Recovering from Your Childhood with Clay Jones | Learn From People Who Lived it

In this episode, you'll hear:

The long-term impacts of moving around a lot when you are a child
How to level up by moving through your fears and triggers
What helped Clay find forgiveness for his parents after their deaths?

Clay Jones is a father, social worker, and survivor who grew up as the youngest child in a dysfunctional, alcoholic, incestuous, and abusive family blended by marriage that frequently moved around the world. Mathew and Dr. Dave talk about the pros and cons of a transient childhood and how it impacted Clay in the long term. He tells us he felt like "the lost child" who didn't mourn leaving people and places he never felt connected to in the first place. Often left to his own devices, he says he became a "frozen boy" that grew into a "frozen man," not allowing himself to feel the good or the bad. He felt most safe with his older sister, but it wasn't until he was an adult that he learned his father had been sexually abusing her from ages 8 to 12. This caused her to be distant from the family and had a profoundly negative impact on Clay.

Domestic violence is often thought of as just involving male perpetrators and female survivors, but it's more complicated than that. Clay is now 20 years into his healing journey and is learning how to fully feel for the first time in a safe space. Even though the feeling of fear will never go away entirely, the ability to recognize it and move forward through it is its own sign of progress in recovery and reparenting. Clay has found ways to forgive both of his parents after their passing, and the trauma of his childhood now makes him a great social worker and loving father. The most important thing in his recovery has been taking a leap of faith, pushing past the shame, finding a community, connecting, and developing healthy relationships.

Clay has written a memoir about his life called My Sister's Brother. A short version of his recovery story can be found here.

"Forgiveness is an inside job."

In this episode, you'll hear: