There are many ways to become invisible.

For Bruce Whealton, invisibility began in childhood: in a home where fear replaced comfort, where being quiet was safer than being known, and where emotional neglect shaped the nervous system long before he had words for trauma. By high school, he had become nearly silent, a ghost in his own life.

But this is not only a story of damage.

It is also the story of becoming visible.

In this book I will discuss a range of topics that relate to my passion in the mental health field and my ability to cope with others who are coworkers, colleagues and supervisors and I contrast and compare that with my work with clients. I will also include stories from past experiences with other work settings that I have experienced throughout my many years in the mental health field. I am curious about matters such as emotional and social intelligence.

A loving spouse. A healer. How does this person cope with evil villains willing to destroy everything?  They convicted the victim... now how does the victim goes on with life as a healer?

By Bruce Whealton

In Three Times a Victim: Living Under the Shadow of Toxic Shame, the author shares a deeply personal and harrowing journey through layers of injustice-first as a victim of a traumatic assault, then as the accused in a cruel reversal of truth, and finally as a casualty of a justice system riddled with gender bias and systemic failure.

This is the story of a life told in poetry—of a boy once invisible who came to feel seen through love, and of a man who lost everything when that love was torn away.

It began when I met Celta, the first person who looked at me as if I was worth loving. Through her eyes, I woke up from the long fog of emotional neglect. After her tragic passing, I met Lynn—my soulmate, my home, my reason to believe that healing was possible.

These poems are in the fashion of how conversation can get tied up into knots and it can be hard to know what to say or how to respond or to think. Thinking is influenced by our thoughts and so what we think is made up of words that can be made up of tangled conversational knots from which we try to make sense of reality. Sometimes no matter what you say, one person or both persons in a two person dialog will lose. R. D. Laing wrote a collection of poems called Knots and as a writer I am loath to immitate or create anything that is not uniquely inspired by myself alone.

This book is dedicated to Lynn Denise Krupey and it's about the love we discovered and shared. It's also about my quest to overcome shyness and to find love. What makes things complicated is that I have always been paralyzed by shyness. I was told and it seems to be the case that the guy has to ask the girl/lady out and not the other way around. This seems brutally unfair and problematic for a shy guy. Who came up with that rule anyway? Why?