321: What if they tried to erase you?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. People manipulate us because we give them the power to decide our value. And we learned this in childhood. Because our parents all too often offer conditional love. I'll love you if you're who I want you to be. That is not love. It's controlled manipulation. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 321. What if they tried to erase you?

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It works just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. My dad was an interesting guy, and truthfully, I don't think I really knew him very well. I was mostly frightened of him.

He was the son of a bastard. And in that era, that was not good because he was born in 1931. Poor farm kid, backwoods of Southern Illinois. The family really struggled. I think he dropped out of school by eighth grade. So he's not educated. He worked as a laborer. He laid hardwood floors. My dad had a distant relationship to his family. And my mother had this mixed relationship with her mother.

I lived with my grandmother for a short period of time. My grandmother was morbid and deeply religious. She just sat reading her Bible all day and praying and steeped in all of this deep Protestant Christianity. And that was really the center of their existence. And they were just waiting to go to Jesus. And they couldn't wait to get out of here on some level, though it took them all 100 years to get there. Mom and dad were 18 and 19 when they got married.

And their parents both forbid them to get married. And of course, they did. It's a consequence. Tell a teenager they can't do something, guess what? They're going to go do it. And then they left town. They really wanted kids. I mean, she immediately got knocked up. And my brother was popped out basically nine months after they got married. And six years after my brother was born, my sister and I came along when we were in Missouri.

My dad was gone a week or two at a time and then come back. And we always had a good time at home until dad came home. And then everybody was afraid because he was violent and angry and controlling. But he was relieved when he left and was gone for another week or two. He had an explosive anger and that anger would come out in the spanking or whether it be a fly swatter or a piece of wood or whatever he had handy. I can vaguely remember his violence with my brother was far more because he was older and they went at it.

And you never knew what was going to send him off. And he got really frustrated with me because I was much smarter than him. We'd play checkers and I'd just eat him up for lunch. And he didn't know what to do with this. I remember we took the Red Cross training. I just went zing, zing, zing, and he couldn't pass the test. I'm guessing that he had some pretty severe learning disabilities. Allegedly, my brother had polio and my mother nursed him back to health.

Like most of the things my mother says, you have to take him with several blocks of salt. But he was her favorite. He was the love of her life in many ways. And so she emotionally incested him. And then that created conflict between him and my father because they were both competing for my mother and my father regularly lost.

He'd come home for the weekend and the tension level would go through the roof. So we didn't know whether explosions were going to be and what his demands were going to be. It didn't endear us to him. And of course, that made mom the hero. My early childhood with my mother was, on the surface, it was fine. I mean, she was the good parent.

We didn't get beaten by her. We didn't get overtly shamed and humiliated. And so she was the safe parent and the one who would intervene upon occasion to keep bad things from happening. And I was a really good kid because I was trying not to get hurt. But mom was a drama queen.

There were all of these trials and tribulations that she suffered through her whole life. And she was supposed to be a professional singer, and she was supposed to have been married three times, starting at the age of 15, I guess, and traveled around the world. And she's this big, important person, and her husband was this big, important person, but her husband's mother hated her and made her life miserable.

She had this amazing history of having been a singer and was about to go big time and had throat surgery that kept her from doing that. And when I turned out to be a singer, then I became the one who was going to fulfill that dream for her. I mean, it's the classic fantasy of somebody who has nothing imagining a different reality. She was really, really smart.

but not educated. And she was incredibly psychic, clairvoyant, which is a really bad combination when you have this kind of delusions. So she was the more interesting of the two. And she wasn't scary. We didn't get beaten by her or terrorized in the way that dad did. But then the stories kept getting more elaborate. We eventually learned that she was ruler of the world and sitting on the right hand of God, traveling around in spaceships.

And then she had a robot double who doubled for her time. So if she acted strange, it was really the robot, not her. So we had endless stories from mom about who she really was. And not just this factory worker or this cook in a restaurant, but she was really ruler of the world. And she sat on the right hand of God. Jesus graciously was on the left.

She had guardian angels, and each of us had our own guardian angel. And some of them were actually angels, and some were actually androids, is what we would think of them as today, who could shapeshift, essentially. So that if we had to run off and solve some problem in the world, that we'd have our double step in.

