Healing from developmental trauma with Rick Morton

0:02 A listener production. This is Crappita Happy and I am your host Castunn. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher and of. Course, author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. In today's episode, I'm talking to Rick Morton, an award winning journalist and author with an incredible story of trauma and survival. His book, My Year of Living Vulnerably sees Rick process his diagnosis of complex post traumatic stress disorder. Over twelve months, Rick went on a journey to rediscover love and to begin healing.

0:56 In this episode, Rick reflects on his experience with generational trauma in his childhood and how it shaped his adult life. He generously shares his pathway to healing from this trauma, various therapies he used to begin this process, and what he learned along the way. Just a heads up that this episode does touch on the topic of sexual assault. If that's something that's triggering for you, you might want to skip this episode. This episode does contain some adult language, so if you have little ears around, you might want to pop in your headphones to listen. Rick Morton, thank you so much for joining me on the Crappy a Happy Podcast. Thanks for having me Cash. I saw your book at a bookstore and it is called My Year of Living Vulnerably, and I was immediately drawn to it. I picked it up, took it home, contacted your publisher. I said, I want to read this book, and then I need to get this guy on the podcast.

1:45 I was so intrigued. Can you, I guess, start by sharing with me what was the catalyst for you embarking on a year of living vulnerably and choosing to write about it? Yeah, it's look I mean. The funny thing is, I didn't want to write this book. It was not my intention. It wasn't meant to be my second book. In fact, I'd never imagined that I would write it. But I was diagnosed with complex post traumatic stress disorder in early twenty nineteen as a result of something I'd learned doing the book tour for my first book about how trauma might actually apply it to my life. And no one had ever said that to me, like in all of the psychological sessions i'd done, had we spoke about traumatic things that happened, and we use the word trauma, but no one ever said, I think you have a condition as a result of trauma. And that is very separate to being told that you've got you know, generalized anxiety disorder or depression. They manifest very differently. And so I kind of decided that if I could, like if I could be taken by surprise, have you written a whole book about intergeneration or trauma in my family and I could still be taken by surprise, that I kind of needed to do something with that, And so that's where this book started my year of living vulnerably.

2:58 I find that really interesting. I haven't read your first book. I really would like to now, having read the second one. My family's from Country, Queensland. I grew up into Warmbar. You understand, oh yeah, right right with I know it well, yes, indeed, So I relate a lot to what you write about. What you talk about about your growing up and your family of origin and all that sort of stuff. But I find that really interesting that you having written about trauma even in your own family, and having been diagnosed with mental health conditions as an adult that you didn't make that connection. How common do you think that is now? Because I think it's very common. One of the points I was trying to make in this book is that I think particularly complex PTSD or developmental trauma, whatever you want to call it, the emotional side of trauma, rather than a single event like a car accident. I think that is at the heart of almost all dysfunction everything in society. I agree everything, I agree.

3:53 We are on one hundred percent of the same page. It's like being taught, you know, It's like going into the matrix right where you can finally see everything in code. Except the code in this instance is that's family breakup. That's emotional neglect. It presents itself in every facet of the welfare system, the criminal justice system, drug and alcohol abuse. Like it's just and I'm like, can no one else see this? You can? And now you see it everywhere? Yeah, yeah, you can't unsee it exactly. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a friend and I said to her, I shared with her that, you know, seventy percent of the population has experienced major trauma. You know, because we talk about now the distinction between what they call big T trauma, you know, those major traumas sexual assault, and the little tea you know, the minor sort of injustices or the lesser I guess, in severity. And I said, but you know, apparently seventy percent of the population have experienced major trauma, and she was saying, wow, like that's unbelievable, Like that's really.

4:52 Significant, like it is. And then in a separate conversation, we were talking about our growing up years and she was. Sharing with me all of the trauma that she's experienced. And in my head, I was thinking, okay, but you seem surprised by that seventy percent, But you've just told me about all of your trauma. And I don't think that she was making that connection. No, No, and I didn't at all, because and you still get it. There will be people who will listen to this podcast, and I don't blame them for asking the question, but they will say, but didn't everyone have a difficult childhood in some way, shape or form. Everyone's had not everyone, but a lot of people have had broken families where a parent left. The cold, hard truth of it all is is that those things really do mess you up, exactly, And it's different for different people.

