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Dec. 14, 2023 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:42:33

The Demons of Childhood Trauma | Aaron Stark | EP 405

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	The very first memory I have of my entire life, where I start my life, is me laying on my bloody mom's body, looking up at my dad, screaming at him, you just killed my mom.
	Hello, everyone watching and listening.
	Today, I'm pleased to be talking to Mr.
	Aaron Stark.
	You might recognize him from his TED Talk on YouTube, which has got about 13 million views.
	Aaron went to some very dark places when he was a kid and a teenager and came from some very dark places.
	At one point in his life, he had formulated very detailed plans That related to shooting up a school.
	And he decided not to do it.
	And what we're talking about, what we're going to talk about is how he came to make those plans, let's say, what the rationale for it was and the cause of those plans, and then also why he decided to back away from the precipice and what the consequence of that backing away has been.
	So, Mr.
	Stark, you turned your life around.
	Yes, sir.
	Okay, so let's go back to when it wasn't turned around.
	Now, you've been touring around and talking to people for how long?
	How long have you been in the public eye?
	About five years.
	About five years.
	How old are you now?
	44.
	Okay, and so, well, why don't you just tell us the story, and then I'll start delving into, well, the details.
	Well, so, I was almost a school shooter.
	When I was really young, I went through a really violent, aggressive family.
	My first five years are like living in a Stephen King movie.
	My birth father was the most violent and depraved person I've ever met.
	Beatings and rapes and just violence and aggression the entire time, running from him across state to state, trying to get away.
	When my mom finally escaped him, got with my stepdad and went from Stephen King to Scarface.
	So it went from extreme violence to crack cocaine and crime.
	You were about six at the time?
	I was about five or six at the time, yeah.
	And I had an older brother who's two years older than I was.
	And so we were very nomadic.
	I went to 30 or 40 different schools.
	We were constantly moving from state to state, running away from the cops or the social workers or counselors or anybody trying to intervene.
	And lived a very nomadic lifestyle.
	And went from early on being a really shy, sensitive, sweet kid who liked reading comic books and superheroes and that kind of stuff In my early teen years, really adapting to the way to survive is I'm going to be the aggressive one.
	I figured out early on that I was the dirty one, I was the nasty one, I was the worthless, I was the outcast.
	I was the one that was pushed off.
	Early on meaning when?
	Six, seven years old.
	So you're assuming it was you?
	Oh yeah, it was me.
	My older brother was two years older than I was.
	Because of my family dynamic, he had a lot of responsibility.
	He had to be the early man of the house really early on to the extent where he had, at 12 years old, had to handle the sheriff throwing all of our stuff in the front lawn and evicting us when my parents are getting drugged out and drunk at the bar and we can't find him for days.
	And he has to find us a place to stay.
	And I was the responsibility to get to take care of him.
	How much older than you was he?
	Two years.
	So he was 12, I was 10.
	And so he was just another kid going through abuse the same way I was.
	But I was a responsibility he had to take care of.
	So while he was shouldering all the responsibility, I'm like the burden.
	And so that was kind of the identities we adapted.
	He was the one that took care of everything.
	I was the one that was the broken thing that needed to be taken care of all the time.
	And as that grew older, I... I became more and more toxic going into my early teen years.
	Why do you think there wasn't enough responsibility also for you?
	Like, why do you think the roles between you and your brother had to be split that way?
	I don't know if they had to be, but that's just kind of the way they ended up being.
	He...
	Just because of our personalities, he was more of a hands-on kid.
	Well, he's older, too.
	Well, he was a gearhead, too.
	His likes were more physical.
	He liked doing things like building things, taking stuff apart, fixing cars, stuff like that.
	I was more intellectual.
	I liked reading and loved...
	I would read, like, the Bull Finch's mythology textbook when I was four or five years old.
	My first book report was on Stephen King's misery when I was in kindergarten.
	I read really early on, super early.
	I was reading full books by the time I was five years old.
	So I would suck in information.
	So that was my escape.
	My escape when all the crime and the violence and people beating each other and digging for crack rock behind me was going on, I would have my nose dug into an X-Men comic book.
	My brother would be...
	and they work back together.
	- Mm-hmm. - So he was more oriented doing practical things. - Practical things in the world.
	And so when, as that grew older, he was the one that had to do like, well, the car's broken and Jake's gonna try to fix it.
	This thing's busted, Jake's gonna fix it.
	I didn't fix anything.
	I was off to the side reading a book.
	I wasn't utilitarian.
	So he was older and more practically oriented.
	I wasn't utilitarian to anything.
	Okay, so you said you were a sweet kid, but that things started to change, well, maybe about when you were 10, if I got that right?
	Oh, earlier.
	I'd say 7, 8, 9.
	Yeah, I... Because of the way that we moved, we were constantly moving from Colorado to Oregon, back and forth.
	And this was the late 80s, so it was before the age of the internet.
	It was really easy to make up your entire personality and make up a whole new identity.
	So my parents would get a job and a house out here in Colorado, and then get evicted, lose their job, move to Oregon, lie about their entire resume, lie about their entire history, get an entirely new house and everything, and then wash, rinse, repeat every couple of months.
	Right, right.
	And so we were always moving back and forth.
	And they were doing that so that their scams could continue?
	It was either their scams could continue or they would evade accountability.
	So that sort of behavior is generally rarer among women.
	You said your birth father was a particularly nasty piece of work.
	Yes.
	And so did you have any sort of quality relationship with your birth?
	Mother or your father?
	At that time, yes.
	Early on with my father, yes.
	My mom at that time was much more like Linda Hamilton from T2. Okay, I don't...
	Oh, yes.
	From Terminator.
	Right.
	She was the survivalist mother who, like, to the point where when...
	My father was so violent and chasing us around, we were bouncing from batter woman shelter to batter woman shelter to get away from him.
	And my mom would have things like...
	Safety words.
	So if we were out about, if she just said the word pocket in conversation, that was a safety tag.
	So she could be at the grocery store and be like, oh, 295, here we go, pocket.
	If that word came out of her mouth, I was to grab the back pocket of her pants and we need to get out right now.
	That meant my father was in sight.
	There was trouble.
	We need to go now.
	We need to move.
	And so it was that kind of survivalist.
	And that was the first five years?
	First five years of my life.
	Okay, so why do you think your mother stayed with your father during that five-year period?
	During that five-year period?
	I think that from my stories that I heard...
	He was a Vietnam vet.
	And when he left to go to the war, he was a good guy.
	When he came back, he was kind of a monster.
	Oh, yeah.
	And so that was, I guess they were together.
	Was she with him before he went to Vietnam?
	She was.
	Because she already established a relationship with someone who was then damaged by the war.
	Came back and was completely a monster and was just violent and got into...
	He was...
	Epically violent.
	Was he hurt physically, do you know, during the war?
	He wasn't hurt physically during the war, I don't think.
	I know he was hurt psychologically during the war.
	Do you know why?
	Do you know what happened?
	He was a gunner on a ship.
	He was one of the ones that would load the ammunition to shoot up off into Cambodia.
	And he was on the ship and one of his best friends got his head taken off right next to him.
	Just...
	The ammunition blew his best friend away right next to him, and that messed him up.
	But that pales in comparison to the trauma he suffered from his family.
	My father, from his own family, was circumcised at 15 years old.
	Okay, so what does that mean exactly?
	They circumcised him.
	They cut off the foreskin of his penis at 15 years old because they caught him masturbating.
	I see.
	So that's just an example of the abuse that my father went through.
	Abuse, in my opinion, is generational.
	It's trauma that rolls downhill.
	And from both sides of my family, there were giant boulders of trauma that were rolling downhill.
	From my father's side, there was that.
	From my mother's side, I had a pedophile great-grandfather, a pedophile uncle, rapist.
	There was a lot of violence and aggression on both sides.
	On both sides.
	What about alcoholism?
	Lots of alcoholism, mental disorders, a lot of personality disorders, a lot of drug abuse.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, well, patterns of behavior are imitated, right?
	Consciously and unconsciously.
	And what that means is that if there is a pattern of pathology in a family, it will echo down the generations until someone...
	Digs into the underbelly of the problem, sorts it out and stops it.
	And then, at least in principle, that'll stop the intergenerational transmission.
	There are genetic predispositions, but they're complex.
	So you can have a genetic predisposition to depression, which would mean that you're likely to be higher in the trait neuroticism, which is a trait associated with negative emotion.
	There are also heritable tendencies towards antisocial personality.
	So, if you're extroverted and disagreeable, and even worse, if you're extroverted, disagreeable, and unconscientious, if you take a pathological turn, you'll tilt likely in a criminal direction.
	And some of that has a heritable omen, too.
	It doesn't mean that wrongdoing or the proclivity for criminalization Yeah.
	The way I present it to my family is that we are taught different languages of how to express our emotions.
	And if your vocabulary of emotional expression is violence and aggression, then that's the language you're going to teach everybody else.
	Yeah, well, it also means that you don't know the alternatives.
	Precisely.
	And so it's really hard to express yourself in a calm, rational manner if the only language you speak in your head and outside and in your world is violence, aggression, and toxicity.
	It's really hard then to assess.
	To learn how to integrate that aggression in a socialized manner.
	So if you have a small child who's extroverted and disagreeable, they're going to push you and they're going to test constantly.
	And now if you take a firm tack and you're sophisticated, You can help those children become socialized and competitive, in which case their proclivity to push can be, well, usefully channeled into, you know, competitive victory, let's say.
	But it's hard to do that, especially when the kid If the kid's particularly pushy.
	And I see that proclivity to push actually manifests itself in large scale from my estimation and from what I've seen doing what I do.
	And kids who are in that dark place, that are in that gray area of depression that might fall into the dark even further, that are trying to reach out for help.
	Yeah.
	The people that reach out to help too, they're going to test.
	They're going to push.
	Yeah, right.
	Definitely.
	Are you faking the funk?
	Are you lying like everybody else in my life that said they were here for me and then they disappeared when everything got hard?
	And so they're going to really test and test and test until you prove consistency.
	And so that proclivity to test, if you don't address that early on, it just sprouts and grows.
	Right, it's going to be exacerbated by betrayal.
	Yeah, it turns into a main defense mechanism and lifestyle that you're going to push and be aggressive to everybody until you can see that one person that actually can stand there.
	Yeah, well, people who have been betrayed and rejected sufficiently can get to the point where they won't make a bond with anyone.
	There's research conducted, I can't remember the people who did it, on children who were separated very young for too long from their parents.
	And they go through a period of protest that's very intense to begin with.
	Of course, they're distressed about being separated.
	And then the protests...
	Behavior decreases, but it'll emerge sporadically, and then that'll decrease.
	And once the protest behavior has been eradicated completely, it's very difficult, even if the parent comes back, to reestablish contact.
	The children put up a barrier, which is akin to the barrier that you're describing, that's very difficult to pierce.
	and as you said what will happen too to children who abandon is that because they've been betrayed repeatedly and deeply and hurt very badly is they will test like mad to see if they can break the bond to see if it's reliable and it that can actually get to the point you see this in conditions like borderline personality disorder where the person will test everyone yeah so completely that no one can actually put up with it yeah and i see that quite a lot and
	And I think that the more we can, that's the advice that I give when I get doing my talks, is to be that island of normal in the ocean of chaos for that person.
	That person is, everybody, when I was in that spot, everybody in my life thought that I was either a monster or a project.
	You either wanted to fix me or you were afraid of me.
