Entering my next decade without the monsters

​This is the last day of the 6th decade of my life. I've written a couple of thousand articles this decade, so it would only be appropriate to share the longest today (this forever renders long post warnings understatements).

It is also in many ways the most meaningful.

Because of its length it's not well edited; I apologize in advance to anyone who reads this. It's in many ways a decade dump - one that felt pretty necessary as I prepare to begin the most beautiful decade of my life.

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This is it. The last day of the sixth decade of my life. I’m looking forward to this next decade.

I haven’t always said that about the next decade; maybe I never have.

Certainly, there have been a few decades I was ready to get to as a means of escaping the decade I was in. That’s not the case here, though. I’m excited. My life is much more embracing than escaping these days.

Oh, some days “I embrace” looks and feels more joyful than other days. But still, I am embracing.

I’ve come to believe embracing is the opposite of escaping.

Escaping is pain; embracing is healing.

Healing began for me in this sixth decade of life. After five decades of hurting, along comes the healing.

In 2016, I was 52 years old. I sat in a presentation at a conference I had to attend for my job. A man presented on the connection between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and long-term health and wellness, to include the risk for addictions.
 
I had never heard of ACEs.

I stood out in the hallway immediately after that presentation. Dazed. ACEs coming at me from all corners of my life.

I know today I was standing in the middle of an unsettling shift in my life. Like an earthquake. I was in one moment being violently haunted by my past, and at the same time, as if stuck in a rip current, drug kicking and screaming into a more hopeful future.

I didn’t know it in that moment, I could have never articulated it then, but an internal wrestling match had begun, one that would make me ultimately choose: past or future; death or life.

You see, healing ultimately is a choice, but one you don’t begin to make until a moment pulls the curtain back on five decades of pain. It’s possible to live life in deep pain and not know you are in pain.

I have written several chapters of the book of my life. Maybe this article will ultimately serve as a suitable alternative to that book. For many reasons I’ve struggled to write that book.
 
I don’t know. But it’s title up until this moment has always been:

“It’s Hard to Outrun the Monster in Your Life When You Are the Monster.”

What that presentation put me on a path of understanding was that the abuses inflicted upon me in my childhood, and the abuses I inflicted upon others in my childhood, they became source material for a monster story I would tell for most of my life.

It’s a story I would tell myself every day and at the same time a story I would hide from everyone else. Which in a way lets that monster become a disease. Because the longer we tell ourselves monster stories, the longer the monster eats away at us, the more likely it is you disappear and the monster is all that remains.

At least in the monster’s mind.

Monster stories tend to intensify when no one talks about them. When they become stories lost in one’s body and soul, protected by secrecy and stigma. When they become buried beneath guilt and shame.

Some things disappear in life when you bury them, monster stories grow.

I always wondered, how was it when, not yet a teen, that I fell in love with the feeling of alcohol. How was it as a teen that I was drawn to experimenting with various pills in the pill bottles I’d find in medicine cabinets marked anti-depressant. I didn’t even know what depression was back then.

I do now.  

How was it that at such a young age I’d become obsessed with people liking me. I craved popularity. I needed it. How was it that there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t say or do to fill that need?

There was no lie I wouldn’t tell, no person I wouldn’t pretend to be. No alcohol or pills I wouldn’t steal and share.

There was nothing I couldn’t be talked into doing if the reward was being liked.

How does that happen at such a young age?

Those are all shameful and guilt-ridden questions you ask yourself until you begin to understand that all of those things are something one turns to to hide from the monster.

They are who one becomes to forget that he IS the monster.

That day, that presentation, that term: ACEs - it put me on a path of understanding and for the first time deeply wondering if it could be true, could it possibly be true that I am NOT a monster?

After all these years, decades, is it possible that I have unnecessarily been hiding in plain sight? Hiding a monster that didn’t exist.

In 2016, several months after sitting in that presentation, I ran my first marathon. I didn’t see that coming any more than I saw that first ACEs presentation coming.

On the surface, these would not seem to be experiences that are connected in any way, a marathon and a behavioral health presentation, but I can look back now and see that they most certainly were in my life.

Maybe even divinely coordinated.  

In running, and especially when you are a SLOW runner training for the most challenging physical endeavor you’ve ever taken on, you spend a lot of time out on the road and a lot of time alone.

It’s just you and your thoughts.

