Dealing With PTSD After Stroke – Dr. John A. King

Dealing With PTSD After Stroke – Dr. John A. King is an author, poet, long-time activist and founder of the Give Them a Voice Foundation in Texas, which he launched in 2015 to provide advocacy, support, resources and rescue for those who have been sexually abused or trafficked.

Socials:
https://drjohnaking.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjohnarthurking/
https://www.instagram.com/drjohnaking/

Highlights:

02:25 Introduction
09:05 Owning The Title
12:09 PTSD
16:07 Emotional Recovery
23:27 The Heart Brain
28:54 How Men Communicates
37:44 Opening Up.
48:32 Finding Common Grounds
56:47 Pouring Your Soul Into Something
1:04:53 Ignorance
1:15:18 Recognize And Communicate
1:21:23 What Stroke And PTSD Have In Common
1:24:50 Deal With It: Living Well With PTSD
1:32:47 PTSD After Stroke

Transcription:

Bill 0:00
The heart has between 30,000 and about 120,000 neurons in it. People with 30,000 neurons in their heart instead of 130,000 neurons in their heart are often the ones that are labeled cold hearted.

Dr. King 0:13
Oh, interesting?

Bill 0:14
Right. And the ones who are young at heart have got more neurons in their heart. So we can influence the number of neurons that we got in the heart, use it or lose it, same scenario. If we’re not practicing, being emotionally available, if we’re not young at heart, if we’re not joyful, we don’t have those neurons and they go away, they physically go away.

Bill 0:37
Therefore, we’re left with only the ones that make us cranky and crazy and disconnected from people, right? There is also neurons in the gut. So the gut has the same amount of neurons as a cat’s brain, which is like several 100 million. So to me that suggests a level of intelligence.

Intro 1:01
This is the recovery after stroke podcast, with Bill Gasiamis, helping you navigate recovery after stroke.

Bill 1:14
Hello, and welcome to recovery after stroke a podcast full of answers, advice and practical tools for stroke survivors. To help you take back your life after a stroke and build a stronger future.

Bill 1:26
I’m your host three time stroke survivor Bill Gasiamis. After my own life was turned upside down and I went from being an active father to being stuck in hospital. I knew if I wanted to get back to the life I loved before, my recovery was up to me.

Bill 1:41
After years of researching and discovering I’ll learned how to heal my brain and rebuild a healthier and happier life than I ever dreamed possible. And now I’ve made it my mission to empower other stroke survivors like you to recover faster, achieve your goals and take back the freedom you deserve.

Bill 1:58
If you enjoy this episode, and want more resources, accessible training, and hands on support, check out my recovery after stroke membership community created especially for stroke survivors and caregivers.

Bill 2:09
This is your clear pathway to transform your symptoms, reduce your anxiety and navigate your journey to recovery with confidence. Head to recoveryafterstroke.com to find out more after this podcast. But for now let’s dive right into today’s show.

Introduction – Dr. John A. King

Bill 2:25
This is Episode 162. And it contains course language and material about sexual abuse of minors. My guest today is Dr. John A. King who is a sexual abuse survivor and is living well with post traumatic stress disorder.

Bill 2:43
Dr. King is also an author, poet, longtime activist and founder of the give them a voice foundation in Texas, which he launched in 2015 to provide advocacy support resources and rescue for those who have been sexually abused or trafficked. Dr. John A. King welcome to the podcast.

Dr. King 3:07
Great Nice to be here mate I appreciate it very much.

Bill 3:13
Cheers my friend I know it’s scotch o’clock or or whiskey o’clock over there wherever you are.

Dr. King 3:20
Yeah it is mate 4pm you’re on coffee sorry mate you got a couple hours. It’s Saturday over there isn’t it?

Bill 3:25
It is welcome to the future my friend.

Dr. King 3:28
Let’s see how that goes give me the lotto numbers.

Bill 3:32
Well I don’t gamble so I can’t do that.

Dr. King 3:35
Neither do I but I’m telling you if a guy gave me 10 numbers mate I’ll take $1 and take a chance.

Bill 3:44
Fair enough. You got a pretty cool name in that there’s been some really important Dr. King’s you know in history. Especially in the United States of America.

Dr. King 3:58
Yeah, there is mate, say I’ve got black feller in me so I’m from the bundjalung tribe up in Byron Bay so second fleet Australians came over here and they were what you know kangaroos are black women that was about it.

Dr. King 4:09
You know so there’s always a little bit of that mixed in there. And it’s funny I was a little bit too white over here and not quite black enough over there. So it was nteresting coming over here and telling people you know, on the other black mate, you know, stride in First Nation stuff.

Dr. King 4:27
And you may not nah you’re not black I said well I look, we’re a little different like, yeah, we’ve been at this thing a little longer than you think so you know, there wasn’t a lot of us between the Irish and the kangaroos. There’s nothing much going on. So yeah, I appreciate it mate Martin Luther King is a legend. I’ve got nothing in common with Billie Jean King at all. I’m not female or lesbian or a tennis player.

Bill 4:52
I was gonna say you can’t play tennis. I find it interesting what you said, you know that blending in, not quite doing it there and not quite doing it here or, or not being quite white enough and that kind of stuff.

Bill 5:11
I am white, when I’m in Australia, I don’t feel like I’m at home, I get called a wog and I get called all sorts of things by the Anglo Saxon whites, you know. And then when I go to Greece to visit my family, where they’re all from where my parents came from, I get called an Australian.

Bill 5:34
And so far out, like I have got an identity crisis, I don’t know exactly where I fit. And I felt more at home in Greece, just because of the reception that I get there is a warmer reception than the one that I get here. Not that I get mistreated on a daily basis here in Australia.

Bill 5:52
It’s just that I don’t know they’re warmer in their welcome. So I really understand what you’re saying. Like I totally appreciate that. Is that does it ever does does it get in the way of how you feel about your homeland, and then how you feel about your adopted land?

Dr. King 6:10
I think what gets in the way is people’s really stupid attitude towards race. I think that’s the thing that I find most annoying. And I remember growing up in Australia, you know, we really didn’t have a problem there was black fellows and white fellows, you know, I’m a bit older than you might think at 57.

Dr. King 6:31
So it wasn’t until the 70s when the Black Panther came over and started to tell us that we had a challenge between each other that a lot of that came out. I think Australia’s views on race have been crafted by external forces and media. True, there’s been a lot of mismanagement of indigenous people in Australia.

Dr. King 6:48
I think there’s been an incredible amount of opportunity as well. I remember Cathy Freeman came forward and she did all that she to me wasn’t an Aboriginal, she was just an incredible human being. And there’s always been that sense in Australia that you can do and same with the in the 40 plus specially playing rugby grown up the Ellis brothers, they were just incredible football players.

Dr. King 7:10
And it didn’t find out later until that be a lot race. They didn’t find out later until well, you know, these are now Aboriginal icons, because we’re allowed to have such things. they were just great Australians doing a great thing. Over here, culturally, it’s you know, to be offended over race or have an issue over race is it’s like a palatable thing. It’s a chashable thing, It’s an item of thing of cards you can play.

Dr. King 7:33
And I find that really frustrating because it speaks to a victim narrative. You just can’t succeed and excel as a human being. You’ve always got to talk about you know, white privileges, the yes mate, like, you know, you and I would be considered white privilege what well, I am mixed race, you would the same and we’ve fought for everything we’ve got male privilege we’ve fought for everything we’ve got we’ve scrapped every day to get up and make it happen.

Dr. King 8:02
Then they’ve reduced any conversation down to an issue of the exterior as opposed to the interior. Everyone’s living their life from the outside in as opposed to the inside out. And I think that’s the real challenge I have with any of that, you know, being put in a box stereotype is one thing or another.

Dr. King 8:19
And I think it’s an attitude that applies to life. You know, even in the space of PTSD. I’ve never been comfortable calling myself a victim of sexual abuse or suffer of PTSD. And you’re probably the same concerning stroke. That’s, something we’ve gone through. It’s not who defines us as men defines us as people.

