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Trauma is a Thief with Dr. Neal King, PhD · The Trauma Therapist

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Speaker 1: Trauma Thepist Podcast Plus listeners can listen to episodes early
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Speaker 1: and ad free right now. Become a Plus listener by
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Speaker 1: going to Apple Podcasts searching for the Trauma Thepist podcast
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Speaker 1: and signing up today. Welcome to the Trauma neverst Podcast,
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Speaker 1: a show about the incredible people dedicated to helping those
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Speaker 1: who experienced trauma. My name is Got macpherson, and my
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Speaker 1: mission is to raise awareness of trauma and to inspire
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Speaker 1: each of us to help those around us.
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Speaker 2: Neil, are you ready, Hill, right?
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Speaker 1: Okay, So here we go, so five four, three, two
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Speaker 1: and one, our folks, welcome back to the podcast. Very
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Speaker 1: excited to have as my guest today, doctor Neil King.
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Speaker 1: Neil welcome, Thank you very much, You're welcome.
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Speaker 2: So.
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Speaker 1: Doctor King has served as a psychologist, psychotherapist, professor of psychology, author,
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Speaker 1: keynote speaker, and college president in his professional life, and
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Speaker 1: he's worked with multiple survivors of trauma in his clinical practice.
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Speaker 1: In his book, Trauma Is a Thief, he applies the
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Speaker 1: same case study methodology he used in his dissertation at
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Speaker 1: UC Berkeley to his own lived experience in a deeply
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Speaker 1: disturbed family. Neil is recognized for his contributions to the
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Speaker 1: LGBTQ community and general population trauma issues. Through his research
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Speaker 1: and clinical work. He focuses on the psychological impacts of trauma,
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Speaker 1: again both to the LGBTQ community and more broadly, including
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Speaker 1: the effects of discrimination, violence, and marginalization. Neil, Welcome to
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Speaker 1: the podcast. Before we get going, here, share with our
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Speaker 1: listeners where you're from originally and where you are currently.
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Speaker 3: I'll do it backwards. I'm currently in southern California, where
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Speaker 3: I grew up. Mostly I'm a military brat, so we
1:45
Speaker 3: moved around quite a bit. I was born in Florida.
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Speaker 3: I've lived most of my life in northern and southern California.
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Speaker 3: So I say I'm from California.
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Speaker 1: Okay, So really interesting background Professor Kenot Speaker, College president,
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Speaker 1: A lot of different stuff here. First question here, how
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Speaker 1: did this, when I say this, this journey to this book,
2:17
Speaker 1: How did this start?
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Speaker 2: How did this begin for you?
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Speaker 3: Well, it began with the trauma and the family. My
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Speaker 3: father was a very disturbed human being, and because we
2:32
Speaker 3: moved around a lot, and because of the time. I'm
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Speaker 3: seventy eight, so come from a generation where there wasn't
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Speaker 3: the public awareness today that there is of sexual abuse,
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Speaker 3: disturbed family's alcoholism, all of that. We lived in a
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Speaker 3: very The family was a very closed unit. I had
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Speaker 3: the role of the hero, the guy who went out
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Speaker 3: to the world and kind of communicated that this family's okay,
2:56
Speaker 3: there's some normalcy here. And the reinforce when I got
3:00
Speaker 3: in that role, I think built over time such that
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Speaker 3: it surprised me when my friends in high school decided
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Speaker 3: I should be student body president. I said, oh really, why,
3:09
Speaker 3: you know, how did that happen? And so I got
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Speaker 3: reinforcement for being in the role of the public guy,
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Speaker 3: the speaker, the likable enough guy, the charming enough guy.
3:20
Speaker 3: And then I found that I have a facility with
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Speaker 3: words and both spoken and written, and so those things
3:25
Speaker 3: began to kind of come together. Eventually, it became clear
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Speaker 3: to me that I was really scarred by my early
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Speaker 3: life and that if I was going to have any
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Speaker 3: fullness of life as an adult, I had some work
3:40
Speaker 3: to do, and I kind of took a took an
3:44
Speaker 3: off road from my path. A lot of people thought
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Speaker 3: I would go into law on politics. I instead went
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Speaker 3: into education and then eventually into psychology, did a variety
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Speaker 3: of different therapies, and it was only after my sister
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Speaker 3: died about seven years ago that I decided that in
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Speaker 3: her memory, my brother's memory, for people who can't find
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Speaker 3: or don't have a voice to attempt to extricate from
4:10
Speaker 3: their own trauma, I would put it all down in
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Speaker 3: words and see if it could be helpful to other people.
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Speaker 3: It was very cathartic for me, see if it could
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Speaker 3: be helpful to other people as well.