At the heart of this ACEs work is an invitation to start connecting the dots of your past. (It’s why I’m currently fascinated by and obsessed with the show This Is Us).

ACEs invites you to understand that the brain patterns of our lives are largely formed in our childhoods (85% of them before the age of 3), and without major rewiring, those patterns tag along with us for the rest of our lives.

Friends or monsters, they tag along.

Out there running, mile after mile and hour after hour, I was coming to grips with the one pattern that was tagging along with me no matter where I went or what decade I was entering.

That pattern: relationships were scary.  

Steven Porges, a distinguished researcher, says that trauma can shift our patterns of connection into patterns of protection.

Porges suggests that after experiencing trauma, individuals might be more likely to interpret ambiguous or neutral signals as threats, activating protective responses rather than open and connective ones. This can lead to challenges in forming and maintaining relationships.

The result, people may become more isolated and less engaged socially.

Bingo.

I loved being liked, and I didn’t mind being around people, as long as I could protect myself from ever being known. Because the closer you get to being known the more at risk you become of someone walking into the bedroom of your life and discovering the monster.

Out there running, I began to understand this relationship pattern of my life: Long for relationship, begin relationship, run as fast as I could from relationship the moment I suspected someone might be close to discovering the monster.

Over and over, three full decades of my life, that was my pattern.

I am out there running, and it occurs to me, I’ve been married 17 years, what changed? How was it that that at the age of 35 years old I was able to overcome the relationship patterns of my life and enter one of the most intimate types of relationships in life.

And the answer was, I hadn’t overcome that pattern.

Turns out marriage can be a great place to hide a monster. You can get so wrapped up in living out the image of a marriage – house, cars, kids, family gatherings – you can get so invested in portraying the perception of marriage that it becomes a perfect place to hide the reality of you.  

You get so busy, you get so determined to appear happy that no one ever bothers to ask, are you wrestling with any monsters in your life.

I’ve come to know there are a lot of marriages that are far more perception than reality. There are a lot of families that are far more perception than reality.
Hiding can be protective and even comforting until you come to realize you don’t want to hide anymore. You’ve been introduced to the possibility you’re not a monster after all, but you’ve spent five decades of your life believing that’s the case.

For the first time, you really want to tell your monster story to someone else. You want them to hear it and assure you the man you heard was right, your experiences don’t make you a monster.

But you can’t tell that story to anyone else.

There is no one else.

You come to discover the relationships you’ve invested the most time holding together in your life are relationships that have been tearing you apart.
Not a purposeful tearing, but when you’re the one being torn it doesn’t really matter if it’s purposeful or not.

When you’re the one who is coming to grips with the reality that what I need most in life right now is someone who can receive my secrets, and the people you want to share them with most have been complicit in or enabling of the secret keeping, you are torn apart.

That is not a blaming or a finger pointing, it is simply a cry from the broken.

When you want to scream “I am not a monster” and you are tortured by the reality you can’t scream loud enough for anyone to hear it, that is not an accusation, it’s a cry from the broken.

It is a resentment of the relationship pattern that is tagging along that has helped you create a pattern of no one to hear you when you most want to be heard.

The monster wants it to be an accusation. The monster wants you to lash out at the world upon this discovery. The monster wants you to villainize and fall into victimhood.

And I confess, I lived much of my life complying with the demands of this monster.

But you know, since that presentation in 2016, I have talked to thousands of people about the impacts of adverse childhood experiences. Today, eight years later, it’s in those conversations where I feel safer than I ever have.

It’s there where I’ve discovered new patterns tagging along with my life.  

I have shared with some perfect strangers far more about the monsters of my life than I have with the people who on paper should have been the recipients of that sharing. But sharing isn’t a function of the relationship on paper.

Sharing doesn’t know this is your wife or these are your parents or this is your pastor or this is your therapist. Sharing doesn’t honor titles and hierarchies or medical degrees and certifications.

Because our bodies, our nervous systems, our emotions, they are not privy to the titles and qualifications of the relationships in our lives, they are only obsessed with feeling safe inside them.

Actually, no, they are not obsessed, they absolutely demand that we feel safe before we will ever consider sharing our monster stories with anyone but the monster himself.

Our nervous systems don’t grant us permission to talk about the hardest experiences in our lives, the things that haunt us, shame us, guilt us, they don’t grant permission based on WHO we are talking to, they do so based on how safe we feel inside the conversations with them.

