Prologue to My Past

Many people have some sort of pain or trauma in their past. Many are still carrying parts of that with them even years after the traumatic event(s). Often it is carried subconsciously for their whole lives. For many that trauma or pain isn’t just in the past, it has made itself a part of their daily life whether they know it or not. It can manifest itself by building walls around themselves to keep them from being hurt or experiencing that trauma again. It can cause them to feel disconnected from others, prevent them from establishing emotional connections with others, make it difficult to sleep, cause emotional numbness, anger issues, and so on. For me, I began to just accept the ways that trauma and pain changed me. I didn’t think that I had a choice. I thought, well, life made me this way, so this is just how I am now.

For the most part, trauma seems to be misunderstood, even by those that have been through traumatic experiences. We often believe that trauma is finite, that it is suffered for a limited amount of time after the trauma inducing events. For years, that is what I believed – I thought that I was over the trauma. I even thought I was healed from it, considering years had passed since the events and I was able to think about it or talk about it without crying. I was wrong. I hadn’t put any effort in to try to work through it. If you don’t take the steps to truly heal from it, you are just burying it deep within you. You wear a mask that tells the world that you are ok, even if you aren’t. As Junot Díaz notes in his 2018 New Yorker piece The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma, trauma “can’t be buried and it can’t be killed. It’s the revenant that won’t stop, the ghost that’s always coming for you…no one can hide forever. Eventually what used to hold back the truth doesn’t work anymore. You run out of escapes, you run out of exits, you run out of gambits, you run out of luck. Eventually the past finds you.” Unless you find a way to heal from the trauma and pain from your past, it will show up one day, oftentimes hitting you like a freight train. You need to truly heal from it to free yourself from it. If you don’t, you are just running from it. Like Mr. Díaz notes, and I as I have found out firsthand the hard way, you can’t outrun the pain and trauma of your past forever and when it shows up it will show you what rock bottom in your life looks like.

I didn’t really try to outrun my trauma, I had just waited for it to fade away. I thought I had left it in the past, that somehow I had put enough distance between it and myself to be safe from it. My breakdown in 2015 proved me wrong. That year was tough, with all of the changes that ultimately overwhelmed me. I have come to understand that although the changes in my life at that time had been too much for me, it wasn’t just those changes that led me to suffer that mental health episode. I had been carrying the immense weight of my past and somehow the weight seemed to be getting heavier as time passed. The weight of the changes in 2015 were ultimately the straw that broke the camel’s back. Sure, I was overwhelmed by those changes, but much of my inability to cope with them was a product of what I had been through much earlier in my life. I remember feeling emotionally exhausted at times. The exhaustion was like I was trying to carry a 200 lb backpack full or bricks up a mountain, but it wasn’t really physical, it was emotional and mental. My body, and even more so, my mind ached from carrying it. I was finally buckling under the emotional weight of carrying my past, my pain, my trauma. I was out of breath emotionally and mentally. After 18 years of carrying that enormous weight, my mind and body let me know it was done carrying it. I was either going to find a way to deal with those issues from my past or my mental health was going to continue to deteriorate. It was time for me to finally face my past.

Napoleon Bonaparte once said,“To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.” I came across this quote while I was looking for quotes about needing to understand someone’s past in order to truly know them. Even though it wasn’t the quote that I was looking for, it caught my attention. My life at twenty had shaped me in so many ways, and the effects of that time in my life are deep and enduring. My first couple of years of therapy primarily dealt with what I had experienced in the years between age 19-21 and the effects that that period of my life had had on me, even decades later.

When it comes to my life and my mental health, there is a giant elephant in the room. To be more accurate there are a couple of giant elephants in the room. Most people that have only known me since I moved to Columbus in 2006 aren’t even aware of those elephants. I had gotten so good at playing a role, at wearing a mask, at hiding them, that people weren’t even aware that those elephants existed. The thing is, over the past couple of years, I have wanted to start pulling the mask down, to stop playing the role I’ve been playing. I wanted to introduce people to both of my big elephant companions, because to really know me, to really know Carl T. Kraley, you need to know those parts of me that I had been so good at hiding, because they are such a large part of me. Those experiences have made me into the person I am today. For better and for worse.

My life and the largely self-inflicted trauma that I endured fundamentally changed me as it does so many people. It made me into something that I’m not. I lived that life, of someone I’m not, for almost 20 years. The “real” me – the warm, friendly, almost always smiling, fun loving kid was seemingly gone forever. He was a memory. All that remained was a broken, jaded man who had shut down emotionally.

