A Path Through Pain and Isolation

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I was conceived in Death Valley, California, in 1969, at a time when the broader culture was already marked by division, violence, and uncertainty. The United States was still reeling from the Tet Offensive and the heavy losses of the Vietnam War. I did not know it then, but my own life would also be shaped by forces I could not yet understand and by pain that would take years to name.

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I was born at Saint Anne’s Home for Unwed Mothers in Los Angeles, California, in the winter of 1970. I was separated from my mother at birth and soon after placed in foster care for the first year of my life.

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There is more to say about those early years, but this is not the place to tell it all. This is written so that you may find something of yourself at the beginning of my story. To tell it all would take too long, and much of it would seem unreal. Some things are better left unsaid.

Functional Illiteracy

To understand why it became so important for me to develop a different approach to trauma-like symptoms, I have to go back to 1982.​

At 13, I didn’t have enough grades to graduate from 8th grade. The principal didn’t want me in school anymore. My adoptive father didn’t want to come to the end-of-year meeting, so my stepmother went instead. I was sitting there when the principal said, “I’m sending him to high school. They can take care of him.”

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By 16, I hadn’t passed a single class in any of the four high schools I attended. I don’t think anyone understood the life I was living, and no one knew that I was functionally illiterate. I had learned to survive inside that shame without giving it a name.

Learning to Read Through Bible Stories

In 1990, many things began to change my life for the better. My future wife invited me to the small Holiness Church that her family attended. It was a black congregation that sang only a cappella, and the services were shaped more by spiritual presence than by fixed structure.

I was struck by its simple beauty and vibrant spirit. I also spent time talking to the church leaders, who were modest, strong, and highly educated. What stayed with me was that they did not seem afraid of my simmering rage or my lack of education.

I would often visit my wife’s grandmother’s house. Sitting in her rocking chair, she would tell me Bible stories because my reading was still so poor and I knew almost nothing about the Bible.

Up until then, I had never read a book. Over the next two years, I read the Bible and short essays on church history over and over again. Slowly, through storytelling and repetition, the words began to make sense. Over time, my reading became strong enough that I began to read everything I could get my hands on.

I remember seeing The Miracle Worker, the play about Helen Keller, and being deeply moved by the moment when she first understood that the patterns her teacher drew on her hand were words for real things. In the play, she grabs her teacher’s hand, eager to know the word for everything.

“As the cool stream flowed over one hand, she spelled the word water into the other, first slowly, then quickly. I stood still, my whole attention focused on the movements of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a vague awareness of something forgotten, a thrill of recurring thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderfully cool something that flowed over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!”

–– Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (1903)

This is what reading felt like to me. Once that world opened up, I wanted words for everything.

Years later, when I read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I was struck by the power of the book’s concluding paragraph:

“The modern hero, the modern man who dares to heed the call and seek the abode of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be reconciled, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to shed its skin of pride, fear, rationalized greed, and sanctified misunderstanding. ‘Live,’ says Nietzsche, ‘as if the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but the reverse. And so each of us shares the supreme test, bears the cross of the savior, not in the bright moments of the great victories of the tribe, but in the silence of our personal despair.”

–– Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Disabling Autoimmune Disease

In 2000, I was diagnosed with a painful and debilitating autoimmune disease, a condition that made me feel trapped in my own body. At the time, trauma theory had not yet fully explained the connection between chronic, physical illness and the psychological impact of complex trauma (C-PTSD).

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At that time, trauma research had made important advances, but the relationship between the mind and the body was still not well understood. Very few people connected autoimmune diseases, chronic syndromes, and other difficult-to-classify diagnoses with long-term emotional and psychological stress.​

I was at a crossroads, either living with my trauma or starting to believe that something more might still be possible. For a long time, survival, transformation, and healing felt out of reach. I had come to believe that I was broken and that managing my physical and emotional pain was the best I could hope for.

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See How I Understand the Mind-Body Connection

The History of How Trauma Has Been Understood

In much of modern psychology and medicine, trauma was understood far too narrowly. The field made important advances over time, but for many years still lacked a sufficiently developed language for the deeper effects of long-term emotional damage, developmental wounds, and the way chronic stress can shape both body and mind. What many people lived with was often fragmented into discrete symptoms, misunderstood in isolated categories, or only treated on the surface. Concepts were emerging, but the larger framework had not yet caught up with the full human reality of complex suffering.

To understand that history more clearly, it helps to trace the major shifts in how trauma has been named, interpreted, medically treated, and sometimes misunderstood.​

• Nostalgia or Homesickness and Soldier’s Heart

• Railway Spine, Hysteria and Nervous Shock

• WWI Shell Shock

• WWII Battle Fatigue and Combat Stress Reaction

• Chronic Post-Combat Disorder in the Vietnam Era

• PTSD Enters DSM-III (USA)

• Trauma Research Expands Beyond Combat

• ICD-11 Formally Recognizes Complex PTSD (EU)

• The Problem with DSM-5-TR (USA)

1861–1865, Civil War: “Nostalgia” and “soldier’s heart”

Trauma was not yet understood in psychological terms. Reactions that we would recognize as trauma today were often described as homesickness, melancholy, weakness, or disturbances of the heart and nerves. “Nostalgia” referred to sadness, anxiety, and disturbed sleep, while “soldier’s heart” was more concerned with rapid pulse, shortness of breath, and fear. Treatment was usually limited to rest, symptom relief, and often a return to duty.

Late 19th century: Railway spine, hysteria and nervous shock

As industrial accidents became more common, trauma began to be understood either as a physical injury to the nervous system or as a psychological condition. There was still no unified model of trauma, and patients were often divided into “organic” and “emotional” cases.