Dr. King 8:38
And yet there’s people who, for whatever financial gain or social recognition, that’s the thing that they hang their hat on. I am this well I’m on any of those things mate it depends on the day. You know, most days I’m just irritable.

Bill 8:52
I appreciate that. Yeah. Most days you’re just irritable. So that means difficult to be around?

Bill 8:59
Yeah, everyone pisses me off.

Owning The Title

Bill 9:05
You own it. I love it. Yeah, I like to identify as a stroke survivor and I talk about stroke as something that I experienced in the past I do and the community that I speak to talks about being a survivor as well.

Bill 9:21
And I think that helps a lot especially when somebody doesn’t understand what the sort of communication or the way to communicate to us about stroke that if they’ve haven’t had a stroke is they’ll say, you’re a stroke victim and it’s like no, no, I’m not a victim you know, I’m a survivor.

Bill 9:39
I’m getting through that and it does shift the way that you then approach the rest of your entire recovery, because it comes from a place of being able to survive and move on rather than a place of being victimized and feeling like why me and going down the path of, you know, I’m a good person why did God do this to me?

Bill 10:06
And having those conversations, I’ve had conversations with people like that, that I coach, but I’ve said that and it’s like, a really difficult place to bring them out of, it’s a really difficult place to get them to move away from so that when they’re observing the world through their new lens of stroke recovery, they have a clear view of actually what needs to be done, how to move forward, where to progress to how to make the most of what they have, rather than sitting in isolation, just wondering about how terrible you know, life has become or can be from here on.

Bill 10:42
So your story, your post traumatic stress story the part leading up to today that I read about you was pretty shocking. So what I realized is that post traumatic stress comes from a beginning of something that is relatively shocking at different degrees for different people, depending on what they’ve been through.

Bill 11:09
And what’s interesting is, is that I asked my something like 4000, Instagram followers, whether or not they’ve been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, after stroke. And the responses were stunning, I couldn’t believe it. Most of them said probably have got Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but have never been diagnosed, and have never seen a doctor about it.

Bill 11:41
I found that tremendously stunning because they know that they have a condition which is debilitating them, and they have some reason haven’t done anything about going to see somebody to help them out with a diagnosis and move on beyond this now. That is kind of where I want to start the conversation. Can you explain that in any way, shape or form?

PTSD

Dr. King 12:09
Yeah, so post traumatic stress PTS, so after a trauma post, there’s a degree of stress in your life, very simple, it’s not complicated. So we all experienced trauma at different times, where it gets into post traumatic stress disorder, or in my case, complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Dr. King 12:32
So post traumatic stress, stress, that happens post a thing. So often people will go through a traumatic event. And that traumatic event might be a car accident might be a robbery might be, you know, a physical attack or something. So after a period of time, most people get through a trauma within about six to eight weeks.

Dr. King 12:50
And when you’re looking at Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, it start to get into the six month issue. Where are for six months you’re having troubles with recall, emotionally placing unraveling emotions now and then there’s complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And I’ll touch on that I want to speak about the stroke community and just some thoughts on there.

Dr. King 13:12
So complex post traumatic stress normally happens with things like abduction, prolonged childhood sexual abuse, kidnapping, those things. So it’s complex in its nature, it’s a lot of different forms. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is often talked about with police, or veterans because there’s a traumatic event that happens in a field.

Dr. King 13:30
And then after that, there’s a series of things which they cannot resolve, like little buckets of trying to things. Now, if you think about the very nature of a stroke, how it impacts I don’t think you could tell me one area of your life that it doesn’t impact, it’s going to impact your self esteem, your marriage, your ability to have intimate relationships, physical, intimate relationships, verbal relationships, they could affect your sight, your mobility, you’re talking about a cataclysmic life event, on some level.

Dr. King 13:38
Now there are people who have mild strokes, and there are people who have extreme strokes. But it’s still a traumatic event. One of the challenges I have when dealing with veterans is that they’ll come back from war situations, and they will have a traumatic event that happens over there.

Dr. King 14:19
But a lot of them have had, especially the warfighters, the elite guys, Delta Rangers, Special Forces, guys, is a lot of that about 85% of those guys have had childhood sexual abuse. Now when they come back from war, and they try to deal with what they saw on the battlefield, they can’t talk to their people in the VA, the Veterans Affairs over there about what happened as a kid, because that’ll take away their benefits.

Dr. King 14:45
And they’ll lose all of that stuff. So they never resolve what happened on the battlefield. Because they can’t talk about the root issue. Now. Here we go. Hey, listen, here’s my wife. Yeah, say hi to Bill the rest here we go. That’s the Mrs. She’s blushing now. So interrupt us anytime love.

Bill 15:11
I’m leaving that in there. I love that.

Dr. King 15:14
So I forgot what we were talking about.

Bill 15:18
The veterans that can’t talk about their sexual abuse, because they’ll lose their benefits.

Dr. King 15:29
So and the thing, the thing with an issue, like something like stroke, is you’ve had this event, now unless you cant, and, you know, I’m sure you know, people Bill more so than me, especially in your space, that are trying to recover and overcome this, unless they realize and come to a point of acknowledging the impact that it’s had on every area of their life and they’re, prepared to unpack that.

Dr. King 15:52
I know when I’m in my book and deal with it, I talk about John 1.0, and John 2.0. And the difference between john before the recall of what happened to me as a kid, and afterwards was me accepting that I was a different man because of what had happened in my brain.

Emotional Recovery

Dr. King 16:07
Now, I’m sure there’s conversations in your community about the impact on the brain on neurological functions. But what about emotional functions? What about the way your brain was changed because of the impact of this trauma. So if you’re talking about it in terms of physicality, and how it impacted your life, but you’re not talking about it in terms of how it changed, your brain pattern changed you emotionally, then mate I just can’t see that people can get 100% whole again.

Bill 16:31
That is a very interesting thing that you say. So that conversation came up as well. So I’ve had that conversation with the people that follow me, one of the questions was, I put it out there that stroke is a three tiered recovery is physical, its mental and emotional. And the question was, which one are you not attending to?

Bill 16:54
Nobody said, I’m not attending to my physical recovery, or very, very few people said that. And then most of the people said that they weren’t tending to their mental recovery, and their emotional recovery, and emotional recovery was the one that was the most unattended.

Dr. King 17:11
Okay. That’s interesting. That makes sense in a lot of ways. Because it’s at least seen and unseen impact, but if you think about, and I’m sure you’ve seen this in your own life, emotionally, our interaction with the rest of the world, ourselves, our view of ourselves in the world, when we’re not attending to those things that are most private and most important.

Dr. King 17:35
Then it affects your ability to recover physically, I would imagine. Because if you’re not emotionally ensuring, if you’re not mindful of the space that you’re in, then you’re not going to give attention to your physical recovery, because you’re not in a good space in here, you know, and I imagine it would flow over everywhere else as well.

Bill 17:53
To give people an insight into whether or not they’re in that space, the space where they’re not attending to their emotions, because some people might actually not know that they’re not attending to them. And if they’re dumb like me, like I was, basically they think they are, but they’re not, they’re just doing at a very superficial level.

Bill 18:11
And what I had in my life before stroke was I had a lot of pain and suffering, it was all mental anguish that I was creating, as a result of not attending to emotional issues, and the mental anguish, was creating physical ailments that I was feeling in my body that I thought was as a result of me bending over the wrong way, or picking up that box in the wrong direction or whatever.

Bill 18:37
So then, what was happening was, I was constantly going on the loop of never being happy or always being mad, never having enough time, always complaining about everything in my life, although there was abundance of everything. And then what happened was I had the stroke and my head switched off completely because there was a baseball sized clot inside of it. And as my head switched off, I started to notice this strange sensation in my chest, you know, kind of near where my heart was.

Dr. King 19:14
You’re fucked mate, your head’s gone and your heart’s gone I’m fucking outta here mate his head is crazy.