5:37 That's always been the case. But if something happens at the right moment in time, at the right age when you were developmentally vulnerable to this, like in my case, I was seven, I was almost the perfect age to remember this kind of snapshot of abandonment. If you're oriented in a way where that stuff can really impact you, then bam, it hits you, and it hits you hard. And you know, I've got friends who are from really well off families, who didn't experience poverty and who went to the best schools, whose parents split up when they were in primary school, and who have suffered greatly because of it. It's different for different people, but it's so insidious and it's so embedded that we actually don't question it. And so I really welcome this, these conversations and books like yours and.

6:22 Just people shining a light on the. Fact that we need to widen our definition of trauma and we need to become I think, on the exactly like you said, we need to become more aware of the role that it plays in all of the things, all of the things I said to Nicole. La Perra who's the holistics. So I college she's going to beg Instagram following I had her on the podcast a year or so ago and I said to her, I have come to the conclusion. I think that we all talk about being our most authentic selves or be you know, go out there and be your most authentic self. I don't think anybody knows who their most authentic self is. I think everybody is a walking bundle of conditioned responses and survival strategies.

7:04 Oh god, God, yes, it's all about just making it through childhood, and then you're stuck with whatever coping mechanism worked for you. I mean that's basically what I am. I am a bag of flesh that happened to develop these really unhealthy strategies to survive year seven of his life. And now we're kind of just like, oh, well, I guess I'm stuck with this fear of being lied to and abandoned by male figures in my life. Like that's a toxic combination as a thirty five year old. I'm going to show you, Yeah, Sorick, what could you share with us what happened when you were seven? I know you share it in the book, but for the listeners. Oh yeah, yeah, I always just I just keep going on about it as if it's like, oh no, something I stuck by toad. It was all a sequence of events, right, So just very briefly, nineteen ninety four, my brother has burned in a really bad accident on the station. I watched it happen. I was right next to him. We didn't know if he was going to live, and I watched my dad pull him out of this pit, it still hot to the touch, with his skin just hanging off him. And then we had to wait because we're on a cattle station in the outback, so we had to wait hours and hours and hours for the row Line doctor service, which had to do a refuel coming from the birds Will races. And so just watching that suffering unfold, and then I always forget to mention my poor sister, who I loved dearly, but she was three weeks old at this point. Was like, you never mentioned that I have a baby at this point. I'm like, yes, because at that point, like I remember you, but it was just not I don't even know what we did with the baby at this point. So my sister Lauren and my mum get on the plane with my brother

8:35 for the flight to Brisbane, and there's no room for me on the plane, which you don't know of itself. Is fine, and I don't blame them, obviously, but my dad and I didn't have a great relationship as it was. I was a bit of a weird kid. He didn't really understand me. I desperately sought his affection. Like the month there's a famous story about where I got stuck in the middle of a creek, like up to my knees in mudgs, surrounded by cattle because my dad didn't wave goodbye to me when he went back went off on the horse. So I followed him that he say goodbye to me. Yeah, I know, this is before all of this happened. And so while my mom and my sister and my brother are away in hospital, my brother's fighting for his life for two months, my dad has an affair with the nineteen year old governess. I'm alone on this cattle station. It's isolated to thousand square kilometers, and I watch it happen like I saw her like jumping on his lap when I tried to surprise them after having a shower. I saw them kissing after dinner.

9:27 One night, I saw her washing the bed sheets, and I was like, what the fuck? What was going on? Like even as a seven year old, I knew it was weird, and I knew that something was happening, but I didn't have the language for it. And God, if you want to articulate literally a maddening situation for someone, it's not giving them the language to understand what it is that's happening, but giving them the feeling that it's wrong. And that is the moment. In particular, those weeks that I spent alone on that session, I don't remember anything except those encounters where I run into her on his lap, them kissing her, watching the bedge. I remember nothing else. Isn't it interesting? What sticks? The important stuff that sticks? Correct enough to know, like later on, to anchor myself in that moment, but not enough that I had to remember every painful, aching silence every day where I was.

10:15 I mean, I don't know what we did, and it still drives me a little bit wild because I've got a great memory, like especially of early children. I've got such vivid memories of growing up as a kid on a cal station well before I turned seven years before because It was such a great childhood up until that point, really, despite a few little problems. But I can't pierce the complete blackness of those weeks. I can't do it. What I'm just curious to know. So was there any contact with your mum and your brother during that time? There was? There was, And again I think back to it, and I can't piece together the sequence of events. But I know that Mum sent care packages back because I do remember getting a care package. But again I don't remember my Dad being there, like I don't remember any other moments of I assume we spoke on the phone.