When you begin to feel safety with strangers, when you begin to see and feel your most vulnerable self come out of hiding in their midst, when you begin to discover the real you who has been living in the shadows of a monster your whole life, you grow resentful that you are living in the shadows of the relationships you spend the most time in.

And sometimes that is when you become the most destructive monster of all.

I apologized to someone recently. The person I’m most sorry for hurting in this journey. The journey of running from my monster to then becoming the monster to ultimately discovering I’m not a monster at all. And I said in that apology:

I never knew how to heal. Not heal myself. Not heal a relationship.

I had known how to experience love, I had just never had any idea how to DO love. I had experienced a lot of relationships in my life, but never ever had I learned how to heal or repair one in a bad spot.

Which in the end, was at the heart of our demise.

I’ve come to know in these vulnerable conversations with communities, THAT is at the heart of our general demise as a society. We in many ways know how to love, we deeply long to love, we just have no idea how to repair love when it is broken.

Unrepaired love often quickly migrates into unquieted resentment.

And there does come a day when the damage to repair is well beyond the desire or energy to do so. When you can no longer feel any signs of a connection, the conversation about repairing a connection seems far more once upon a time than an act of love.

When you have a relationship built on hiding who you are, repairing it often starts with acknowledging we are complete strangers. Folks on the outside looking in might believe that’s just a part of the healing process. Those inside the process might feel like having some hint of who the other is is a pretty important element of that process.

At the finish line of that first marathon, I often say I didn’t feel this sensation of “I did it” – instead, I found myself far more wondering, what else am I capable of?

In 2018, I pressed into that wonder. I signed up to run a 35-mile trail race in Dalton, Georgia. It was a longer distance than I’d ever run, and it was WAY more climbing than anything I’d ever climbed.

It was by far the grandest challenge ever to my comfort zone. And maybe as not much of a surprise to me, I didn’t finish it.

In 2019, I took my first trip to Honduras. Talk about another step way outside my comfort zone. While there, I found myself standing in the courtyard of a small building in a remote village. Young kids were lining up, smiling, anxious to get a new pair of shoes.

But leaning on a fence that wrapped around this courtyard was a group of older teenage boys. I saw darkness in their eyes. Not a mean dark, but a lost dark. I felt ill for a moment. I couldn’t explain it but I felt it.  

Maybe it was the first time I was fully aware that the emotions we feel in a moment can be emotions that have nothing to do with that moment at all, but emotions living in you, in some part of your body, from some dark place in your past.

Maybe they are not your emotions; they are your monster’s emotions.

I remember coming home from work one day and snapping at my two young boys for playing with an older neighbor boy. It was hardly the first time they’d played together. I told them, I don’t ever want to see you playing with him again.

They were confused. It’s the one time I vividly remember my boys looking at me like I was a, well, a monster.

This neighbor boy was a good kid. He didn’t deserve monster treatment. Sometimes we judge people in our current life through the emotions of experiences in our past life. Boys playing with your kids aren’t the boys who played with you the kid.

That is one thing that makes repair hard; not knowing that what you’re really trying to repair is your past and not your present. You are hiding from the villain in front of you who is only a villain because they remind you of the villains of your past.

In 2020, in the heart of a pandemic, shortly after a conversation that confirmed my marriage was over, in the middle of more days than I care to remember since that trip to Honduras when I wanted to call it quits on life, I went back to Georgia.

I went back to repair something I broke in many ways back in 2018.

The morning of the 35-mile race, I texted my dear friend and Georgia Jewel race director Jenny. I told her, I can’t do it. I can’t do this today.
She told me to get to the starting line. She told me she believed in me.

It was Jenny who 13 hours later was standing there waiting for me at the finish line of that 35-mile race, offering me one of the most meaningful hugs of my life.

For 13 hours I wrestled with the story of my life. All I had hidden from. All I had denied. All I had destroyed. All of the patterns and addictions that had come to thrive and grow and take over my life deep within the fertile soil of secrecy.

In that moment, in that hug, Jenny might have been holding the realest version of me anyone had ever held. It is a hug I will never forget.

Many folks applauded my physical accomplishment that day, but few will ever understand the emotional mountain I climbed that day. I climbed to exhaustion with just enough energy left to whisper, I am not a monster. 

It’s amazing how my running journey has paralleled this healing journey I’ve been on the past decade. How it has helped expose the vulnerabilities in me, unveiled secrets tightly kept within me, shown me my potential, taught me that life is never over, and that repair is never beyond our reach when our hearts desire is repair.