Bill 19:24
Pretty much. You know what it was? It was my heart was actually coming online for the first time in 37 years old. And it was going hey I’m here, pay attention. It took me months to work out what the hell it was. Yeah, I was experiencing heightened emotional responses crying like a baby over like a cat tripping over the gutter or something like that.

Dr. King 19:51
Those Kleenex ads on telly, mate.

Bill 19:53
Yes, yes, the little dog you know tripping over the toilet roll or whatever. And, it was associated to the pseudobulbar affect, which is an out of control response and emotional response after stroke. So people some of them have it laughing, they just laugh at things that are inappropriate to laugh at like at funerals and stuff like that.

Dr. King 20:21
That’s me being a dick.

Bill 20:26
So, eventually I got to that point where I started to recognize there was something in my heart that was beyond the pump, that was just sending blood around the body. And I started to attend to it. And believe it or not, I was at counseling and in therapy for a good 12 years before that.

Bill 20:47
So even though I had to do something to attend to it, I didn’t really actually know how to attend to it how to do it still, it was still like this most amazing thing. And then that took my therapy to the next level.

Bill 21:03
Because when I was going to see my therapist, I would actually cry. And I would actually express my emotions, rather than express what I thought was happening about my emotions. I was actually speaking from my heart rather than with my head representing my heart.

Dr. King 21:20
Yeah, that’s good, mate. Very, very cool. Look, I talked about it in my book. I don’t know if you got up to the spot where I talk about the heart has a memory.

Bill 21:29
No, no, I haven’t. But I do know that. But tell me about that.

Dr. King 21:33
So there was a guy, he was a heart transplant surgeon in America. And what he noticed is that he would take these, transplants a classic one was a guy who loved classical music and refined food, his heart was transplant with a young African American guy. And all of a sudden, he started thoroughly enjoying chicken fried steak and hip hop music.

Dr. King 21:58
And he was like, “What the hell is this?” You know, “I never liked this stuff before.” But the one that really got me was the story of the patient who got the transplant of a young girl, and starting to get the memories of a serial killing a killing that took place.

Dr. King 22:12
And they actually took it down, wrote it down, they thought the parents were abusing the girl, but a police officer said hang on, listen, there’s some things here that are very similar to a case in the area, and actually tracked down via her that the recall of this person, the murderer, because the heart does literally have a memory, right?

Dr. King 22:29
I’m a Christian man. And, it talks about the heart being the seed of courage, a seed of faith. And so it’s literally not only a physical organ, but it’s an organ that contains the same neurons that we have in our brain, they’re connected. And when we, as you said so eloquently, we disconnect these two.

Dr. King 22:48
And we’re operating only out of the cerebral one, which is a very Western way to do things, as opposed to offering out of this sense of unity. And I think a lot of that disconnect causes the stress that leads to things like heart attack, stroke, breakdowns mentally.

Dr. King 23:04
But when these two are in Union, there’s is literally this yin and yang flow of energy, emotional spiritual, where we can start to see the world differently. And that was part of my thing, when I went from John 1.0 to 2.0 was realizing the import that I’ve been carrying around these emotions for years of suppressed memories of what happened to me as a child.

The Heart Brain

Dr. King 23:27
When the recall came back. It affected me here, because it changed the way that the cranium function, my brain function, because it was a totally different set of emotions than it ever had before.

Bill 23:41
Okay. Wow. So, that’s it you’ve nailed it right? Now firstly, let me just say this, the heart has between 30,000 and about 120,000 neurons in it. And what has been shown is that people with 30,000 neurons in their heart instead of 130,000 neurons in their heart, are often the ones that are labeled cold hearted.

Dr. King 24:05
Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Dr. King 24:06
Right. And the ones who are young at heart have got more neurons in their heart. So we can influence the number of neurons that we got in the heart, use it or lose it, same scenario. If we’re not practicing, being emotionally available, if we’re not young at heart, if we’re not joyful, we don’t have those neurons, and they go away, they physically go away.

Dr. King 24:31
Therefore, we’re left with only the ones that make us cranky and crazy and disconnected from people, right? There is also neurons in the gut. So the gut has the same amount of neurons as a cat’s brain, which is like, I don’t know, several 100 million. So to me that suggests a level of intelligence.

Intro 24:55
If you’ve had a stroke, and you’re in recovery, you’ll know what a scary and confusing Same time it can be, you’re likely to have a lot of questions going through your mind. Like, how long will it take to recover? Will I actually recover? What things should I avoid in case I make matters worse?

Intro 25:12
Doctors will explain things. But obviously, you’ve never had a stroke before, you probably don’t know what questions to ask. If this is you, you may be missing out on doing things that could help speed up your recovery. If you’re finding yourself in that situation, stop worrying, and head to recoveryafterstroke.com where you can download a guide that will help you.

Intro 25:34
It’s called the seven questions to ask your doctor about your stroke. These seven questions are the ones Bill wished he’d asked when he was recovering from a stroke, they’ll not only help you better understand your condition, they’ll help you take a more active role in your recovery, head to the website. Now, recoveryafterstroke.com and download the guide. It’s free.

Bill 25:57
That we are not taking advantage of but we refer to it all the time. So we often say I took gutsy action, right? And we often say, my gut instinct. And I pushed through the fear, right. And we use these words like I wear my heart on my sleeve. And we’re referring to those organs all the time in our language, and it’s cross cultural, it happens every in every culture in the world.

Bill 26:27
And yet, we’re still able to be completely disconnected and not understand the origin of those words. And that’s what i was i was just this walking piece of meat in a bag of bones that had no idea where his words were coming from, how they were formed, where, what they were impacting, if my words were impacting anything, I had no idea that there were.

Bill 26:54
So I had this whole loop of being disconnected in the head, that the mental anguish was causing physical pain, which was causing emotional pain, the head switched off, and started to notice my language where it was coming from, I started to notice my heart was online at the same time.

Bill 27:11
And then as a result, I got to this point of being able to go, okay, there’s more to life than just working stuff out with my head, I’ve got to work out what’s happening in my heart, but for a lot of men, and women, but I’ll say men, because I do see this a lot in men, and there’s not a lot of men interacting on my space.

Bill 27:31
And there’s not a lot of men that I can get on the podcasts, mainly women, they’re much more likely to go to those places of emotional distress and talk about it and overcome it. Whereas the men seem to not as much. A lot of the men feel the pain, that that’s going to be exposed the one that you mentioned, which was it’s dealing with that stuff that happens in your chest, and understanding that a lot of men feel that going there.

Bill 28:02
And then as a result of that, they don’t, but they don’t know they’re just on the other side of those fears that pop up and those emotions, like just on the other side of they’re dealing with that is like a completely different feeling. Which is not painful. It’s relieving and it takes a weight off the shoulders. Can you talk to that a little bit about like, what stops us from going there?

Dr. King 28:28
I think a couple of things. I think we live in a very dysfunctional era as far as gender and gender roles. I think, you know, it’s people have lost their mind on that stuff. So the concept of a warrior poet is historic. You know, the the Bible figure of David a warrior, but one of the greatest songwriters of his time in his era.

How Men Communicates – Dr. John A. King

Dr. King 28:54
You know, the Spartans, incredible poets and songwriters. Incredible warriors. I think there’s always this thing of the warrior poet that is in the heart of a man. Women talk about things face to face, men talk about things shoulder to shoulder. So women will sit around and have a cup of tea and have a chat and talk about all their emotions and feelings and stuff like that.

Dr. King 29:14
You’ll be sitting down watching the footy with a guy, and you’ll say, how’s the family, right, he’ll go, yeah not too good. And you’ve got this fraction of a second where you’ve got an opportunity to have a conversation. And in that fraction of a second, if you go, Oh, really what’s going on? Then you’re gonna have an hours of conversations, you’ll all get half cut and he’ll have smoking cigars for the first time, and hacking up your throat, and you’ll have a real in depth conversation.

Dr. King 29:38
But there’s those little moments and that’s why men that work together men that go to war, men that face obstacles, men that even go and even do a sport together, now have those conversations, but we’re expecting men by the very nature of who we are, to have a conversation the way women have a conversation. We’re just not we’re just not wired that way.

Dr. King 29:57
We won’t do it, we’re not going to sit and share our feelings and shit with a whole bunch of people we don’t know. And even around the home in the family, even with my wife, my wife’s very verbal, very emotionally warm and bracing, great lady. But if we need to get to talking to things, we’ll go for a walk. But we’ll go walk, work in the garden together.

Dr. King 30:17
Because I know if I’m going to chat, I need to be doing something. Because somehow doing something with this opens up my ability to be able to communicate what’s in here, even if it’s the just going for a walk, or whatever. So I think there’s a lot of that stuff is poo, pooed by people are well, that’s just men, their clothes, look managers different. We’re just different. we’re wired differently.

Dr. King 30:39
You know, we want to protect our families, we want to die for our families want all that sort of stuff. We’re just wired totally different. I think we mentioned Jordan Peterson before. And I think that’s one of the great things that Jordan Peterson has done for a generation of men he said, You’re different. And that’s really all he’s saying. And you got to get in touch with who you are.

Dr. King 30:59
Because for the last 50 years, we’ve been focusing on the other 51% of the population instead of talking about, you know, everyone across the board. So I think guys, I find guys actually very emotional and very prepared to talk about their emotions, and particularly these warfighters that I deal with. So my background is different childhood sexual abuse, never been a veteran.

Dr. King 31:22
And I’ll talk to some of these guys who have done have been in the biggest theatres of war in the last 40 or 50 years. And they’ll read my story. And I’ll read theirs and I’ll say, Man, I would never swap my ship for your ship. And I say the same. So let’s talk about what’s in common.

Dr. King 31:37
And there’s never a dull moment, mate, there’s not an a coaching appointment, I don’t do there’s not a barbecue, I don’t go to there’s not an event where I don’t spend hours and hours talking to men who want to freely talk about it. Because we’re acting in an activity together, and we’ve found a shared commonality.

Bill 31:54
I love that. So as soon as you said that they do it shoulder to shoulder. I’ve just done an audit of all the conversations that were meaningful to me. When I was being mentored or I was mentoring somebody, my son’s or whomever. And every single one of the ones that actually made a difference was actually us walking together.

Bill 32:16
And I had no idea about that my youngest son, who is the hardest nut to crack emotionally and have conversations like this the uplifting ones, he will not sit face to face with me under any circumstances, if he can avoid it. I’ve taken him on a walk maybe two or three times he avoided like the plague.

Bill 32:37
But if I take him on a walk, and we’re talking shoulder to shoulder, we get a very different level of communication that I don’t experience with with him in his 21 years I’ve maybe had three deep and meaningful conversations with the guy that he hasn’t instigated.

Dr. King 32:57
My boy, Noah loves movies. If I need to connect with Noah we’ll watch a movie, we’ll sit there and watch the movie shoulder to shoulder engage in an activity together. At some point it will be Hey, listen, man, I want to have a chat to you about this. Might be 90 minutes later. And we’ll have a chat. Because we’ve done this activity together.

Dr. King 33:18
There’s something men bond in motion. When women can bond static men bond in motion, they have to be involved in something together. Now you told me about the tremmies and the lunchtime thing and all that sort of stuff going on in Melbourne.

Bill 33:33
I’ll give some context there. So in Melbourne right now the tradies, who work on the large construction sites in the central business district, were asked by the government not to eat their lunch in the sheds on site, because of Coronavirus. They were asked to eat their lunch outside and there’s hundreds and 1000s of these guys and they work in the open they work in the sun, they work in the rain.

Bill 34:01
So they go into the sheds to get out of the elements for a little while. And as a form of nonviolent protest. What they did was is they took their tables and chairs. They installed the tables and chairs in the middle of the central business district roads in between tram lines, buses traffic.

Bill 34:23
And hundreds of people had lunch in the middle of the roads in a central business district. Picture your central business district and hundreds of people sitting at tables and chairs eating lunch on the road. That’s what happened. So I just wanted to lay the context there. Tell me about those guys?

Dr. King 34:42
Well, here’s just my thought on that. So by the very nature of what they do every day is spent shoulder to shoulder and one of the activities I do they shoulder the shoulder and they sit around a table and even though they might be face to face eating this now engaged in another activity of having the after having spent years together or weeks together and here the day here they are sitting down and you’re not only removing the whole comfort thing you’re removing, male community.

Dr. King 35:09
You’re removing this sense of bonding and the ability to have a conversation and process what’s going on in the world. And how the way guys do guys love the shed mate, guys love getting together in a shed wood working, playing darts, looking at old pinups, whatever it is, and they get together and there’s a sense of safety as a shared but a close place where they can have these conversations.

Dr. King 35:32
So you start to take those things away and you start to the emasculated society, you start to take all those elements Araya routed, you know, the sheeple just roll over and say, Well, I’m not going to do they will thanks very much, but let’s comply. But there’s another way of saying, you know, piece off, all want to do is sit down and have my chips and my fish with Bob and have a chat about the world. And that’s where a lot of their life is process.

Dr. King 35:57
That’s where it met like marriage advice. I remember I was young Philip was working as a truckies offsider in Sydney. And some of the first advice I ever got on relationship was from this old fella on his third marriage, talking about the things he did wrong in these first two and the things you got right in this one, sitting in a cab with a young 1617 year old kid who was way too young to be working as a truck is offsider.

Dr. King 36:20
But as you said, that’s where it happens. Now, that was great, incredible, rich experiences for me. And you can’t take that away. And that’s what these guys, they’re, they’re being robbed of that ability to be able to form community and have conversations about the things that are important to them. Now you take it over into the PTSD space.

Dr. King 36:41
You take it into the stroke space, and yeah, you talked about there’s a reluctance amongst men in your space to talk man, it’s the same over here. You’re like, no, and you sort of didn’t even got the in a conversation. Hey, how you going Bobby? Good Johnny, what’s going on? Yeah, I just processing? I know, right? Because he hung fella, what was your day? Like? That doesn’t happen, mate, you know, it’s just never gonna happen.

Dr. King 37:02
So whenever you get those shoulder to shoulder opportunities, and you can facilitate those, just like you did with your son, I often do it with my clients is, that’s an incredible way, particularly with dealing with men, to get them to open up about the stuff that they face every day in life.

Bill 37:18
Right? So the other thing that I realized is perhaps one of the reasons they also don’t talk about is just reading the first couple of pages of your book is, who do you talk, how do you lay that on somebody? That information that you have about what happened to you in your past? Whether it’s the guys on the battlefield? Or you through your sexual abuse as a child?

Opening Up

Bill 37:44
How do you lay that on somebody and have a conversation with the person who you love the most? Who cares for you the most? Because that’s pretty heavy information to lay on somebody in your home, your wife, or whomever? Or even maybe a sister or a family member? And is that another thing that gets in the way of men, or of any body actually overcoming post traumatic stress? Is that something that really locks it in place and keeps that cycle happening of pain?

Dr. King 38:19
Great question mate. Great question. So talking deal with it again about it, because this is one of the things I had to deal with. There was a point where my memories and what I went through, had to go from scars of shame to Medals of Honor. And it was simply a switch that I had to throw inside.

Dr. King 38:40
So you don’t talk about your scars of shame. You hide your scars of shame, be it stroke, be it childhood abuse be it not coping, as a police officer not coping with what happened to you at war. There’s no form to have those conversations that i think that’s one of the major malpractices has happened with this pandemic bullshit, is the absolute disregard for mental health.

Dr. King 39:02
They all talk about it, but it’s total bullshit. And I think part of the thing that you’ve got to do is you’ve internally got to lose your shame. You got to lose your shame about being a stroke victim, you got to lose your shame about the fact that your legs don’t operate the way the next guy, you’ve got to redefine your normal in a lot of that.