11:04 I don't remember talking to Mum on the phone. It was some time after the accident. Before Dad we got in the car and we drove to Brisbane to finally see them, and I still I don't remember the car. I remember being in that hospital with my brother, and I just let my memory kicks back in, but I don't remember anything else. And then we went back and we still had to wait for them to come home because my brother was getting skin grass and back in the day when it was even more rudimentary than it is than it is now, which is they will literally scrape it off you somewhere to get the skin. Yeah, just take it where they could. So that is significant trauma. And I think so now it time. Yes, and my brother experienced the physical trauma right and also the loss of his dad after this because of subsequent family breakdown and became a textbook case study for a Waywood straight boy, sisterender boy who kind of gets into drugs and alcohol and doesn't have his father. Fore and I experienced the emotional trauma before and after so and we dealt with it in different ways, but also we both both suffered because of it.

12:12 And so I mean, I guess that manifested later in life in various ways. How do you connect the dots now, like what sort of things did you experience? What were your survival patterns? Rick? I guess that you now realize how direct result of that. Well, I mean, the interesting thing is that it took a long time for me to realize that anything had gone wrong. Like I knew that that whole period was terrible, and I used to tell the story to anyone who would listen, but I told it almost as if it happened to someone else. And the hardest thing was then being raised by a single Mum an amazing woman who loved it steely, but we just had no money because Dad FROs bank accounts. He kicked us out. Wow, whispered yeah, he because he basically when they got back from I should probably tell you that when they got back from hospital, he basically said, I don't love you anymore. But I mean my brother was his favorite, and seeing that happened to my brother broke him. He had a terrible childhood himself, my dad like way. It was violent and cruel in ways that are almost unimaginable. And he turned out to be a pretty good dad all things considered, except he couldn't handle his emotions, and this is something I've always been really afraid of, and so he just just became a coward essentially, when he was faced with what happened to my brother and couldn't deal with it, so he kicked us out. He froze the bank accounts, he sold the car that was in both his end Mum's name, which should have required her signature, but this is sexist nineteen nineties, and Dad just convinced the guy to let it happen. So Mum got nothing for years until there

13:43 was a settle when they owned a small block of land in Booner, which I think she got like ten thousand dollars from at the time, but that was a few years later, and it was enough to set us up in terms of furniture and stuff like that, get her a car, but we had nothing. And so the thing that I was preoccupied with for all of those years until I turned twenty one and realized that I was gay, was, oh, we don't have a lot of money. But other than that, I was so naive. And then of course dealing with my sexuality in my twenties when I'm away on the Gold Coast for university and work kind of precipitated my first breakdown. But it wasn't until a few quite a few years later, actually twenty twelve when I found out that Dad, or twenty fourteen actually when I found out that Dad had found out that I was gay and had said to my brother, despite everything that had happened to us and that he had helped happen to us, he said, basically, what your brother's doing isn't right. I don't agree with his lifestyle and stuff like that. So it was like the emotional neglect in a low level abuse I could deal with, but that broke me. That was the start of this unraveling that took a very very long time to correct.

14:56 So you had a series of, well you call them sort of mental breakdowns. I do, and I mean that. I know we're probably not meant to use those terms anymore, but I find it hard to describe. They were violent, they were jarring, they were incredibly unnerving. They were like I look back and I have a pretty vivid memory of some of the moments where I completely lost it. Not at anyone. I didn't hurt anyone physically, but just screaming at people who I loved and who loved me, but who I had judged in those moments were not helping me in the way that I thought that they should, which was to tell me that I am lovable. Of course, the bar I set for them was that they had to tell me and remind me always and forever. Because I create whole arguments in my head. I would array information from every conceivable source, text, messages, photos, inflection points in a sentence set in a verse conversation, and I would use that information to essentially create a narrative that these people were trying to leave me, or abandon me, or get the hell away from me, because that had been my experience to that point. And I look back at these moments and they were shattering in just the toll they took on me. And I had no understanding of what was happening. I just thought I had really bad anxiety, and anxiety is crippling and bad, but this was different, and I didn't know that at the time because I'd

