An Open Letter to My Abusive Stepfather

Below you will find An Open Letter to My Abusive Stepfather:

Child abuse is war. 

I opened my first book with that line because I feel that truth deep in my soul. When I created Think Unbroken and The Think Unbroken Conference, I did it because I knew how much healing could come from storytelling and guidance from those who did it before us. 

You know my backstory. I have shared how my mother cut my finger off, how I was homeless, a drug addict at twelve years old, and a lot about the healing journey.

But I have never shared what is in this message. 

Before you go on and read this, know two things:

1- I am sharing this because I felt a massive calling in my soul to do so after a conversation with a friend who may have just saved a little boy's life from his abusive mother and father. The moral responsibility I feel to tell this story is overwhelming, and I can't keep it in because I know that by sharing this, it may change your life or someone you know. I have done my work for over a decade and know that this is from a place of strength and empowerment. And that it is one more step in taking my power back. 

2- A hero's journey always starts with facing the pain of the truth of the experiences of their life. That holds true for me. What is below is an open letter to my stepfather. I wrote this some time ago in a healing exercise that I did for myself during a moment of true power. 

What I feel in sharing this is a deeper level of taking my power back. More so, it's an acknowledgment that even as the #1 trauma coach in the world that my message of “this is a lifelong journey of healing" continues to hold true in my personal life. 

This is very long piece of writing, and it may impact you in many different ways, but my hope is that it gives you the power and opportunity to write your own open letter and to share it with the world. And to know that in doing so that you get to be the one in control of your story. I often say that we can own our story or our story can own us. 

In writing this, please know that I only care about one thing: seeking freedom in truth.

As you read this, if you find you need support or even if you just want to share your thoughts, you are welcome to respond to this, and I will reply.

It took me over 30 years to bid the courage to write this. Even in writing this I feel the immense sense of resistance in each word I type, the gutteral feeling of shame as I remember the key moments that shaped my childhood, and the freedom that I have in being a man that has dedicated his life to not only healing my own expereinces of trauma and abuse but those of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.  I no longer carry the shame and guilt that I once did from the things that happened that were out of my control. I now longer carry the hurt that you brought into my life. For me, I have taken my power back. For you, I hope this letter makes you question your own experiences and painful childhood.

I can’t begin to express the pain that you caused in my life, and even if I could I doubt you would get it because how can a man rationalize beating a child, locking him in closets, slamming his head into walls, smashing his plate onto the floor, waking him up in the middle of the night and welting his body because of putting away wet dishes, or belittling him to the point that he tried to kill himself not once but twice? How can a man find reason in hurting a child? How can a man find justification in his actions?

I tend to sit on either side of a coin depending on how I feel in a specific moment. One on hand I have found the space to be the bigger man through the work that I have done due to the impact of my past and to give myself space and grace. I have found peace in my life. This work has cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars, more hours than I can count, and so much energy that I am literally biologically older than my age. On the other hand I want to throw the work away entirely and make you feel the same pain that I have felt. And then I remember the truth - hurt people hurt people, and HEALED PEOPLE HEAL PEOPLE.

There are moments burned into my brain of the suffering that both my brothers and I endured at your hand. And let me be clear, this is not a letter to forgive you and to say that I have found God or enlightenment and that you are absolved of all wrong doing. No, in fact, this is the opposite. This is a letter to bring to light the immense torture and pain that you bestowed upon three helpless young boys who needed a man of love, compassion, hope, empathy, and leadership. It’s not my place to judge you, but it is my place to call you out and bring to attention the secret that you are hiding. This is an opportunity for you to change your life and to end the cycle. What you do with that opportunity is for you to decide.  I’d like to think it tortures you at night, but I have good reason behind that thought. Those who hide in the dark can never bring themselves to the light. 

It’s been over 30 years since you entered my life and not once have you apologized. 

Do you know what I have come to realize? The apology that I am seeking is not for the actions you took but instead for the actions that you should have taken and for the actions that you can still take to right the wrongs and to end the generational trauma of both your existence and mine.

People often leverage the idea of forgiveness as a tool for the victim of terrible crimes of the body, spirit, and soul. I am not saying that I don’t believe in forgiveness, becuase I do, but for you I just can’t offer my forgiveness without a penance being paid. I believe that forgiveness in many circumstances requires an action to precede it’s acceptance.

I find it interesting that some people will disagree with me on this and say that you should always forgive your abusers becuase that is how you find your freedom. But the truth is that I found my freedom, healing, self-love, and growth while still wanting you to get down on your knees and beg for my forgiveness. Perhaps this is the selfish, self-aggrandizing, and maleficent part of me that believes to some extent that an eye for an eye is just cause. Or perhaps it’s the part of me that so desperately wants you to understand the pain that you caused. I don’t think there is any right or wrong in the way that we as individual survivors choose to allot forgiveness. 

