Childhood Trauma can be abandonment and silence. It can be bullying and abuse. It can be a totally dysfunctional family or it can be a drug and alcohol addicted parent. For Michael Unbroken, it was all of the above and more.
Generational trauma ran down both lines of Michael’s family tree and it played out in front of him everyday of his childhood.
I asked Michael what he did differently? Why didn’t he get trapped into the cycles of abuse, addiction and destruction that he saw daily?
He told me this… “boundaries. I knew how to say “no”. And I got good at it”.
Michael is sharing with us the chaos of his childhood and the first 6 steps he took on the healing path.
I came from generations of trauma. I was really born into chaos.
You look at generational trauma and this idea that what happens in the womb continues through birth. If you look at my family, our lineage, our legacy, from where I come from, there’s generations of trauma. I’m half Irish and half Nigerian, and so you have trauma dating back tens of thousands of years. Not only through those moments and experiences of birth, but slave trade and famine, and the list goes on and on and, it’s interesting the way people think that somehow we’re only a generation removed from all of the things that have ever happened, but that’s just not true.
You trace back our DNA and we’re all a part of the same experience dating back to the dawn of humanity. And so you’re in this thing where people fail to realise and understand that we are more than just the experiences we’re having. We’re also a combination of all the experiences that have ever happened in our DNA from history.
We have to recognise the truth that everything that’s ever happened impacts us. And so especially at that time, from what I do know and understand is, my mother was with a man who was abusive and who was an alcoholic.
And my grandmother, her mother, was super abusive to her, and she was an alcoholic. And my mom was doing drugs and drinking while she was pregnant. Not to mention all the violence, I’m sure that was happening. You’re born into that and that becomes the framework and baseline for everything you understand.
I was subject to violence and abuse.
What happened when you were 4 years old?
Let me just say this… please don’t compare my life to yours. It’s pretty crazy. It’s like a damn movie and I know it’s going to sound unbelievable. I promise you all of it is true. And if we compare, we take away from ourselves. So please do not do that.
So when, I was four years old, my mother, who’s a drug addict and alcoholic, actually cut off my right index finger. And so multiple surgeries, multiple skin grafts, and when I was six, she married my stepfather who was super abusive. The kind of guy you pray is never your stepfather. He kicked the shit out of my brothers and I and put me in the hospital multiple times. And so right now I’m six foot four, 220. I’m the size of an NFL linebacker.
When I’m a child, he’s my size. And imagine a man that big beating up a child daily, right? And so growing up it was always being in a space of fear, a space of shame, a space of guilt, never being able to have a voice, have an opinion. There was always a ramification and that was what I understood to be life.
When I turned eight, we were massively impoverished. And we were even homeless for periods of time. In fact, I lived with over 30 different families between eight to 12 years old. People from our church, strangers, family members, my grandma. Sometimes we live in a van and an abandoned house. I never knew where we were gonna end up.
And at that time, one really interesting thing happened. I started to notice that not every family was like my family. Not everyone was violent. Not everyone was hurtful. Not everyone, would lock you in a closet if you spoke out of turn, right?
And so I was getting access to all this information and recognizing like, Wait a second, something about my life is massively wrong. Well, when I was about 12 years old, I’d been living by myself in my stepdad’s mother’s house. So my mom was in rehab again. She didn’t tell anyone what happened. She was just gone. Apparently. She went on this drug bender. Next thing you know, she’s in state mandated rehab. Nobody can find her. She and my Stepdad had started the divorce process. He had all but disappeared. And so I’m living in this house by my freaking self with no heat, no electricity, no water. And my grandmother had found out.
There was total abandonment
And so six weeks or so goes by, I’m literally showering at school, stealing food from the big lots on the corner of 30th and Georgetown Road in Indianapolis, not really knowing or understanding what’s happening. Just being like, ‘I guess this is my life now’. And so my grandmother adopted me, which in some sense is like a godsend, right?
I learnt to use drugs and alcohol to numb the pain
Because it’s like, Oh, finally somebody. Well, yes and no. Again, I’m biracial black and white. My grandma’s an old racist white lady from a town in Tennessee in the middle of America you’ve never heard of. So like insert identity crisis. And at 12 years old, I started getting high, doing drugs. I was smoking weed, smoking cigarettes. I was popping pills.
By 13, I was getting drunk. As a kid, I looked at those things, I was like, Oh, this is how you connect. This is community. This is brotherhood. What I understand now, of course, looking back on it, oh, those are coping mechanisms. This was me stuffing everything down so I did not have to deal with the chaos of my reality.