16:27 been diagnosed with anxiety. It's all I'd been diagnosed with. What I would do was because I never had this affectionate male role model in my life, and so every now and then I would come across I would get a friend or develop a friendship with a guy. And I've got lots of male friends who were gay and straight and everything in between, but it was always the straight ones. And I think there was an element of me being bedazzled by the idea that a straight guy would a choose to be friends with me, and a particularly kind of straight guy who would actually not just choose to be friends with me, but would actual be affectionate in their love and attention, not in a romantic sense, but in a you know, hug your mates, telling me you love them, chat to them openly about feelings and things like that. It was like watching David Copperfield make the shutter, the space shuttle disappear, like there was that kind of like, oh, I still think it, like I still am, like there's something intoxicating about it because I didn't get it. And so those friendships in particular were fine if the person already had a partner, or if they were single, but the moment something changed and they were looking for a new partner or they were dating someone for the first time as a single person was when everything around me felt like it was being up ended.

17:39 And I can literally still feel the feeling in certain moments when I found out, either directly from the person, and there's different people. The attachment's always the same, but different people who trigger it. I can still remember the feeling either when they've told me, oh, I just met this cool chick and we went on a day that it was amazing, or when I found out from a friend of a friend. It's like someone is seeing this person and it was like I'd been shot. It was visceral and like I was leaving my body because it was just fear and the thing that again it took me, so I knew that that was the trigger after four or five years, But it wasn't literally until a couple of years ago, where I realized that it wasn't specifically about the attention. It was about me trying to figure out what was going on, because that was me when I was seven. I knew that Dad was lying to me.

18:36 I knew that something was happening. I didn't know what it was, and it drove me crazy. I know we shouldn't use such terms, but here we are, and I genuinely believe because it happens. I think it's why I'm a good journalist. Sometimes when someone lies to me, I just get obsessive about finding out the truth. And the thing that really broke me in these situations was not that the person was dating someone, but it was that I wasn't sure how it was going to end up. I didn't know whether they were going to be together for a long time and I would be welcomed into their friendship group, or whether they would leave me as a result of this new relationship. And it was me trying to find out that was just crippling totally. And I can prove that actually just quickly I can prove that because in a few situations the person did date someone for three months and then it became sort of a long term thing, and it just finished this feeling that I had this complete up ending, but if completely went away, as if nothing had ever happened.

19:34 It's interesting, isn't it. We all have two varying degrees difficulty tolerating uncertainty, and I think particularly the more chaotic or the more unpredictable, or the more uncertain, then the lower your tolerance for that ambiguity. And we go about all sorts of ways trying to put things in place in our lives to try to minimize ambiguity and unsernish. I mean, because I had to be I had to be tolerant it to it for so long, and I didn't realize. It's kind of like a fish in the ocean, right. You don't realize that you're swimming in water until you're out of it, and then you're like, anything that's even mildly uncertain then just sets you off. Through this process. Rick like you're you said, you're seeing therapists, you've generalized anxiety disorder, or there's this, or there's this, like through that process.

20:21 How much did I guess you come. To understand things like, you know, your attachment style. You know, as a psychologist you're. Talking about, you know, somebody with an say, an anxious or an avoid at attachment style. Somebody with an anxious attachment style, they'd say, becomes especially sensitive to any signal or queue of a possible rejection. Like what did you learn things like that about yourself? Oh? I don't think I did. And I'm trying to think, like, I mean, I know that there were we did go through schemas at one point, but I think there was with the therapists who diagnosed with the complex post traumatic stress disorder. Before that, I'd never heard of schemas. I certainly don't remember anything beyond oh, yeah, you've got an attachment issue, which is that your dad left you. But really it was all about it and I can understand why.

21:12 But it was cognitive behavioral therapy, right, and so I'm sure of works. I've got no doubt about it, except except it never fucking worked for me, because every time I went to the therapist was when I was having a mental breakdown. I was in acute stress, acute acute stress distress. I should say and at no point with any of the seven or eight psychologists that I have seen, including one psychiatrist actually so nine that I've seen over theirs decade, at no point was I in the state of mind to take on board anything that they were saying. For good reason, right Like I, we're all trained in CBT in psychology.

21:57 I've never been a massive fan. Never worked for me either. Ironically, this book for me was cognitive behavioral therapy, but I wrote it from a place of me being relatively mentally stable, and I had money for the first time in my life, so I could actually afford to take care of myself, which meant that I was cooking and exercising. Great mental health care is you know, something is for the privileged, for you who can really afford to take it? Really fuck it is. So I'm trying to keep my swearing down, but people ask me. They're like, oh, so, you know, did you write this book to help yourself? And I'm like, well, yeah, But also I think I could only write the book because I had money, not heat some money, but enough that I didn't have to worry for the first time in my life.