So what is the price that you must pay for forgiveness? What is the penance so great that you could free yourself from the shackles of your decisions? What could you possibly do that allow yourself to move through purgatory into the devine light of humanity? It’s simple. You need to acknowledge that you came into the lives of three young boys and destroyed them, cut them to the quick, and left them for dead.  Are you willing to pay that coin to cross the river? 

I remember the day that you came to us and asked our permission to marry our mother. In the immediate moment I had no real idea of what that meant or really who you were, it all happened so fast. I only recollect meeting you once or twice before that moment, and so you were simply a stranger with a strange request. If I could pinpoint the day that my childhood ended, it would be that day.

Little boys and girls crave the freedom to connect, to be authentic, and to be loved. It’s our biology as a human species that requires these elements like alchemy to live a prosperous, sustainable, and healthy life. Children for most of modern history were reared in a communal setting with support mechanisms that allowed them the space to explore authentically and safely, and more importantly, they had the opportunity to be loved, taught that they matter, and given the space to discover their identity. These are the circumstances in which a child is most set up for success, this, however was not my reality. 

I came to realize at twenty-seven years old that I had zero confidence. Yes, I had a very expensive car, lots of clothes and shoes, a gorgeous girlfriend, and tons of friends, but I was a shell of a man floating in a pool of suffering, now at my own hand. Just a couple of years prior my life looked amazing on paper, but that was only if you weren’t reading the words and not living them as I was. I was three-hundred and fifty pounds, smoking two packs a day, drinking myself to sleep, high from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to bed, cheating on my girlfriend, almost fifty thousands dollars in debt, and had just attempted to take my life for the second time. 

We ask the wrong questions about mental health in this country and often look at disease, addiction, and mental health issues as people who just don’t care about life instead of asking why are they suffering in the first place? What is the root cause? What has happened so terribly in their lives that they would rather self-destruct, put a needle in their arm, or take their own life? Why do we not have empathy for these people and offer a hand of compassion and love instead of one of blame and guilt? It’s because we are terrified that we might catch ourselves in the reflection of their pain-filled eyes. 

I, like many other survivors hit a major rock-bottom which in turn required me to start doing “the work”, becuase I had no other choice. I was faced with a crucial decision - transform or die. There was no other option. Fast forward twelve years later and here I am. 

There is empirical evidence that supports childhood trauma and abuse as being the cornerstone to many ailments, diseases, mental health disorders, and addictions. Have you heard of the ACE score? My guess is that you are probably a six or seven on that questionnaire. The gest of it is a series of questions that are predicated on exposure to childhood trauma experiences before the age of eighteen. 

Some of the questions are: 

Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you?

Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Push, grab, slap, or throw something at you? or Ever hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured?

Did you often or very often feel that … No one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special? or Your family didn’t look out for each other, feel close to each other, or support each other?

Did you often or very often feel that … You didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes, and had no one to protect you? or Your parents were too drunk or high to take care of you or take you to the doctor if you needed it?

Was your mother or stepmother:

Often or very often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or had something thrown at her

Did you live with anyone who was a problem drinker or alcoholic, or who used street drugs?

Were your parents ever separated or divorced?

There are three more questions but I wanted to bring these to your attention for two reasons:

One - I took the ACE survey, and it is the singular thing that changed my life more than any other piece of information that I have come across. After doing the research and diving deeper into the causation and correlation of abuse from a research perspective, I realized that my body was in constant fight or flight, dissociation, hyper-independence, and hyper-vigilance. It’s no wonder I was where I was in my late teens and twenties. I was trying to hide the pain of having an ACE Score of Ten. I’ll give you the space to do your own research to find the other three questions. 

Two - Those seven questions I listed above all impacted my life because of your decisions. Are you willing to sit in that truth? Are you willing to acknowledge that who you are created who I am? But I choose to recreate myself in love and not fear. May these questions burn a hole in your soul big enough to see the light.

I remember the feeling of immense fear every time that I walked into the house after you arrived in our lives. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, was more terrifying for me at seven years old than when the car door would shut on that little black sports car you had when you would arrive back home. The visceral response that I had in that moment was that of crippling pain, tunnel vision, ringing ears, and the feeling that I was going to poop my pants. This response was happening in my body every single day. 

Do you know that I didn’t start wetting the bed until you started beating me? 

Do you know that I was a good student until you started telling me that I was stupid?

Do you know that I had and on some nights still have insomnia becuase you would pull me out of bed to beat me in the middle of the night?

Do you know that I was athletic and loved baseball until you started belittling me and calling me a lazy fat cat?

Do you know that I was immensely kind and empathic until you started hitting me to the point that between gasps of breath I could only hear “If you don’t stop crying I will hit you harder?” 