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Speaker 1: So just at the outset, you know, if I ask
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Speaker 1: you something you don't want to talk about it, just
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Speaker 1: that's perfectly fine to say.
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Speaker 2: I don't want to go there. Whatever. So you were abused?
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Speaker 2: Were you abused by father? Okay?
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Speaker 3: I respectually physically abused by my father?
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Speaker 1: Yes, Okay, If we take a step back, how did
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Speaker 1: you You said you played the hero role? How did
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Speaker 1: you deal with it in other ways? With that the
4:49
Speaker 1: only way you dealt with it? With that one way
4:51
Speaker 1: you dealt with it? How does one How did you
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Speaker 1: manage that?
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Speaker 3: Yeah? It was very lonely, a thing that I realized
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Speaker 3: really writing the book, because I described I'll talk about
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Speaker 3: two incidents that I think make the point. My father
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Speaker 3: was a naval officer and at one point after he'd
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Speaker 3: been overseas for a while, invited me to spend time
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Speaker 3: with him on his ship. He was in command of
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Speaker 3: five different ships at the time, and he lead me
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Speaker 3: out in his bunk in his cabin and masturbated me.
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Speaker 3: It was my first orgasm. I was twelve. I had
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Speaker 3: no idea what was going on. Five minutes later, we
5:25
Speaker 3: were sitting in the officer's stateroom having lunch and he
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Speaker 3: was being the commanding officer, and I was like, what
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Speaker 3: the fuck just happened? And so part of how I
5:34
Speaker 3: dealt with that is I just stuffed it. It was
5:36
Speaker 3: like I was in shock. I had no idea what
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Speaker 3: to do. Nobody I could talk about with it, talk
5:41
Speaker 3: with it about it another are you?
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Speaker 2: I'm sorry? How old were you all the time?
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Speaker 3: Twelve?
5:46
Speaker 2: Okay.
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Speaker 3: Another incident sometime when I was in high school, probably
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Speaker 3: within two or three years of that time, my father
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Speaker 3: and I were alone in the house and he was
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Speaker 3: chasing me around with an obvious erection in his pants,
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Speaker 3: and I was determined, oh no, this is not going
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Speaker 3: to happen, and so I got out of the house
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Speaker 3: and I stayed out until somebody else came back, and
6:05
Speaker 3: then I came back into the house, and we both
6:07
Speaker 3: acted as if nothing had happened, and we sat at
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Speaker 3: dinner that night. I say he was on my left,
6:11
Speaker 3: my sister was on my right, and I was just
6:14
Speaker 3: seething internally. So how did I deal with it? I
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Speaker 3: stuffed it. I internalized it. I hid it away someplace
6:21
Speaker 3: where it became a dissociated, a split off part of myself.
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Speaker 3: And that's where it lived until I was able to
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Speaker 3: give it voice, access it, understand it. But I had
6:32
Speaker 3: to get some distance to do that.
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Speaker 1: And you mentioned siblings, so this was just going on
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Speaker 1: with the siblings, your siblings as well.
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Speaker 3: He abused my brother, my older brother. In a one
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Speaker 3: rare moment of candor, he said to me, your brother
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Speaker 3: got the worst of it. My sister, I think more
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Speaker 3: his sexism. He ridiculed her for having breast, for being
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Speaker 3: a girl, basically said she didn't have to go to
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Speaker 3: college because she was just going to get married and
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Speaker 3: have kids. So she got sort of a residual I mean,
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Speaker 3: the guy was just so toxic. She got the more
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Speaker 3: of the residual toxicity. My brother and I got the
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Speaker 3: full brunt of it.
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Speaker 2: Therapy at all. Did you go into that? Did you?
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Speaker 2: Did you tell anyone, any friends what was going on.
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Speaker 3: The first person I told was a I was a
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Speaker 3: college student and he was a member of the faculty.
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Speaker 3: He was a monk. This was at a Catholic college,
7:35
Speaker 3: and he was a psychologist. And in the in the
7:38
Speaker 3: terms of our friendship, it wasn't a therapeutic relationship, but
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Speaker 3: I confided in him. He confided that he had gone
7:46
Speaker 3: into the ministry in some ways to escape his own sexuality.
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Speaker 3: So that was that was my first telling anybody. I
7:55
Speaker 3: didn't I didn't really enter into any psychotherapy until I
7:58
Speaker 3: became a graduate student in my mid to late twenties.
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Speaker 3: So it was just something I lived with all through
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Speaker 3: and I talked about it in the book, a very
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Speaker 3: confusing mix of what was the reaction to the abuse,
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Speaker 3: what was my sexual orientation? It really messed up my
8:18
Speaker 3: psycho sexual development in terms of any kind of chronologically
8:23
Speaker 3: appropriate development of the sexual identity.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's just it's I mean, it's just
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Speaker 1: so horrific and so intense, and you know, we talk
8:35
Speaker 1: about compartmentalization, association and stuffing things down, but it has
8:44
Speaker 1: to come out some way, right, It's got to come
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Speaker 1: out in some manifestation. It comes out and in varying
8:52
Speaker 1: degrees you talked about psychosocial, psycho sexual development.
