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To summarize my story, I am ageyears old. I am one of 17 children, 13 boys and four girls, in my family. We lived in a three-bedroom shack where the rats ran wild. My first memory is of my mom and dad fighting. I was screaming in my crib. They wanted me to shut up, so they slammed my head. I woke up with the taste of blood in my mouth, and my ass was on fire. This was just the beginning. I was sexually abused for years by a friend of my parents. I felt alone. I started using drugs and alcohol at the age of eight. There is more that I am willing to share, but I hope this gives insight into how my life started, and I hope my story can help anyone never to give up no matter how hard you try.

Most of the abuse and neglect I grew up with was verbal abuse and emotional neglect. It was a lot of being yelled at by a parent. A lot of violence on objects in our presence - fists pounding on the dinner table, milk pitchers getting thrown off the table while we were all seated, banished to my room when I was angry and upset, a telephone getting violently torn from the wall while a sister and I stood inches away. The phone incident occurred at night. My memory is my sister and I were in bed. We were called out of our bedroom and yelled at for going to bed without doing the dishes. We were told we were lucky because our parent was so mad at us for not doing the dishes that they wanted to hit us but they didn’t hit us, instead they violently tore the phone out of the wall in front of us. I didn’t feel lucky. I was very upset, angry and scared and walked out of the house at night in my nightgown crying. I was then told I was overreacting and crying in order to get attention and sympathy. Another night as a younger child, I was having nightmares and crying. I was really scared and upset and couldn’t sleep. A parent came to my room and slapped me repeatedly every few seconds on my cheek. As they slapped me, they told me I would continue to get slapped until I stopped crying. I was slapped on the face every few seconds until my crying stopped. I am learning that as a result of the verbal abuse and emotional neglect I grew up with, I have thought and acted as though I was to blame for how I was treated as a child. I have lived a life plagued with guilt and self-reproach. My brain interpreted how I was treated as how I deserved to be treated and that I, not my parents, were at fault. If I hadn’t been scared and crying, I wouldn’t have gotten slapped. If I had done the dishes, the phone wouldn’t have been torn out of the wall in front of me. It’s pretty messed up thinking but not uncommon in people who were treated the way I was as a child. I am working hard to unlearn that way of thinking. The effects of the abuse and neglect endure to the present day. I have come to understand that a lot of my current overwhelming emotions like rage, anger, depression and passive suicide ideation are throwbacks to my childhood when no one helped me contain, process and move through big, strong, volatile feelings. As a result, I have had bouts of profound and debilitating depression. I have been passively suicidal, wishing I was dead or at least in a hospital. All my siblings have suffered. I have a sister who has been hospitalized over fifty times for mental health issues and is also on disability for those issues. I have pretty constant low grade anxiety that has been around so long I wasn't aware of it until recently, such a part of my being it is. I am hyper-vigilant and routinely react to present day situations in ways that don't match the present day issue. Something minor can happen and instead of being slightly bothered by it and quickly returning to calm, my nervous system interprets it as an unsafe situation, I unconsciously go on high alert and have an overblown reaction. I also frequently interpret a benign situation as dangerous. For example, I hear a certain tone in someone's voice and suddenly I think I'm about to get yelled at, hit, or have something thrown at me when someone is merely telling me I dropped a dollar bill on the floor. Learning about complex ptsd (cptsd) has been extremely helpful as has Internal Family Systems (IFS) and my therapy which is in part traditional therapy but also trauma informed with a lot of body based, bottom up (as opposed to brain based, head down) concepts and work. I was 56 when I realized I am dealing with cptsd and now feel, in many ways, like a new person. It’s never too late!

I became a ward of the state in date due to abuse/neglect in my home in Interior Alaska. I was in 13 foster homes, group homes and then juvenile detention at the age of 14. I suffered with addiction due to many things in my past and it led me to prison with a 20 year sentence for a drug crime. In prison I began my healing process in dealing with the things that led me to addiction and prison. In datethis journey began and today I am a productive member of society, I have 18 years drug free and I'm an advocate for others like me. I lost my son in dateto a murder in Southcentral Alaska. And it was a true test of my healing and recovery as I walked through the grief without relapsing or falling deep into depression. It only fueled my desire to raise awareness on ACEs and addiction and to be a part of the solution for many who have experienced traumatizing events and circumstances.

It’s still difficult to find the words to write this, even after years of getting familiar with stories like this and even though I’m not the survivor of what happened. When I was in my teens, I learned my cousin had been forcing his sisters to perform oral sex and other sexual acts with him. It was briefly mentioned to me (I don’t remember any kind of long conversation about it) but I do remember not wanting to talk to him and not knowing what to say to my cousins who had endured that. I think that not enough people realize how often this can happen – child on child abuse, even with kids that are the same age. The impacts of child abuse, especially child sexual abuse, stay with a family for a long, long time, and often never get spoken about. I don’t know if I’d want to change that within my family right now, I don’t know if everyone could handle talking about it openly, but I also know that it doesn’t feel good to never speak about it. I’m still not sure how I feel about my cousin, even now, twenty years later. I don’t know how his sisters feel or if forgiveness is something that ever crosses their mind, but I do know that if I was a part of their immediate family, I would need support, I would need a place to talk about it, and I would need to know how other people moved on. So, I am glad this page exists and that people can find community and hopefully healing through the words of others.

I grew up around very, very strong women. Granny - "big momma" - and my mom. They just really instilled into me to the gospel, Jesus. That was the focal point of my spiritual development as a kid. But on the flip note, my father was the complete opposite. He was an alcoholic. We tended to stay out of his way when he came home. Growing up, we were disciplined. My father came home drunk, confronted me and my sister, and beat me like a grown man. I think that a part of me did die that day. My sister and I were in foster care for a very brief time. My sister and I and my mom reunited and stayed at a shelter for a while. There's been a lot of healing since then. I recently visited him and we got past this point. Complete forgiveness. But what I realized is that I let him off the hook, but I never let myself off the hook. It came up in a conversation with my wife. She has done a lot of deep healing in her own journey. We sat down and were talking - there was a secret that I was keeping to myself about self harm and suicide. It's crazy how things can be so wonderful on the outside, and then I have these moments where I don't want to be here. I kept this to myself a really long time. She asked me, "how old is this?" and I went right back to when I was 8 years old and I went numb. She asked me, "what would you tell 8-year-old nametoday?" You're going to live. Not only are you going to live, you're going to live well. Everything opened up and the container expanded. I've been able to receive more, I've been able to give more. You are not your past. If you're hurting, healing is possible. Not only is healing possible, but you can become a very productive member of society. I never would have thought that I'd be in the place where I'd be a profession dealing with people who have gone through similar things that I have gone through. I'm not 100% healed, but I suit up and show up every day and I'm very effective at what I do. And I'm very proud of that. It's not over, and I look forward to seeing what comes next.

I grew up homeless and in foster care in two separate states and was trafficked for many years: I want to impress upon people that true equity begins with giving people the resources and space to share their lived experience. Redistributing power to the Survivors allows them to influence better evidence based practice forward, lets them know they are not alone, gives them places to heal, and the opportunity to take something negative and oftentimes, horrific: and shine a light on a new path for children who are currently struggling with their own victimization. Survivors have the expertise to provide solutions that work in real time to protect children.