	And neither one of those were a person.
	Yeah, well, a project is often something that people undertake for their own self-glorification.
	Precisely.
	And if I'm just a mark on your checklist, and I'm not actually—I'm an activity to you.
	I'm not a person you're engaging with in a rational response and listening to my—and having a rational, reasonable discussion and discourse.
	I'm an activity on your checklist, and that means that I'm automatically under you.
	When we have activities and we're doing things, that activity is a thing we are doing.
	Yeah, well, that's the toxicity of pity.
	Mm-hmm.
	The toxicity of pity.
	It's demoralizing for that reason.
	It is.
	And the thing that my best friend did, and he's still my best friend to this day, was he was the one person that saved my life by treating me like I was a respectful person that deserved love.
	When did you meet him?
	I met him when I was 10.
	Okay, so did you have friends before the age of 10?
	I... Not really.
	Well, it's hard with an itinerant lifestyle.
	Yeah, I didn't have any real connections.
	And then even after that, once that slightly stabilized in my teen years, the moving down slowed down a little bit.
	I was able to stay in places for slightly longer.
	I didn't really gather friends.
	I got what I called disaster groupies.
	They were people that wanted to kind of live vicariously through my darkness because they didn't really have anything like me in their world.
	So we were, there was a bunch of...
	Was that like a group of outcasts?
	Yeah, it was a bunch of teen kids.
	Me and maybe one or two others that had a similar kind of background.
	Because looking back, it was a bunch of depressed kids trying to navigate depression without any adult supervision.
	But it was, in reality, what was going on was there was a house that one of my classmates at school, his dad paid the rent, his dad bought all the food, but his dad didn't live there.
	So it was just my 16-year-old friend and his little brother that stayed there.
	And so that turned into just a flock house for a bunch of kids.
	And so that was everybody else that was there.
	And there's no older men there.
	There's no guidance.
	No guidance whatsoever.
	And so that turned into where all the other kids had houses and had families and could go there.
	They were rebelling.
	They were trying to find their own way.
	These are all the other kids in the group.
	All the other kids in the group.
	They were like rebelling and stuff.
	I didn't have a house to go back to.
	I was going to go back and sleep in the field behind Casa Bonita in Denver.
	I was going to go try to steal free samples out of the grocery store and evade my criminal family.
	If I did hit my family's house, it was to grab a little bit of clothes so I could get out of there before the violence started.
	So I wasn't going home to any stability.
	I was going to go live on the streets and I was going to go try to survive.
	They all got to go home to their houses.
	So you were in this neck deep and they were playing with it.
	Yeah, exactly.
	They were playing with it.
	I was living it fully.
	And that...
	They were pushing me further off on the edge.
	It was like a real-life Reddit forum.
	Were you getting rewarded, so to speak, for the darker parts of your personality?
	Yeah, rewarded, so to speak, in a social sense, where it turns into a party favor, almost.
	Let me tell you the craziness of what happened to my family this day.
	Yeah.
	I had a friend like that who was extraordinarily comedic.
	And he was probably the funniest person I've ever met in my life.
	And it got, at one point, it got to be a burden to him because that's what people expected.
	They expected him to be on and funny all the time.
	Yes, yes.
	I've had that time where I'm at a party and like, oh, tell me what craziness your family went through today.
	I'm like, I don't want to talk about it, dude.
	I got cuts in my arms from it.
	Like, I don't want to talk about this pain right now.
	Yeah.
	But it would turn into the fiction.
	So when we're talking about that, that leads into the toxicity of what fed my own anger, toxicity, and depression with going into that spot.
	Because I, by that point, I started doing that when I was 14 years old.
	Okay, what year is this?
	So I was 14 years old.
	I was born in 1979.
	So we're talking...
	93.
	93.
	Okay.
	Just to place it.
	Just to place it.
	And you're in Denver at this point?
	Yep.
	Denver.
	And you're 14.
	14 years old.
	And that's when I finally left home because I couldn't deal with the violence and the crime and the beatings constantly and watching my mom stab my uncle in the gut with a doorknob.
	If you take apart a doorknob, the inside gear parts.
	Pointy.
	Yeah, that makes a very dangerous weapon.
	Don't ever stab someone with it.
	And so, just violence like that constantly.
	And what does constantly mean?
	Like living in that fight or flight response every minute of every day.
	How often did you see events that were violent in your house?
	Three or four times daily.
	And what kind of violence?
	To the point where, here's an example, I'm sitting in my bedroom and nobody had seen that I came home from school, or I think I was working a day job, I think I was 15 or 16 at the time.
	I walked in, sat down in my bedroom, nobody heard that I was home.
	I picked up the game controller, was playing PlayStation for a second, heard a rumble outside my bedroom.
	And I stand outside and my stepdad has my mom up against the wall by her throat, dangling like two feet off the ground and he's choking her.
	And so I immediately grabbed him.
	I'm large.
	I just had puberty, so I was getting into my body.
	Grabbed him, slammed him into the microwave, broke the microwave, pushed him back, slammed him into the fridge, broke the fridge, pushed him back into the back wall.
	Then I had him by his throat up against the wall, choking him.
	And now my mom is smashing plates over the back of my head for me to drop him.
	She's attacking me because I got into the fight.
	So I drop him, go back to my video game, pick up the controller, keep on playing.
	Nothing happened.
	Like, you go from zero to 60 instantly.
	Right, right, right.
	And then go back to nothing.
	And do that four or five times a day.
	And at the drop of a hat, stuff can go wrong.
	And at the same time, dealing with my parents, their method of discipline or any kind of control was to threaten the absolute worst possible thing.
	Right.
	That's not discipline.
	I'm going to beat you terribly.
	I'm going to kick you out.
	You're going to be gone.
	You're going to be out of here immediately.
	And then five minutes later, act like nothing happened.
	They wouldn't follow through with any kind of punishment, but act like nothing happened in that conversation at all, and we were just having a good day.
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	Were you ever disciplined in a manner that you regard as vaguely appropriate?
	No.
	Never?
	And when I was a kid, they had lost the ability to parent me by the time I was 12.
	How are you going to tell me to be home by 10 o'clock when you're digging through the carpet for Crack Rock in front of me?
	Yeah.
	Because they didn't want to hide anything, so they did it all right in front of me.
	They would pull out the flat iron skillet.
	So why didn't they want to hide anything?
	That was just my mom's philosophy.
	She just didn't believe it.
	So that's like a warped form of honesty.
	Yeah, she would pull out the electric skillet with the water and the vials and the baking soda, and I watched her rock up crack right in front of me.
	I learned how to do it when I was five years old.
	I took crack to school as a so-and-tell for one of my schools.
	What?
	That's not generally a very good idea.
	No, it isn't.
	Right, but that would also indicate how much you didn't know, how strange what was going on in your family actually was.
	And it was part of what built into me that help was a peril.
	That reaching out for help was a danger.
	Okay.
	That it was...
	Why?
	Because I... When I would do that, I took Crack Rock to school, and then the next day, we're out.
	We moved out of state.
	As another example, I was very unkempt, very dirty, very smelly.
	I never had clean clothes.
	I never changed my clothes.
	I would constantly be filthy.
	There was one school I went to.
	I must have been nine, ten years old.
	Really young.
	And I went to the school, and on the walk to the school, I actually defecated in my pants and kept on going.
	I crapped my pants and kept on going to school.
	And so I walked, went to school, spent the entire day there.
	Next day, I go to school, and there's a box of stuff for me, okay?
	The teacher had brought a box of stuff.
	They brought clothes and books and a coat and all these new school supplies.
	I take it home, and I show my mom, like, hey, check this out.
	I got all this stuff.
	The very next day, we're out and moved away.
	Because that's the sign the teacher got too close, that someone's investigating too fast and we need to go.
	I see.
	It turns into a danger signal.
	If I reached out for help, that meant that the police might get involved, my parents might go to jail, my brother might go to foster care, I might go to foster care, all because I tried to get help.
	Right, right.
	So, okay, so let's go back to between one and five.
	You talked a little bit about your mom and your dad.
	You said your dad was particularly damaged in Vietnam.
	Your mom had established a relationship with him before he went.
	So I imagine she felt somewhat beholden to him.
	And also, I would imagine maybe she loved him.
	Certainly, she would have felt sorry for him when he came back because he was so damaged.
	And so how did the two of them spiral into the trouble that they had?
	And then when did you and your brother come along?
	Were they married?
	They were married.
	They did get married.
	They were married.
	By the time I was born, the extreme violence had already started.
	So I'm not sure about how that spiraled in.
	I have memories early on of my father sleeping on the couch.
	And my mom realizing he's finally asleep.
	So she picked up a 2x4 and beat him bloody.
	Beat him almost until he was dead.
	Because she tried to escape.
	And so she beat him.
	How old do you think you are?
	I was...
	Four?
	And you can remember that?
	Mm-hmm.
	I remember him laying on the couch and over him slamming into him with a two-by-four.
	I remember that.
	And then us going.
	But then he found us.
	Okay, you left, but he found us.
	He found us.
	And he would chase us down.
	Why?
	There's a distinct memory I have of us in a battered woman shelter.
	Me and my mom and my older brother were living in a battered woman shelter.
	And me and my brother were playing outside.
	Okay?
	And a car pulls up and my dad kidnaps me and my brother.
	Convinces me particularly to get into the car.
	I'm pretty sure my brother just followed us.
	I just get in the car because it's my dad.
	And so he takes us and then calls the battered woman shelter, talks to my mom, tells my mom that one of us are dead and the other one's going to be dead if she doesn't show up at this restaurant to meet him.
	And so she, against the protestations of the Banner Woman's shelter, of course, she goes there to meet him at this restaurant.
	And when she gets there, and I know the story both from vivid recounts from her from the story and from news clippings that we had growing up.
	So she goes to the restaurant, and he's there, and they're arguing, and he flips the table over in the argument and pulls out his classic weapon, which was a cross-shaped, X-shaped tire iron.
	That was a weapon of choice.
	Oh, yeah.
	So he picked that up and went to go hit her with it.
	And right then, everybody else in the restaurant pulled out guns and pointed at him because the bad woman showed her called ahead and filled it with undercover police officers.
	And so I had had a noose clipping when I was a kid of my dad getting let out of a restaurant with shotguns in his head.
	Are your mom and dad still alive?
	My mother is.
	My father, I don't know.
	And my stepdad died in 2015.
	Do you still see your mom?
	No, I haven't spoken to her since I came out with my story.
	Last time I talked to my mom, I had just left a live TV show appearance in Denver.
	I was having a really good moment.
	I just was on live TV for the first time, took my daughter with me.
	She got to see a TV studio, so I was having a cool little.
	How many kids do you have?
	Four.
	Four kids.
	How old are they?
	23, 20, 16, and 12.
	The two older are my step.
	16 is my age.
	How long?
	And you're married?
	13 years.
	13 years.
	And how has your marriage been?
	Great.
	Fantastic.
	Really?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, congratulations.
	I am as happy as can be, and I successfully broke the cycle.
	My family doesn't have any of the trauma that I went through.
	Okay, good.
	Well, we'll get into how you did that.
	Okay, so now back when you were little, Your mom and dad are in a very violent relationship.
	They're married.
	Your dad obviously wants you guys around for some reason.
	I think it was more to control her.
	I didn't think it had anything to do with us.
	Because once we were gone, he didn't care.
	He never came to contact.
	I never had any time where dad tried to reach out.
