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.

Through therapy, friendship, poetry, and the painstaking work of learning social skills, Bruce began to emerge. Love deepened that transformation. Celta showed him that he could be cherished. Lynn became his secure base, his beloved partner, and the…

Letter to: Undisclosed: Toward Justice (Rabia Chaudry, Susan Simpson, Colin Miller) Podcast covering wrongful convictions

Dear Professor [Miller / Simpson],

My name is Bruce Whealton, and I’m writing to seek your guidance—or any support you may be able to offer—regarding a wrongful conviction I’ve lived with for over 20 years in North Carolina. It impacts every aspect of my life.

I worked very hard to become a mental health professional…

✨ 8 AI Tools Every Writer & Creator Should Know (May 2025 Edition)

Whether you're a memoirist, poet, podcaster, or content creator, artificial intelligence is opening powerful new doors. Each tool below is designed to enhance your creative process, streamline promotion, or bring your stories to life across platforms.

This is part of my ongoing effort to curate AI tools for writers, artists, and therapists who use creativity as a path to healing, connection, and meaning. Expect new…

I’m honored to share that my newest memoir,
Tell Me I Am Not Invisible: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning to Live Again,
is now unfolding live on my website.

The book is told in two parts.
Part I is the story of becoming — a journey of emerging from emotional deprivation and shame to discover love, creativity, and purpose.
Part II, still being finalized, will explore the heartbreak of loss, trauma, and the long road to healing.

You can start reading from the beginning — including the preface and Table of Contents — here:
👉…

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.

This collection of poems includes themes about very real monsters in the world, metaphorically speaking. The ideas about vampires are that they are without a soul and thus have no conscience, remorse, empathy or compassion. I mention this because this theme was explored in a collection that was published with another poet named Scott Urban who also wrote poems about the macabre. That book was called "Puncture Wounds." I lost track of Scott Urban but had more to write on this topic.

This book is inspired by actually experiences that I have had. I have spent time in the same room with evil wearing the appearance of being a normal person. I could not have known when I first wrote…

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?

As the book opens, I was in a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt in December 2019. What starts as a simple conversation with another patient changed my life. Most of the rest of the book tells the reader how I got to this point. I experienced profound injustice between 2004 and 2006. By opening with a story about suicide, I want the reader to understand that the injustice was not just something that happened long ago.
 
This book is an account of all the…

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.

With raw honesty and emotional depth, this memoir delves into the profound psychological impact of being disbelieved, shamed, and ultimately betrayed by those entrusted to uphold justice. It explores how pre-existing wounds of childhood abuse, emotional deprivation, and toxic shame collided with the crushing weight of false…

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.

But in July of 2000, everything changed. Lynn, born with a terminal genetic illness, began to slip away, and I, a therapist and healer by trade, was powerless to stop it. Her illness, along with other betrayals and losses, shattered my sense of self. Grief…