By the time that I was 15, I got kicked out of high school for selling drugs, and so here I am, I’m selling drugs, breaking into houses, stealing cars, running from the police. I’m getting shot at like some movie shit, like some craziness, and I get a call one day from the guidance counsellor at school and she says, “Hey, you need to come to school. The Dean wants to talk to you.”
And I’m like, For what? You guys kicked me out already. We have nothing to talk about. But my grandma overhears the conversation. She says, “go to school, figure out what this is”. And I’m sitting in the library with the counsellor and this lady I’ve never seen before, and they tell me, “You’ve been nominated to be in a last chance program and we’re gonna give you an opportunity to graduate high school and not be whatever is destined for you if you don’t create change”.
1. Break Contact With A Toxic Parent
And I thought “well, what do I have to lose? Right?” And these amazing things happened in that time period. Two things. One, I put a restraining order on my mother and my stepfather. And two, you see my grades go from straight F’s to straight A’s. Next thing you know, I’m captain of the wrestling team. I’m on the football team, I’m dating a cheerleader. I have a real job. I quit doing drugs. I quit drinking. I removed myself from a lot of those friends, and I’ve literally posted this report card. It’s on the internet.
Well, a couple years goes by, my mother gets sober. For the first time ever. I’ve never seen her sober, and at the same time, my grandmother had fallen into a coma.
And so myself and my next youngest brother were living in this house by ourselves. My mother comes and moves back in with us. She’s now sober. My grandmother’s come out of the coma. She’s like, “Hey, you need to help these boys. Come be their mother, take care of them”. Within 30 days, my mom is back to hiding alcohol bottles, drinking and driving, crashing her car, popping pills, stealing money.
It was chaos and what I know now, of course, retrospectively, she was in the place of her trauma. She’s reverting to her coping mechanisms and behaviors. And one night she attacked me and I told her, and this was a really interesting moment in my life because my grades had started to fail again. I’m on the path to not graduating high school.
I’m doing drugs every single day. Like again, I’m in this cycle. And I told her after she attacked me, I said, ‘If you ever touch me again, I’ll kill you”. And I meant it. All the beatings, all the pain. I’d never done anything about it, because I’m like, that’s my mom and blah, blah, blah. That, indoctrination we have about family.
And so later that day, I said “not only if you ever touch me again will I kill you, but I’m never going to talk to you”. I knew. I know that’s like this crazy thing to do at 18 years old, but I knew if I didn’t make that decision, there’s no way I’d be here today doing what I’m doing. There’s no way. And I realised something at such a young age, that if I didn’t put myself first, nobody was going to. And so until the day she died, I think I talked to my mother once or twice because I had to protect myself.
And she ended up dying legless in some random place in Indiana from all the drugs, all the alcohol, all the chaos, right? Never healing, never breaking the cycle. And so as I’m going through this last phase of high school, my grandmother gets out of this coma. She’s back in our home. My mother’s away again, and I am just in whatever chaos you can imagine that someone could be going through. And so I end up not graduating high school.
I go to summer school and I’m in night school while I’m working a warehouse job. I’m literally taking these microchips and I’m putting them into motherboards on an assembly line, working for a giant computer company, 12 hours a day, four days a week.
And I get fired and I’m like, what is happening in your life right now? And the night before I got fired, I’m in night school and the teacher comes up to me and he says, “You know what? We’re done with you. You don’t want to be here. You’re wasting everyone’s time. We’re just giving you the diploma. Get out”.
2. Make a clear decision to get out of your stuckness
And I was like, “What? You’re going to give me the thing I didn’t earn so now I have this fake diploma, basically, right? And I’m sitting in my car after getting fired and I’m like, “okay, hold on. What is the solution for all this? For homelessness, for poverty, for abuse, for everything that I’ve been through for the last 18 years, that is so absolutely insane that I cannot even really understand it at that point in my life, you know?”
And I was like, “Oh, it’s money. That’s the thing that solves all these problems is money”. Because if we had that, then maybe our lives would’ve been better. And so I made a declaration to myself. I said, “by the time I’m 21, I wanna make a hundred thousand dollars a year legally”. And that legal part was super important, right?
Because I have family in prison for life. I’ve been in handcuffs more times than I can count. And my three best childhood friends have been murdered. I knew the path I was going down. And so I took all those skills I learned in that last chance program, and at 18 and a half years old, I was in a leadership position at a fast food place with 52 people under me.
And by the time I was heading into 21, I landed a job with a Fortune 10 company. No high school diploma, no college education, I’d almost hit my goal. I was so damn close. I made $96,800. But then my life became a complete disaster because you see, I didn’t have clarity, right? I didn’t really have any indication of what it was I wanted in my life.