Do you know that I questioned my sexuality at eight years old becuase you called me gay in a derogatory way?

Every day with you was torture. I suffered in ways that no child should. I felt the pain of both your fists and your words. I felt a smoldering sense of injustice in the world when you and my mother had my youngest brother, who I am since estranged from because he did not have the same fear or pain that I did. I will never forget you slamming my head into the coffee table when I mispronounce the world Pisces as feces when attempting to read my his horoscope. I was ten years old. 

It was surreal to watch you verbally and physically assault everyone in our home, my mother included. I know her battles with drugs and addiction didn’t help, but did you ever think about the power you could have had as the hero to three little boys who needed a father, not an executioner? The wars between you two late at night set me up for massive failure in both communication and in relationships. I only knew physical and verbal violence as a method of communication and that carried into my friendships, intimate relationships, and even my early working life. It took more work than I can even begin to convey to begin to shift the nomenclature of what I thought it meant to be a man. Talk about getting set up for failure.

I could go on and on about the suffering, I could talk about you forcing me to eat food that made me sick, about when I had asthma and you would hit me for coughing, how you wouldn’t allow me to take a shower before school on mornings that I wet the bed, or how you would bring gifts home to your son and tell my brothers and me that we didn’t deserve anything. Oh and of course my favorite you constantly reiterating that I was worthless or my real father would have been around. Growing up with you and my mother was like a greatest hits of child abuse. 

Do you want to know the craziest part about all of this as I sit and write this to you? I get it. Yup, I get it. I can only imagine the suffering you experienced and instead of healing, you choose to continue the cycle.

I have dedicated my life to not only understanding childhood trauma and abuse but also being an advocate and voice for those impacted by it. And in this dedication to healing I have learned five lifetimes worth of information that all points back to the root - hurt people hurt people. I can only imagine what your childhood must have been like. This is not said in jest, your mother was the worst human being that I have ever met, and this holds true today. She was a monster who was also unhealed, and I have so much empathy for her because the suffering she must have endured was rained down on you. I saw the way she treated her foster kids, her blind husband, and the people in her life. I was ALWAYS paying attention as a child. My impeccable memory and the ability to read people and evaluate situations and environments in lightning speed is my superpower, and I will tell you this, I don’t even want to imagine the pain that your mother caused you or her mother caused her. THIS IS GENERATIONAL TRAUMA. THIS IS THE CYCLE.

When I am speaking on stages, coaching, writing books, and creating my life,  people often ask me to define trauma. I think this is a critical understanding that we need to have as we move forward as individuals and a society of hurt people. Now, this is just my opinion but to me trauma isn’t the pain of the beatings, the belittlement, the times that I needed safety and was denied it, or even the constant fear I felt because of your decisions to both intimidate and foster that sense of fear in me. No, for me, trauma is the fact that you stole my identity. You took from me the very thing most precious to any human being, my sense of self, autonomy, authenticity, and confidence. 

Humans are the ultimate adaptation machine, this is why we have become the apex predator. Our ability to adapt is the single reason that we have survived this long and have been at the top of the food chain. No animal is more wise, cunning, conniving, manipulative, self-sufficient, aware, unaware, selfish, caring, kind, destructive, or malicious than humans. We are a complex machine. And in our ability to adapt, which is our first instinct and most practical survival mechanism, we make meaning of our environment to delineate meaning. We first seek to survive and second to understand. 

Did you know that when you are in a survival state, your non-essential bodily functions lose massive amounts of blood flow to prep you to fight or flee from danger? Did you know that survival function is reserved for the most dire of situations like an attack, car accident, or fending off an animal in the wild? It would seem entirely counter-intuitive for that survival function to always be stuck to the “on” switch, and for many trauma survivors like myself, the on switch is exactly when we get stuck, always in survival mode. 

So how do you thrive in survival mode? You don’t, you literally can’t. From a biological and physiological standpoint, one cannot process, learn, sleep, rest, digest, or heal in a Sympathetic state. 

It is only through learning to regulate the system and get into the Parasympathetic state that adaptation to an unchaotic environment can begin. I used to say these words all the time, ‘I thrive in chaos.” This is perhaps the most dangerous sentence that is used in the human language. We should only need to survive chaos when absolutely necessary. So think about this, if as a child I was always in chaos, how would I ever have the space to access and make meaning of who it is that I am or want to be? The simple answer is that  I couldn’t and my guess is that neither could you. 

One of the most difficult aspects of healing for me was to create myself. I realized that I had no idea who I was. I didn’t know how to say yes. I didn’t know how to say no. I only ever did what other people wanted of me. I did things that can only be explained as autonomic responses to the stimulus of my environment. I lied, cheated, stole, hurt people, and worst of all, felt nothing about it because I was on autopilot, just barely surviving and counting down the days until I was dead. 