22:40 I believe I need to say cognitive behavioral therapy has its place. It's certainly one of the fundamental things that I teach people as a therapist and as a coach I do both, is that the thoughts that you think are clearly going to have an impact on the way that you feel. And sometimes you have automatic thoughts about things, and they they're not rational, they're from some early experience and let's just be aware of them, right. So that's of course that has its place. There are people out there, can I say, in particularly in the life coaching world, who teach that model as the answer to everything, change your thoughts and chant you and good as gold, and it drives me wild.

23:21 And to them, I would like to say a big fu yes. So would I. So would I. So what you have experienced is the way trauma lives in your body, and anything in your world can trigger a visceral reaction in your body, and it is stored in a part of your brain that is not accessible. It's not in your prefrontal. Cortex, no at all. And that I mean, that's what I find so well, It's fascinating to me now but also scary because I'm not a dumb person. I am relatively intelligent emotionally, probably very undercooked, to be quite honest about.

24:02 But I journey, you know, as my mum would say when I was growing up, for somebody so fucking smart, you've got no common sense, and she was right, but I was. I don't. I still cannot properly describe the feeling of being hijacked by a part of myself that I can't access. It is scary as hell, and it is wild to me that we think talk therapy will get you all the way through that, because it can't. I mean, I'll just very briefly tell you about the very first time I saw a psychologist after I was at university, which I barely count because I can't even I didn't even remember it until that psychologists got in touch with me after this book came out, but I saw it was on Medicare. I was a bulk build psychologist in Newtown. God bless her. But it was one of the worst experiences of my life because I was at the very early stages of these role series of complete catastrophes in my life that I did not understand at all. At that point, I'm like, wife is happening to me? And this psychologist just gives me like a photocopied book that's bound together. It's like two hundred and fifty pages or something like that of a four sheets of what is essentially an XCEL spreadsheet, where I had to write down in fifteen or half hour blocks everything that I was thinking, feeling, eating, or doing. And I'm like, I'm not showering, like I'm not looking after myself right now.

25:29 I'm absolutely not in a position to live more inside my head than I already am. I just I am not functioning. And that was pretty much that. It was just so dispiriting that that was my first proper experience with a psychologist, because that's what they're funded to do. And it's heartbreaking because it does leave people feeling like there's no hope, Like if this is what psychology has got to offer me, and this is all there is, then what hope. I thought I was done for? I thought I was done for. I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you apps drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. You describe in the book a process of neuro feedback, which I was fascinated by because I'm not familiar with that, but I found it fascinating.

26:31 Can you describe what that was about and what you learned? Yeah, I mean, I good question, because I mean I'd never heard of it either. Neurofeedback is essentially a way to try and trick your brain into behaving itself via the use of they put electrodes on your head. The best example is they put all these electrodes on your head. There's brain waves that are meant to be in certain quadrants and frequencies that in a healthy person look certain a certain way. And so what they try to do, who is pick the frequency that is best for the different parts of your brain to be in and then set a protocol, and then you watch a game of pac Man with the electrodes on your head. Now, when your brain waves are in the right range, pac Man goes and he eats all the lollives and you're watching him go. But when your brain waves are outside of the healthy range or the range that they're trying to promote, he stops, he freezes. Now you can't and they say this to you, you can't control pac Man, you can't do it. Your brain will figure out on its own eventually that the reward is to tweak those brainwaves and eventually, over time it will get better. And I would love to know the answer to that. But COVID came along, and because it's a very touch intensive thing, at the very bit they put gel in your ears, they're up close and personal, and so I just had to interrupt it halfway through. What I do know is that, for reasons I can't explain, after those sessions, I felt like I'd been hit by a bus on the line lass one that I did, I fell asleep, like I got

28:02 home and I fell literally passed out for like four hours. It was wild and literally all you had been doing is looking at something happening on a screen, just. Sitting in a chair doing what I do for work, which is sitting in a chair and looking at a screen. One of them, I got to watch The Matrix, which was also very funny. It was a show about whether you're in control of your life. The principles the same, like if your brain's not doing what it's supposed to do. There's this kind of opaque white cloud that develops over the film and you get annoyed because you're like, I want to watch the film, and so that disappears. If your brain ways are doing what they're meant to do. It's fascinating, really, isn't it. And it's very similar in concept to well, not exactly, but like emdr which is the other thing I've read about, which which is about it like it's an embodied thing, right.