Great stories about her first and second husband, which to my knowledge are completely fabricated. It's all part of this delusion. Her second husband and the love of her life was really the attorney general and he was also the spy and they'd go behind the scenes in the war of Korea and do all these strange things and

She'd been captured and why her health was so bad because of all the torture when she was captured. That she was related to Queen Elizabeth, that she was chief of the Cherokee Nation, and that we had this giant yacht that was actually a disguised battleship that she traveled a lot on. I mean, this is very elaborate and very detailed and all sorts of amazing things. It was better than a lot of television at the time.

And part of this delusion was that she traveled on spaceships to other planets and was working this intergalactic thing. And so she was the most powerful person in the world. We were really raised that our family was everything. It was the center, literally, of the universe. And we didn't have contact with the outside world. There was no way to spellcheck. We just lived in this illusion.

And that made being in the world really weird. And it got weirder. This was a cult. Just of the four of us, that it was a textbook cult. We were told repeatedly that if we told anybody who we really were, we'd be killed. And so, while I couldn't talk about any of that, this was so deeply programmed into my psyche that I just walked into any room and assumed that I was in charge on some level. And I didn't understand this was going on. It just simply was how it was.

We literally lived in the middle of nowhere in Missouri. This is in the backwoods of the Ozarks in St. James, Missouri, which was about 6,000 people. Tiny little town, just a little cabin in the middle of nowhere without running water and an outhouse, I might add. It was very primitive. And we had no playmates. We were at school so little that my sister and I never had the opportunity to develop social skills. I was a loner.

I was in second grade, and I remember being invited to the most popular kid in school's home for Halloween parties, I recall. And I remember walking into their place and seeing all this table set out with nice cold cuts and everything perfect in the way you would see in the movies or something. And I froze. And I ended up crawling under the table. I had my first inkling that the world I grew up in was not like the rest of the world.

This was so removed from my reality. It just hit me like a train that, oh, this is what the rest of the world looks like. And this is not my family at all. And there was nothing I could do with that. I couldn't escape my family. I couldn't change anything. I just had to live in that horror film life that I was living in.

We had pigs and chickens and rabbits and a zillion dogs and cats, and they weren't any nicer to the animals than they were to us. I saw many a dog killed. Dad would get mad at a dog, and he would beat it to death or shoot it. Saw many puppies and kittens drowned because he couldn't get them spayed or fixed. It was pretty sad, and it made it hard to get attached to things because everything was transitory, and you never know when something was going to die.

This is where so much of the violence really hit a peak with my brother and father. It was just scary, and there was nowhere to run. So there was a big change that happened in my life, in that my brother was my mother's favorite. And when he finally fucked up enough that he went to send off to the military, then suddenly I became my mother's favorite. I was the heir apparent. After my brother fell from favor, I was going to be the next ruler of the universe. So then I became dad's target.

So I was about nine years old. It was in the middle of third grade. And one night, I heard footsteps on the stairwell coming up to my bedroom. And I remember tall figures coming and standing over my bed. And that's the last thing I remember. Fast forward to 1993, when I was an intern, a psychotherapist. I'd finished grad school, and I was collecting my hours to get licensed.

And I went with my supervisor to this newfangled technique called EMDR. In the first day of training, they're giving you the basics of how this works. And then they send you off to practice the basics. And they tell you to pick something small. Not a big T-trum, a small T-trum. And I couldn't think of anything. And so the only thing that occurred to me was that I had this longstanding phobia of tall buildings. I'd look up at a tall building and just about pass out.

So we picked on that, we got everything set up, and about 30 seconds into her doing the bilateral stimulation, my head went back, the cock went down my throat, and I was gone. That phobia of tall buildings was just the replay of looking up at my father standing over my bed. The whole memory was of the assault. My head going back, cock going down my throat, and I literally dissociated. And so I blocked out all the memories. I just remember the day after it happened,

wandering around in the yard lost, but all this overwhelm of feelings in my body, mostly sexual stimulation that I had. I was a nine-year-old boy. I didn't have any context or ability to process this or to make sense out of it. And I didn't remember what had just happened. I just knew I was completely overwhelmed with these feelings that I didn't know what to do with. And it made me sick.

It was two weeks before I would go back to school because every time I thought about getting on the school bus starting that next morning, I'd get nauseous. It changed everything in my life.