The sad truth is that anyone who has met me, or gotten to know me in the years since 2000, doesn’t really know me. They know a shell of me. The broken me. They know the version of me that emerged from the hell that was my life in the years following 1997.

For a lot of you, the upcoming posts will be the first time hearing many details about these parts of my life – especially those who I have met since moving to the Columbus area 14 years ago. That was by design. When I moved to Ohio, I realized that I could control my narrative. In Ohio, no one knew me or my story, besides Kate and her family – whereas back home in West Michigan, everyone that knew me, knew my story. In Columbus I was anonymous.

For the most part, I have hidden my past, since moving to Columbus. I had decided that I would wait until I got to know someone really well before beginning to share even the most minor of details of parts of my story, so they wouldn’t be instantly judgmental. In my mind, that would help them see me for something outside of what I did, what happened that horrible night. I was able to share that part of my story and my plan seemed to work, as evidenced that I am still close friends with those people. The problem is that I can count the people in my social circle that I have shared with on two hands at the most. As time passed, it was too hard to even know how to bring it up. Over time, it got too easy to just keep going on as is. I had trouble finding the opportunity to go into that part of my story. It wasn’t exactly something that one brings up over coffee. It got too easy to just keep wearing the mask and playing the role of your average person with an average background, of playing a role that my life has been much easier than it has been.

I hid it from most of the world, while at the same time speaking to groups at Ohio State University, Ohio University, and a statewide conference about it. I hid it while volunteering and advocating for non-profit organizations that help others that had experienced what I had experienced. I hid it while providing one-on-one & group mentoring to people who I could relate to based on my past. I was living two lives – completely open and transparent about my past and experiences in one, and hiding my past and those experiences in the other.

In his book, The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk makes a statement that has summed up my life since I was 19 years old. In talking about individuals who had suffered extremely traumatic events he notes, “Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning”. The problem is that while my experiences had become my sole source of meaning, I kept those experiences secret. I was living two lives simultaneously and that ended up eating me alive from the inside out.

I view life through the lens of those experiences. While I kept those parts of me to myself, I was chasing labels and status. In retrospect, I think I was chasing those things with the hopes that they would take the place of the what had happened, that they would be what started to define me, not the dark parts of my past. I came to understand that living the two lives that I was living, was in many ways, tearing me apart. It was so tiring. I had a beautiful home in the suburbs, a great family, a nice car, and a good job. I had the appearance of the average middle class man. In a lot of ways, I strove to keep up those appearances, but inside I was someone else and I saw life through those eyes. Who I looked like and who I was on the inside couldn’t have been farther from each other.

I thought that the real me was lost forever, buried under layers upon layers of emotional scar tissue. I am happy to say that I am slowly getting parts of that me back, through a lot of hard, painful work. I don’t care how hard the work is because the pain of not being myself, of keeping that version of me buried, is far worse. As author, ultra-marathoner, and former Navy Seal David Goggins has said, “Life may have made you this way, but you don’t have to live this way”. In many ways, that has become my motto over the last couple of years. I often say it to myself when I find myself reacting to some thing as the cold, emotionless version of myself & not the warm, friendly version. If you don’t know who David Goggins is, please check him out. His physical feats are astonishing, but his inner journey and what he has overcome is even more impressive.

For those of you out there that have endured painful events, and haven’t put the work in to heal from them, I urge you to stop holding back, to stop holding onto that pain. Please take off the mask that you wear to show the world you are ok, even though you are not. Start taking steps to truly heal from it, no matter how small those steps are. I know it sounds scary, but you can do it. You have to go through the darkness to get to the light. I’m here to tell you that, the light is so much brighter on the other side of the darkness. The light of healing is more beautiful than you can imagine.

You don’t have to carry your pain or your trauma forever. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been, months, years, or decades – you can heal from it and let go of it. You can claim your life back from it. It doesn’t have to own you or define you anymore.

Over the past year or so a voice within me kept saying, “You need to speak your truth”. As the years of therapy had gone on, I started to understand that I was whole in that room because I was speaking my truth and not hiding parts of me. I am whole with my immediate family and Kate for the same reasons – but those are the only places that I am whole and my true self. Everywhere else in my life, with everyone else, I am only been sharing parts of me. I know that I need to speak my truth to the world. I need to stop trying to play a character. I need to stop hiding. I can’t go on living two lives. I can’t go on with secrets. I need to be whole. In the upcoming posts, you will learn about the parts of my life that shaped me, that I have kept hidden and that I finally have had to face over the past few years. You will learn my truth.

#depression #mentalhealth #trauma #mentalhealthawareness #selfimprovement #healing