Harley - 35



Content Warning - The following story discusses suicide ideation and incest. If you or someone you know is at risk, please visit www.befrienders.org to find support in your area.


I’m so grateful to be alive. My childhood was a beautiful whirling nightmare concoction: At times there were generous portions of unconditional love, laughter, and nurturance, and at others it was extreme sexual violence, physical and emotional torture. Incest.

It’s not as simple as most people might think. Western culture likes to portray people who act out sexual abuse as simple evil creatures with no love in their hearts. But that hasn’t been my experience. I know in my bones that my parents had parts that did love me and when embodying those parts, did everything in their capacity to give me a good life. Unfortunately, generational trauma, addiction and substance abuse, and limited support/real medicine was available when I was growing up. And so, their capacity to give me that good life was pretty friggin diminished.

I suffered in silence and survived by dissociating and fracturing into parts. While at school, karate class, and with friends I masked by learning to be charismatic, charming, and funny. Meanwhile I was being groomed to abuse others. It was naturally very confusing as an innocent child with an open heart, I knew that certain things being done to me weren’t right. But the language used to rationalize the damage being done to me was that I deserved it, that it was my own fault, I’m asking for it, it’s my punishment, it’s my reward. Extremely confusing messaging, especially for a child.

This disorienting experience combined with the toxic masculinity displayed in the mainstream Western Culture at the time turned up the pressure to be a dominant sexually/physically/ and emotionally controlling masculine presence. If you don’t follow the script, you’re not really a man and you’re guaranteed to get attacked on a level you can’t even understand.

Predictably, in Highschool I would turn to drugs, alcohol, sex, and porn in an attempt to try and numb/escape the ever-present feeling that I am a worthless, horrible, poisonous unsafe creature walking this otherwise beautiful planet. My soft heart knew all along that my abuse and the cultural messaging were poisonous. Yet the damage had been done and at times worried if I was an inherently sick person like people who abused me had told me. The physical and psychological affects of abuse festered in my body and mind, pickling into a potent nauseating brine. I never told anyone a whisper about the poison I felt inside. How could I? I was frozen in terror, had no communication skills, couldn’t understand or process what was happening in the first place.

Amazingly and graciously, I learned to soothe myself with creative outlets like music, skateboarding, and making awesome silly short films. This was the bedrock of my healing practice that continues to hold me to this day.

At 18 me and my best buds moved to Montreal to be Indie Rockstars. We lived in a grungy 4-bedroom apartment in the plateau, worked nights at restaurants and partied, played shows, and rocked the fuck out for a couple years. I have lots of beautiful memories from this era and forged some life-long connections with some spectacular humans.

When I was 20 I found myself experiencing a major heartbreak and needing some comfort and support so I thought I’d come back to Ottawa and try and regroup with my family. Upon returning home I learned my parents had separated and I quickly found myself in a support role for my dad. He was suicidal and it quickly became my job to try and convince him life was worth sticking around for. This wasn’t exactly the supportive vibe I was hoping for, but we rolled with it. I ended up leaning hard into my friends and our band that summer and we got through it as a team.

Fast forward 4 years later and my then-partner confronts me with a major potentially life-altering situation. I feel excitement at the prospect of getting to completely abandon myself for the foreseeable future and focus entirely on people I love. She wisely and maturely tells me that we’re not remotely ready or equipped to move forward with the situation and actually we weren’t even a couple anymore. She was very wise. Decisions were made and we separated, and I’m asked to cease reaching out to her. Heart explodes once more.

It’s at this point where it really became clear just how miserable I was with my life. I had spent the past 10 years drinking, fucking, and running away from my childhood trauma and it was hitting critical mass: I wanted to die and truly felt like I was going to die if I didn’t get help immediately.

And like every other moment in my life where I truly needed it: help arrived! A loved one connected me with his Somatic Therapist, and I proceeded to experience a level of safety and emotional atunement that I had never known. Never had I realized that for my entire life I had been living in a state of fight/flight/freeze/fawn. I cannot tell you just how profound this whole “safety” thing felt. I left my first therapy session and was seeing new colours, smelling new smells, and felt more comfortable in my body than I had thought possible. Epic healing mojo.

I would spend the next 10 years obsessed with therapy, writing music, constantly travelling across Canada, accumulating debt, planting hundreds of thousands of trees, paying off debt, racking it up again, falling in love with people and life and myself, more heartbreak, forging the most incredible friendships, more thousands of trees, develop a mysterious inflammatory respiratory disease, accumulating debt, starting university, dropping out of university, more trees, more heartbreak, starting massage school, dropping out of massage school, more debt, planting more trees, then the pandemic hit. Oh ya, I also recorded 8 albums and hundreds of songs during those years which I’m very, very proud of.

But continuing to 2020- I’m in debt $50,000, broke, unemployed, stuck in perpetual freeze/emotional shutdown. Critical mass 2.0 has arrived and I need to do something to mobilize out and get to work securing housing and feeding myself: I shared some of my survival story online and received the love and support of hundreds of people. I also made boundaries with everyone in my family and changed my phone number. The safety and support I felt from my community combined with the new boundaries from my family was the boost and support I needed to step into the working world again and get back on my feet. I would end up working as an audio engineer for ICAO - the aviation branch of the UN and also worked and learned carpentry and how to redo floors at my neighbours business.

The last several years I’ve been living in a small town in the Pacific North West of Canada. I moved out with my closest tree-planting buddies a few years ago and have been hunkered down in the dreamiest little house just minutes away from the ocean and not much farther from the mountains and sacred forests. It’s been the perfect place to settle in and I’ve been privileged to attend Rhodes Wellness College on-line in their Professional Counselling program. Which I will graduating from this spring!

Though I am still technically in debt $85,000 (Hehe whoops), I am finalizing a bankruptcy claim and will be graduating, debt-free, surrounded by loved ones, my dog Keva, cloaked in one of my hand-made Vests, hitting the road with my new band, seeing clients, and sharing stories of resilience, universal love, loss, and everything in between.

My healing journey has been anything but linear and I’m beyond proud and honoured to be able to use my incredible life experience and hard earned skills to walk alongside others seeking to heal, resonate deeper into their authentic selves, heal past trauma, and break toxic patterns. It is the most rewarding work I have ever experienced and means everything to me.

I hope my story can inspire others to embrace themselves in their entirety. We are all incredible, complex, nuanced beings capable of extraordinary magic. So many of us grow up in environments that we don’t feel safe in, environments that can’t nurture the depth of our spirit and we can end up developmentally stunted and out of balance. Often with wounds that may take lifetimes to heal. You can plop me in this category! There’s nothing to be ashamed of for we do not choose the circumstances of our upbringing. But we can choose how we deal with those experiences and their affects on us, our beliefs, nervous system affects, behaviours, and patterns.

All the love in my heart to every one of you reading this. Being vulnerable is so scary sometimes but it allows the universe to see us more clearly and send us the medicine we need while providing medicine to others as well. Sending warmth, safety, and gentleness to you today and whenever you need/desire it. Thank you for holding this sacred space with me and reach out if you’d like to connect.

With reverence,

Harley


Music - Harley's music choices during our photo session included Mike Trask, Harley Alexander, Allegra Krieger, Charley Crockett, and Michael Nau.


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