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Speaker 2: Were you aware and how this did was impacting you? Yes,
9:06
Speaker 2: you were no.
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Speaker 3: Okay, So I talk about in the book as well
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Speaker 3: that I've done quite a deep dive into human sexuality
9:15
Speaker 3: sexual orientation. Of course, like a lot of gay people
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Speaker 3: who are abused, the temptation is to say, well, I'm
9:23
Speaker 3: gay because I was abused. So that's simply not true.
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Speaker 3: There's absolutely no evidence supporting that there's a connection. There'd
9:29
Speaker 3: be a lot more gay then if it was true.
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Speaker 3: So simply not true. But in doing the dive, I
9:36
Speaker 3: had to spend a lot of time differentiating between what
9:40
Speaker 3: was a residue of the abuse, which tended to be hypersexuality, depression,
9:48
Speaker 3: escape my tool step. Friends later in life would say,
9:55
Speaker 3: you spend a lot of time doing geographics, getting you know, changing,
9:58
Speaker 3: getting out of the situation.
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Speaker 2: And and I did.
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Speaker 3: It's true. I learned that escaping physically, mentally, psychologically, dissociatively,
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Speaker 3: those were ways that I was able to survive. But
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Speaker 3: I didn't get insight into that until I entered into
10:12
Speaker 3: my really significant therapies, which were when I was a
10:16
Speaker 3: doctoral student in my thirties.
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Speaker 2: So what inspired you to pursue psychology.
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Speaker 3: I mentioned this in the book as well, that I
10:27
Speaker 3: was interested from the beginning. I wanted to be a
10:29
Speaker 3: psychology major as an undergraduate, and I took the first
10:32
Speaker 3: psychology course. I took the course again, I was living
10:36
Speaker 3: with a hypersexual herper sexualized reality. The professor said, okay,
10:40
Speaker 3: I want you. I'll take out a piece of paper
10:42
Speaker 3: and draw the human figure. And he was walking around
10:45
Speaker 3: looking over our shoulders, and I thought, he's looking inside
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Speaker 3: of me. He's going to see something that I don't
10:50
Speaker 3: know that I want anybody to see kind of thing.
10:53
Speaker 3: And so I changed my major. I became an English major.
10:56
Speaker 3: And it wasn't until years later, after i'd been a
10:58
Speaker 3: high school counselor been around the world, been a teacher.
11:01
Speaker 3: I was working with adolescens at the American School in London,
11:05
Speaker 3: and I had my BA in English, but that was
11:06
Speaker 3: it had no formal training. But I was really working
11:09
Speaker 3: closely with them and their families, more psychologically than just
11:13
Speaker 3: in a propicial counseling kind of way. And I said
11:16
Speaker 3: to myself, for a number of reasons, it's time to
11:19
Speaker 3: go back to school and you know, develop this gift
11:22
Speaker 3: that I seem to have in terms of working and
11:25
Speaker 3: interacting with people, but also to challenge myself and to
11:28
Speaker 3: finally make the investment of getting underneath all this stuff.
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Speaker 2: So how old were you at that time?
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Speaker 3: Thirty three?
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Speaker 2: It's it's.
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Speaker 1: It's really interesting when we get I mean my experience
11:44
Speaker 1: when as someone who you know, you get to a
11:49
Speaker 1: certain age and if there are things in your life
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Speaker 1: that you don't look at or don't want to look at,
11:56
Speaker 1: and then get to a point where you look at
11:59
Speaker 1: you're like, okay, I'm ready to look at this.
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Speaker 2: That can be a huge moment. What was that?
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Speaker 1: Sounds like you had a revelation or realization or moment.
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Speaker 2: Was there energy? There was there?
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Speaker 1: Was there a decision like I want to help other people.
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Speaker 1: And maybe we're getting into the impetus for the book,
12:22
Speaker 1: but talk a little bit about that, if you will.
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Speaker 3: It's a great question, and I say, there are several
12:29
Speaker 3: parts to it. I started a master's program in my
12:32
Speaker 3: twenties and counseling, and it was kind of a variation
12:35
Speaker 3: on the being observed drawing the human figure. I thought,
12:38
Speaker 3: you know, there's there's so much inside of me that
12:40
Speaker 3: hasn't resolved. I'm not like you know in your group
12:43
Speaker 3: therapy clash was. I wasn't prepared to talk about the
12:47
Speaker 3: mess that was inside of me. I didn't know how
12:49
Speaker 3: to find words for it. I was so afraid of
12:50
Speaker 3: being judged. I was so full of shame. So I
12:53
Speaker 3: stopped the program and I did other things. I call
12:56
Speaker 3: it my Bohemian period in the book. I really traveled
12:59
Speaker 3: around the world. I did a lot of LSD. I
13:04
Speaker 3: learned kind of meditation that became very important to me.