28:49 They're trying to get to the parts of the not the parts of the body, but they're trying to reach into your body to extract understanding or change in a way that talk there a big can't do. Because I've talked, I can talk about this until the cows come home. And I'm not saying it's not helpful, because there was a point where I didn't have language for what's happening to me, and that was scary as hell and I was in the dark, and getting that language brought me. It was kind of leveled up, as like playing a video game character, like I leveled up to the next level. But you can't fight the final boss of trauma just with talk therapy you need, you need the potions and the spells in the subconscious to do that. Yeah, I believe that as well. I'm not trained in EMDR. But the other one that I'm really into is EFT tapping. This whole tapping on.

29:34 You complete news to me. Oh you're not heard of tapping. No, so it's. I've got terrible rhythm, but go on, So. For yet, all good, just quickly for listeners. EMDR is iye, movement desensitization reprocessing, I think, is what EMDR stands for, and it is is a form of therapy where you move your eyes, is my understanding, and it does something can rewise your brain and you don't actually have to. Talk about your trauma, but you. Think about it while you're doing these eye movements. And but there is loads of evidence now for it. These things seem so woo woo and so out there.

30:15 And it sounds crazy and they actually work. So ef T tapping it's called EFT stands for Emotional Freedom technique. But it again, it came out of this really weird sort of energy healing thing, but it somehow worked for people. And it involves connecting with your whatever is distressing or uncomfortable or you know, an unhelpful belief for example, like I'm a shit person, or a feeling of emotional distress, something that causes stress in your body. So it's quite universally applicable anything that causes you to feel some level of distress. And then you as you connect with that, you tap on these pressure points on your face and you know, upper body basically, and again.

31:01 It dissolves. It dissolves. I mean, I absolutely believe that. And what happens. And the very first studies of e FT tapping were with PTSD and combat veterans, and they it's far more effective than CBT. It works faster, and it lasts longer. And now they've done studies on a whole lot of other different populations. And problems physical pain, chronic pain. Psychological struggles, trauma, anxiety, and it works and it lasts, and there's hundreds of research, you know, clinical research trials now that support its effectiveness. So it's now being becoming quite mainstream. It just makes me so sad just looking back on it, like the amount of times I just left a psychologists room not to mention the fucking GPS to get my mental health care plan I've never had a good GP.

31:50 I don't dislike GPS. I know people who have amazing ones, but I personally have never had a good one. In fact, I've had ones that maybe want to hurt myself because of the experience of trying to like get this thing. But yeah, just looking back on and like the psychologists who are kind of handstrung because of the funding system in Australia, the way Medicare works the same with the GPS. The hamstrung in terms how much time they can spend with you. And none of this stuff is set up to deal with any kind of chronic health, which requires time and attention and effort, and mental health is one of the biggest chronic health problems we've got. Yeah, it is rick. You make the distinction in the book between knowing what it means to be vulnerable and actually being vulnerable.

32:35 Oh god, I'm guilty of failing on this, do you know what? So I started dating someone this year because it was kind of to me as the final frontier. And the thing is I wasn't They were very attractive, but I wasn't really into them, except that it became exciting, and then after a few weeks It became like a or because I am not used to spending so much time with other people and I'm really bad at sharing myself, and so it felt like work. And I was like, oh, fuck, I don't want to do this. But in my head, I'm like, no, you wrote a whole book about being vulnerable. You've got to be open to this anyway. Can I just tell you that was one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made in my doe. It did not end well.

33:21 It did not end well. Out really no, Oh, that's disappointing. It added in a way that was actually harmful to me, probably to both of us, but certainly to me in a way that probably set me back. And I realized I made a mistake, I think, and I think my mistake was confusing vulnerability and being open to something with ignoring the rational part of your brain that is also there to help protect you. And so it is a finely balanced thing, right. But I do genuinely believe that if with the people in your life that you do love and that you do have relationships with, being vulnerable cannot hurt you. In fact, it's never done anything but prop me up and make me better, make me a better person. It doesn't mean that you need to like every time you see someone you love and just be like, all right, now, open up to me and tell me.

