My Healing Journey: From Trauma to Self-Leadership

I got sober at twenty-seven. Seven months later, I had an emotional collapse in the grocery store where I worked. One minute I was stocking shelves. The next, something inside me broke open. I had no idea what was happening, and no one around me seemed to know either.

A sober friend rushed me to a treatment center, where I spent the next twenty-eight days. I never experienced anything quite like that again, but years later, I came to believe that what surfaced that day was emotional pain I had been numbing for most of my life. I remember hiding under a desk in a backroom office for hours, overwhelmed by emotions I could neither understand nor control. Something buried had erupted, and at the time, I had no language for it.

When Thinking Replaced Feeling

During treatment, a counselor kept asking me how I felt about being there. Each time he asked, I explained what I thought. He asked again, and I explained again. Eventually, he stopped asking.

At the time, I truly did not understand the difference between thinking and feeling. His question made no sense to me. I had spent nearly three decades disconnected from my emotional world, and I was trying to answer from the only place I knew how to access: my mind.

I stayed sober after that, and sobriety mattered. It gave me a foundation. It stopped the most obvious form of self-destruction in my life. But it did not reach the emotional pain I was carrying.

Realizing My Childhood Had Shaped Me

A little over two years into sobriety, I attended my first Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting. People shared stories of violence, neglect, dysfunction, and abuse. Some cried openly. Some were angry. Some spoke with a kind of flatness I recognized in myself.

As I listened, I began to understand something I had never fully allowed myself to see. The way I grew up had shaped me. The fear, tension, and dysfunction of my childhood had become part of my internal world. I could talk about it calmly. I could describe it. I could explain it. But I still could not feel much of it.

Inside, though, something was building. I was impatient, angry, depressed, afraid, and anxious. Beneath all of that, I hated myself. My marriage was unraveling, and I could see how insecure and controlling I had been from the very beginning. I wanted to act differently. I wanted to feel differently. I wanted to be different. But wanting to change and knowing how to change were two very different things.

After ten years together, I was terrified I was going to destroy the relationship.

Desperate for Change

At some point, I read The Primal Scream and became convinced that the pain from childhood had to be released from my body. I searched for a Primal Therapist but could not find one. Instead, I joined a Bioenergetics therapy group in Vancouver, Washington.

Once a week for six months, we twisted towels, beat pillows, screamed into mattresses, and threw adult-sized tantrums. It felt ridiculous, and I was desperate enough to do it anyway. I believed that if I could release whatever was trapped inside me, I might finally experience some freedom.

And something did shift. After ten years of insecurity and distrust in my marriage, the suspicion simply stopped. I was not managing myself. I was not trying harder. I was not using willpower to behave better. The suspicion was just gone. For the first time, I experienced an internal change that did not require constant effort.

Loss, Codependency, and More Pain

Three years later, my wife died of a brain tumor. I was nine years sober. Even with the healing I had experienced, I was still deeply wounded.

Within days of her funeral, I entered the first of several painful, codependent relationships. Over the next two years, I became involved with five women before marrying my second wife, someone whose wounds fit painfully with my own. For nine years, I lived inside verbal assaults and emotional volatility. Eventually, I left because I was afraid that if I stayed, I might lose control and hurt her.

By then, I had been sober seventeen years, and I felt more broken than ever. The Bioenergetics work had helped me touch something real, but much of the deeper healing still had not happened. I was functioning. I was sober. I was doing my best. Inside, I was desperate.

Discovering The Work of Byron Katie

Then I found The Work of Byron Katie. For the first time, I learned how to question my own thoughts.

The Work is a simple and powerful inquiry process built around four questions that help identify and examine stressful beliefs. Rather than trying to fix other people, control outcomes, or manage my emotions from the outside, I began looking directly at what I was believing.

That changed my life. Over the next twelve years, I practiced The Work consistently. I attended therapy. I participated in personal development seminars. I read everything I could get my hands on. I continued 12-step meetings and remained sober. Slowly and steadily, something inside me changed.

Developing the Capacity for Healthy Love

During those years, I committed myself to developing the capacity for a healthy relationship. For twelve years, I dated cautiously. Aside from one four-month disaster that reminded me how much growth I still needed, I stayed out of committed relationships.

When I met my current wife, I had been practicing The Work for eight years. Something in me had softened. Something had healed. I had more capacity than I had ever had before. We have now been together for almost thirteen years.

Discovering Internal Family Systems

The same year I met my wife, I began seeing a few clients as a life coach while still working full-time to pay the bills. In 2015, I left my corporate job and committed to coaching full-time. After completing a one-year coach training program, I unexpectedly lost my confidence. I returned to therapy because I wanted to understand what had happened inside me.

That is when I discovered Internal Family Systems, or IFS. IFS gave language and structure to something I had sensed for years. We carry wounded parts. We carry protective parts. We carry parts that developed strategies to help us survive. Healing becomes possible when those parts are met with curiosity, compassion, and understanding.

Over the next three years, I became more aligned with what IFS calls Self-energy, the calm, clear, compassionate presence that can relate to our parts rather than be taken over by them. I entered Level 1 training in 2019. I became a Certified IFS Practitioner in 2021. I continue doing my own IFS work privately, in therapy, and with fellow practitioners. The healing continued, and it deepened.

Healing Has Its Own Path

Each of us has a unique healing journey. We are wounded in different ways. We develop different survival strategies. We protect ourselves in different ways. Over time, the strategies that once helped us survive may begin to limit our lives, our relationships, and our capacity to feel whole.

My path included sobriety, Bioenergetics, The Work of Byron Katie, therapy, 12-step recovery, and Internal Family Systems. Each step mattered because each step helped me access something I could not access before. Each step moved me closer to who I truly am.

If You Feel Broken

If you feel discouraged, confused, or fundamentally flawed, I understand that experience from the inside. For many years, I believed something was wrong with me.

What I have come to understand is that much of what I called brokenness was pain. Much of what I called dysfunction was protection. Much of what I judged in myself had once been an attempt to survive. Healing became possible as I found ways to increase self-awareness, question my thoughts, receive support, and relate to my wounded and protective parts with more compassion.

Every step away from trauma is a step toward healing. For me, those steps have led to an ever-increasing experience of Self-energy. I am calmer, clearer, less reactive, and more connected than I used to be. And the journey is still unfolding.