13:08
Speaker 3: I developed a relationship with silence. There are a lot
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Speaker 3: of self therapies, but the impetus was really working with
13:16
Speaker 3: these the kids at the American School and thinking people
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Speaker 3: seem to trust me, people seem to want me to
13:22
Speaker 3: be to engage with them. I think my instincts are good,
13:25
Speaker 3: but I need more training. And then I think maybe
13:30
Speaker 3: I wasn't even fully conscious that I also needed a
13:33
Speaker 3: lot of work of my own and it needed to
13:35
Speaker 3: be more formally done than what I've been doing sort
13:38
Speaker 3: of on my own. And I engaged with a number
13:40
Speaker 3: of different psychotherapists, including union analysts, through the period that
13:46
Speaker 3: I was in graduate school, and it was again I
13:48
Speaker 3: talked about it in the book. It was transformative. I
13:50
Speaker 3: came out a different person in terms of awareness, integration,
13:55
Speaker 3: awareness of what was happening inside of me.
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Speaker 1: Talk about the book again. I'm speaking with doctor Neil King.
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Speaker 1: The book is Trauma is a Thief. At what point
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Speaker 1: did you say to yourself, I'm going to write this.
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Speaker 1: I need to write it. Perhaps, How did that come about?
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Speaker 3: Yeah, it was one of those things that felt like
14:17
Speaker 3: it had to be told, a story that had to
14:19
Speaker 3: be told, a book that had to be written, and
14:21
Speaker 3: it was about a ten year process. So it and
14:28
Speaker 3: I went through all kinds of I was going to
14:29
Speaker 3: make it primarily genealogical, and I was going to make it.
14:31
Speaker 3: I was going to give it it right in the
14:33
Speaker 3: third person and create a character. I was just too
14:36
Speaker 3: it took so long to like say no, this has
14:38
Speaker 3: to be my story and my voice and it has
14:40
Speaker 3: to all be told. And so I talk about my
14:43
Speaker 3: secret life. You know, I just feel like I just
14:45
Speaker 3: got to kind of get it all out there. And
14:47
Speaker 3: the intent is that I know that a lot of
14:49
Speaker 3: trauma survivors live with buried in shame and paralyzed by
14:53
Speaker 3: shame and then undeath that shame. There are a lot
14:55
Speaker 3: of secrets. There's a lot of stuff that they've never
14:58
Speaker 3: been able to resolve. My older brother drank himself to death.
15:01
Speaker 3: That was a huge motivation at forty seven. That's how
15:03
Speaker 3: he dealt with his trauma. So there was the determination
15:09
Speaker 3: a ten year process. Once I got clarity on it,
15:13
Speaker 3: it was written in about a year so, but it
15:16
Speaker 3: took me a long time. And again I'm the only
15:18
Speaker 3: one now surviving from my nuclear family. My younger sister,
15:22
Speaker 3: who was very dear to me, her death and her
15:25
Speaker 3: struggles with addiction were huge motivators as well, to you
15:30
Speaker 3: to live, to thrive for myself and for others, and
15:32
Speaker 3: to find words.
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Speaker 2: It takes a lot of guts to do that.
15:38
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it takes a lot of courage
15:40
Speaker 1: to get to a point where not only do you
15:42
Speaker 1: say you're going to write it, but you're not going
15:46
Speaker 1: to write it in the third person. You're not going
15:47
Speaker 1: to create some character. You're putting yourself on the line.
15:53
Speaker 1: I mean, what was that like for you or or
15:58
Speaker 1: where you just at a point were like, fuck it,
16:01
Speaker 1: I need to do this.
16:02
Speaker 3: I don't care what yeah it was, you know, what
16:06
Speaker 3: what was it like? It was enormously liberating, but I
16:08
Speaker 3: reached so again, I'm seventy eight, I see eighty on
16:11
Speaker 3: the horizon. I've been retired for a while, and I
16:14
Speaker 3: did kind of like reach a fucket points. I don't
16:16
Speaker 3: care what people think. You know, I have neighbors who've
16:18
Speaker 3: read the book and and uh, you know, some of
16:21
Speaker 3: them will talk about it with me. Others they don't.