34:07 You don't need no, Just hug your friends, tell the people you love you love them. And if you're going through a shitty time, tell people and ask for help. Like that's the core of it. It's not about being a newer energy person or any of that, and like, if that works for you, good on you. But it's not about any of those things. It's about being practical and not shutting yourself off from the world. I think that's the most important thing. And I say that as someone who's currently shutting off myself off from the world. Some here we go. You make a really good point there about self trust, about the impact of trauma on your ability to trust yourself to make good decisions or the right decisions for you. You also, I'm going back a little, you were sexually assaulted in your twenties and never really it seems like didn't actually make the connection that that was that wrong thing or.

35:07 Wrong My best friend did and correctly made the decision to let me come to that understanding on my own because I don't think it would have worked for her to be like, you were raped, because I would have been like, huh no, and also why would you say that? But I was, and I did damage in ways that I'm still trying to understand because I thought it was funny. I told it as a funny story. I mean, I didn't actually think it was funny. I think deep down I knew that it wasn't, but in order to deal with it, I had to make it funny. I thought it was what I wanted, even though I was so drunk and I was unable to communicate and I was raped by someone I didn't go home with. It was these two other people in the house and who I didn't choose any of this stuff, and so it was kind of like, oh, well, I'm like, well, I went home with one person, but I guess I got the rest.

35:58 Like it was just just really and I'm not comparing myself to them, but reading up on similar types of you know, children in particular who have been through abusive type situations or emotional abuse or neglect, and the Romanian orphanages is the one that really springs to mind because they did studies right on the kids who were ripped away from their parents, and they were not held, they were not touched, they were fed completely nutritious diet, but they didn't have any actual love in their life. And those kids, compared to kids who managed to spend some time in foster care versus kids who had never taken from their families, those kids were the most likely to answer the door to a stranger and the stranger asked them to go, hey, come with me, and they would just do it. They were so abused and so degraded by everyone in their life that what's one stranger, Why would you change your approach? And so there's a part of the abused person in whatever shape or form that abuse happens where either you don't trust yourself to make the correct decision, or you just don't have the language or the ability to talk to think about it, so you just you do things that are ordinarily more dangerous or more harmful than someone who was raised with two parents in a loving home might do, for example. And I think that's why, you know, I certainly I get myself into situations and I'm not blaming myself for this, but the way I dealt with it was very much a hallmark of oh well, that's I mean, it wasn't out of the normal like I did. I degraded myself in many other ways in my twenties, and then this relationship that ended really badly. It was never going to

37:28 work out, and it was going to be really difficult if it did, for a whole bunch of reasons which I won't go into to protect the other person's privacy. But it was not going to be an emotionally sustainable thing. It was going to hurt both of us in the long term, I think, and that's not healthy. But I was just like, well, I guess this is what you need to do, which is just yeah, it's just not a way to go through life. I should point out I had never dated anyone before that point. I turned thirty five in March, so I was, you know, and talent of thirty four turning thirty five, and this is the first time I've ever had, I guess, a boyfriend. We called each other boyfriend. At one point I was like, well, that seemed strange to me.

38:09 I have heard or read somewhere that people who have experienced trauma tend to be like later with everything. I thought, yeah, that makes sense like, oh, yeah, everything's still late. I'm a child still because I mean I got frozen in time. I got frozen in time at the age of seven, essentially, which is a strange thing to say out loud, because I'm otherwise successful. I have an amazing life in many respects, but I have missed every major developmental milestone. You know, I did the first time ever dated someone, and I was just like, I was like going to the zoo and be like, am I allowed to touch the monkey? Like it was just like a strange experience to have.

38:50 Yeah, I thought that when I read that, it hadn't occurred to me before. And I thought that was a really useful thing for people to understand, because you can feel like, what's wrong with me or something when everything's you're almost like a decade behind everybody else because you spend so much time just trying to make up for. And it's like just make up for every and it's not to help by the fact that I was gay as well, like, which just kind of compounded it because I didn't get any of that. You know, I don't think I would have had the ability to do it anyway because of my childhood, but I didn't get to date anyone in high school. I didn't get to have a crush that I got to talk open. I had so many crushes on boys, but I couldn't tell a soul. I could not tell anyone. I remember seeing my first real life gay couple when I was twenty and I was at university, and I was so like, I'm like, you mean they just walk around and people know that they're together. Like it was like mind blowing to me.