	Never had any of those loving conversations.
	I don't have any loving memories with my father.
	The very first memory I have of my entire life.
	Where I start my life is me laying on my bloody mom's body, looking up at my dad, screaming at him, you just killed my mom.
	Oh yeah.
	That's where I start.
	That's not a good...
	Yeah.
	Alfred Adler, a famous psychologist, he believed that those first memories in some ways are determinative, right?
	That they sort of set the frame.
	And so that's a hell of a first memory.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Now you had...
	Your older brother, did you have a relationship with him?
	I did.
	We were pretty close growing up.
	Okay, so you had a male role model in the house who wasn't completely pathological.
	Do you see your brother?
	No.
	I haven't talked to him since I started talking about it.
	That side of the family attacks me not because I'm saying something that's not the truth, but just because I'm talking.
	Because I... And your brother as well doesn't feel that that's appropriate?
	Because I'm making my mom cry.
	Because...
	I see.
	And so he feels that's inappropriate in relationship to your mother.
	Does he still see your mother?
	I believe so.
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	I haven't spoken to any of them.
	I haven't spoken to that side of the family in five years.
	Five years.
	Five years.
	Okay, so when you're little...
	How do you survive between one and five?
	Like, you have your brother, so that's definitely a plus.
	Okay, and you said that you were a very early reader, so you escaped into the world of fiction and reading.
	Yep.
	Comic books and mythology.
	Did you do well in school?
	So I tested off the charts in my tests, but I didn't do any of my assignments.
	Okay.
	Well, that's not surprising.
	Yeah.
	Well, first of all, that's not all that atypical for smart kids, but you lived in a pretty chaotic environment, so it would have been quite surprising had you managed to buckle down and do your work.
	Did you pride yourself on your intellect?
	I did.
	I did.
	I would carry around both inches of mythology with me all the time, or giant stacks of X-Men comic books, or the complete works of Shakespeare, and just read voraciously.
	And I loved doing oral reports and book reports, and when I was in high school, The one at the final high school, North High in Denver, the only two classes I ever actually attended were English class and choir class.
	I would skip every other day.
	And I even failed those classes because of attendance rules.
	Once you miss four days, you fail the semester.
	And I would only attend class once every three weeks or so.
	But the classes I would go to were English class in choir.
	Why choir?
	Choir because I think that actually has a superpower when it comes to kids who are depressed.
	Did you sing?
	I did.
	I still do.
	I still love singing.
	And I was in statewide choir and citywide choir and 16 personal acapella choirs.
	I would always go whenever all the schools I would go to, I would go to whatever the advanced choir was and try out for it.
	Because that's what I wanted to do.
	What did they make of you in the choir?
	Because you said you were like an unkempt kid.
	You dressed badly, you're dirty.
	The teachers always put me in.
	I went to Oregon one time, and I managed as a freshman in high school to, through a tryout, make it into the senior acapella choir.
	It was just a 16-person acapella choir only for seniors.
	And I was a freshman.
	So you had literature and music to save you.
	Yep.
	Did you listen to a lot of music?
	I did.
	Who were your favorites?
	I'm very eclectic.
	I like a wide range.
	Back then, I liked a lot of oldies.
	I really liked the 50s music, so I listened to a lot of Buddy Holly.
	It's very positive, eh?
	Yeah, I listened to a lot of Buddy Holly and that kind of stuff, and the La Bamba soundtrack.
	I liked that a lot.
	And then I didn't really like the 80s style music, the poppy kind of stuff.
	I didn't really like that, but I got into metal when I was older.
	So the Nine Inch Nails, Downward Spiral album is pretty much an autobiography.
	That's pretty much how my life was going at the time.
	And so it was, when I was a teen, it was Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Pantera, Tool, that kind of stuff.
	Right, right.
	So the dark end of the metal spectrum.
	Darker, yeah.
	But the more intelligent end of the metal spectrum.
	Yeah, right.
	I wasn't really into the death metal, screaming, anger kind.
	I was into the stuff that was talking about the emotions.
	I like singers that have heart.
	So like Creedence Clearwater Revival.
	Yeah.
	Something where when you sing it, it feels like it's digging in your soul.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, they're great.
	Their music has aged really well, too.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah.
	So, okay.
	So, one to five...
	You had no relationship with your father except one that was extremely negative.
	All you saw from him was violence.
	You had some relationship with your mother.
	Do you think your mother loved you?
	Yeah, yeah.
	That's where the only time I have good memories with my mom is during that time.
	The best memory I have with my mom ever is sitting watching Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory and singing every single song.
	And I knew every word to that movie.
	So I would sit there and sing the entire movie and we would go back and forth with the songs.
	And that was the best memory of my childhood.
	That's the highlight of those years.
	And are you, during that time, one to five, are you playing with any kids?
	Are you playing with your older brother?
	Do you remember any play?
	No, no.
	Not really any playing.
	Just reading.
	I wasn't much of a player.
	Everybody else would go out and play and I'd sit with my books.
	Okay, so you were...
	Now, let me ask you some questions about your personality.
	Totally.
	Okay.
	Introverted or extroverted?
	Then or now.
	That's changed, eh?
	Mm-hmm.
	Were you introverted before, or were you just afraid of people?
	That's a good question.
	I don't think I was afraid of people.
	I think I was—well, back then I was, because it took a while for me to burn that out of myself.
	In my teen years, I think that I lost the ability to get embarrassed or ashamed or afraid of anybody, because when I was a kid, I made fun of myself more than anybody else did.
	Oh, yeah, that's a good trick.
	Very self-deprecating.
	Yeah, that's a good trick.
	So I had a better fat joke than you did, a better insult than you did.
	Yeah, well, it would be surprising to me if you were introverted as a kid, because you appear to be very extroverted.
	You smile a lot.
	You talk quickly— I don't think introverted would fit, but I wasn't extroverted.
	I kept to myself pretty much, but I liked the arts.
	Right, right.
	Okay, so maybe what happened was that your interest in literature, let's say, in the arts was so strong that it Yes.
	Yes.
	I always wanted to learn more stuff.
	Even now, I'll be walking, listening to...
	I just finished Lawrence Krauss' book, Edge of Knowledge, like bleeding-edge physics and science and philosophy, your podcasts.
	And I listen to a wide range of topics, and I try to get the entire spectrum of opinions.
	So I'll listen to the farthest right, the farthest left, someone in the middle, all different sides of the topics, and try to see the whole side of it.
	And, yeah, so these days I'm just all over with it.
	But I don't think that back then I was introverted.
	I think you might have hit the nail on the head.
	Yeah, well, you're very old.
	More tentative people.
	Okay.
	Are you compassionate, polite, or tough and stubborn?
	Yes.
	Which one?
	What if you had to pick?
	So, in general, I would think I'm compassionate and polite.
	However, because of the survival mechanisms and the way I had to live a long time, I can turn on that hard note pretty easily where I can easily cut people out of my life.
	I can easily decide that it's done and you're hurting me more than you're good.
	My philosophy these days is I give up too much time in my life to people that hurt me, so I just don't do it anymore.
	Are you likely to be taken advantage of or not?
	No, not now.
	Not now.
	Not now.
	Before?
	I don't think so, but I can't say no because I might have been.
	Yeah, okay.
	You said when you were in school, you never did your assignments.
	Now, there are obviously situational reasons for that.
	Are you a conscientious person?
	Dutiful, orderly, industrious, or more easygoing?
	Kind of half and half.
	I tend to go...
	My wife is the one that does all the planning, so that's the best way to put it.
	When I'm doing my events and stuff, my wife sets up the planning to make sure I have my interior.
	She'll do the scheduling.
	She'll do the scheduling.
	I handle the material of it.
	Yeah, okay.
	I'm order detailed about certain things, but I'm very non-materialistic.
	Very, very non-materialistic.
	Nothing in my world matters physically.
	It's all about experiences, and it's all about memories.
	So, like, I've had, at more than five times in my life, I had people burst in my bedroom at 3 o'clock in the morning with a duffel bag screaming, I mean, we have five minutes to get out of here, we need to grab everything and go.
	And so everything I had disappeared because the only thing I had time to grab was comic books.
	So I would lose all the toys I had or all the TV I had or all the different books I had.
	I'd lose everything except for my comic books.
	And so over the years, none of the material stuff matters to me.
	And so it's really hard for people to buy me.
	Like my wife says, I'm the hardest person to buy a Christmas present for because I don't want anything to give me the things that I want.
	Suitcase.
	Yeah, that's about it.
	Yeah.
	But a memory.
	Take me on a trip.
	Give me a memory.
	Give me something fun.
	Right, right.
	So you're very high in openness, right?
	Creativity, interest in ideas, and interest in aesthetic experience.
	Love of learning.
	Right, and that was one of the things that seems to have saved you, that you found that niche, and that was something you could do alone, and you could even do that when you were moving from place to place.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yep, and it was a deep escape, so there could be abject violence happening right next to me, and I could be buried reading about what happened with Mike Crawler and the X-Men.
	You ever watch the documentary Crumb?
	Yep.
	I love Crum.
	Albert Crum.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Or Robert Crum.
	Robert Crum.
	Well, Crum, you know, what Crum did reminds me a bit of what you did because he took refuge in his RRT. And that really saved him.
	You know, he had a life.
	He had a wife.
	He had a child.
	He had a career.
	I mean, Jesus, he's got a dark side that time.
	And he came from one brutal family, man.
	It's rough.
	Yeah.
	But he had that creative escape that sounds like it was there for you.
	Okay, so we covered a bit of your life from one to five, and you talked about things starting to turn on you around eight, something like that.
	Yeah, so there's three steps in that.
	From five to seven, there's three steps that happen.
	The way my mom did it is she escaped my father by sending me—I don't know how she actually got rid of him because we went to Oregon.
	She sent me and my brother to Oregon for a year.
	Just by ourselves.
	Just flew us out to Oregon to go live with grandparents.
	Oh, and did you have a relationship with your grandparents?
	With my grandmother, yes, but that was one of the most toxic times of my life in that year of Oregon.
	Because that sent me out to go live with my pedophile rapist uncle.
	That's right during that time.
	So there was no escape during that period.
	No escaping that.
	And that's when I figured out that that trauma hill is huge in my family, that there's a large mountain of abuse.
	Like, my grandfather, his name is H.L., because that's the only two letters that his mom knew how to write when he was born, because she gave birth at 13 in the Ozarks.
	So that trauma hill is big.
	And so it wasn't positive at all.
	And so when we finally came back from that, after a year of that, my mom brought us back, and she had got with my stepdad.
	And my stepdad was a...
	Did you divorce your father? - I think, I don't know.
	But she's with another guy.
	This is now your stepdad.
	Yep, yep.
	And so, he is a smooth-talking criminal.
	He is a manipulating, lying, smooth-talking, can sell an ice to an Eskimo kind of guy.
	He's the kind of guy that will lie and steal every day, all the time.
	Right.
	Right, right.
	But also gets heavily involved into drinking.
	When I met him, he was in prison for a strong-arm robbery.
	He spent four years in prison for a strong-arm robbery.
	He would steal entire delivery trucks that were going to grocery stores and take all the stuff and go sell it at the flea market.
	So why do you think your mother picked him and do you know how they met?
	I mean, she's already hanging around in the dark side of the planet.
	So I imagine she had the opportunity to run into people like him.
	I think they met at a bar, and I think when they met at a bar, he heard about my father and was like, oh yeah, I'll keep him away.