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So what would happen for me is that repeatedly I would hear the footsteps on the stairs. And upon the beginning of hearing the footsteps, I'd simply leave my body. And this happened over and over again. And to put this in context, there were no real sexual boundaries in the family. My mother would...

bitch about my dad wanting her to suck his dick and how disgusting that was. This was family living room conversation. And dad was basically nudist and he would trap me between his legs in front of the family and make these sexual humiliation games with me. Because I was so naive, I didn't understand what any of this meant. We didn't have context for what we're experiencing. So we didn't have a way of categorizing it or making sense out of it.

It was overwhelming. And dissociation was my friend. That's how I lived through all of that. And dad was my male role model. I mean, this was my image of being a man. I hated him and loved him at the same time, if that makes any sense at all. Did my mother know that my father was sexually abusing me? Yes, I believe so. From her perspective...

I believe that she saw it as, after all that she'd done for me, this is the little thing I could do for her because she didn't want to suck his dick. But this was completely covert. It was completely hidden. So this was just our little secret. And we're a family of secrets. So having a secret was pretty common. Why my mother wanted me to be a professional singer. My parents were too poor. I mean, I excelled in music.

And the school wanted me to join the band. They wanted me to play the French horn. And my parents justified in me not being allowed to do that because it would blow out my voice blowing into this horn. And they were protective of my singing voice. The truth was they couldn't afford it. And then when I started learning the piano, they didn't have the money to get me piano lessons. And so I taught myself to play by ear. And so I had a talent for this, but there weren't the resources to back that up.

And that's just sort of the story of my childhood is that I was this really bright kid. But coming from such a poor background, there weren't any of the resources that could really have fueled that. And so I spent the next 20 years of my life trying to catch up. So the move to Arizona was really the beginning of my life. It was the middle of seventh grade. I was around 12 years old.

We went from the backwoods of the Ozarks to the ghetto in Tucson, Arizona. And so I was in this whole world of kids. I had never been in a world of kids. I did not know what the fuck was going on. I didn't have any of the social skills. Most of them spoke Spanish. Sex was off the scale. I mean, in terms of the sexual energy.

The boys in the locker room were running around from aisle to aisle showing off their hard-ons. I saw nudity all over the place. And I was completely overwhelmed by all the sexual energy because my only experience of sexual energy was the rape. So I didn't know what to do with it. So I was just running away as fast as I could from all this because it was overwhelming. But at the same time, it was the beginning of my having a life.

It was really the beginning of my questioning about everything because the world that we had painted and lived in up through middle of seventh grade didn't exist anymore. It was just the beginning of some freedom. I wasn't trapped at home with my parents and they were busy running this little motel thing for a while for snowbirds. And the most amazing thing is, is that when we moved to Arizona, the sexual abuse stopped. My father became a completely different person.

The anger was gone. He like turned into this mellow guy. I still hated him. I was still scared. But it was like night and day. It's like somebody came in and took him over and he was gone. And there was this new person in my father's body. So it was really the beginning of exploring and discovering a completely different world. But adolescence was really a hard time. By the time I got into my mid to late teens...

I knew that getting married and having babies didn't match what was going on inside of me. Even though I didn't have a word for homosexuality or being gay, I just knew that there was no interest there for me at all. One of the things we don't talk about in sexual abuse of children is that they absorb the shame of the abuser. And so they're feeling bad about themselves and blaming themselves for this happening. All of my fantasies were really masochistic.

Because my whole sexual indoctrination was about being a sexual sub, for lack of a better description. And so that was really unknown to me, really what was going on. And once you eroticize shame, it virtually never goes away. So I had all this weird sexual stuff going on that I didn't understand. I was compulsively masturbating. I never got any sex education. And I didn't have anybody to talk to.

And just before we left Missouri, at the beginning of adolescence, I was in seventh grade and I started developing breasts. I was a skinny little boy who started growing breasts. And it was noticeable. And so a few of the girls offered the bras and the boys were always grabbing at my breasts or making fun of them. And so that just further isolated me from the world. And so we get to Arizona. It's less of an issue now.

And then what happened when I got into high school, I just started putting on weight and that just made it worse. So my parents had bought this big double wide trailer and moved to this trailer park and they had a swimming pool in the middle of the complex. And so one day I went out to the swimming pool and I jumped straight down to the three feet head first and crashed my head on the bottom of the pool. I think it was a suicide attempt.