16:24
Speaker 3: They don't want to talk about it. Okay, I don't care,
16:26
Speaker 3: but I just I just feel like I had to
16:28
Speaker 3: be at that point where my own my own healing,
16:33
Speaker 3: my own process required me to just kind of like
16:36
Speaker 3: come clean, and uh, the final leap was the fuck it.
16:42
Speaker 3: I don't care.
16:44
Speaker 1: Now you you talked about your obviously your dad.
16:50
Speaker 2: Where was your mom in this whole picture?
16:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's kind of the sad story. In a way.
16:55
Speaker 2: She was.
16:56
Speaker 3: She was a good lady. She and my dad married
16:59
Speaker 3: when she was a and he was twenty four, and
17:03
Speaker 3: they met through her older brother, who was a sailor
17:07
Speaker 3: who my father I believe fell in love with the
17:10
Speaker 3: boyish several years younger. So I think, in a twisted
17:14
Speaker 3: kind of way, my father wanted to marry my mother
17:17
Speaker 3: as a way of being close to her brother, and
17:20
Speaker 3: so it was off to a lousy starship being with
17:22
Speaker 3: and then you know, she was a navy wife, and
17:24
Speaker 3: she had three kids before she was twenty five, and
17:27
Speaker 3: she dropped out of school to get married to this guy.
17:29
Speaker 3: And they were both very attractive young people, so it
17:32
Speaker 3: wasn't as if on the outside he was an unattractive guy.
17:36
Speaker 3: So she, you know, she became severely depressed. She drank heavily.
17:40
Speaker 3: She died at fifty three from a combination of her
17:43
Speaker 3: alcoholism and her cancers. So and she was she was
17:47
Speaker 3: a very unhappy human being most of her adult life.
17:52
Speaker 2: Was she aware of what was going on, She has
17:55
Speaker 2: to have been.
17:56
Speaker 3: There wasn't very much acknowledgment. I think she tried leaving
17:58
Speaker 3: him a couple of times. I think she was so
18:03
Speaker 3: immersed in her own survival that she didn't really have
18:08
Speaker 3: much energy for the kids. She would send me to
18:10
Speaker 3: the grocery store where I worked as a box boy.
18:13
Speaker 3: This was so embarrassing, and in high school, with a
18:16
Speaker 3: note to the guy in the liquor department to sell
18:18
Speaker 3: me a bottle of vodka for her and bring it
18:20
Speaker 3: home so she wouldn't have to go in herself, and
18:25
Speaker 3: so there had to have been levels of awareness. My
18:29
Speaker 3: father once brought home a hitchhiker and in front of
18:32
Speaker 3: her begged him to stay with her. A teenage boy,
18:35
Speaker 3: and she moved out for a few days. He was
18:37
Speaker 3: a pedophile, some kid he was enamored of. She moved
18:41
Speaker 3: out for a few days and realized she didn't really
18:43
Speaker 3: have any options, so she moved back and drank more.
18:45
Speaker 3: I mean, so it was She's a tragic character in
18:48
Speaker 3: the story.
18:50
Speaker 1: Was there, And forgive me if this seems like a
18:55
Speaker 1: naive question or maybe even in a sensitive question.
18:59
Speaker 2: But you had a brother? Was there ever? How did
19:05
Speaker 2: did you guys talk about what was going on?
19:07
Speaker 1: Was there ever, like let's jump them and you know,
19:11
Speaker 1: get them, let's fight out, you know, was there any
19:13
Speaker 1: of that?
19:14
Speaker 2: No?
19:14
Speaker 3: He today, I think he would be on the autism spectrum.
19:18
Speaker 3: He was an extremely bright guy. He was an engineer.
19:22
Speaker 3: He he flunked out of UCLA for trying to forge
19:28
Speaker 3: his grades because all he wanted to do was play bridge.
19:31
Speaker 3: So he got kicked out of UCLA and then he
19:33
Speaker 3: went in the Navy. They tested him. He went through
19:36
Speaker 3: their nucletar reactor school. Then they brought him back to
19:38
Speaker 3: teaching the nucletar reactors school. So, you know, he was
19:42
Speaker 3: just a super bright guy, but he was he was
19:44
Speaker 3: so socially awkward and I as adults. I one time
19:48
Speaker 3: said to him we were leaving, one of the rare
19:50
Speaker 3: times we were such different people. Unfortunately we were never friends.
19:55
Speaker 3: And I said to him, I said, you know dad
19:56
Speaker 3: molested me as a kid. He did you too, didn't he?
19:59
Speaker 3: And he just got this or if I'd look on
20:00
Speaker 3: his face and turn around and walked away. So that
20:02
Speaker 3: was as close as we ever came to having a conversation.