It's been a journey that started with me running from life and now that has me running full steam ahead toward life. 

I told someone the other day that turning 60 is the first number that has ever sounded truly old. Which is why I’m caught completely off guard by how exciting it is to hit that number.

Hope is powerful, you know. Or at least I’ve come to know it.

Hope can untangle life and connect the dots. Hope can reveal monsters and then just as quickly kill them off. Hope is the friendly mirror that slips in and replaces the one that has haunted you for decades. Hope says let me introduce you to the real you.

I am grateful for every moment of the last six decades. Without NEEDING to heal I would have never LEARNED to heal and without ever learning to heal I would have never been in the position I’m in today to HELP OTHERS heal.

A passion that has both become my mission and my identify.

Monsters are no longer my identity.
  
I have said that there are certainly many steps along the way of this hurting and healing journey that God was not beside me applauding. But God has ALWAYS been beside me.

When your relational pattern is one of being afraid of relationships, the relationship that comes to scare you the most is your relationship with God.

But when you truly begin to heal, feeling God’s presence becomes the peace that soothes any fear you’ve ever had of him. In feeling as alone as you’ve ever felt you come to discover you’ve never been alone at all.  

I’ve come to know that’s because that was behind God’s design of human relationships. He intended them to be the peace that soothes any fear we ever had. He intended them to feel like togetherness.

God has said, I didn’t give you a spirit of fear, I gave you love. Nothing unravels love or prevents love or makes us forget love like a spirt of fear.
I know that is true because of my two sons.

Every moment I am not with my two sons, I miss them. And missing people is not something that has come easy to me. But I always miss my boys.

I’ve come to know this decade that missing and love and all the beautiful feelings and emotions that come from connection are indeed a product of the connection, of fearlessness, not the names in or the nature of a relationship.

There are a lot of relationships being held together out there out of a sense of obligation; the grand prize for doing so is a pat on the back for obedience.
But the reality is, the grand prize of connection and relationship was designed to be fearlessness. It was supposed to be safety and love. But when relationships aren’t built on those foundations those prizes are never experienced. 

One year ago today, I was back in Honduras. I was standing in a small school yard looking at all the beautiful people.
There were no dark faces. No mysterious ill feelings inside.

It was a beautiful feeling to know that the monsters were all gone. Not just that, but that there were never any monsters at all.

They were simply stories. Stories I told myself. Oh they try to show up now and again, but I simply say to them, you are a story I no longer tell.
The me who went to Honduras in 2019 thought he was going there to heal others, the me who went in 2023 actually was.

The me who turned 50 nearly ten years ago had decades of unhealthy patterns tagging along. Tomorrow, I will turn 60, and I know many of those patterns will be left behind. Many of them with this article.

It has not been an easy decade by any stretch of the imagination. I suppose there are many on the outside looking in upon it thinking, he sure went through one hell of a midlife crisis.

When people say that I think maybe they put too much blame on the midlife while withholding curiosity and compassion and empathy toward the crisis.
Many times, that crisis has very little to do with middle age and everything to do with early age. Many times that crisis wasn’t as much crisis as it was healing.   

As I begin this new decade, I am not healed. And neither are you. I suppose that’s my biggest takeaway from this past decade. That one big secret to a content life is not finding a magical place called healed but to invest in the magical process of daily healing.

For many of you, that will start with discovering you are not your monster stories. If that is already you, if you already know that, then chances are that’s because you have people in your life you’ve shared those stories with. People who responded by treating you like a beautiful human and not a monster.
That is my commitment this next decade. To doing everything in my power to help people come to know they are not their monster stories.

Because that is where hope begins.

And it is hope that untangles life and connects the dots.

It is hope that reveals monsters and then just as quickly kills them off.

It is hope that slips in and replaces the mirror that haunts us with the mirror that smiles upon us.

Smiles and says, let me introduce you to the real you. I think you’ll like him.  

Smiles and says, you may not be repaired, but you know how to repair now.

Oh, what a beautiful way to start a new decade.

I am grateful for all who have joined in my healing journey, and to the degree that journey has aided your own healing, I thank God for that.

For ultimately it is God who has coordinated this healing journey called life. It is God who has said you were created in my image and not the image you create of any monsters.

Thank you for never leaving God.
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Thank you for your image.