I think I was so overwhelmed with all of this that I didn't have any capacity to process or to understand. I just wanted to end it. It was too much. I was so excited to get out of high school and go to college because it meant that I could leave home, that I could start having my own life, and that I could chart my own direction. But I brought all the baggage of my childhood with me.

Unknowingly, I had no concept of how arrogant I was. I had no concept of how dissociated I was. I had no social skills. I would just state things blatantly. It wouldn't occur to me to talk any other way. I went to college, University of Arizona, music major, and I was ambivalent about it, really. I mean, I majored in high school in choir, and I could sing.

But this was a whole nother level and a whole nother game that while I said I had a buy into it, I don't think I was bought into anything at that point because I don't think I really knew who I was. I was just going along in the programming that had been programmed into me by my mother. And then I basically flunked out of college because I couldn't function. And I remember my roommate was in therapy with his therapist. And he said, I think you might benefit from some help.

I went to see this therapist. She was a Gestalt therapist. We were sitting in the first session and I'm talking and she stops me. She says, "Are you afraid of me?" I said, "No." She said, "What are you afraid of?" I said, "What's inside of me?" And that's how it began. The first five years were crucial. It indoctrinated me into a different world of questioning. And while I was still profoundly dissociated at that point, I developed a trust in the process. I began to trust something beyond myself.

It gave me a different road. She was really trying to help me diagnose. There's clearly some sexual trauma there somewhere, something which I hadn't owned and I had not remembered at that point. And so she was basically stirring a pond in hopes of catching something. And we didn't catch a lot overtly, but it was the beginning of me facing my arrogance. But I think she really made my...

social interactions more human. And so she started putting me into my body. I was completely up here. I had completely disconnected my body because my body had betrayed me so many times. I had all the symptomology of being sexually abused. I had incredibly sexually compulsive in my 20s, late teens and 20s. I was so sexually compulsive. I spent a lot of time in bookstores and bathhouses.

My second major concussion was when I was probably 20. I was busy, sexually compulsive in the bookstores, and I picked up this guy, came back to his place. He went in to get something, came back with a gun. We struggled. I turned the gun on him in the struggle and pulled the trigger. It was not loaded. The gun broke apart, and he beat my head into the barrel. And then I was at the bathhouse.

This was as AIDS was hitting. 82, 83. I had a hookup with this very cute Latino boy. Great fun. Good time. Went home. The next morning I woke up and I was screaming in pain and bleeding profusely anally. I had an anal fissure, which is a tear in the rectum and rectal lining. But it saved my life. I was dating a man named John and it happened just as AIDS was happening. It prevented me from getting fucked and John couldn't fuck me.

And John was one of the first men to die in Arizona. He broke out from the neck down with carposi sarcoma. If he'd have fucked me, I'd have been dead. As I said, I've had some really awful things happen. But most of them had a reason. Most of them were about this path and staying alive. My first job ever was at U-Totem. It was a convenience store chain.

And I worked as a graveyard clerk down the street from a gay bar. So I'd have all these gay guys coming in the graveyard after the bar. And one of my customers named Chris, and he figured out who I was pretty quickly. And he introduced me to his two friends, Ray and Dave, who ended up being my gay dads. They were these very sweet couple. They've been together a lot of years, and they were much older. And they saw this very unpolished gem.

and set out to give me social skills, table manners, and all of the things that I never got training in. And then one night, we were at a bar. We were sitting there chatting, and in walked what would be my husband, Reber, who was terrified. It was his first night he ever walked to a gay bar. He'd just driven around for 20 minutes, trying to get courage to come in. He was a graduate student at the University of Arizona.

Reber and I clearly had had past lives together. There was an immediate knowing each other and trust, and it just happened. He still had a girlfriend, for God's sakes. He was born in Natchez, Mississippi. I was born in Raleigh, Missouri. So both Southern boys. It was an interesting combo, though he came from a much better off family than what I did. We were living together three months later and lasted 19 years. So we got together in 82, 83 years.