Dr. King 39:21
And when you get comfortable with the fact that these listen man, these are medals of honor, these are the I’ve survived. I’ve got through this I’m prospering. I’m not a broken man. I’m john 2.0. And I love who I am and I love my life, then you can talk about like it’s an old football game, then you can talk about it. And it takes all of the emotional weight off of it because the emotional weight is really shame.

Dr. King 39:44
The emotional weight is feeling like you’re less of a man, less of a human being because you went through these things as a child, as a survivor of stroke. You went through those things, and that actually is a great impetus because it normalizes a conversation that is normally it’s you know, it’s normally a bar. It’s like, you know, I can talk about what happened to me because it made me who I am. And I’m really comfortable with me.

Bill 40:13
I’ve had people on the podcast, who have had a stroke 10, 15, 20, years ago and haven’t spoken about it to anybody. And the first person they spoke to about stroke was me on the podcast. And I’m just sitting there stunned, completely stunned that after 20 years, this amazing lady hasn’t had the opportunity to have a conversation with anybody about her stroke.

Bill 40:41
And apparently, she doesn’t know anybody around her that’s had one or said they’ve had one or she hasn’t noticed anybody. And it’s not uncommon one in six people will have a stroke in their lifetime. And I think the number is being changed to one in four. So I just find that stunning that you would go through life for such a long time, never discussing the elephant in the room, like it’s in the room, I mean, you can see it every single day, you walk through it, you hit it, it knocks you out of the way, like it’s there every day, how could you not talk about it? I mean, that’s a great skill.

Dr. King 41:19
Yeah, it is, and hey mate listen, I’ve got people I’ve talked to, who’ve been married for someone to 20 years, 30 years, and they’ve never told them what happened to them as a kid, or why they have a challenge with sex, or why they can’t be intimate, or why they wake up every night with nightmares at two or 3am and have to go outside for a walk.

Dr. King 41:39
Never, then got a partner who’s likely going Hey, what’s I just got nightmares is all. And to pop that bubble, to let someone into that heart realm, and have an intimate and honest conversation is a level of vulnerability and courage. vulnerability is courage, a level of vulnerability in their level of opening up.

Dr. King 41:59
But as you talked about earlier on, on the other side of taking that step is, is going to be authenticity, integrity, it’s going to be authentically wonderful. Or it’s going to cause a relationship to fall in a heap. Because it’s not really authentic. It’s built on a lie. And I think that’s the fear factor.

Dr. King 42:18
That people are scared that if they open up their life, and talk about something, and it’s only a fear factor, if it’s a shame for you, if this is shame for you, if this is a shameful thing, you’re embarrassed because you have a hitch and you get along, you’re embarrassed because sometimes you laugh out loud in public.

Dr. King 42:36
If I was having problems laughing out loud, I’d print a card saying I’m sorry, I’m a stroke survivor. And occasionally I just, like Tourette’s, you know, this is my situation this is my problem. Own that stuff. And if you own it, and it’s yours, then really, it’s up to everybody else to give you grace and room to be like that. It’s not on you anymore. The moment it’s you, all that judgment becomes external, it’s no longer internal. It’s not your problem, not your problem.

Bill 43:04
So what you’re saying, in fact, is external judgment is less impactful. If there’s no internal judgment?

Dr. King 43:13
Absolutely. It’s like the who gives a fuck, it’s like, yeah, the whole thing of the amount of facts. I don’t give it at some point. You’re so busy concentrating on having a tremendous, wonderful life and becoming Oh, you don’t care what anyone now Does it still hurt? Does it still rattle your cage every now and get? Of course it does. But the reality is it no longer has an impact, or it has an impact.

Dr. King 43:38
But you can mitigate that impact by being aware that it’s there’s so let me tell you a little story. So as a kid, I went to a dentist and he was a sadist. And he pulled out my back teeth and I passed out and I woke up and I had semen on my face. So you know, ridiculous, horrible things.

Dr. King 43:55
And I hated going to the dentist now everyone, you know, does like going to the dentist, but man I had a deal I had a real deal. And once I started to understand that these are no longer scars of shames, but a medal of honors. I remember going to this dentist and this is the nicest guy in the world.

Dr. King 44:12
But I walked in and I came with my wife and I said, listen, man, well, you’re a nice guy, I wanna tell you about a situation. This happened to me as a kid. So I need you to understand I need my wife in the room with me. And I need to hold her hand I need to be able to see her at least.

Dr. King 44:26
And I’m going to tell you, I’ve got a problem with you. Because of you’re a dentist, now I don’t have a problem with you. But because of what happened to me as a child, this is what my propensity is and just having that conversation pops the bubble. But here’s the other thing. It moves his response to him instead of me sitting there trying to second guess what someone’s gonna think if I punched them or knocked them out, because all of a sudden I’m a 13 year old boy again, waking up and some guys masturbating in front of me.

Dr. King 44:57
And now I’m a 50 something year old man and I just caught this guy, because I’m having a flashback, I’m caught in a moment, it moves everything away. Now this guy says, Well, no, you can’t have your wife here, I don’t really care about the background, this is not what we do.

Dr. King 45:09
Well screw you, buddy, you know, I’ll go find someone who will listen, it pushes everything to the external, I’ve owned my stuff. And if they can’t accept that, if they can’t accommodate that, then that’s on them. That’s not on me. I didn’t have to hold it in worried and concerned about what someone’s gonna think of me if they said this. It’s like, it’s out there.

Bill 45:33
Yeah, that’s fascinating. So a while ago, I was listening to a podcast called conversations, the ABC in Australia, runs it. And the guest was a lady called Sharon Zacks. And she’s a dentist. And believe it or not, the conversation was about changing the way she goes about dentistry because she realized that a lot of the people coming to see her was sexually abused.

Bill 46:04
And being on a chair in a dentist’s office, and having their mouth open and entered for the sake of repairing teeth and penetrated for the sake of repairing teeth was extremely traumatic for some people, right. And she went about completely changing her practice and the way that she was approaching people and speaking to people.

Bill 46:28
And as a result of that, she helped a lot of people through needing A dentistry, but B the situation of the trauma that they experienced in a previous experience. And it’s a fascinating conversation that I was listening to, because you have to pay a pretty special person to take dentistry to that level, and get beneath the layers of it’s just, you know, a tooth, we have to pull it out, like, don’t be like that, I’m just here to pull your tooth out, people, like me are so naive about what can happen in different situations.

Bill 47:05
Because I’ve had a blessed life, like, I’ve not been through any of the traumas that some people have other than stroke, right. And I find it hard to relay the information across to people who are suffering through previous life experiences, to find a way to break down the barriers of me supporting them, or helping them because I can’t relate to them.

Bill 47:34
And I found that struggle as a coach, people would come to me with an idea in their head of what they had to do, but couldn’t connect to their heart, and therefore, the coaching session would fail, achieving the outcome which was, you know, to overcome this challenge that they were experiencing.

Bill 47:52
But the coaching session achieved, that even though it was a failed attempt to overcome this issue, it was an attempt and hopefully with more attempts, you’ll get better at addressing the issues. Is that something that you see, that happens? Does it happen over time? Do these recoveries happen very quickly? How does it sort of evolved from somebody knowing that they need help to finally being on that other side like you are and and you can observe it as an event that happened not as who you are, it hasn’t become you.

Finding Common Grounds

Dr. King 48:32
I think and look I want to speak to something you said there you know, in a nice manner just to try and give you a different perspective. It’s all internal. It’s how I see it and face it. And again, that’s on me. Like when you said you’ve had a blessed life and you can’t relate all except for what you’ve come with stroke.

Dr. King 48:51
Hey, brother, I don’t want your shit. Like, I would rather deal with 12 years of childhood sexual abuse than a fucking stroke. I’m just telling you straight up, I don’t want what you’ve been through, it’s like scares the shit out of me. That I would have to face that. So what I do in my situation with a Warfighter, or with someone like yourself is okay, we’re two poles apart in terms of our experience.