	And it started as a protective thing.
	I see.
	So she found one monster to keep another one at bay.
	Yep.
	Aha.
	Do you think that he was a project for her or an adventure?
	No.
	No.
	You think the protection thing was genuine?
	I think the protection thing was genuine at first, and then it turned into a trauma bond from all the drugs.
	So he might have...
	You said he was a narcissistic manipulator.
	He offered her an escape that was false.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Okay, and she stayed with him for how long?
	Until he died.
	He died in 2017, in the most fitting way possible.
	That drunken, drugged-out violence never stopped in my family.
	And they were having an argument while they were high and drunk, and he went to the bathroom, had an aneurysm, collapsed on the floor, and crapped all over himself.
	Laid there for three hours while she screamed at him from the living room how worthless he was.
	I really can't think of a more fitting way for the guy to end.
	Why did she stay with him?
	Why did she stay with him?
	Yeah.
	Because she had severe lack of self-respect and sense of self-accomplishment.
	She didn't think she could do it.
	She didn't think she could survive without him.
	She thought that she was broken and couldn't do anything without him.
	And he, over the years, had kind of built that into her.
	Right, right.
	I see.
	She just thought that he was indispensable and she couldn't do anything without him.
	And so we tried.
	Me and my brother tried to have interventions.
	I personally had an intervention with him.
	By the age of 14, 15 years old, I'm big in beating him up now.
	Because like I said, I was gone from home.
	I was living on the streets.
	But I was home occasionally because I had to come home to recharge.
	Okay, so when were you with your grandparents?
	That was, no, I was with my grandparents from five to six.
	Oh, so, okay, five to six.
	And then, so, first to five, father, one year with my grandfather, and then back home with my stepdad.
	With your stepdad.
	And then it was my stepdad on.
	And when did you get big?
	Thirteen years old.
	Oh, how big?
	Six foot, 280 pounds.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	So that was handy.
	I got big fast.
	Right, right.
	But I was also quiet, shy, and sensitive and didn't know how to use it at the time.
	So I got picked on constantly.
	I used to go to school and get bullied all the time.
	I would get beaten at school, come home with bruises all over me, and I never defended myself.
	I would never stand up for myself.
	Why didn't you defend yourself?
	I don't know.
	I started defending myself one day when I snapped.
	And a kid had slammed my head into a locker and I picked him up and kind of ragdolled him and slammed him a bunch of times.
	And I noticed that when I did that, after that, for the next four or five months I was at the school, I didn't have anybody bother me.
	Right, right, right.
	So that was the first time you realized that, eh?
	Why do you think it happened then and hadn't happened before, despite the fact that you were bullied?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I think it might have been because the chaos at home was really starting to spin up.
	That's right about the same time.
	Hit your limit.
	You know, have you ever read about people going berserk?
	Some.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, it often happens to people who are in a very chaotic environment, who are being abused continually, and they hit their threshold, and it's something like a last-ditch do-or-die response, right?
	It's like, well, I've tried to retreat.
	That's not working.
	I'm cornered.
	I've got nothing to lose.
	It's a very dangerous position to put someone in.
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	And that's where I ended up being at the end of the story.
	Yeah, I bet.
	I bet.
	Okay, so at 13, you're fairly large, and you learned one day at school that if you...
	So that happened when I was about eight or nine, when I ragged all that kid, because I was still pretty big.
	That was when I was about five and a half foot tall and still pretty large.
	I was growing into my body at that point.
	Right.
	So I was still pretty big.
	But that was when I first figured out that if I lashed out, that people would leave me alone.
	I also, right around that same time, figured out that one of the first things—I would kind of do the reverse of what people talk about when they're going to prison.
	You know when they talk about going to prison, they're going up to the biggest guy and try to fight him and establish a role in the world?
	I would kind of do the opposite.
	I'd go up to the most popular kid and then insult myself to him.
	And then— And make fun of myself to that kid.
	Uh-huh.
	And kind of like established the pecking order immediately.
	Like I'd go find the biggest, whoever the ringleader is.
	You did it with humor.
	Yeah.
	Well, kind of.
	Self-deprecating humor that nobody else found funny but me.
	That kind of insulting, kind of like...
	I see.
	So you got the pecking order problem over with as fast as you possibly could.
	As fast as possibly could.
	And you were willing at that point to accept a relatively low social position.
	I knew I was.
	By that point, I had internalized that I was the low social position.
	I see, I see.
	So you thought you might as well just get it over with quickly.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I'm going to end up there.
	Well, then you don't have the conflict.
	Yeah, exactly.
	The sooner I can resolve it, the less fights I have.
	Right, right, right, definitely.
	The less bullying I'm going to go through.
	If I can establish myself right there and make it, and if I can do that and make fun of myself, I'm not an appealing target.
	Because bullies only want to go after you if they get a response out of you and they make you cry.
	So did that generally mean that you were left alone, even though you were a low man on the totem pole?
	Kind of, but it was more left alone at a stabilized level of ridicule.
	Okay.
	Like, left alone down here.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Like, it's not left alone entirely like, hands off, he's okay, we can't make fun of him anymore.
	Right.
	It's like, we're going to make fun of him right here.
	But we're not going to pick on him down there because he's not going to cry.
	There's no fun in that.
	Right.
	So it's predictable, low status.
	Predictable, low status.
	Yeah, that's a good one.
	Yeah, well, you see this.
	You see that in primate social troops, too, is that sometimes, this is one indication of that, is sometimes if an interloper comes in who could disrupt the whole hierarchy, you might think that that would be useful for the lower ranking primates because they would have an opportunity you might think that that would be useful for the lower ranking primates But they'll generally resist the interloper, too, because the cost of social transition, the conflict that goes along with social transition, the cost of that can be so high.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yes, that's a precise, that's a very apt description of what was going on with that.
	I would rather just be what I think I am.
	I'm the worthless one.
	I'm the one you're going to make fun of anyway.
	I'm the fat, smelly one.
	Let's get this out of the way, and then I can go ahead and try to live, try to be, I'm going to be out of here less than six months anyway, because I'm pretty sure my family's going to evaporate soon anyway.
	Right, so it's temporary.
	So let's just get this out of the way and we'll go.
	And while you're doing that, you're solving yourself, so to speak, with books and so forth.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	So you have a life.
	And right around then, that's when I really started to get more and more toxic.
	And I really started to...
	Between 9 and 13 was really when I started to become more...
	Not toxic in an attacking way.
	Not like insulting everybody I'm around.
	Just unappealing.
	And filthy.
	And off-putting.
	And just kind of like give off almost a xenophobic reaction.
	Kind of like just don't want to touch it.
	Were you bitter?
	I think looking back, yeah.
	I think I was.
	Well, you had reason to be.
	I mean, it would be surprising if you weren't.
	I didn't think I was then.
	What did you think then?
	I think I was just living...
	I didn't have...
	I didn't think that there was a tomorrow then.
	I would regularly say that I felt my life was like I was watching a movie.
	Like I'm sitting in the audience watching my movie pass by and it sucks.
	And I don't have any real control over it.
	Another description I would use is like I'm living in a tsunami of pain.
	Like I'm just sloshing back and forth.
	Like I don't...
	That first response, that's called derealization.
	It's a symptom of trauma, which is to see your existence as separate from you.
	The derealization is that this isn't, and I don't know if this accurately sums up what you're saying, but that this isn't real.
	You're like a watcher.
	Yeah, it felt very unreal.
	It felt very much like I am not in my movie.
	I'm sitting in the audience and my movie is passing me by, and every now and then it pulls me into a scene and I have to be in it, but I'm not, I don't have any script in this.
	I'm not engaged in this at all.
	Well, yeah, well, that would also be reflective, at least in part, of the fact that you had almost no agency.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	I mean, you're being pulled from place to place.
	It's not surprising that you felt that things around you were going Yeah, yeah.
	And that's a very difficult thing to contend with when you're like nine.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And my brother at the same time is getting a little more family status because he is assuming the responsibility.
	He's the one that's handling getting the houses when we're getting evicted.
	And he's the one that's handling fixing the car.
	And he's also joining in.
	So he starts doing drugs with my family.
	He starts drinking with them.
	He's really early on.
	He just joins in.
	You don't?
	I don't.
	I don't at all.
	Why not?
	I found it very unappealing.
	I would sit and watch those guys do it.
	I never understood why.
	Did you drink?
	Not until I was in my 20s.
	Oh, well, that was a wise choice because you would have been in real trouble.
	The only drug I did as a teenager was LSD. I tripped LSD when I was 16 years old, but I didn't smoke weed until I was 19.
	Okay, so now you're starting to change somewhat dramatically around eight.
	You said you start to become markedly consciously unappealing, like trying to turn people off, do you think?
	It started unconscious and then gradually, I wouldn't even say gradually, it moved into conscious, yes.
	Okay, so what were your conscious strategies and thoughts at that time?
	I wouldn't bathe.
	I wouldn't change my clothes.
	I wouldn't brush my teeth.
	I would say the really inappropriate things about myself and about what was going on.
	I would describe the stuff I was seeing in my house blatantly around people.
	And it was just trying to be And I think it was, again, trying to establish that social pecking order on a constant basis.
	Well, it's also an attempt, it looks like an attempt also, to bring what was happening to you anyways under some degree of voluntary control.
	Right?
	You didn't, there wasn't, Any obvious way for you to improve it.
	But one way to control it was to take, well, you might think, to take ownership of it.
	I don't know what that is, though, to make it even worse, you know, because in some ways you're spiting yourself.
	Well, people will do that.
	They'll punish themselves for being low status, for example.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And I knew that I belonged there, and I really internalized that.
	Right, so then you're not worth taking care of either?
	No, I wasn't worth taking care of at all.
	At the same time, the violence and chaos at home is getting worse and worse.
	They are now entering late-stage crack addiction and massive problems with alcoholism.
	When you're an early drug addict, it's alright because your body might be able to do it.
	When you're 15 years in, you're not resilient.
	You can imagine you had a choice to make.
	Imagine this is the choice.
	It's something like, either there's something wrong with you and that's why what's happening to you makes sense.
	Or there's something unbelievably wrong with almost everyone in your family that goes back multiple generations that's so deep that it's terrifying.
	And that's the decision that I made.
	That's what I mean when I say I changed.
	Because that's the decision that flipped.
	I went from thinking that it was me to realizing that it was that.
	Between 19 and 27.
	Okay, so that was what switched on you.
	Okay, now, you've talked publicly quite a bit about the violent school shooter fantasies.
	Okay, so detail that out to me.
	Do it chronologically so I can understand.
	And the philosophy as well, because you're smart.
	So the probability that you had a philosophy is very high.
	So I'd like to know all of that.
	So the...
	We'll start around the 14 years old age when I'm living with that disaster-free house, where all the teenagers are there, because that's right around when that starts.
	Right.
	Now you've got a gang.
	Kind of, yeah.
	We'll call it a gang.
	That's the way to put it.
	And so I've got enablers, let's say.
	Okay, fine.
	Psychological enablers with that.
	And so, I am...
	I've now fully embraced that I'm the dirty, fat-skinned one.
	Right, right, right.
	I, like, wrapped the darkness around me like a blanket, and it's become my personality.
	Right.
	And now, I started self-harming, right around 14 years old.
	What were you doing?
	Cutting.
	I would start with light cuts on my arms, and it started, I think, as an emotional regulatory thing, where it would calm the tsunami.
	It would...
	When I felt like I was completely out of control.