He had more social skills than I did. Everybody loved Reaper. He was the consummate, polite, southern gentleman. We had an open relationship from day one because I knew that once he truly understood the candy story that was out there,

he was going to need to have the opportunity to explore that to see where he fit in. And I'm not a particularly jealous type and had nothing going on about that. We created rules around how that would work and he agreed to them and they were fairly reasonable. So we evolved into a close relationship. So my first therapist and working with her, and while we didn't get to unpack the sexual abuse issue,

She was clearly very spiritual, fairly Buddhist, got me involved in the New Age movement, and really introduced me to a whole different way of looking at the world. And it resonated so deeply with me.

with who I was, that I jumped in with both feet. And while she was not a perfect therapist, she was certainly a very good one and what I needed at the moment because it was that five years or so I spent with her that convinced me that this was what I wanted to do, that I was really a healer. It just resonated so deeply in me that this was the path. Finally, I found my path.

So we moved to California. There was a graduate school that I wanted to go to. I knew I wanted to be a therapist. And I got into therapy fairly quickly as I was working and going to graduate school. In my second year of grad school, there was an assignment in the marriage and family therapy class to write a three-generation autobiography of the opposite-sex parents' perspective. And so I had to get inside my mother's head and write her story.

And the only person I'd ever told this to was my partner. So I wrote it, got an A, then gave it to my therapist. He went, oh. So it took a long time for all the pieces to come together.

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This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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Around 93, I took the EMDR training with my supervisor at the time. We'd heard about this new trauma protocol, and so we went out to see what it was. I was hungry to learn anything at that point. And so we went to this training, and on the very first day of training and doing the practice session, the sexual abuse came out.

And my therapist spent the next month putting me back into my body because I was so badly dissociated. But the gift of the EMDR and the emergence of the sexual abuse as a conscious memory started making my story make sense. And once the memories came in, all of a sudden, oh, this explains so many things about what's going on that we could actually do something to heal it because it wasn't possible until the memories emerged.

We all want to make sense of our life. And it was so relieving to make sense of how I was acting all of those years. Reber, he was the love of my life. He was very smart, but clearly had a whole lot of trauma that he was absolutely unwilling to deal with. And I was committed to healing. And 19 years later, there was such a gulf between where he was and where I was that it wasn't crossable.

After I broke up with Rebrier in 2002, it was so painful. I cried for five years. But it was the beginning of a journey. I got very successful in business. I bought my condo. I was a general practice psychotherapist. I mostly worked with men, gay and straight and bi. But the big ugly secret is that most men are traumatized. But they're not allowed to be traumatized because they're men.

A lot of them are sexually traumatized. I like working with men. I've worked with a fair number of women, but I really specialized in men. I mean, it was just, there's not enough men specializing in men. So I really like men and they're not used to being liked. Feared. Misunderstood.

but genuinely liked and getting okay with another man liking them who doesn't want to fuck them. This is a big deal for a lot of guys who are almost phobic of male relationships or don't know how to be in relationship with a man other than beating each other up or playing basketball or something, but to actually be in intimacy and relationship with another man.

It's complicated. And so, by my being open about being gay, and being open about the fact that there was no sex that was going to happen, we created a safe container that they could say anything, because they could say anything to me that they couldn't say to a straight man. So it was really important that I do that, and I loved that. So I was in practice from '90, and I left in 2015. Everybody said I was burned out. I think there's some truth in that, but the truth was that I had hit the end of a road.

And I didn't know where next was for me. And I knew I couldn't figure out why I was doing this because this was consuming me. So I sold my house. I closed the business and took these trips to Mexico and to Australia and New Zealand and

And Reber, in our last meeting in 2015, I'd just gotten back from my trip to Australia and New Zealand. And I called him and said, you don't know this, but I have closed the business, sold the condo. I'm leaving. I may never be back. And I said, this may be our last chance to have closure. I don't know if I'll ever be back here. So we meet.

Spend the first hour talking about how wonderful it is to travel without the other. We traveled badly. And then the second hour, he went over the litany of things. He'd been mad at me for 20 plus years at that point. And I just let him vent. And finally, I said, can I talk now? I just looked at him and said, all I came to say was thank you. We were just babies when we got together. We raised each other. We are where we are today because of all that we did. And I just came to say thank you.

And he softened. And that was the last time I saw him. The morning he died, before I knew he died, he died of a heart attack in his sleep. He was a type 1 diabetic and weighed 350 pounds or something like that. And a voice in my head said, you're free now. Neither one of us ever got into another relationship. I ended up doing a lot of training.

Somebody was talking to me about boundaries. And so I put together this little training thing on boundaries. And it's now evolved many years later into a full-blown seven-step online video demand workshop. And so the people who take it, it often dramatically changes their life. Because most people don't really understand boundaries. Literally, a boundary is where I stop and you start. It's really that simple. But it's not that simple. Because our socialization is around merging.