20:07
Speaker 1: So you you sit down at some point you're like,
20:10
Speaker 1: I need to write this book. Fuck it, I've got
20:13
Speaker 1: to get it out there. What was your goal? What
20:19
Speaker 1: did you what was you know, what was the thing
20:21
Speaker 1: you needed to get out there?
20:23
Speaker 2: And for whom? Yeah?
20:26
Speaker 3: I think it had several stages. One was I just
20:30
Speaker 3: needed to write it and needed and then I, uh,
20:34
Speaker 3: and I didn't have a lot of confidence because you know,
20:37
Speaker 3: I don't know if you're a writer, but sometimes you're
20:39
Speaker 3: so close to it that you're not sure. How what
20:41
Speaker 3: clear do you have? So I sent it to I
20:44
Speaker 3: sent a draft to Janne Goldstein, who I mentioned in
20:48
Speaker 3: the book. She was my editor for a book that
20:50
Speaker 3: I did on mail Survivors a childhood sexual abuse in
20:52
Speaker 3: ninety five, and she's she's an excellent editor. No bullshit,
20:57
Speaker 3: she's not going to try to be your friend. And
20:59
Speaker 3: I said, you know, is there there there? What do
21:03
Speaker 3: you think? And she gave me a five out of ten.
21:05
Speaker 3: She gave me a lot of suggestions on structure, on voice.
21:08
Speaker 3: She was as unsparing as I knew she would be.
21:12
Speaker 3: But I came away from the interaction with her thinking
21:15
Speaker 3: there is a there there, So I'm going to polish it.
21:18
Speaker 3: I'm going to take her suggestions to heart, and then
21:21
Speaker 3: I'm going to see if I can find somebody who
21:24
Speaker 3: would want to publish it. And that was a whole
21:26
Speaker 3: process in itself. I knew that the major publishers don't
21:32
Speaker 3: publish memoirs of non famous people, and I consider this
21:35
Speaker 3: to be only partly a memoir, but also sort of
21:37
Speaker 3: partly the case study thing of like the objective being
21:41
Speaker 3: to be helpful to others. But my ultimate attent was
21:44
Speaker 3: to get it into the hands of people who have
21:48
Speaker 3: had similar experience and who could benefit from reading it.
21:51
Speaker 3: People who love them. I think those of us who
21:53
Speaker 3: survive trauma are mysterious to our loved ones a lot
21:57
Speaker 3: of the time, and people who want to love us
21:59
Speaker 3: but don't know how. And then also people who treat
22:01
Speaker 3: and study survivors or trauma. I'm hoping that that lands
22:05
Speaker 3: in some of those hands and is helpful.
22:08
Speaker 1: Well, obviously we have a lot of those listening. How
22:13
Speaker 1: might that help them? What do you think they would
22:15
Speaker 1: get out of it? Specifically?
22:17
Speaker 3: Well, as you mentioned in the intro, I chose to
22:24
Speaker 3: emphasize my lived experience. I thought, Okay, I'm a psychologist,
22:28
Speaker 3: I've been on the expert side of this, conducted research,
22:31
Speaker 3: I've written about this. I think what I have to
22:34
Speaker 3: contribute is I can also draw back the curtain and
22:36
Speaker 3: talk about having lived it and you and using myself
22:41
Speaker 3: as a ca study and talking about I mentioned I'm
22:43
Speaker 3: kind of my in ethnographer. I'm walking people through the
22:47
Speaker 3: experience of living in that really messed up family, as
22:51
Speaker 3: a psychologist, as a researcher, as a writer, you know,
22:54
Speaker 3: as an adult who's had a lot of time to
22:56
Speaker 3: reflect on that. I don't think that perspective. I haven't
23:00
Speaker 3: run into it before, so I think that a lot
23:03
Speaker 3: of times, and I think I did this myself for years.
23:05
Speaker 3: You can hide behind the research, you can hide behind
23:07
Speaker 3: the clinical rule, you can hide behind the expertise. But
23:11
Speaker 3: I wanted to unmask, you know, the behind all of that.
23:17
Speaker 3: Having myself had to struggle to survive, let alone to
23:23
Speaker 3: be in any measure successful, I just wanted to put
23:26
Speaker 3: that out there as something that perhaps is a different
23:29
Speaker 3: kind of contribution. That's my hope.
23:32
Speaker 2: How did you structure the book?
23:37
Speaker 3: I decided I did a lot of genealogical research looking
23:43
Speaker 3: for context, and so I started with context and the background,
23:46
Speaker 3: going back generations. My mother's family initially came over on
23:52
Speaker 3: the Mayflower, so they were here two centuries before my
23:55
Speaker 3: father's who escaped fam in Ireland. The English had subjugated
24:03
Speaker 3: the Irish for eight centuries. As soon as the English
24:06
Speaker 3: got here, they wiped out the native populations on Cape Cod.