	Did you have to draw blood?
	Yeah.
	So let me ask you something about that, because I've wondered about that.
	I've had clients who self-harmed.
	I'm wondering, tell me what you think of this hypothesis.
	So imagine, you know that time you snapped?
	So you could say you're out for blood.
	Okay, so imagine that there's a part of your brain, a relatively primordial part, associated with defensive aggression.
	Which, if pushed, will only be satisfied with the sight of blood.
	Well, so, because it's very common that people who self-harm will state very specifically that unless they draw blood, they won't calm down.
	Yeah.
	No, that's...
	Because it wasn't finished.
	If you didn't draw blood, you didn't do it.
	And that was very much...
	It started with very life superficial...
	It's like a sacrificial gesture, eh?
	To offer blood up to the gods of emotional storm...
	In a way, yeah.
	And emotional storm is a good way to put it because it would really calm the tsunami.
	It would like lower the thing.
	It would maybe even not lower.
	It would kind of like cut through that fuzz with something that was concrete and mine.
	And even though I knew it was destructive and I knew doing it, it was bad and it was hurting me, it was still mine and it was real.
	And nothing else in my life felt like it was real.
	Well, blood is real.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And the scars afterwards are real.
	And the pain was real.
	And the scabs were real.
	So that's interesting, too, because that means that it also stood as an antithesis, perhaps, to that sense of derealization that you had.
	Yeah.
	And I was also, at that time, feeling a strong sense of anger at a complete lack of accountability.
	For anybody in my world.
	Nobody in my world had any accountability or responsibility for anything.
	When stuff went wrong, they didn't have to deal with it.
	They evaporated and started over.
	They didn't have to deal with the ramifications of the hell they were causing.
	They just continued and continued and continued.
	Why do you suppose that bothered you and not them?
	I don't know.
	That I don't know.
	It really did start to bother me, though.
	That was a thing that was really getting to me.
	So that's a violation.
	Yeah, yeah, well, I can understand that, you know.
	The complete lack of accountability.
	Yeah, when I see people in my life, in various places, Failing to be held accountable for their pathological actions.
	I find that very, very difficult.
	Especially when there's no, not even any self-reliability, self-acknowledgement.
	Not even any self-awareness that this is what's going on.
	To me, it's a violation of the intrinsic moral order.
	Yes, it's a violation of our social contract.
	That we are supposed to at least engage in a normal way where I'm supposed to, if you say you're going to do something, I can reasonably accept that that's what you're going to do, not that you're lying to me and doing something else entirely behind my back.
	And then getting away with it.
	And then getting away with it and smiling and doing it again and enjoying the fact that that happened.
	Oh yeah, that's rough, man.
	I had to sit and listen to them laugh about the lies that they were doing and how my stepdad was stealing.
	He would lose jobs over and over again because he would get a job, steal everything from the job and go sell it and then lose the job again.
	Right.
	And I would sit and laugh and listen to them revel about that and laugh about that stuff.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And so I'm now in this.
	Yeah, well, everyone that a psychopathic thief robs is a fool.
	That's how they justify it.
	Well, if you're so stupid I can steal from you, then you're so stupid that you deserve it.
	Exactly.
	Everyone's a rube and everyone's a target and the person who's doing it is smarter than everyone else and Now take that phenomenon and apply that in that dynamic to a depressed kid.
	If you're depressed, you deserve it because you're the worthless one and you should have deserved it.
	Yeah, so you're in a weird situation there because on the one hand, you feel that strongly that people should be held accountable for their moral shortcomings.
	But on the other hand, you've accepted your role somewhat perversely as low status.
	You've started to, in some way, revel in it.
	A little bit, yeah.
	Well, you've adopted it voluntarily and you said you were pushing it to its limit.
	You said you wrapped the darkness around it like a cloak.
	It became a definite, not only personality trait, but survival technique.
	Well, it's an identity as well.
	It was an identity.
	You said it worked in this house that you were in.
	It was.
	I was the dark unicorn.
	Right.
	Where they didn't have anything like me.
	But at the same time, I was living three parallel lives at that exact moment, okay?
	Because at that house, Dark Unicorn, where all the pain I was going through turned into a party favor.
	It turned into some weird positive in a negative way.
	Yeah.
	Like negative, positive toxicity.
	I've actually seen people like that.
	And so there's that side.
	Yeah.
	Then I have my home life, where it's just abject hell, and I'm the worst, and I'm the bottom, and I'm the cast-off, and I shouldn't even be there in the first place.
	Why the hell am I even in the house?
	Then I have the other side, which is I met at 12 years old, which is Mike.
	And when I went to Mike's house, Mike, so it's a very important character to bring him in the story right now.
	So I met Mike when I was, he was 10, I was 12.
	We met at a comic shop.
	We bonded over comic books.
	We met playing the original Mortal Kombat 1 video game to time it out and see what time it was.
	But we immediately bonded.
	The first day we met, immediately hooked.
	I went to his house.
	I basically never left.
	We just, deep conversations.
	How old were you?
	I was 12.
	He was 10.
	Oh yeah.
	Why did his parents put up with you?
	They were really...
	At the time, they were super sweet.
	They lived in a giant four-story house.
	They were both really well-off.
	His dad was a computer programmer.
	His mom was a lawyer.
	Very well-to-do.
	He was just...
	They thought that I was just a sweet kid down the street.
	I lived at the opposite of one of the blocks at that time.
	So, at the opposite of the block of one of the houses I lived in, is what I meant.
	And so, we just bonded immediately, became good friends.
	And it started where...
	I would stay there for weeks and his parents were fine with it.
	And then over the years, I'd stay there for a couple days and they were okay with it.
	By the time I'm 15, 16 years old, I can't stay there anymore because now I'm really dirty and filthy.
	And if I sit on their couch, they have to clean it when I stand up.
	I see.
	So you weren't so bad at the beginning.
	Mm-hmm.
	Okay.
	I was wondering why they would put up with you, but I get the picture now.
	So you were a more or less ordinary kid, as far as they were concerned, when the relationship started.
	I was just with his son's friend at the start, and I was having a rough life, so they were going to try to give me all that good.
	I see.
	Okay.
	And then over the years, as I went from 12 to 13, 14, 15, that arc, that abusive arc I was going on made me go down.
	And what's Mike doing during the time that you're declining?
	He...
	The whole time I've been friends with Mike, he's never treated me like anything but an equal.
	Mike would tell me constantly, you're a good kid.
	Can I have language in this podcast?
	You say whatever you want.
	You're a good kid in a shit world, he would say over and over.
	Yeah.
	You're a good kid in a shit world.
	And that was like a constant refrain he would tell me all the time and over at his house.
	And he would listen to me about my pain I was in, listen to all the abuse, and it was right around that time when the self-harm started.
	He would notice that I would come in with cuts and he wouldn't really ask, but he would just like, dude, you're going to be okay.
	He would try to tell me that.
	But I'm also spinning out because I'm only there for a couple hours and I go out and my world is very chaotic.
	So the normal part of your world is shrinking.
	Shrinking.
	Shrinking very quickly.
	Yeah.
	So the self-harm starts getting really bad, like deeper, deeper cuts.
	And I can't stay at Mike's house because his parents won't let me.
	I'm too filthy.
	And I'm burning out the rest of the friendship.
	And then that disaster group of friends' house ends in one incident where I'm having a big party.
	There's like 20 kids there and all these kids from the school.
	And there's even a band from one of the kids.
	It's just at the house.
	At that house.
	We're at the big, big party.
	And then right in the middle of it, there's like 13 kids tripping acid.
	The parents arrive.
	So, party's over.
	All the kids have to go home.
	All the other kids get to go home.
	I get to go sleep in the field behind Casa Bonita, because that's the one last refuge, the spot where if I didn't have anywhere else to be, if I couldn't go to Mike's house behind Casa Bonita, which is a big Mexican restaurant in Denver, that if you ever watch the show, South Park did an episode on Casa Bonita.
	It's big.
	And that episode is actually accurate.
	It's got pink restaurant with its cliff divers.
	It's really weird.
	But behind there, there was a field.
	And in the field, there was a little dip.
	So if you laid in, you couldn't see it from the street.
	So I was kind of invisible, little camping area.
	And so that was one of the last places that I could be.
	And so they got to go home.
	I got to go there.
	And so when that happened, that really sent me off on a really dark place.
	That was kind of like my last support that I had been staying at.
	Right, right.
	Because I couldn't go home because the violence at home was really bad at that time.
	They were in the midst of a crack binge for months.
	They were really, really bad.
	So I couldn't go home at all for more than an hour.
	Right.
	And so I'm now homeless.
	Yeah, right.
	And you don't have Mike.
	No.
	And by this point, instead of sleeping in his house, the only place I can go, he lets me sleep into his tool shed.
	Because in his tool shed behind his house, they had a big recliner chair they had in storage, like a big lazy boy.
	And so I would go in there, and if I didn't have anywhere else to be, I could go to his tool shed and I could sleep.
	Do you still know Mike?
	He's still my best friend.
	I just talked to him yesterday.
	Oh, wow.
	Still my best friend in this world.
	Well, thank God for these small mercies.
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	So I'm in his shed, and now I'm cutting myself so bad that there's a pool of blood on the ground beneath me.
	And it's like 2 o'clock in the morning, and I look up, and the roof in the shed has gaps in it where you can see the stars in between.
	And so I'm looking up and thinking, I've got to do something, I'm going to die.
	If I don't get some help, I'm going to die.
	And so over the years, social services had tried to intervene a couple times, so I think, well, I'll call social services on myself.
	And so when Dawn...
	You're how old?
	I'm 15.
	15.
	So when Dawn came, I go...
	And this is late 15, early 16.
	So this is the end of that year, beginning of the next year.
	My birthday's in May.
	So it's about a...
	This whole process takes almost a year for this process to take.
	Okay.
	So the...
	I think I got to get myself some help.
	So the next day, when Don came, I knocked on Mike's back door and borrowed a bus fare and a phone book from his mom and called social services and set an appointment for that afternoon.
	And so they brought me there and it was Don when I called.
	The appointment wasn't until three or four in the afternoon.
	By the time I got there, they brought my mom in too.
	So we sit around at a table, big counseling table, and there's on one side, there's four or five counselors.
	On the other side, there's me and my mom.
	They have us all sitting together.
	And the counselor says, so what are we here for?
	What's your problem?
	And so I produce a bloody razor blade.
	It's a box cutter style razor blade.
	So I throw it on the table.
	I said, that's my problem.
	I lift up my arm.
	I show them the cuts.
	I say, I feel like I'm worthless.
	Filling with the bottom.
	I feel like there's nothing left.
	My mom, who is the most practiced liar I've ever known, got them to believe I was just making it all up.
	I was just doing it for attention.
	I just did it to get a rise out of people.
	It wasn't that important.
	And they sent me home with her.
	And so we get three blocks from the place and she turns to me with this evil look on her face and snarls and says, you should do a better job next time I'll buy you the razor blades.
	And I'm like, okay, you think I'm a monster?
	I'll show you what a monster is now.
	And instead of wearing that dirt just like a blanket, I dove right into it.
	I went on what I call a nine-month period, what I call scorched earth.
	Where that was where I hit my full toxicity.
	I was consciously going to anybody that was nice or good or positive in my world and offending you on purpose.
	If there was something that you liked, I would find that and break that.
	If you like something, I would steal it.
	Whatever would offend you the most, I'd do that.