Two shall become as one. To become intimate, you have to first be vulnerable. You have to expose some part of yourself to the other that risks you being rejected. And if you're not rejected, you're deepening the trust and deepening the intimacy. But if you want to kill the sex in your relationship, merge. Excitement happens at the contact boundary. If you're merged, you're killing the excitement. You have to also understand that we're all made up of energy. We're just atoms.

When your energy gets in relationship to their energy, what happens? Do you merge in your one energy? Or do you come up against that energy and feel the excitement of that? Stay inside of you, but still have contact with who they are. But that's against our training. So I understand this on a deep, deep level. The damage of merging and being lost in the system and forming a cult, which is just a form of merging.

And whether it be their religion, or whether it be their relationship philosophy, or their empathy-compassion philosophy, most people are merged. And so what I teach people is, one, what that is, and then I teach them about energetic boundaries and how to manage these energies and how to stay in what I call your bubble. And when your bubble makes contact, not merge, but makes contact with the other bubble, you can actually know everything that's going on in their bubble.

without merging. People manipulate us because we give them the power to decide our value. And we learned this in childhood because our parents all too often offer conditional love. I'll love you if you're who I want you to be. That is not love. It's controlled manipulation. You learned your boundaries from your family and that dance of intimacy. So you go out in the world looking for that same dance. And that's why we marry our parents.

I married my dad. He married his dad. And I say we are going to often marry our parents, but marry a healthier version. Know what you're getting into. What ended my 19-year relationship was that I did 17 years of individual therapy. I did 20 years of consultation on my therapy. But he wasn't willing to do that.

And so while we were pretty similar places when we got together, 19 years later, the discrepancy between where he was and where I was was so vast. And he wasn't interested in meeting me. I think I'm a really tough person to be in a relationship with. But mostly, I just won't put up with the silliness. There has to be some level of vulnerability. Because then we can make some real contact.

But most guys don't know what it is. They're not interested in knowing what it is. But it's lonely. I don't like the loneliness. I'm at peace with it. I'm content. But it would not have been my first choice because I like being in a relationship. But I'd rather be lonely alone than lonely in a relationship. And that's why I'm single.

I was willing to take the leap of faith and trust the universe was going to take me where I needed to go. And as I trust today that that's going to happen. I wouldn't be where I were if I played it safe. I wouldn't be where I were if I had to have a guarantee of what the end was going to look like. My life has been far greater than anything that I could have ever imagined. And I think it's sad that most people don't live their lives.

They're hidden in little tents and bubbles and families that keep them stuck in their old dysfunction because they aren't willing to risk losing any of those things that they think are important. There's some core part of me that's invested in the truth, no matter how painful the truth. And there's another part of me that's unwilling to be a victim. We've all been victimized.

Nobody gets through childhood unscathed. It's not intended that way. It shapes us. The victimization impacts us just as much as the good stuff, if not more. But I don't believe in being a victim. It's a dead end. It's a life killer. Our society is in a competition for who can be the biggest victim in the world right now. There's no winning.

and to become a whole person is a journey. But the step that most people are unwilling to take is that they have to accept full responsibility for their life and their action. It's not fun, but if you do the work, the payoff is so enormous that it's unbelievable.

All of those first 15, 20 years of my life have reverberated through the rest of my life in one form or another as I've had to confront all of that and face the pain of it so I could find the freedom. You don't get one without the other. As a Buddhist, I believe...

All of this was pre-planned before I got here. For me to be the person that I was going to be, and to give me the challenges to become the person that I was to be, I wouldn't be the therapist I am today if I hadn't gone through all that. I wouldn't have the empathy and compassion which most people misunderstand. I also wouldn't have such high standards. I would be willing to give in just to get some semblance of attention or love or affection, and then feel even emptier after it's done.

Victimhood goes back to being shamed. I am sick. I'm twisted. I'm horrible. It's taking on the negative of, I got raped because it's my fault. The way to get rid of the shame is to own it. That's like you can stop drinking when you own that you're an alcoholic. Then you make it a choice as opposed to a compulsion. It's not about taking the fault. It's about owning the negative self-belief so that you can let go of that negative self-belief. But you can't let it go until you own it.