Dr. King 49:16
And a lot of people would say, there’s no commonality, now strip that away, we have a commonality, we’ve had to overcome some things. And as human beings and as men, there’s this circle, there’s Venn diagram. And we can go to either end of those Venn diagrams, or we can focus on what it is.

Dr. King 49:32
And so if you take that as a coach, and this is what I do, is I have a look at what our commonalities are as human beings, what we’re trying to do and overcome. And we focus on that, and then it can go wherever people want to go. I can talk to someone who’s been to Afghanistan, I’m dealing with mates at the moment that are dealing with that rubbish that’s happening over there that the administration needed.

Dr. King 49:54
And they’re so traumatized by what’s happening there. And so here I am with no experience. But then I’ve got all the experience of being massively disappointed, massively let down time and time again having to come up and face with things. So that’s where the commonality is. And I think that’s how you and I can have those conversations, so you find that commonality.

Dr. King 50:15
And part of it is is also is not denying the reality and the impact, and the incredible guts it took for you to overcome what you did. And you own that as much as anything else. And I think that opens the door, to have conversations about helping other people. And I think when they find people like us, Bill, and they look at us as, dude, if this guy can do it, I can do it, too.

Dr. King 50:38
And that’s really the I hate telling my story. The thought of coming on your show and doing this, I hated the Bill, I hated you. I hate everybody. I’ve hated you all day. I hate this guy. I don’t have to tell him shit, I hate it. Because I am not that stuff. And I don’t like talking about it, because it will probably take me a day or two to overcome it.

Dr. King 50:59
But by coming on, and being vulnerable, and being prepared to talk about it, I’m hoping I give your listeners a chance to earn permission to overcome whatever it is they’re doing. So if the testimony of the story of my life can mend 1000 others, then that is a price that’s worth paying. And I think that’s where we get our freedom and our power to speak greatness in other people.

Bill 51:25
For somebody who doesn’t like to talk about it, you’ve written a book documentary.

Dr. King 51:34
And everywhere I go, oh, yeah, the guy who got anally raped with plastic sodas. Yeah. Thanks very much. Nice to meet you. I, appreciate it.

Bill 51:42
I call bullshit on that. But anyhow, I’m just being smart.

Dr. King 51:46
No but it’s true it’s just one of those things you do mate you run at something.

Bill 51:53
I know I do share the story of my stroke, in my experience with stroke. When I interview people to create context, and to relay the story, as a result of somebody else, sharing their stories to see what the similarities are. And it’s not about me, that episode is about every person who I interview, it’s about them, so that they can share their story.

Bill 52:18
And before I realized it’s like, so I can be maybe the first person they’ve ever spoken to about stroke. Like, that’s amazing, right? So it’s like, but I do share. And I suppose I don’t really like sharing the hard parts, but there’s some good parts in my story as well, that I think are really relevant and worth sharing and laughing about right.

Bill 52:45
So we do that. So that’s quite fun. But I’m in the process of writing a book. And I’m finding that I get stuck and it becomes very difficult sometimes to go back into somehow create context of other life experiences, put them in the book. Tell me about your journey to writing your book? Was that early on in your sort of big awareness situation?

Dr. King 53:14
So 2008 45 mate I was walking out in the shed. At the time. It was a beautiful day, daffodils were blooming. When I was a kid growing up. Every time I walked to school after having a horrendous time at home, there was this one particular house, Bloom daffodils, and every year I would see these daffodils and I thought that the most beautiful flowers that I ever saw, I’m getting a bit teary now I’ve been thinking about it.

Dr. King 53:38
And I would see him and what what struck me is that every year I would see these daffodils I thought I survived another year. So 2008, I’m walking out of a shed, beautiful that I can remember was a Thursday, beautiful blue day looked down. And I remember the last words I said, which were the last words that John 1.0 ever existed. I looked at the daffodils and said they’re beautiful.

Dr. King 54:00
At that moment, like a flood, everything came back to me. And all these little frames of eight millimeter film finally came and they played in my head and they didn’t stop playing for five years of everything that happened to me as a child. It just went on going. So that was in our way. So here I am in 2015. And unfortunately I’d lost my marriage. My first marriage, a strain for my kids, I was running a very successful corporate coaching company.

Dr. King 54:27
I was running a church over here in America, training young business leaders and a range of other things. And I’ve lost all of that. And I was sitting in an apartment by myself with a mattress on the floor, just after a divorce. And some people you know, a few I’m a Christian, you know, Christian preacher, and they, these Buddhist monks found me on Twitter, because I was anonymously posting poetry about the impact of sexual abuse on men.

Dr. King 54:55
Because no one else was and they said look, you’re a bit of a unocorn you’re male you’re a poet and you’re prepared to talk about this stuff well as anonymous because my kids were very young. And so they wanted to come down, they were doing a documentary stopping traffic, they came down and they did it.

Dr. King 55:10
And, you know, we’re talking about in the book, you know, I just said I needed to do this thing. And, and Melissa was helping me at the time current wife, and she said, don’t do it. I said, Look, I’ve got to do it, I just, I just feel I’ve got to do this. So they shot this thing. Two years later, they came back. And we end up with his multi award winning documentary, you know, with Dolph Lundgren, and a whole bunch of Hollywood celebrities.

Dr. King 55:36
And I thought maybe I’d get two or three minutes in it, but they decided to make my story that the centerpiece for this thing. So we’re getting Hollywood scene, and we’re doing all these shines, and red carpets and all that. And I would be asked time and time again, how did you overcome it? What did you do? And I got tired of retelling the story.

Dr. King 55:56
So I took two boxes of cigars, six weeks, and set him a garage in Texas at 115 degree heat. And, and wrote deal with it. And that’s how I did it. Because I wanted to get it down and get it down once. And if I could help one person, show them it would look selfish. I just wanted to stop talking about the story and said, you know, exactly the opposite effect.

Dr. King 56:28
So when you talk about here you are documents, it’s like, Yeah, whatever. That’s true. I didn’t know what I was doing. God leads me down this path. And here I am. And you’re the abuse guy. Fuck off no I’m not and so, you know, cigars, no cigars with it, you know, in this process, they willingly gave their life for the cause.

Pouring Your Soul Into Something

Dr. King 56:47
And so I ended up writing deal with it. And I didn’t know that deal with it would be the incredible success of the tool that it has been. And I think that’s what you’ll find with the book mate, is there’s something about putting something down, when you open up your soul and you pour it out.

Dr. King 57:03
And people can pick up your soul. And they can see themselves. It’s like it’s reflecting, they can see themselves in the mirror and they can they connect on different levels of different parts. And and that was really the reason I did it. Cuz I didn’t want to keep talking about it. And I thought, you know I’ve never prayed or said, God, why me? I’ve only ever prayed and said, you know, turn this round for good.

Dr. King 57:29
And, deal with it as part of that journey. For me. The documentary is that also did another documentary on recovery on PTSD called Light The Darkness. Another group did that. And it’s gone very well as well. But was because why have we gone through what we’ve gone through Bill, if it’s not to benefit and help other people? what’s what’s the point of it, the tragedy, the trauma, the impact, the loss, the struggle, if it can’t be if someone else can’t benefit from him?

Bill 58:03
Yeah, I’m with you. 100%. I remember getting a little bit confused. Early on, I discovered a couple of things that were helping me overcome fatigue after stroke. And I shared that with a lady who was a stroke survivor who I thought we were on the same wavelength.

Bill 58:23
She was just a local, we used to catch up at a cafe nearby and I kinda just said to her Oh, like, I noticed that when I don’t eat sugar and carbs, I don’t have fatigue as bad, you know. And I thought that I was saying the right thing, but apparently not. Because after that particular interaction and me discussing what helped my fatigue, she cut ties, she didn’t want to talk to me anymore.

Bill 58:50
All that kind of stuff. So I thought maybe you’re not supposed to talk about this stuff. And just keep it to yourself. And I just left it at that for a little while. But because I’m a problem solving kind of a guy, I was discovering a lot of things that were helping me to overcome the problems stroke created, right.