39:42 And I remember when I went to my best friend's wedding and I invited my mom and what they invited my mom and my sister because we the families are close in twenty fifteen, and my sister left that because we had a mutual friend on our table, and she left that she said to me, She's like, Rick, that's the first time I've seen a gay couple in real life. And I'm gay and they all knew that at this point. So it's just like all of these experiences that you might have had during the time when you're allowed to figure yourself out are suddenly happening or potentially happening at a time when you should have figured yourself out according to everyone else. And I haven't, and I don't know that I will ever catch up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think the best thing we can I am really all about self compassion. Like again, I think trauma is the biggest, the problem, the fun foundation of all the problems in the world. And I think, honestly, self compassion is the answer to everything.

40:34 It's the more we can be kind to. Ourselves and accept ourselves and be a little bit more tolerant and patient and forgiving of ourselves, the better off we will all be. It does set a good foundation I think for the way you go about yourself carrying yourself in the world. Last, but not least, your book is about trauma and it is laugh out loud funny in part crack me up. You know. I think we're just really coming to understand trauma better at the moment. But I also saw some meme on Instagram recently about the funniest people are. The traumatized people? One hundred right, what's your take on that?

41:16 I mean, the funniest people that I've ever met, and I mean this as a group. First Nations people in Australia, the most brutalized, colonized, you know, victims of racism, subjective to just like dehumanizing forces every day of their existence, right, And they are the funniest people I've ever met. And I you know, one of my favorite people is Ronnie Gorri, who wrote the book Black and Blue. And she makes me laugh because like I remember we were doing a right Assessal event together and that we'll just talk about whether we need a lectern and she's like, no, I need the leg turn. We can't all be fucking Einstein over here in points at me. And she reminded me so much of my mum. And I think there's and I'm not comparing you know, our white trash struggled First Nations people. But the struggle of some sort does require of the person. I think, if you've survived it, it requires a sense of humor. In fact, it may build the sense of humor. I'm not sure and the cause and effect there, but I know that for a fact that my mum is one of the funniest people that I've ever met, and that together me and my mum and my sister like just hows of laughter about things that you probably shouldn't say in public.

42:27 Right, Yeah, badly, I get that, Yeah, yeah, no. And it's like, and it's it's because I mean, what else is there? Right? And I know everyone says if you don't laugh, your crime, but it's actually true. But also, and I genuinely mean this, like, I think the people who get offended at those types of things or those senses of humor, I'm like, I'm not talking about people like making jokes about minorities or something like that, but just about their own experiences in life. The people who can't handle that are people who haven't really had to go through anything terrible, and fuck I wish that was me. Good good luck to them. But like at Rider's festivals and things like that, there's often one or two people who were just like, oh, I couldn't. I just couldn't.

43:08 I couldn't read your book. I couldn't finish it because it was just too horrible, and not because they were being triggered by it because of their own background, but because they had never been exposed to it, and which is fair. It's fucking hard reading sometimes, but also it's like have a laugh, like we're here to walk you through it, and that's probably the greatest gift that you can get from an experience like that. I think, Yeah, and. I just wanted to make sure I make that point because it is a really it is a really good read, and it is why you know, I was really keen to go back and read your first book as well, because you articulate so well and it's very relatable and hilarious for some dark content like there's it's it is laugh out loud funny in part, and.

43:53 Like, I mean, the thing that I've learned, and I know we're out of time, but the thing that I've learned is that even in the darkest moments, the moments there is comedy. Rick, Thank you so much for your time, and thank you for turning your experience into a book. You said it wasn't your intention, but I'm very glad personally that you did, and it's been a pleasure. Yeah. So why it's a very special book to be that book because I still read it for myself sometimes just to remind myself of yeah, just to remind myself that you did think this and you do believe this, and it's a constant project. It did occur to me that in the year of living vulnerable, writing the book seems like probably the most vulnerable thing.

44:33 Oh god, it almost killed me. It was just not necessarily because of the emotions, although that was definitely part of it, and COVID happened obviously, and I was like, oh God, but it was just all of that with the combination of having to do this incredible workload. I just I'm just not built for that. I'm fundamentally a very lazy person. I just want to live my life and be happy. You know, yeah, don't we all, don't we all? Well, I appreciate I appreciate that you made that you made. The effort for all of our benefit. Thank you, Thank you. Cash Rick's book is called My Year of Living Vulnerably.

45:14 It's available right now in all bookstores. If you love Crapy to Happy, please do make sure that you subscribe, leave a review, and come and. Follow me on socials. I'm cast done underscore XO on Instagram or TikTok castdone dot XO on Facebook. I cannot wait to catch you on the next episode of Crappy to Happy. Listener