	And it was to the most important people in my world.
	I even went to Mike's house, stole three of the big boxes of comic books, went and sold them to a comic shop.
	I was trying to break every bit of positive in my world.
	For nine solid months, I did that.
	And then during that period, I also snuck and charmed my way into every family member I could and smoothed my way in and got into all their picture albums, got a photo albums, gathered every picture of me into a pile and burned them.
	So currently, there's only like five pictures of me that exist before the age of 15.
	Because my...
	So you went and established good relationships?
	Just briefly, specifically to get the pictures.
	Why?
	Because I wanted to erase my past.
	I wanted to annihilate my history.
	I was trying to erase me.
	And so, after nine months of that...
	Do you think that what you were doing...
	Look, the story that you've told so far makes...
	Why you did what you were doing, even in this situation, understandable.
	Did you know it was wrong at that time?
	Oh, yeah.
	You knew it was wrong.
	Well, why do you think it was wrong, given that you had all the reasons that you've described to do it?
	Why is it wrong?
	Because I was hurting myself.
	At the time, I was in that self-destructive mode.
	I would...
	Mike, for instance, as an example, when I did that, Mike's like, dude, what the hell are you doing?
	Right.
	So now you're doing to yourself what has been done unjustly to you.
	Yes.
	So you're actually participating.
	Now you're participating in the hell that should be torturing you.
	Yes.
	Now I'm fully giving into it, and I'm going to do all the self-destruction myself.
	I'm going to go all the way with it.
	I think I was told I was worthless and a monster enough, and I told myself enough that I fully believed it, and now I'm going to make everybody agree with me.
	And I went to try to offend everybody.
	Right, right.
	And so after nine months of that, of personal societal destruction, I was alone.
	Completely alone.
	And I had been alone for over a month.
	And I was in that field behind Casa Bonita.
	And I'd been living there for about a month.
	And I hadn't taken my clothes off.
	How were you eating?
	I was stealing free samples from the grocery store at the top of the hill.
	Did you ever engage in any criminal activity during that time, a part of that?
	Yeah, I would walk up to the comic shop and steal a whole shelf full of comic books, walk down the street and hand them to the first kid I saw.
	During that period, what about criminal behavior?
	Minor shoplifting.
	I would go to the stores, steal candy bars, stuff like that.
	Nothing major, just minor shoplifting.
	Okay.
	But during that period, I was doing it, like, egregiously and blatantly.
	Right, so that's part of the pattern of self-destruction.
	Yeah.
	I would go to the grocery store, steal an entire shelf worth of comic books, and the first kid that I would see walking down the street, I'd just hand them to him.
	Hey, here, you want some comics?
	Mm-hmm.
	Because it didn't matter to me.
	So yeah, I was that kind of crime.
	Okay, so now you're out in the field.
	You're completely alone because you cut yourself off from everybody.
	And I wake up in the snow.
	And because I had been there for months, I hadn't taken my shoes off in weeks, but I also wasn't wearing socks.
	My feet were just rotting off of my body.
	I, like I said, I was surviving by eating free samples from the grocery store and stealing whatever food I can from up there and going dumpster diving.
	I was trying to evade the police during school hours by being on school campus but not going to class because I had to be, otherwise you'd get arrested for truancy.
	So I'm evading the police.
	And then I wake up in the snow.
	And it's so cold.
	The two-block walk to get up to the grocery store, I wasn't just shaking.
	I was seizing.
	I was like, I could barely breathe.
	Like, my body could barely move.
	And I get up there, and I'm looking in the mirror, and I'm trying to wash my face off.
	And I'm like, I've got to do something.
	I'm going to die.
	If I don't do something now, I'm going to die.
	And so, across the street from the school I was at, there was a building that said medical health.
	Why didn't you just want to die?
	I don't know.
	I don't know, Kay.
	Across the street from the school that I was nominally at was a building that said mental health.
	And I didn't know what it was for.
	I just knew that the sign said mental health.
	But I knew the last time I warned them, they brought my mom in, I'm not doing that shit again.
	So I'm just going to go in cold.
	And so I went to the place that afternoon, and they had me meet a young lady.
	It was a counseling center.
	They had me meet a young lady.
	She was in her early 20s, I think.
	And I don't really remember much about that conversation.
	Because all I remember is the very end, where she said, I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do.
	I can't help you.
	And I walked out of that door, and I remember vividly standing on that porch, and it was early night, so like that evening hour.
	Why had you not gone for any, well, I guess you said why, when you did try to go to social service.
	And then they brought your mom in and that went even worse.
	And now you went to this mental health place.
	And so when I stepped out that door, my brain broke like a mirror.
	Like standing on that step, that's the spot right then and there.
	Then my brain snapped like a mirror and felt like shards of glass in my brain.
	And instantly three things happened, like one right after the other one.
	First thing was I found what was at the bottom of that tsunami.
	Like that tsunami of pain I was living in went all the way down to the bottom.
	And at the bottom, there's no more waves.
	It gets really quiet, it gets really still, and all the waves go away.
	Because there's nothing left to lose.
	Like, what are you going to do, cut my arm off?
	They're going to die.
	They're going to put me in jail, they're going to feed me.
	I don't have any more down from here.
	And so, right then, the plans that I wanted to do crystallized in my head.
	I had talked them through with those disaster groupie friends.
	Because when we were sitting with those disaster groupie friends, instead of talking about sports or girls or football, we'd talk about killing people.
	We talk about, so if you're going to shoot 10 people, how would you do it?
	If you're going to shoot up a school, what would you do?
	And that was the fiction of the group.
	And so over the years, I had already talked.
	And based on why did that be...
	You said you were at the center of that.
	So were they showboating?
	Were they bragging?
	A lot of it was showboating and bragging.
	And it started off as just like we're looking at mass murder things and crazy videos and stuff.
	Right, so you're toying with the dark side.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I always would go further into that dark than anybody else would.
	So that's a status issue as well.
	Yeah, kind of.
	And that's initially how those started.
	It was kind of like a status conversation.
	Who can be the darkest?
	Yeah, yeah.
	But for me then, it was plans.
	I knew.
	I had talked it through.
	I had already knew what I was going to do.
	I was going to go either through the windows into the food court.
	This was open campus era.
	This was at the school that you were supposed to be attending.
	At the school I was supposed to be attending, North High in Denver.
	And this was open campus era, so they didn't lock the doors or nothing, so you could get in and out easily.
	You could leave the campus and go to lunch and then come back.
	So I knew if I went in, I could go in through the doors and go right into the food court and kill everybody in the food court.
	And how are you going to do that?
	Well, so that portion of it.
	So the two plans was either the food court there or the mall food court.
	And it's both the same things.
	Neither one of those spots were soft targets.
	The school had uniformed armed police officers stationed at all times.
	And the mall had a police station a couple doors down from the food court.
	The plan was to cause as much damage as possible and die while doing it.
	But that wasn't really the goal of my attack.
	The goal of my attack was to cause my parents to deal with making me.
	I wanted to have them deal with the ramifications of creating me.
	So I wanted to cause as much damage as possible, as visibly as possible, die while doing it, so then they had to deal with creating a monster.
	Do you think that would have made any difference?
	I don't know.
	But that was the goal at the time.
	That was what was in my head at the time.
	So was that revenge on them?
	It was a form of revenge, yeah.
	But I felt that attacking them would have been useless.
	They're going to hurt for one day and that's going to be nothing.
	They've never faced accountability for anything they've ever done.
	And they did me.
	So now they have to face up with making me.
	And that was the goal of that.
	And I knew where to get a gun because this was Boys in the Hood era.
	This was late 90s.
	So the gangbangers were all over.
	And they would bring guns into school and flash them in the school because it was before the age of metal detectors.
	So they would just flash handguns.
	And they bought and sold drugs from my family.
	So they knew me.
	They knew I was living in the field.
	They would regularly buy drugs from my family.
	And so I went up to them like, hey, can you get me a gun?
	Hopefully one that shoots a lot of bullets.
	Yeah, sure.
	Get me an ounce of weed.
	And that...
	These days, that's walking down to a store and getting it.
	Back then, that's like $300 worth of illicit narcotics.
	But for me, that was easy.
	They knew my parents were drug dealers.
	I just went to my family's house, stole it out of a druggie's pants sleeping on my brother's bedroom floor.
	Like, he had three ounces in his pocket.
	I just took one out of his pocket.
	Took it.
	So did you get a gun?
	I didn't get a gun.
	I went and gave him the weed.
	I was set to get the gun.
	He told me three days.
	Within three days' time, I was going to have the gun.
	And in that three-day time, that's when...
	I was set.
	The instant I got the gun, I was going to cause the attack.
	If it was daytime, go to the school.
	Nighttime, go to the mall.
	That was the only difference.
	And how detailed had your plans been?
	I knew exactly what door I was going to go into and what I was going to do.
	How much time do you suppose you spent setting up those plans?
	Oh...
	So, that's a two-sided question.
	The plan itself crystallized instantly, but I had sent months planning that because we had talked about it.
	How much time do you suppose you spent with your guys talking about it?
	Oh, weeks and weeks.
	So, how many hours?
	At least 30 or 40.
	Okay, okay.
	Yeah, long times of just that dark conversation of planning it.
	So that's fantasizing and planning.
	And in that, you're working through the, and I didn't realize it then, I don't think they realized it then, but we were working through the ins and outs and the problems with it and what's going to work and what's not going to work.
	So yeah, by the time it all happened, I had the plan and it came out in crystallized.
	That's the danger of practicing something.
	Yeah, and so I knew right then.
	And so in that three-day time, I didn't think about it then, but looking back, I think I was saying goodbye.
	Okay.
	Because I didn't know that was what I was doing then.
	But I was going to people in a much more peaceful way and, like, saying thank you and went to my ex-girlfriend and said, thank you for letting me sleep on the gravel outside your window.
	And I was going just saying sorry for things.
	And I think I was saying goodbye.
	And at the end of that, I went to Mike's house.
	And when I went to Mike's house, I knocked on his door.
	And he opened it, and I was in tears.
	And I was just crying.
	And he brought me in, and he never asked what I was there for.
	He never asked what it was about.
	He knew intimately the hell I had been living in.
	It was his bedroom that I was in there when I was with the cuts in my arms.
	And he saw the pain from my family.
	He knew intimately the hell I was in.
	But he didn't ask.
	He just brought me in and sat me down and kept on telling me over and over again, you're a good kid in a shit world.
	That's what he kept on saying to me.
	And he sat me down and he gave me some food and we watched a movie.
	And he acted like that nine months of destruction never happened.
	And it wasn't hanging out with a friend that saved my life.
	That wasn't what did it.
	It was that when I knocked on his door, I felt like I was a walking ball of nothing.
	I was just there to close off my life and write the last line and say, thank you, goodbye, I'm done, turn the lights off, I'm out.
	And so I thought that I was just a nothing waiting to explode.
	Right.
	And what he did, I think, was he put the tiny granular bits of being a person back on the bottom shelf of my life.
	So why was he able to do that, do you think?
	What is it about Mike?
	If you asked him what he did, he just said he just did what a friend's supposed to do.
	Yeah, but he was the only person that you found who did that for you.
	And I don't know what it is, but he's the only one that, no matter what happened, he never treated me like I was anything but an equal.
	He never looked at me like I was broken.
	He never looked at me like I was a project.
	He looked at me like I was a kid in pain.
	And so he would talk to me about it, and we would...
	He never looked down on me.