That's the paradoxical part of this. You're just accepting the truth of that belief of yourself. And then once you accept, then you're free of it. That's the beauty of it. I wrote my dad a letter saying how angry I was at what he did to me. And I spelled it out. I didn't ask for an apology. I didn't ask for anything. I was simply telling my truth.

This created a lot of outrage in the families. Of course, there were mass denials across the spectrum. It made a major breach between me and them. I wouldn't take it back. They weren't willing to own it or do anything about it. But I didn't need anything from them. My goal was to tell my truth and to say a truth that nobody in the family was willing to acknowledge. And I think telling your truth...

It's one of the most important things that you can do. The truth will set you free. But understand there's often a price for freedom. You have to also be willing to accept the consequences of telling that truth. And there were going to be minimal consequences of my telling this truth. I had virtually no relationship with them. And I didn't really need a relationship with them. And I don't think it was that long afterwards that I completely cut them off.

It was a way of taking back my power, so it made me a more whole person, so that I could be out there in the world searching for what was next for me, as opposed to being lost in the past. My dad died in 2010. My twin sister called me and left me a voicemail. It was a garbled message, so I didn't really understand. All I heard was Tucson 10 o'clock.

And so I called her up and said, what's going on? She says, dad died. We're burying him in Tucson on Tuesday at 10 o'clock. I said, oh, okay. And she said, are you coming? I said, no. I didn't want to see him in real life. Why would I want to see him dead? I mean, it doesn't make any sense to me. Didn't make the family happy. My mother was pissed as hell because she was going to read me the riot act at the funeral. Like, yeah, fat chance on that. Why would I set myself up to be a victim of this silliness? And so...

As it happened, two weeks later, I already had a trip scheduled to Tucson. I was going to visit friends. So I came. Tucson and my friends, you have to go by the gravesite. I said, really? Why do I need to go by the gravesite? So they dragged me to the gravesite. My only response was, one down, one to go. There's no animosity. There's no anger. Simply nothing there. Mom never changed her story to the day she died. She was fully lost in the delusion. She was always in the middle of everything. She was in control of the universe.

That's how she survived. So I have pity for that. I have understanding for the pain. It was something around her 88th birthday or something. And I could tell that she didn't have a lot longer. And so I wrote her this note that said, I can't imagine the horrors of your childhood to create your personality the way it did. And I'm so sorry that happened to you. That was my parting letter to my mother. My parents' deaths were...

Uneventful in a certain way. I never considered forgiving. I don't believe in forgiveness. Forgiveness in the dictionary means absolution. I wasn't interested in giving them absolution. They were responsible for what happened. And so I believe their job is to offer an apology and make an amends. My job is to take back all the power I've given them so that they can't hurt me anymore.

I've taken it all back. I've healed it. I've worked it. I'm done. I'm just finished. I don't need anything from them. There's no charge going on. And so when they died, they died. And my mom died last year. But I think she's probably at peace for the first time in her life. And I'm glad that she crossed over so effortlessly. But I was done a long time ago. Too many people live in the past and drag it into the present constantly and can't understand why they don't move forward.

It's a great way to destroy your life. Heal the past. Put it behind you. Look forward. That's where life exists, not in the past.

Today's episode featured Merle Yost. You can find out more about Merle on his website, merleyost.com. That's M-E-R-L-E-Y-O-S-T dot com. And more about his workshop, Unspoken Boundaries, at unspokenboundaries.com. If you'd like to reach out to him, you can email at merle at merleyost dot com. And you can find him on Instagram at loveyost.com.

Merle is now a full-time writer, speaker, and consultant, retired from private practice psychotherapy as a licensed marriage and family therapist after 25 years. He is also the author of six books, including When Love Lasts Forever and Facing the Truth of Your Life, which you can find links to on his website, merleyost.com. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me, Andrew Waits, and Aviva Lipkowitz.

with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook, or follow us on Instagram at ActuallyHappening.

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She struck him with her motor vehicle. She had been under the influence and then she left him there.

In January 2022, local woman Karen Reed was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.

Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia. Or a corrupt police cover-up. If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover-up to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion.

And after the 10-week trial, the jury could not come to a unanimous decision. To end in a mistrial, it's just a confirmation of just how complicated this case is. Law and Crime presents the most in-depth analysis to date of the sensational case in Karen. You can listen to Karen exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.