July 2021.
The first sign that something was wrong came from my body.
I was in training to become a Peer Support Specialist — trying, in some small way, to turn pain and survival into something useful. I knew trauma. I knew loss. I knew what it looked like when people kept going long after their systems had been overwhelmed. What I did not expect was to become physically ill while listening to other people speak.
Most of the participants were in recovery from substance use disorders. I was not. My recovery had nothing to do with drugs or alcohol. It had everything to do with what had happened to me — what happens when a nervous system is pushed beyond its limits and never allowed to come back down.
As people shared their stories, my stomach tightened. Then bloated. A dull pressure spread through my abdomen — nausea, cramps, the unmistakable feeling of being unwell. I shifted in my chair, breathing slowly, trying to ground myself. The sensations didn't pass. I wondered if it was something I had eaten. Then I noticed my breathing — shallow, fast. The body was speaking before my mind could catch up.
I had shared pieces of my own story before. I knew how to listen. But this was different. The discomfort followed me home and stayed through the night. When it returned the next morning — stronger, faster — I understood that something was demanding attention.
And then it clicked.
What I was reacting to wasn't the substance use stories themselves. It was something underneath them. A tone I had heard before. An attitude I couldn't yet name. The training material had used the phrase at some point — tough love — offered as a frame, a philosophy, an approach to people in crisis. And something in my body responded to those two words before my mind could catch up to why.
It was clearly the most inappropriate response to tragic and traumatic loss. Yet that was what the response to everything in my own life had felt like. Not the substance use counselors' response — they were doing their best — but the echo of it. The logic underneath it. The idea that suffering must first be assessed for appropriateness before it deserves a human response. That compassion is something you earn by demonstrating you have tried hard enough to not need it.
My life had changed catastrophically more than twenty years earlier. Suddenly. Traumatically. I had tried to explain what had happened — again and again, in different configurations, to my parents and my sister. Each time, it was as if I were speaking a foreign language. There was no curiosity. No emotional response. No sense that what I was describing had weight.
I understood the difference because I had seen it elsewhere, in the most ordinary of moments.
When I returned from my wedding ceremony in November 2010 and told my second wife, Elee, that my dear friend Thomas had died, her response was immediate and human. Her voice softened. "I'm so sorry. I know you were close." That was it. Nothing dramatic. Nothing performative. Just recognition. Two sentences that said: I received what you just told me, and I understand that it matters.
Years earlier, when Lynn — the woman I had loved and lived with as husband and wife — became critically ill, I had told my parents and my sister about the terror. The grief. The fear that she might die. I waited for something similar. Concern. Empathy. A simple acknowledgment of how devastating it was.
It never came.
I can see now how abnormal that was. If a hurricane tears through a coastline, people assess the damage. They offer shelter. They bring food. They understand that survival comes first. What I had endured wasn't a natural disaster — but it required the same response. Instead I was met with something else. Not concern. Not care. Not recognition.
What I needed was compassion. Understanding. Empathy. I needed a human response.
Sitting in that training room in July 2021, my body was telling me something it had been trying to tell me for decades. The nausea, the tightening, the shallow breathing — these were not malfunction. They were memory. They were the nervous system finally being given a moment of safety in which to say what it had not been safe to say before: something was very wrong with what happened to you. And you were right to feel it as wrong.
I can't believe I let them poison my mind with the notion that there was something unnatural about my reaction. What was wrong was the absence of care. No one assessed the damage. No one said: of course you're not okay. No one offered shelter, time, or protection while I tried to recover. Instead, the chaos compounded. Within months of losing Lynn, I was facing homelessness. Within months of that, I was fielding court dates and failures to appear and extraditions and jails. And at every point where I reached for my family and asked them to be moved by what was happening to me, the response was the emotional equivalent of a processing notice.
My mind moved, during that training, to the phone call I had been part of years earlier — Qwillpen on one phone, me on another, both of us on a call with my parents, while she tried to explain who John Freifeld was and what he had done and what the aftermath had looked like from the inside of it. And then her voice changing, when she believed the call had ended but it had not.
I don't think they care at all about Bruce.
She had been right. She had been right in 2001 or 2002 when she said it, and she was still right in 2021 when I was sitting in a training room in Durham with a stomach full of the body's accumulated testimony. She had understood something about my family that had taken me nearly twenty more years to fully accept.
During that training weekend I met someone who had survived Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. A parent had poisoned him and then presented him as ill. I asked if he would be offended by an analogy I was wrestling with.
"I wasn't physically poisoned," I said. "But my family — my sister and my parents — made me believe my normal reactions were signs of sickness."
He understood immediately.
That was the moment I realized what my body had been telling the truth about all along.
Not weakness. Not failure. Not something wrong with me.
The cost of surviving without support.
The clinical literature has language for this — complex PTSD, the accumulation of harm without relief, without protection, without the emotional responses that might have prevented further damage. I had read that literature. I had studied it with the specific intensity of someone reading a map of territory they have been lost inside for years. In therapy with Andrea, beginning in 2018, I had processed more than fifty distinct events — each one a punctuation mark in a long sentence of ongoing harm.
But sitting in that training room in July 2021, it was my body that delivered the final piece. Not as insight. Not as language. As sensation — the tightening, the nausea, the shallow breath, the physical knowledge that arrived before thought had a chance to organize it.
The body had been keeping the score all along. It had been waiting, patiently and without my permission, for a moment safe enough to present its evidence.
In July 2021, it finally had one.