Healing My Trauma

I believed the achievement of doing a huge movie like SuckerPunch would change my world, and also change how I felt about myself. I thought it would lift my self-worth, and give me the belief to go out and conquer the world making movies. The achievement felt good momentarily, but then my self-doubts crept back in. I had finally done something I’d been pushing to do for years, get a movie on the big screen. I feel fortunate and grateful for that experience. But when it didn’t change my core feelings about myself… things got a little desperate.

In the years after writing SuckerPunch, I wrote and wrote and wrote. I struggled to sell my screenplays, but most of all, I struggled to sell myself. I felt unworthy. When I would go to meetings, I felt like I was pretending, very badly, to be somebody who I wasn’t. And when you do that, everybody feels awkward. In those moments, meeting with companies and executives, I would suddenly feel the repressive silence and shame from my parents, magnified by the frozen terror from the boat accident. It was a classic case of imposter syndrome, with a heavy dose of low self-worth. It took its toll, but the really difficult part was how it affected my home life.

When my self-worth was challenged, this kid from my dream, and all his frightened feelings would rise up inside me.

Me and my wife were struggling. My inability to be an equal partner financially was making things difficult. My wife was working as a high fashion make-up artist. And I was a screenwriter working from home, raising our daughter when my wife wasn’t there. Today you see men taking care of their kids everywhere. But at that time I didn’t see other men with their children. I feel I was a bit of a pioneer for the stay-at-home dad. I remember taking my daughter to mommy and me classes and being the only guy. I would feel like the women were looking at me thinking “What a loser why isn’t he working?” At times I felt pretty pathetic as a husband and a father. I would wake in the middle of the night and beat myself up calling myself a failure. Me and my wife were headed for a divorce. A couple of times our marriage was in a nosedive, but we pulled out of it at the last moment. All of this stress was building and building, and when this happens, something has to give. And the give, was my wife getting very sick.

She came down with a high fever of 103 which went on for fifteen days. We went to the Emergency Room twice, she was given antibiotics but could not break the fever. She was fading. Then finally she was prescribed the right antibiotic by my cousin who’s an ENT. Her fever broke and she began to stabilize. But she was so weak and needed a place to recover. I decided this was my chance to do something for my family. To prove my worth as a husband and a father. I was going to redo my whole backyard which had areas of grass, and create a beautiful retreat so my wife could heal. I would tear out all the grass and make paths of decomposed granite lined with bricks bordering beds of flowers. And in the corner where there was a dead tree stump, I would build a clubhouse for my daughter.

We were in the middle of one of those hot summers in Los Angeles. I was wearing a straw hat, and I was swinging a big double-headed axe. I was in the corner of my backyard chopping away at the dead tree stump. I lifted the axe over my shoulder and swung hard! Immediately the axe came straight back at me, hitting the side of my head with the side of the axe! It didn’t knock me out, but I was in a daze. I took my straw hat off and saw the clothesline that I didn’t take down. I had swung the axe, hit the clothesline, and it came straight back at me. Luckily the axe turned just a bit, clocking me with the knuckle on the side of my head. I was in shock. My wife and daughter could have found me dead in my backyard holding the axe buried into my skull. Deep down I believe this was a reflection of all my negative self beliefs.

The axe that almost got me.

My daughter waiting for her clubhouse.

A few months later, I was lying in bed with my wife. I saw a lot of my hair on the bed. I grabbed a clump of it on my head, pulled and my hair came out. In the weeks to come, all my hair fell out. Shocking. Unbelievable. Terrifying. It was all those things and more. My Dr. told me I had alopecia, it’s an autoimmune disease that attacks your hair follicles. It can be brought on by stress. Stress shows up in all kinds of ailments, mine took my hair. I believe the axe was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The cherry on top of all the stress, trauma, and repressive silence I’d been carrying all my life.

My backyard garden today.

Because of my writing credit for SuckerPunch, I was approached by a well-known producer. He had a project based on a big Intellectual Property. An animated TV series that he wanted to turn into a movie. I was excited and dove into the work. I spent hours, days, and weeks going over source material, having meetings, and creating a structure and outline for what this movie could be. I presented him with my work, I even wrote the entire first act of the movie. He wanted to make a deal with me to write the whole screenplay. Here was my chance, to be paid what I felt I was “worth”. And underneath it all, a way to feel better about myself, and prove to others I was good enough. I sent an email telling him how much I wanted to be paid… and then, I never heard from him again. Did I ask for too much? Are we going to negotiate? All I heard was silence. How could he just stop responding to me after taking my ideas for six months? Very easily, that’s Hollywood for you. It pissed me off so much that I wanted to write something just for myself.