	We would have deep discussions.
	He was going to high school for philosophy and going to college and all this stuff.
	I was a dropout, and I was living in this crime-infested hellhole.
	And he never once acted like it wasn't anything but a buddy that deserved respect that he talked to.
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	And it was the only part of my life that...
	Mike have other friends?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Mike had a big social circle, and that's going to tie into the next part of the story.
	So, what he did with that, it wasn't just that I could, like, have a meal.
	It was that I can enjoy food now.
	Like, I can be reminded of the base human things.
	And for me, it was absolutely cathartic.
	It was like...
	Rolling the clock back on my humanity.
	So you had abandoned any sense of value in yourself?
	Yes, totally.
	But he was unwilling to let that go?
	Unwilling.
	Unwilling to let it go.
	And not even unwilling to let it go.
	It was that he didn't even see that it was leaving.
	It was like, that's a weird dynamic.
	It wasn't that he didn't let me slide off the cliff.
	So he didn't even see that I was on a cliff.
	Or didn't even treat me like I was on a cliff.
	And that was extremely powerful.
	To be seen when you feel fundamentally invisible.
	Like, I would walk around and ask my classmates, do you remember when I leave the room?
	When I'm gone, do you remember that I was here?
	And you'd just been ignored by the mental health clinic, too.
	Yeah, I felt completely invisible.
	I felt alone and nothing.
	And to be seen and validated in the most normal ways, just like it was just a regular Tuesday.
	And to me, I was on the precipice of a life-altering madness.
	And it was just a Tuesday.
	And it fundamentally changed my life.
	And I didn't leave his house for a week.
	I never went and got the gun.
	Now, was Mike still living with his parents?
	Uh-huh.
	So why were you allowed to stay there for that week?
	I think he went and talked to him.
	I don't know why.
	Okay.
	I didn't ever ask him.
	I never even saw his parents that week.
	Uh-huh.
	I just went and basically stayed in his bedroom.
	I think he just went and talked to him.
	I think he just was like, hey, Aaron really needs this.
	And so, yeah, he's staying in my bedroom.
	So I can get in trouble for it if you want to, but he's there.
	Because by that point, that's kind of the attitude that he had.
	He had had it with his friends groups.
	He went to art school, and so he had a bunch of art friends.
	And so they were really preppy and yuppie and so well to do.
	And not all of them were very as charitable as Mike was to someone like me.
	And so there were friend groups where they were like, well, Aaron needs to go.
	He smells.
	And Mike would stand up in the middle of him like, no, dude, if you're saying he needs to go, you go ahead and bounce right now because he's not going anywhere.
	And so that kind of validation and belonging, it fundamentally changed me to my core.
	And during that week?
	During that week, it changed me.
	Well, that's the start.
	It's important to note that it's not like it's a magic light switch.
	It's not like, ding, everything's better and it's all fixed.
	This was a process, and this was the start of the process.
	So what he did was give me a frame shift.
	He let me change my perspective a bit.
	The clock rolled back.
	It was like, instead of washing in that tsunami and going through crazy and sloshing around, I could set my feet down for the first time.
	So he reminded you that you were rotten to the- That I wasn't rotten to my core.
	And so I could be for a little while.
	And he also talked to one of his friends and let me stay with one of his friends for a while.
	So I was able to get a house, a sleeping arrangement.
	And Reassess and shift my frame of reference just a bit enough to take a breath and reestablish with my personhood.
	But the chaos at home was still the same.
	The abuse at home was still the same.
	The violence all there was still the same.
	The self-hatred was still the same.
	That hell was still there.
	But I was able to step back off that edge and take a breath.
	But now we're going to fast forward three years, because that was between 15 and 16.
	Now to go to the night of my 19th birthday.
	The night of my 19th birthday, I was planning on committing suicide.
	So now you dropped the school shooting plans.
	Dropped the school shooting.
	Why?
	It had went from outward anger to, because almost instantly when Mike did that, I felt ashamed and remorseful.
	Almost instantly.
	When that re-establishment of my humanity hit, the remorse and the shame of what I had planned was pretty crushing.
	So what's interesting, one of the things that you're claiming is that you would have only been able to go through with what you had planned if you had, in fact, successfully severed every tie you had.
	You would have had to have been genuinely alone and And Mike reminded you that you weren't.
	So I thought that I was.
	Right.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But Mike reminded me that I wasn't with that.
	Right, and sort of despite your best efforts, right?
	Because you'd spent, you said, eight months trying to alienate everyone.
	Yeah, nine months.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Despite all my best efforts, and despite massive effort on my part, that he just wouldn't let go.
	That's love.
	Very much so.
	Here's a great example of that love.
	That's why I like telling this part of the story.
	So my 19th birthday, I was planning on committing suicide.
	And I was going to do it by overdose.
	I had gotten a bunch of LSD off the streets, stolen a bunch of pills from cocaine from my mom.
	I had copious amounts of drugs, way more than we're going to need to do the job.
	And because my depression had spun up, but I was inward.
	I wasn't outward regressed anymore.
	I was ashamed and depressed.
	I just wanted to end it, but tired of dealing with this anymore.
	But I had interventions in the past.
	My kid would be like, dude, you're depressed.
	We need to stop it.
	I didn't want any of that.
	So I was trying to act as normal as possible.
	Trying to act like nothing was wrong in my day.
	So I went to Mike's house.
	Mike's a very social guy.
	He has a social circle of his own.
	And one of his group friends is a girl named Amber.
	And Amber was really friendly with me.
	She was always really nice to me.
	But she was his contact.
	She was definitely his friend.
	And we would go over to her house every now and then, watch a movie, listen to music, whatever.
	And so he's like, hey, we're going to kick it at Amber's today.
	I'm like, right.
	That sounds like a great last day.
	I'm going to spend it with two of my favorite people and then go back to the field behind Costa Bonita and end my life.
	That was the plan.
	And so I get there and that wasn't it at all.
	I actually walked into a surprise birthday party for me.
	And I walked into about 14 people saying happy birthday and Amber had baked a blueberry peach pie.
	And I walked past him and dropped on my drugs in the toilet.
	And that was the last time I ever tried to kill myself.
	And that's what really set me on my path.
	And here's where the love portion comes in.
	Because when we left Mike's house, there was no birthday party.
	Mike called ahead to Amber's house and said, hey, Amber, I'm taking Aaron over there and this is her birthday today.
	And Amber was having a get-together.
	She had already had a bunch of people over.
	She had already baked the pie.
	And she's like, hey, Aaron's coming over and it's his birthday.
	Let's make it a birthday party for him.
	So they all got together and made a bunch of decorations and stuff and threw up a quick birthday party.
	I walked into a fundamentally life-changing thing that changed my opinion of myself to my core that my friend put up in five minutes of being nice to another friend.
	So, yeah, just a simple act of kindness.
	Nothing...
	The people who tried to be...
	Well, not so simple.
	Not so simple.
	Awake, man.
	But real.
	Yeah, right.
	And fundamental.
	Genuine.
	Genuinely thoughtful.
	Genuinely thoughtful.
	Right, right.
	And it changed me.
	That's what really started me on the path to...
	That was the time when I reassessed.
	And right after that, I did some serious soul searching about...
	Is this me?
	Or is this not me?
	And have a deep conversation with Mike and Amber and other friends about how, no, dude, this isn't me.
	I lived through hell.
	And yeah, I maladapted to it.
	I made some really bad decisions and I made some really toxic choices.
	there i can move out of this hell now and i can keep going and i can let them live their hell on that side yeah well now you're old enough too because you're 19 yeah yeah and at that point mike actually saved my life one more time but he moved me out to kansas city the final clip that cut the family hooks out of me was he went to college in kansas city and moved me out there for a summer i got to go live with him out in kc and i was i'm from denver so i got to go spend a summer out away from my family That did two things.
	It gave me the confidence that I could do something on my own, went and get a job, pay bills, pay rent, be stable.
	It also pissed my family off.
	When I got back, how dare you leave?
	How dare you think you're better than us?
	How dare you have a life?
	How dare you think you can exist without us?
	And so that was where I was able to be like, all right, fine, dude.
	They're attacking me for making myself better.
	This isn't me.
	This is them.
	And so that's where I finally made that flip.
	And right about that same time, I started on the real process of my recovery, which I call acknowledgement.
	So I was about 19 years old, and I still, again, mom still has her hooks on me at the time.
	I was working with her at a Veterans of Forum Wars bar.
	And so, she...
	It was right shortly after I had kind of started to sever contact, and I'm in this process, but I was working there.
	So, she was running the bar.
	I was a bartender there.
	And it was a Veterans of Foreign Wars bar, so veterans go in there and start drinking.
	How old?
	I was 19 years old.
	Okay.
	So...
	And my aunt is on the other side of the bar.
	And it's a bunch of people drinking, a whole busy night.
	And she's on the other side of the bar.
	And she's one of the people who had tried to molest me when I was younger, dug through the carpet for crack rock, tried to kill herself a couple of times in front of me.
	Toxic, toxic person.
	And she's on the other side of the bar.
	And she's just offhandedly talking.
	I don't even hear the conversation they're having.
	All I hear is they're saying, oh, Aaron, you know you love me.
	And I stopped and said, no, I don't.
	And I didn't mean to say that.
	It just came out.
	I said, no, I don't.
	And she said, what?
	I said, no, I don't actually love you.
	Tried to kill yourself in front of me.
	You tried to molest me and I don't actually love you.
	I'm done.
	And she started screaming.
	She blew up and had a big old screaming fit.
	And to me, it was like white noise.
	I didn't hear any of it.
	It turned into static because it was like an anvil jumped off of my chest, like instantly, just instant release.
	And I felt so good afterwards that I just walked out like, oh my God, I just did that.
	So that was a declaration of freedom.
	Yeah.
	And so that started a process where I did that exact thing to everybody in my life that abused me.
	I went in a process of acknowledgement and I made sure it was purposeful, very purposeful, that it wasn't retaliatory.
	I didn't go to anybody and say, you did this and you need to pay for it.
	I went to him and said, our relationship has fundamentally changed.
	I don't actually love you and I'm done.
	And I walked away.
	And that had such a cathartic effect on me.
	How did you know that it shouldn't be retaliatory?
	I just felt it in my core that it shouldn't be.
	Because I felt if it was retaliatory, that just continues the argument.
	Yeah, right.
	It engages and continues the contest.
	You're still hooked.
	It's still hooked.
	And it still continues the back and forth.
	And it's still the toxicity.
	You're going to come back with, well, you did this.
	I don't care about that.
	Maybe that's why you turn the other cheek.
	Yeah, and this isn't about retaliation.
	This isn't about me getting something back because you hurt me.
	You hurt me and I'm dealing with it.
	Right, and I'm dealing with it by being done with it.
	Yeah, I'm dealing with it, I'm done with it, and I'm gonna walk away, and I'm gonna stop having that hurt.
	And what sort of response did you get from people?
	Some of them screamed, and some of them yelled, and some of them begged me to stay, and I didn't care.
	None of it mattered to me, I just made sure that I said it.
	Why do you think you were able to not be manipulated into feeling guilty?
	I think because by that point I had burned out the ability to get embarrassed or ashamed about anything.
	I had burned out the ability for any of those family members' judgment to hurt me anymore.
	Yeah, well, and as you said, too, you'd be down in Kansas City and you had that break where you couldn't take care of yourself and have a life.
	And that gave me a breath and light on that to see.
