A man describes losing a toddler named Joey in rapids at age ten, then a pattern of deaths and divorces that taught him to cut people out before they could leave. He never got help for the grief, and Speaker B explains how that early trauma shaped a lifetime of pushing people away.
And I saw this white thing. I jumped in the rapids, grabbed this kid, brought him back. I started doing CPR, screaming for help. Long, you know, the kid passed away. And at that time, you know, after kind of really digging deep these last couple months, it's like that's when it started. You know, I never really went to counseling that I can remember. So, you know, losing— you ask if I've lost someone, I think that is the beginning of it. And then since then, you know, I've been through a divorce. You know, I moved a lot as a kid. We moved about every 3 to 4 years. So it was kind of like, you know, you have all these friends and then you lose them and you have to make new friends. So I learned at a young age to kind of just, you know, push things under the rug and move on. And that kind of morphed into, you know, people. And you're spot on with, you know, if you're not in my circle, then you're out. Kind of a deal. Um, yeah. And I, you know, I've lost my mother, um, 4 years ago to cancer. 3 weeks after her death, I lost my grandfather. Um, so I've had a lot of loss as of recent. So yeah, I, I've, yeah, I've experienced loss, brother.
Yeah. I think the situation with Joey, God rest his soul, I think that that was, uh, I think that was extremely traumatic.
Extremely traumatic. And I have never done anything to address that, right? Like my parents counseling, I think I went maybe once or something, but they didn't really back then. I don't even know, you know, what therapy, what it was clinical back then. All I know is, is, you know, I keep diving deep per the program, you know, and it's been a wonderful experience by the way. And that came up and I'm like, this has gotta, you know, there's something's tied to this. Yeah, um, that has really altered my behavior in a lot of different ways, um, for a lot of years.
Yeah, well, thank you so much for sharing that, man. And you know, when you cut people out of your life and you just move on, what you're really doing is you're protecting yourself from the feeling of grief and loss that accompanies losing any relationship. And protecting yourself from that feeling of grief and loss is something that you learned to do at 10 years old. With the situation with Joey, you never got to move through those 5 stages of grief and loss. And you know what a 10-year-old boy— you know what a 10-year-old boy thinks when he's responsible at 10 years old for watching a toddler and that toddler perishes?
I felt a lot of guilt, brother.
Yeah, you felt like it was your fault.
I 100% did.
Yeah, and you still do.
And yeah, I do.
Yeah, even though consciously you know that it's not your fault, subconsciously you feel that it is, because that's how the memory was left. That's how that file was stored away. It was stored away with an— with a piece of guilt connected to it in that Rolodex, in that file cabinet, and that thing was closed and locked.