So I decided to write a movie about the boat accident and my childhood. I guess I was finally ready.

It had been forty-five years since the boat accident. When I did think about it, it felt like it happened yesterday. I still had no idea it was affecting my life. The process of writing the screenplay was enlightening. Seeing moments from the perspective of a viewer watching a movie brought clarity and understanding. Writing the scene for the boat accident was exhilarating and haunting.

When I finished the screenplay I sent it out to others to read. One comment that came up was “What happened to the other family in the boat accident?” I realized I didn’t address them in the story, and then it hit me…

I never addressed the boat accident in my life.

Because I wrote it in screenplay format like a movie, I saw the boat accident from an outside perspective. I was no longer just feeling the energy of the trauma stuck in my body. I could see myself from the outside as a character in a movie.

A screenplay is just that, a play for the screen. When you read a screenplay, it’s like watching a movie.

As I watched the boat accident on the pages of the screenplay, I got distance from the event. I was no longer just stuck in the event feeling those overwhelming feelings. With this perspective, I realized something I had never realized before, that the boat accident was a crazy event. To be dragged underwater by an unmanned boat, watch my uncle drown, and then never talk about it was crazy. And then… the thought of trauma came up. I hadn’t ever thought about that word before. I searched the word and found the book “The Body Keeps The Score” by Bessel van der Kolk. Reading this book was a revelation. I saw myself throughout its pages. It explains why I felt disconnected, what happens in trauma, and what happens to the body afterward. It was how I’d felt my entire life. I read two other books by John Bradshaw “Homecoming”, and “Healing The Shame That Binds You”. “Homecoming” was about the Inner Child. He has these videos on YouTube where you can close your eyes and visualize. He would say things like imagine yourself walking down the street you grew up on. Now imagine you come to the house you grew up in. Then out of the front door steps you as a little child. Now go up to that child and say “I’m sorry I left you here. But you can come with me now.” These visualizations resonated with me.

I’m aware the term Inner Child can sound a little hippy-dippy. But I see the term as a metaphor, a reflection of a real biological survival response. In an overwhelming moment like my boat accident, I instinctively disconnected from it to survive and protect myself. That terror, that overwhelming feeling got pushed down and hidden, it got stuck. No one was there to support or help that eight-year-old child process and understand what happened. So that frozen energy stayed alive within me, unconsciously guiding me into adulthood. Driving the car, like that little boy in my dream.

The Inner Child is a visual metaphor that gives shape to a feeling.

One night, after I finished reading, digesting, and processing all these books, I sat on a bench in my backyard. I closed my eyes and started to visualize the boat accident. Since I wrote the scene like a screenplay, I could see myself as a little child, a character in a movie. I watched the boat accident unfold, I saw myself, the frightened eight-year-old frozen in the water as the boat spun round and round. And then, as an adult, I went up to that child and said, “I’m sorry I left you here, but you can come with me now.” I embraced the child and started to cry.

When I opened my eyes, something had shifted inside of me. I felt different. I had this feeling of wholeness. What I would eventually understand was I had completed a survival response that got frozen forty-five years ago in the trauma. It was an immediate shift in my feelings like something had lifted, like something had been put to rest. Instead of this traumatic energy hanging over my head, I felt neutral. I had healed my trauma. As the days passed, I realized I wasn’t waking up in the middle of the night calling myself a failure anymore.

In a traumatic experience, when we are overwhelmed and disconnect from ourselves to survive the event. If no one is there to help us process the feelings we are disconnected from, we get stuck with the pain. All we remember about the event is the pain. And out of survival we bury it, hide it, and try not to touch it. But it’s alive. It’s a natural survival response that got stuck. Writing the screenplay about the boat accident finally brought perspective. Solid ground to stand on, where before it was only a feeling of chaos. With solid ground and perspective, I gained awareness and understanding, which led me to reconnect and forgive myself. I had carried a pain and blamed myself my entire life, for something that was never my fault.

I’m grateful to my parents who couldn’t heal their traumas. But they supported me as best they could, allowing me to search and question, and do more than just survive like they did. They gave me the space to heal.

I had finally healed from the trauma of the boat accident. I didn’t fully understand what had changed in me, but I would in time. All I knew now was I had to do something with this new knowledge, I had to share my story.

In my next blog, I’ll tell you about how I began to teach my workshop Defining The Moment: Addressing Trauma Through Screenwriting at a women’s jail in Los Angeles.