	It shone a bright light on that toxicity to see that that was its own sense of hell.
	Like, it's...
	Their insults cause other people to insult them back, cause a fight to happen.
	It's just a violent circle that just spins around and around.
	And if I engage in that at all, I get sucked into it.
	But looking at it, it looks really stupid.
	So the more I can step back and look at it, the easier it got.
	Right, right.
	And so your life- It was very important to me to not have it be retaliatory and to make sure that it was just get it out of me.
	And every time I did, it was like a step.
	It was like flying.
	It was like elation.
	Yeah.
	Just pure elation that I was able to do it.
	And now today, I can confidently say that I never sit and have the regret that, oh my God, I wish this person knew how I felt it.
	Uh-huh.
	They all know.
	I'm fine with telling them again.
	So you started to get your life together fairly seriously at about 19?
	Mm-hmm.
	At about 19.
	That's when I started, well, kind of, emotionally, I started to get myself better.
	Yeah.
	And I started to reassess that I can do it, get myself some stability, and drop a lot of that toxic affectation.
	Did you go back to Kansas City?
	I did not.
	I actually came back to Colorado and got by living by myself and got my own apartment.
	Mike was helping me and got my own job.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Out of that family hook.
	And what job did you get?
	I was actually, let's see, right around then, I was working at a Starbucks in Barnes& Noble, downtown Denver.
	So I was just working at a coffee shop, service jobs.
	And did you learn to do a good job?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I've always been, every job I go to, they always want me to be manager.
	I see, I see.
	First job I ever had.
	I became assistant manager my second day.
	Well, you said that you didn't do your assignments and so forth at school.
	So how was it that you were able to do a good job when you got a job?
	Because when I... The assignments, I just never found them to be important.
	For me, I engage with things that I think are important.
	You felt it was important to do a good job.
	I felt it was important to do a good job and beneficial to do a good job.
	The assignments of the school, I felt, were rote, busy work.
	If I know the subject, for instance, English class, the reason why I always went to English class, It was because I had a teacher that I had gotten kicked out of the Advanced Placement English class for correcting the teacher on Shakespeare.
	The first day of class, I corrected him on Shakespeare.
	I had happened to be in my acid-filled parties with my friends.
	We were acting out the plays of Shakespeare at night.
	That's what we would do.
	We had the complete works of Shakespeare.
	We got the Midsummer Night's Dream and just pick a character and go through the play.
	That's what we would do, Tripp and Acid, 16-year-old.
	And so I went to school, and my teacher was teaching Shakespeare the first day, and he was getting it wrong.
	And it happened to be in the Midsummer Night's Dream.
	And so I corrected him.
	And the teacher does that thing you see on the TV. We're like, well, Mr.
	Stark, would you like to get up and teach the class?
	I'm like, yeah.
	So I stood up and started holding court.
	And so I started talking about it.
	And he pulled me out of the class, opened up the door of the class so everybody could see.
	Stood me in front of the class, started berating me and screaming at me.
	Don't you ever contradict me like that.
	How dare you confront me in front of the class like that.
	Don't you ever do that.
	Get out of here.
	Kick me out of his class.
	Send me down to remedial English.
	So I got kicked out of the class where I'm correcting him on Shakespeare.
	Go into the class where they're teaching sentence structure and punctuation.
	Mm-hmm.
	And I'm like, I go to the teacher.
	You didn't find that particularly motivating?
	No, not really.
	I went to the teacher.
	I'm like, hey, I know this.
	Can I do this?
	Can I get your final?
	Because I know this stuff.
	I write and I read.
	I'm really good at this.
	Like, you can do that?
	Like, please just let me prove it.
	And so she did.
	She gave me the final.
	Same teacher?
	No, different teacher.
	Oh, different.
	Different teacher.
	Remedial English.
	Oh, oh, oh, I see.
	Good end remedial English.
	The remedial English teacher is a lady.
	And she's like, can you do it?
	I'm like, yeah, sure.
	So I take her final.
	I aced the final for remedial English.
	Got 100%.
	And so...
	From then on, I was her de facto class assistant.
	So even though I never went to class, and even though I was only there once every few weeks, when I was there, I didn't have to do the assignments.
	I could just walk around and help everybody else with their assignments.
	And on book report day, I didn't have to read the book if I could walk up to her and explain what the book was.
	If I'd go to her and tell her the story and tell her what happened to the book and explain that I knew what it is, I didn't have to write the report.
	Oh yeah, so she was the real teacher.
	She was the real teacher.
	And she saw me as being smart.
	And so I would, even though it was remedial English, I went to that class every day.
	Every day I could.
	Every day I could get to that class, I could go to that class.
	Because that was one little hour where I felt valued and like I belonged.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, well, part of the story that you're telling has that motif in it, is that what you needed, and unsurprisingly, given the structure of your family, and the fact that you were moving constantly and that you were generally friendless, was a sense of genuine belonging.
	And you had that to some degree with your group of historians, but it was based on something that was very bad at its core.
	Yeah, very toxic.
	Whereas with Mike, you had a...
	You had an actual relationship, an actual relationship.
	Yeah.
	And with Mike, I valued it so much that I memorized his phone number, and every time I moved out of state, he was my home base.
	Yeah.
	So every other attachment could disappear, but Mike was always there.
	Right, right.
	Okay, so we've got to close this up, unfortunately, because I'd like to find out what happened later in your life, too, because you got married and you have kids and you have a life.
	Yeah, so we can fast forward to when I came out with my story.
	Well, I want to ask you a specific question, if you don't mind.
	Well, there's going to be people who are watching this and listening to it who are feeling both desperate and they probably have their reasons for it.
	And who are feeling not only desperate, but resentful and vengeful, right?
	And who are toying with those sorts of dark ideas that you toyed with.
	And so, if you could say something to them, other than everything that you've just said, is there anything specific you would say that you know that would be helpful to someone who is tempted by those darkest of motivations?
	What I tell my own kids all the time is that the only thing constant in life is change.
	That the only thing that's absolutely certain is that tomorrow's going to be different than today.
	That it might not be better and it might not be worse, but it is going to be different.
	And so we have choices with that.
	We can either resist that change and get worn down like the rocks on the beach turn into sand and just get annihilated.
	Or we can adapt with those changes and move like the water itself.
	And the more we can be that change and realize that the past that we are carrying and the damage and the destruction that we have experienced is not us.
	It's just luggage that we're carrying around with us.
	It's just the baggage that we carry.
	That the more we can maybe set that baggage down.
	Right, so it's part of not accept that damning judgment of yourself and others.
	When you tell yourself that you're worthless enough and that you hate yourself and everybody hurts you too, that's your brain lying to you.
	That's your brain lying to you.
	You are, in fact, good enough.
	You woke up good enough today, and it's okay that you messed up, and it's okay that you were wrong, and it's okay that you got mad.
	And it's okay if your future's okay.
	And it's okay to be okay.
	It's okay to be good sometimes.
	Yeah.
	That's not a bad thing.
	It's okay to feel emotion for people.
	Well, that's a weird thing to conclude if you have, for example, bargained to accept a very low social status because you've already, in some ways, made a contract with yourself that you're going to be an outsider, you're going to be unpopular, and that you are worthless.
	And one thing that happens when you internalize that so much is that it gets to be repellent to any positivity.
	Yeah, right.
	If someone were to come up and say, oh, you're a really good person, well, you don't really know me then.
	If you see me, then you'd see the monster, because I'm not really a good person.
	Yeah, well, it also violates the contract.
	It does.
	It does, because we've established now that I'm the low impeccable order.
	And the only way that I've seen for an outside source to be able to combat that is with consistency.
	By being the one that doesn't break when the waves crash against you, to be a Mike, to not give up when the stuff gets hard.
	But when you're in that dark, to realize that just keep going.
	So why do you think Mike liked you so much?
	Because I was smart.
	He always says it was because of the deep conversations.
	Because we could sit and talk for hours and never be bored.
	We can sit and talk and talk.
	So he really valued that in you?
	Really valued that in me.
	And that I was always, that I would give everything of myself for my friends.
	Even from back then, like if I had it, I didn't value my stuff.
	So if I had something, you needed it, I'm fine with giving it to you.
	And I would give Mike the shirt off my back.
	I'd tell him today, dude, I'd give you the skin off my back if you ever have a need for black skin.
	So you were also a friend to Mike?
	Yeah.
	And it was intellectual respect.
	Like the meeting of peers.
	Mm-hmm.
	No.
	All right, well, I'm going to close this up.
	I think that's a very good place to end.
	Thank you for walking us through that.
	One of the things I did notice, from a clinical perspective, by the way, is that you showed very little emotion, negative emotion, when you were describing what happened to you in your past.
	And there's two possible explanations for that when you see it.
	And one is that a person is hurt so bad that the emotion is just, they're just flat.
	Events have been put in their proper place and stripped of their emotional significance and transcended so that they're no longer relevant.
	And that looks to me like what you've managed.
	And congratulations on that.
	Thank you very much.
	Given what you went through, that's a major moral achievement.
	Thank you very much.
	To deal with that and to stop it from being transmitted to your children, that's work of incalculable significance.
	Yeah, today my kids have all gone to the same middle school, elementary school, and high school.
	They've all gone.
	They've never been evicted.
	They've never had their mom beaten their dad or their dad beaten their mom.
	None of that.
	I use what happened to me growing up as exact examples of how to parent my children.
	I just do the opposite.
	Isn't it interesting, you know, and this is a real mystery about human beings too, is that Really, in some fundamental sense, all you had were bad examples.
	Now, it's not exactly true, because you had your brother, and you had Mike, and you had some friendships, and so you could see how reasonable and positive human relationships were structured.
	But anyone listening to the story that you relayed would say, well, you have every reason to not know how to be a good husband and a good father.
	And yet...
	Despite all that, and despite the determinism of a multi-generational family of pathology on both sides, you were able to step away from it and establish something positive in the confines of your own life.
	And I do it specifically by using what happened to me as a kid, like exact examples of the parenting that I went through, and just do the opposite.
	Right, right.
	Well, it's so interesting because if you're a bully, there are two things you can learn from that, or at least two things.
	One is how to bully, and the other is that you should never bully.
	Right?
	And it's the same lesson.
	There's something about the manner in which the lesson is received that determines the consequences.
	It's not a deterministic course in that, like, well, we do know that most people, and this is actually the truth, almost all people who abuse as adults were abused as children.
	But...
	Most people who were abused as children don't abuse as adults.
	Yep.
	Right, right, right.
	So now I think that I won because today my kids are happy and healthy and friendly.
	Yeah, that's a good deal.
	My 12-year-old, when there's a new kid in her class, the teacher puts the new kid next to her because she's the class ambassador.
	So she's the welcomer for the class.
	Right.
	Right.
	So, yeah, you said that I don't get emotional with that.
	That's a good one.
	That's a good way to end, man.
	Well, congratulations on that.
	Thank you, sir.
	That's a major accomplishment.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, and say hi to your 12-year-old.
	Thank you, I will.
	You bet.
	You bet.
	All right, everyone.
	Thank you very much for watching and listening today.
	Your time and attention is always much appreciated.
	Thank you to the Daily Wire Plus people for facilitating this live conversation.
	We're going to be doing a bunch of them over the next couple of months.
	To the film crew here in Scottsdale, Thank you for, well, setting this up and making it run so professionally.
	And we'll see you all very soon.
	Thank you for having me.
	That was great.
	Yeah, appreciate it.

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