Bill 59:07
And I needed to tell people because I wanted to test whether it was a fluke, or whether, in fact it solved this little problem of mine and if it happens to you, maybe it’s legit happened to me as well. So you know, tell me, so that’s kind of where my sharing started from. It’s sort of set from what I just discovered this thing you need to know about it. Tell me if it happens to you, so that we can have this experience together and we got something.

Bill 59:33
So I find a lot of comfort in sharing what I know but more importantly, is learning what other people know about stroke recovery and sharing that because I don’t know everything about stroke recovery. So I get this amazing group of people come on here, and they’re all strangers. I’ve never met them before. They only have ever I’ve only found them because they have the hashtag stroke either in their bio on it. Instagram or they, they posted about it.

Bill 1:00:02
And they come on my podcast, and they want to do the same thing they just want to share. So it sounds like that we are all here to support and help each other rather than tear each other down and make life difficult for each other. But sometimes even I miss the cues of when it’s time for me to be helping somebody.

Bill 1:00:22
Like I take some interactions as threat because I process them through my bloody head, instead of connected to my heart to understand, these people are reaching out for support and help. And I take them as competition and I take them as all these things. And I frickin hate it later. But when I’m doing it, I don’t realize that I’m being an asshole.

Dr. King 1:00:44
Yeah, I get that. I get that. I found mindfulness a great practice, the practice of mindfulness of learning to be in the moment. You know, they call it meditation, which is whatever man I’m not going to sit them across my legs and go on my bum gets to small me my mindfulness is in is in a garage with a cup of coffee at like five o’clock in the morning and a cigar.

Dr. King 1:01:12
I’ll sit down and play my little meditation, my mindfulness stuff. And I’ve learned that what that does is just help me align, align these two things. Because I’m on the site, we are, we’re competitive guys, we’re competitive before our trauma. And we’re competitive afterwards. And, and I think being attuned to being attuned to that, and how much impact we can have. And the audience, we’ve got the privilege we’ve got being able to share.

Dr. King 1:01:41
Rather, you’re sharing a story about stroke with some people that they couldn’t even matter cut two or three words, and you’re in a privileged position to change steward and lead your community. And I feel a little bit the same. It’s like, every time, low that I am, I get to share my story, where someone comes back, and it happens every day bill, it happens, maybe that’s an exaggeration.

Dr. King 1:02:04
Every week, someone sends me an email saying, Look, your book changed my life, your book kept my marriage together. And it’s like, it’s I mean, I’m still getting weepy now about it. Thinking about the emails I’ve got, where my vulnerability, my pulling the scab off and taking a risk. It’s save someone else’s marriage.

Dr. King 1:02:25
Whereas mine was destroyed by this. Yet my sharing my story, save someone else’s. It’s like, you know, wish always there for me. Which is really interesting. Because no one was there for me. No one wanted to talk about what it was like to be sexually abused. No one wanted to talk about what it was like the impact would have on a life and a marriage. And as a man, you know that there was no resources for it.

Bill 1:02:53
I’m going to talk to nobody wanted to talk about that. I’m going to talk about that in a moment. But for right now, I’m going to tell you that Blair, if you’re listening, thank you so much for your email. So Blair, I’ll just leave it at that I won’t give his other name. Contacted me to emails ago to say I listened to your podcast, thank you so much, that was it.

Bill 1:03:13
He just told me that he had experienced a bleed in the brain similar to the one that I’ve had because of an AVM. And he’s 33 years old. And he’s very early on in his recovery. And he just reached out to say thank you for the podcast. And it’s like, far out, man. That’s what I was missing that I didn’t have. And I’m so glad that you have what I didn’t have. That’s amazing, I just can’t believe it.

Dr. King 1:03:39
That’s fantastic man. Here he is at 33 you’re now at 40. I think you’ve said?

Bill 1:03:43
47.

Dr. King 1:03:44
You’ve saved him mate, we’ve saved this guy. What? Like, you know, 14 years? Saved him 14 years. It’s incredible.

Bill 1:03:53
Yeah, absolutely. So with regards to not talking about stuff, that we’ve gone through people not wanting to talk about it. I mean, especially with sexual abuse. This is a just me sort of putting out there like a hypothesis. Is it possible that it’s so unbelievable what happens to children sometimes, that an adult who would never perpetrate those types of crimes on a child, he has a story like that and says, that is impossible to have actually happened because adults don’t do that to kids.

Dr. King 1:04:34
So here’s the horrible thing about this. You can have a conversation about a woman being raped, or a little girl being sexually abused, and people will talk about that. But if you cannot talk about a boy being sexually abused, particularly by a woman, they don’t want to have those conversations.

Ignorance

Dr. King 1:04:53
They will tell you, boys like sex. They enjoy it. This sort of thing doesn’t happen. Mate this happen like two weeks ago, some Philistine was prepared to have that conversation I you know, I did respond well wasn’t my most graceful moment I told them go fuck themselves.

Dr. King 1:05:10
And, you know, that’ll still be my response tomorrow. But they don’t want to have that conversation because and we’ve done presentations around the whole issue of keeping kids safe is a seminar we do for community groups and how to do it with being in meetings, I’ve shown a trailer from that movie, told my story showed the statistics, and I’ve had parents stand up in the room and say, that’s rubbish. That does not happen in our community. I’m thinking you’re a moron.

Dr. King 1:05:44
There’s 2.4 million sex slaves in America every year, okay, at the height of the African American slave trade, there were 378,000 people at the height of it every year in America today, 2.4 million people. And people go now it doesn’t happen in our community. Well, you’re an idiot. You know, and that’s what I’ll tell them. You’re an idiot, and I don’t get invited back, you know, so because I’m gonna, it’s just wrong. They don’t want to have the conversation.

Dr. King 1:06:14
And when they confronted with it, it’s talking. Okay. So let me make fun of stroke victims, because that’s really politically correct. All right, you got some guy with a gangly arms dragging his leg, drool and can hold a conversation at a middle of the funeral. No one wants to talk about that, because it’s just fucking embarrassing. They don’t want to talk about that. And why it’s embarrassing for them is because they’re ashamed of their response, their lack of compassion whatsoever.

Dr. King 1:06:41
They’re embarrassed, they’re ashamed, they’re uncomfortable. So they want to push that ugly thing away, and not have to talk about the cripple guy. They don’t want to make a conversation, give room or accommodation for the girl who’s going to sit and drool over there. It’s I will take that ugly thing away. And it’s the same with it’s the same with the sexual abuse stuff.

Dr. King 1:07:02
There’s some you know that with a mental health issue, you know, some scars are visible and others are. I remember, I remember when I went started going through this thing. I remember saying God, I wish I had cancer. I wish I was a paraplegic. Because I probably still be married because then everyone, my wife, my kids, whatever would have been able to point well, dad’s got cancer, and they were received all this support.

Dr. King 1:07:28
Now even in a stroke community, man, it’s like it’s unseen. You’ve got a gangly leg, your drill, you’re mentally not function, you’re not handy. It’s like, Man, that’s uncomfortable for me. I just need that to go away. Because then I can continue with my life being normal. And I’m not a fronted with something that’s happening in the life of someone else.

Dr. King 1:07:47
Because if I am affronted, and I accept that affront and I realize that what’s happening to me when I see it is not pleasant, is not embracing, then I have to examine myself. And that brings me back to the scars of shame. And the Medal of Honor point, is you I think if we’re going to change the way people view mental health and I think I see strike as part of that part of that handling that trauma, is we’ve got to be prepared to have champions are going to push back a little bit and say no, now that shit don’t fly you can’t say that.

Bill 1:08:22
I love the reframe that you just made a couple of times there about the other person is ashamed of their response and their lack of empathy and their lack of being able to to facilitate a way of supporting this person. That is an interesting reframe. For me. It just speaks to me that completely makes sense because I know the people that didn’t come to see me and didn’t ask about how I was when I was in hospital, you know, half dead. Actually, it wasn’t about me it was about their inability to be in that space with me because they had only ever experienced the other space. You know, the healthy laughing not unwell.