On the morning after my rock-bottom moment, when I attempted for the second time, I had this memory of when I was eight. You were gone, driving for the trucking company, and the water company had come to the house. My mother was passed out on the bed with a little orange pill bottle next to her. I woke her up to come and talk to the water guy at the front door. He told her they were turning off the water, again. She pleaded with him, but he was just doing his job, and turned off the water. Two things happened in that moment that have propelled me to where I am today. First, my mother took the small manhole cover from the ground in the front yard and told me to turn the water valve on just enough to allow a drip in the house. The second is that I went to the backyard, grabbed a little blue bucket, and went to our neighbor's house, turned on their spigot, and for the first time I stole water. This would happen again and again as you know. Between this, the constant moving, living with strangers, and being abandoned for the better part of four years, it’s no wonder that I had focused a life of choas. 

As I had this memory, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I recalled a promise I had made to myself that day. The promise was very simple, when I grew up, I would not allow my life to look anything like the life I was born into. And in so many ways it wasn’t but I was still that hurt, lost little boy. The moment in the mirror became a defining moment for me and is very likely the singular reason that I am here today, because I asked myself, “what are you willing to do to have the life that you want to have?” And in that singular moment, everything began to change because my answer was, No Excuses, Just Results. I was so tired of being the victim, ruining relationships, hurting friends, hurting my brothers, hurting myself. Until that moment, I was everything that you said I would be. And I was done. 

I have these flash moments when I want to hurt you, and in those moments is when I feel my most healed because I ask myself what do I need, and the answer is always empathy. I don’t know that the feeling of satisfaction of causing you pain will ever leave, but I don’t lean into that and I refuse to because I made a promise to myself to end generational trauma and to never cause suffering the way that you and so many others did and have. It would be a lie to say that sometimes those feelings don’t pop up. I honor them. I don’t run from them, hide from them, or stuff them down. Gabor Mate, one of the leading experts in the world of trauma taught me something that changed me. He told me that when we stuff our emotions down that we depress them and that in depressing our emotions it leads to de-pression. 

I ran and hid my emotions in drinking, sex, food, drugs, alcohol, and any other vice that I could get my hands on. I have taught myself over the years that in order to feel any emotion you must be willing to feel all emotions. The hardest thing I have done in this journey to learn how to cry again. You took that from me, and I have taken it back. I wonder, do you cry or is your ideal of manhood which is tied to your childhood trauma holding you back from your full potential? 

I didn’t cry for fifteen years. I had learned not to. What does a child do when emotions and their nature of being is the very thing that they suffer the most for? They turn off, chameleon, placate, and do whatever it is that they have to do to survive, not thrive. Are you still in survival mode? Are you still living out your trauma responses and being an endangerment to yourself and those around you because you are an emotional recluse, hyper-violent, and ignoring the truth? 

I asked you if you were willing to pay with acknowledgment as penance for your misgivings. And I want to be clear here, I’m good. I turned my trauma into triumph. If I never heard from you again I would content because this letter, this writing, this is for me, but what you do with it is for you. My brothers are good. I am healed and healing. I have done my work. I have paid my price. I have stepped through the gauntlet of self. I have endured countless hours of therapy, coaching, personal development, and deep reflection. I have let go of shame, guilt, pain, suffering, and victimhood. I have faced fear in ways that most people can’t fathom. I have traveled the world, read beautiful poetry, fallen in love, created a life I am proud of, and most importantly, I have been able to look in the mirror and be ok with the reflection.  I have come out the other side of the tunnel, and now I lead and emancipate others as I guide them down the same path of healing and self-love. 

I have crafted and created an Unbroken life. I have helped thousands of people learn to Think Unbroken, and like I teach my clients that thye are not broken. I know this to be true for them and for me as I am not a hurt lost little boy. I am me. My life mission is very simple, can I end Generational Trauma in my lifetime? I believe the answer is yes but that starts with all of us who have suffered having the courage and willingness to acknowledge that bad things happened to us and that we are not culpable for them. I think about this every day, it is not on me to take responsibility for what you did to me, but it is my responsibility is to do something about it. 

And do you know how I got here? I asked myself a very simple yet life-changing question: What am I willing to do to have the life that I want to have? My answer was No Excuses, Just Results. What’s yours?

I look at trauma like having a house with a yard. You walk outside and on the ground is a bunch of trash, it’s not your trash, and you didn’t put it there, but it is your house. My hope is that you will acknowledge your own traumatic experiences and your continuation of the cycle of abuse and in that acknowledgment find the courage to end the cycle of your family here and now. 

It’s not going to be easy.

It’s not going to be fun. 

And it sure won’t be cheap.

But maybe instead of your headstone being like so many others and reading “Here lies a man that was a coward and afraid to face his truth” it could read ‘Here lies a man that made a decision.”

Michael