Preface

There are moments in life that quietly divide everything into before and after. You don’t see them coming. You don’t mark them as history when they arrive. They slip into your life like shadows—unnoticed at first—and when you finally look back, everything has changed.

This is a story about how love found me, how it changed me, and how the eventual loss of that love shattered everything I had come to believe about who I was and how life works.

But this is not just a story about love and loss. It is a story about attachment—what it means to be seen, held, chosen. And it’s about what happens when those bonds are broken… when the one person who once made you feel safe no longer turns toward you in your moment of need. The idea of having someone turn toward me and see me through the eyes of love that is the most amazing thing for a person who was not noticed by his own mother.

As a child, I knew emotional deprivation. I knew how to hide and survive. But I didn’t know how to want—because I had never been taught what it meant to be loved.

Then, I met Celta. And then Lynn.

Through these women, I tasted the kind of connection I once believed was reserved for other people. I built a life. I became a therapist. I knew joy and purpose and secure attachment for the first time.

And then, in 2000, everything fell apart.

This book is told in two parts.

Part I is a love story. A story of healing. Of what it means to be truly seen.

Part II is about what happens when that love slips away—when loss becomes trauma, and the past you once survived comes roaring back.

This is not a tale of tidy recovery. It is a story of endurance, dissociation, searching, and longing. Of trying to find one’s way through a fog of Complex-PTSD. And of wondering whether hope, once lost, can ever be trusted again.