I didn’t have any goals. I had no ambitions. The only thing I thought was going to fix and solve this problem, which we all know doesn’t work, was money. And so fast forward five years, I’m 350 pounds, smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, drinking myself to sleep. Cheating on my girlfriend. I’m high from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed.
My little brother literally tells me, “never talk to me again. You’re not my brother”. And I’m $50,000 in debt. Because money does not heal you no matter what you think. And after the thousandth rock bottom, I realised, I’m destroying everything again. I’m laying in bed. It’s 11 o’clock in the morning. I’m smoking a joint, eating chocolate cake and watching the CrossFit games.
3. Back Yourself. Design the life you want to live
And I thought, “Oh, this is the bottom”. This is as bad as it gets. Yeah. And I pulled myself up off that bed and I went into the bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror and to this day, I don’t know why I did this, but I remember I just said “F you man. You need to do something about this”.
So I’m looking in the mirror and I remember being eight years old and the water company had come and turned off our water and look, they were always turning off our water, our heat, our electricity. We were always getting evicted. Another Tuesday, this is not new. But for whatever particular reason on this day, I go in my backyard, I grab this little blue bucket, I walk across the street to our neighbor’s house, and for the first time I stole water.
And I remember being there, being like, You know what? When I’m a grownup, this will not be my life. And in a lot of ways, anyone would look at my life and be like, “that’s insane that he could accomplish all this coming from nothing”. But in so many ways, I was that hurt lost little boy.
4. Keep the promises you make to yourself
And as I looked in that mirror and I realized the truth, I was breaking the promise I had made to myself, and I asked myself a question, I said, “What are you willing to do to have the life you want to have?” And the answer was, “no excuses, just results”. And I meant it. And that meant no more being the victim.
No more blaming everybody for the shit I was doing. Go to therapy and be serious about it. Stop smoking, stop drinking, stop cheating, stop lying, get in shape, eat healthy food, learn, educate myself, become literate. Stop being ignorant. All of the things. And that’s what I did for years and years and years. And even to today, I still do it.
5. Set boundaries and stick with them
Tony Robbins talks about this a lot, and I think it’s really powerful. He says, ‘we will only ever tolerate what we allow ourselves to tolerate’. I had tolerated it, and even though I was a kid, you know, 18 years old, and I don’t know nothing about anything, I’m like, “no more”.
At 18 years old, looking at that situation with my mother, the foresight was obvious. Can you pay attention to the signs? Can you actually look at them and more importantly, are you willing to do something about what you find when you look at those signs?
And the problem is, some people aren’t done because they’re 45 and they’re still in relationships with abusive and narcissistic parents, with partners who don’t care about them and treat them like crap. With family members who would much rather run them over with a car than help them up, right?
6. Cut toxic people out of your life, even if they are your family
And, we live in this weird world where they say “family over everything”. No, not for me. The thing I was good at as a kid was setting boundaries. I didn’t have that word then. That word didn’t even exist. But I said “No”. And so I just kept to it and it just kind of grew. It just exponentially grew into this thing where the more I went through, the more I pulled away.
I have a 10 on this thing called the ACE’s score. Adverse Childhood Experiences survey. And so I discover, looking back, it’s like, “Oh, of course I behaved that way. Of course I did that thing. Look at this trauma”. And so a big part of pulling away from my mother and eventually I did the same with my grandmother as well. Not to the same extent, but my grandma is an old racist. She was a shitty person to be around as a biracial kid.
And so eventually I got to the point where I was like, “Oh, I’m done with you too. We’re not gonna do this. This is my life”. And that’s the thing that I was able to do was to take all the data, extrapolate it for what it was.
Most people hide the truth. People put it in front of you, they’re like, ‘hey look, this is real shit that happened in your life”.
And they say “No, it’s fine”. Okay, then don’t complain. Because if it’s fine, then that means it’s tolerable.
And it was so intolerable for me at 18.
These relationships, these friendships, these experiences with my family, I pulled away. In fact, besides my brother and my sister, I don’t talk to any of my family because they don’t bring value to my life. They’re takers. They are people who are unhealed, who are continuing the cycle.
And, that’s what I recognized at 18 in that moment with my mother. It sounds wild, but I meant it. I was gonna kill her if she ever touched me again. You can only do this so many times to a human before they have a full breakdown.
And I was there. And so I made a decision. And that’s the thing that has carried through my life even to today.
Michael is an incredible human and I had the honor of speaking with him on the podcast. To hear everything Michael shared go to Episode 114 of the podcast
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