything wrong about you. Again, I was kind of showing up with an ego and thought I knew it all and all this stuff. And he goes, I had everything wrong about you. And he goes, let me tell you something. I'm in my late 50s. I've got four kids. I've been married for 25 years. My wife doesn't know. My kids don't know. No one knows. This happened to me when I was 11. for many years. And it was, it's still the deepest secret that I have. You're the first person that knows. Thank you for having the courage to open up and give me permission to start talking about it. I'm gonna go tell my wife tonight. I'm gonna start the healing journey. Thank you. And I was like, I'm just kind of in shock. I'm still like emotional. I'm a wreck. He's hugging me. We're crying together. And then one by one, probably like 12 or 13 men come out of the room and they all come and give me a hug. And not everyone had been sexually abused, but a few other guys had been. And they all came to me and said, this happened to me when I was eight. This happened to me when I was 13. This happened to me when I was seven. And these few of the guys kind of said, I've never told anyone. Thank you for opening it up. This was. So this is back in 2013, 10 years ago. when I did this. And I was kind of like, wow, okay, other men have experienced this and they started talking about it. And it was very therapeutic and very healing for us to experience it. The weekend, you know, I go on over the next few days and finish the event and have a powerful experience of just catharsis and healing and then sharing these vulnerable moments with other people who had similar experiences, which was extremely powerful. but I remember thinking to myself, like, I can't tell my family. Like, these are strangers. I never have to see them again. Like you said, what's my family gonna say? What are my friends gonna say? Are they going to be as emotionally available and courageous to be able to receive this information? And that was a fear and concern of mine. But eventually I ended up telling them all. I. I reached out to a therapist friend of mine afterwards, and I said, hey, this is something that happened. And I started to open up about it. But I'm terrified to tell my family and friends because I don't think they'll accept me. And I said, what's a process I can use to connect with them to see if they're available to hear it? And this friend of mine said, Ask them all a question before you share with them. Ask them this question, Is there anything I could ever say or do that would make you not love me? and based on their response, if you feel like they're receiving of it, then you can open up and talk about it. And so I did that one by one with my family and then my friends. And, you know, it brought me closer to all of them. They started to open up about things that I didn't know about them, things that they went through that I had no clue about. And it brought. It brought us closer together. It created a stronger bond of intimacy and connection. And that was really the journey where I was like, wow. I've been missing out my entire life, 25 years of true intimacy and real authentic connection because I've been hiding myself from so many people. And it doesn't mean you've got to reveal all your darkest secrets to everyone right now and publicly. I'm not saying that's the case. But I do believe that we are missing out on something extremely beautiful and we will never be peaceful and fully free internally or externally, until we can accept the things of our past that we're most ashamed of and afraid of and insecure about, we will always be a prisoner in our heart and mind until we can face it and accept it and embrace it.

You know, prior to this, this moment, what was your relationship like with your parents and your siblings?

I had a challenging relationship with my parents. I had a, it was kind of interesting. I mean, I loved my parents. I had some great moments with them, but I begged them to send me away because I just grew up in a lot of a stressful environment. Um, my parents were kind of explosive with each other growing up. You know, they should have probably never been married. They got married when they're 18. They didn't have the emotional tools, things like that. until later in life. So they stayed together because of the kids and then just kept having more kids.