24:09
Speaker 3: So I was trying to I suspected and found to
24:14
Speaker 3: be true that traumas sort of lived across the generations
24:17
Speaker 3: in my family story that and I tried looking for
24:22
Speaker 3: the roots of my father's pathologies, and I think that
24:26
Speaker 3: the generational stuff was a part of that. So I
24:28
Speaker 3: started there then I started talking about my father's early life,
24:31
Speaker 3: my mother's early life. There meeting and contributing factors there.
24:36
Speaker 3: They came from working class families. Nobody had any money,
24:39
Speaker 3: you know, they had to struggle. They bought their first
24:43
Speaker 3: house when I was nine for fifteen thousand dollars in
24:46
Speaker 3: LA That was a huge you know PLoP. Here you
24:49
Speaker 3: are in the middle class, post post World War two.
24:52
Speaker 3: So then I talked about our early years as a family,
24:57
Speaker 3: and I talk about each of us, my brother, my sister,
24:59
Speaker 3: of the family, the interactions school, which was a lifeline
25:03
Speaker 3: for me at every level. And then escape, you know,
25:07
Speaker 3: when I had I just had to get out of there.
25:11
Speaker 3: I graduated high school here in LA or southern California,
25:14
Speaker 3: a little bit north of where I am right now,
25:16
Speaker 3: and my parents wanted me to stay in southern California.
25:20
Speaker 3: My dad said, I'll buy any car you want if
25:22
Speaker 3: you stay here and go to school here. I said,
25:24
Speaker 3: I don't need a car. I'm out of here. I
25:27
Speaker 3: was seventeen. I thought I wanted to be a priest.
25:29
Speaker 3: I initially went the seminary briefly. So I talked about
25:34
Speaker 3: escaping college. My brief stay in the seminary. What begins
25:39
Speaker 3: to happen as I differentiate is I have some opportunity
25:41
Speaker 3: to be off on my own, and then I go
25:43
Speaker 3: into the bohemian period the you know, kind of like
25:49
Speaker 3: the way I describe it as I sort of my
25:51
Speaker 3: trauma just sort of thrust me out into the world
25:53
Speaker 3: without a plan. But somehow that was what I had
25:57
Speaker 3: to follow in order to escape, in order to get
26:01
Speaker 3: underneath it all.
26:03
Speaker 2: When you started seeing a therapist, was it because of
26:10
Speaker 2: you wanted to deal with this or was it for
26:12
Speaker 2: a different reason.
26:14
Speaker 3: No, it was primarily because I wanted to deal with this,
26:16
Speaker 3: and I found therapists to be very divergent in terms
26:20
Speaker 3: of their ability to understand it, absorb it, be helpful.
26:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, Now, was there someone who really helped you? And
26:31
Speaker 2: so what did they do?
26:37
Speaker 3: There are a couple of people who I think were
26:39
Speaker 3: not helpful, and a couple of people who I think
26:40
Speaker 3: were very helpful. A couple of people who were very
26:43
Speaker 3: helpful happened both to be Jungian analysts. One was an
26:47
Speaker 3: older woman who was retired. She worked in her home
26:50
Speaker 3: and you could only work with her if a dog
26:53
Speaker 3: liked you and would let you into the house. And
26:57
Speaker 3: she was absolutely great, and she was empathic, she was
27:02
Speaker 3: non judgmental. You know, you could go as deep with
27:05
Speaker 3: her as you were able to, and she was right
27:07
Speaker 3: there with you. And another was a guy, a psychiatrist
27:12
Speaker 3: who practiced in San Francisco, also a union analyst, and
27:16
Speaker 3: we did a lot of dream work and he was
27:20
Speaker 3: very empowering around I mentioned that in my secret life
27:25
Speaker 3: I frequented young male escorts, and he was very empowering
27:30
Speaker 3: around the value of that to my healing process and
27:34
Speaker 3: to my integration process.
27:38
Speaker 1: When you look at if we take a step back
27:40
Speaker 1: and you look at where we are now with the
27:43
Speaker 1: therapeutic culture, and there are a lot of trauma modalities
27:47
Speaker 1: out there.
27:48
Speaker 2: Trauma certainly is.
27:51
Speaker 1: More in the news right, we have more language for
27:55
Speaker 1: talking about it, and certainly there's a greater acceptance than
27:59
Speaker 1: when you and I were both young.
28:02
Speaker 2: What do you see now that is helpful in all
28:08
Speaker 2: of this? What do you see now that maybe you
28:12
Speaker 2: wish you had access to as a young kid.
28:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, So a couple of reactions there. One having written
28:21
Speaker 3: the book and now, you know, trying to get the
28:24
Speaker 3: word out about its existence. I feel like I've discovered
28:28
Speaker 3: that trauma is an industry of sorts, and it's and
28:33
Speaker 3: there are superstars, and there are you know, people really
28:39
Speaker 3: who are able to capitalize on it in a certain way,
28:41
Speaker 3: which which I don't really want to do. I don't
28:43
Speaker 3: think that's my place or the gig that I'm looking for.
28:48
Speaker 3: And trauma itself, as you know, I mean you, I
28:52
Speaker 3: can't imagine the range of what you hear in the
28:54
Speaker 3: process of doing your show, But trauma itself is fast.
28:58
Speaker 3: There's so many aspects of trauma, there's so many instances
29:00
Speaker 3: of trauma, there's so many variations on the theme. So
29:05
Speaker 3: I guess one thing is that I think there's a
29:09
Speaker 3: gigantic validation of the existence of trauma. I didn't have
29:12
Speaker 3: that word in my vocabulary as a young person, and
29:15
Speaker 3: I didn't know that that was what was happening to me.
29:17
Speaker 3: So the existence of it, the effects of it, I
29:21
Speaker 3: think there's a lot of the you know, PTSD alone,
29:24
Speaker 3: the knowledge of that that's a condition I think has
29:27
Speaker 3: been extremely valuable. And then you know various my work
29:33
Speaker 3: with children, childs with sexual abuse survivors, it was a
29:37
Speaker 3: narrow sort of universe of trauma. And I realized when
29:43
Speaker 3: I came to write this book that it was it
29:45
Speaker 3: was too narrow for me. I needed to broaden the
29:47
Speaker 3: context and talk about trauma more broadly. Why because the
29:52
Speaker 3: sexual abuse doesn't tell the whole story. It existed, It
29:56
Speaker 3: existed in a context, and it was it had the
29:59
Speaker 3: sexual You've had cousins in the trauma universe that I
30:02
Speaker 3: lived in, and they all you know, they were they were,
30:07
Speaker 3: you know, threads of the same tapestry or whatever. They
30:09
Speaker 3: had to understand the trauma. They had to all be
30:12
Speaker 3: digested and understood.
30:15
Speaker 1: And then finally, the title trauma is a thief. I mean,
30:19
Speaker 1: one can imagine what you mean by that, but what
30:22
Speaker 1: what it was your intention with the title.
30:28
Speaker 3: I think the essence of of what I wanted the
30:30
Speaker 3: title to do was to explain that that trauma does,
30:37
Speaker 3: in fact rob you of some essential parts of yourself,
30:41
Speaker 3: and you don't ever get them back. Fully, I don't
30:44
Speaker 3: believe you can ever erase it. So but I think
30:48
Speaker 3: you can do a lot of work and recovery and
30:50
Speaker 3: and and take it back and and uh, you know,
30:52
Speaker 3: recover from it. So I wanted to just validate my
30:56
Speaker 3: own experience in the experience of others that yes, that's
30:59
Speaker 3: that is what happened. That is what has happened, is
31:01
Speaker 3: that trauma is a thief. It steals from you and
31:04
Speaker 3: you're never going to get it all back.
31:07
Speaker 2: The book is called Trauma Is a Thief. We'll have
31:10
Speaker 2: it linked up here at the show notes page at
31:12
Speaker 2: the Trauma Therapist podcast dot com. Neil, what is the
31:15
Speaker 2: best way for people to learn more about you and
31:19
Speaker 2: learn more about the book? Et cetera.
31:22
Speaker 3: So the book is available on Amazon. I am on
31:26
Speaker 3: LinkedIn as Neil King. I don't have a separate web page,
31:28
Speaker 3: but there's my bios there and at the back of
31:32
Speaker 3: the book. My email address is there n kingphd at
31:37
Speaker 3: gmail dot com. People are welcome to contact me. I
31:40
Speaker 3: am no longer doing psychotherapy. I do have a small
31:43
Speaker 3: consulting practice where I focus on life transitions, but I'm
31:48
Speaker 3: not My license is inactive as a psychologist in California
31:52
Speaker 3: by choice. So I feel like I'm more valuable as
31:55
Speaker 3: a writer and as a consultant. But if people want
31:58
Speaker 3: to find me that, they're ways to do that, and
32:00
Speaker 3: they're welcome to do that.
32:02
Speaker 2: Awesome. I appreciate you coming on this podcast again. I
32:06
Speaker 2: admire what you've done. I think it takes a huge
32:10
Speaker 2: amount of courage to do what you did, so I
32:15
Speaker 2: appreciate it, appreciate you coming on here and love to
32:18
Speaker 2: have you back.
32:18
Speaker 3: Thank you, I appreciate it. Let's enjoyed the time talking
32:21
Speaker 3: with you, all right, take care all right. Bye bye