Bill 1:09:15
And then as a result of that, they are in the, they’re in this other weird space that they don’t know how to be so they don’t turn up. And initially I was annoyed and frustrated, and maybe even angry that some people didn’t put it out there that they were interested to know how it was. But then I was like, that was the best person in the world not to come because to have that kind of energy in my room. I’d rather not there. Yes, that was a that was another kind of amazing intuitive thing that they did to support me was not turn up.

Dr. King 1:09:47
And that is a great reframe of that. There’s a difference between being alone and lonely. being lonely is one thing but being alone. A lot of things with recovery. You’ve got Walk Alone, look, it all happens in this, six foot, two foot, bit of meat here, it all happens in here, mate, all my recovery is happening here, I have to take response from my negative, I can celebrate, I can still I can celebrate the successes outside.

Dr. King 1:10:15
But it is all happening in here. And I think that’s a very important understand that people can support you, Bill, you know this, the therapist can support you, you can go and see a physio therapist and I say go home and do these exercises. If you go home and sit on a couch, you’re not going to get better, it all happens in here. So and all the recovery happens, or the struggle happens, or the victory happens, or the shame or the defeat.

Bill 1:10:45
In my language is that in my language, that’s me taking responsibility for that part of it not outsourcing that part to somebody else. That’s the part that you’re talking about being doing alone, that thing, that is my responsibility, my action steps that I need to take.

Dr. King 1:11:05
So, and this is where it would be interesting probably for you to think through with your community. There’s two things that I talk about it, again, deal with it. But in my own life, I talked about instances and episode, if I have an instance, that’s when I’m so. So PTSD, it changes the way your brains are able to process information and emotional energy. So most people have little buckets of emotion.

Dr. King 1:11:32
So they get these little buckets in a roll together, you’ve got to work bucket, a home bucket, a sex life bucket with a kid’s bucket, you know, all that sort of stuff. So when you if you’ve got if you’ve got a rattling at work, you can only leave that bucket at work come home, it might froth a little bit, but you can go home and deal with everything else.

Dr. King 1:11:50
So with PTSD, if I have a shake, in my home life bucket, it affects everything. It’s like a pebble in the pool, and the ripples go everywhere, and goes everywhere and affects every aspect of your life. And I think what happens is the same thing happens with Okay, so if I’ve got one thing happening in one area of my life, it’s going to affect and run over. So if I have an incidence, it happens in here. I’m having an incident, I’m not coping with the situation. I’m out in public, there’s a lot of people I’m feeling threatened, I’m concerned, but it really happens internal to me.

Dr. King 1:12:25
So that’s what I define as an incidence an episode is when it impacts the people around me. I start to not cope, I start there yell at my wife, I started not cope without life itself. It’s the same trigger. But how it manifests it manifests differently. Now you take that over into your space. And a lot of the people were the same Well, that’s just because you know, the thing happened in the brain is just a stroke thing.

Dr. King 1:12:48
Man, I’d want to unpack that a little bit more. Because a lot of those things have gone from being personal incidences. Now it’s manifesting out into an episode that affects everybody else. So I think there’s that progression that happens with emotion, and progression that happens with interaction. And that was a very big understanding for me when I started to realize that all of this happens in here. And if it’s starting to impact people out there, I need to pull it back to a degree. And I’ve got to set up mechanisms that stop it going from an incident and manifesting in an episode.

Bill 1:13:24
You describe me exactly, we spoke about it just a little bit earlier, like before stroke. I was angry shitty, you know, had the whole negative emotional loop occurring that was starting from me avoiding my heart It was impacting my mental health, my physical health, and then I was having episodes that was affecting my entire family in my four walls, and then outside because I thought that everyone else on the planet was the dickhead and I was the perfect one until my counselor asked me that question. Is it possible that you’re the problem not everybody else? I told her to get fucked.

Dr. King 1:14:10
Perfect response. Told her to get fucked and then went home and then think about it.

Bill 1:14:17
And then went back and told her she was right. And I told her to get fucked in a way that two mates at the forty like you and me talk say fuck off like how could I be mean? She started to laugh did exactly what you did, and then she just pretended that that was it. She wasn’t saying anything else after that she just.

Dr. King 1:14:42
Moving on to leave it with you.

Bill 1:14:45
And then she was right. So what you’ve described is me, exactly. I was having incidences that I was turning into episodes and one thing that occurred to me now on reflection and because you so eloquently described the form is one thing that occurred to me was that I stopped having episodes and I started to take ownership of my incidences, and then I worked through each incident and had less episodes.

Recognize And Communicate

Dr. King 1:15:19
It’s exactly what happens. So if I feel something building in here, I, I think when you got a partner my spouse, Melissa, very supportive of what I do and what I struggle with. And I will tell her, I’ll say on that well, and she’ll go physically? I said no, no, I’m not well, I’m not well, I’m not coping, and I’ll feel it building and I might be over something.

Dr. King 1:15:47
And she’ll go okay, what do we need to do? Well, probably nothing I’ve told you that I’m not well, so that lifts the shame lid off straightaway. Okay, so now I’m vulnerable. So now I’ve moved from being having been shamed. I’ve now moved into a place of courage I’m not well, okay, I’m prepared and open to listen to it, okay.

Dr. King 1:16:07
It also gives me freedom and room and this not permission to be a dickhead, but freedom, and room, that if we’re not coping with something, that we’ve already established that I’m not coping, I think the other thing too Bill is in the journey, when people like us start to get better at it.

Dr. King 1:16:23
Because everyone wants to get back to what their normal life is, the more that we can cope, the more they assume Nothing’s wrong with us, instead of the fact that I know every day of my life going forward, I’m going to have to manage this thing. And, and she will forget sometimes that I hate crowds, that I hate going out in public, I don’t like to be away from the house. I’m very fearful every time she leaves, that something will happen to us.

Dr. King 1:16:50
And it’ll be like a ringer say, well, where I What’s going on? Are you okay? is safe to I’m just, I’m just more mad, I’m just up the road at the grocery store. What’s wrong? What do you mean, what’s wrong, it’s, for me, it’s like the same thing I deal with every day that she’s got so used to our communication.

Dr. King 1:17:08
And with me coping, she forgets that, that’s just me managing it everyday. And some days, I don’t manage it well. And so even being able to have those conversations of babe, I’m the same guy, I’m just better at managing it. And some days, I’m not going to manage it as well. So you know, and, you know, it actually builds in a place of strength.

Bill 1:17:28
Stroke survivors have got a lot in common then because most stroke survivors do not want to go into public places because of the overwhelm. And the sensitivity to multiple things happening at the same time, the brain just can’t cope, it has to switch off. So a lot of stroke survivors will isolate and stay away from the public and I did that.

Bill 1:17:51
Especially loud places and people moving everywhere and cars and horns and trucks, like they’ll do anything they can to avoid that it has eased for me, but it’s not my favorite place to be still a place where there’s too much going on around me the sensitivity, my brain gets overwhelmed, it switches off and then and then I can’t function the rest of my body can’t function and then it’s not enjoyable for me and the people that are around me.

Bill 1:18:21
So I can relate to that part of not wanting to be out in public for different reasons, but I feel like the internalized experience is similar it would increase cortisol, it would increase the heart rate it would increase blood pressure, it would increase all the you know, stress or responses and put that person in a sympathetic dominant emotional state, and then they’d have to be some sort of a come down.

Bill 1:18:55
And for me to come down, it takes a while to get over like a takes a few hours, maybe into the next day before I can just fully recover. And that is I think what some people don’t understand about me is that I need a day or two or whatever, to not be spoken to not be consulted, not be asked to just be me in my own zone.

Bill 1:19:21
So that I can just reset kind of like a pressing the reset buttons anyway that I know how to do it. And a lot of that involves quietness, quietness from the noise that’s going on around me whether that’s noise, ambient noise, or you know, just general run of the mill kind of stuff.

Bill 1:19:40
And life noise and then I’ve just got to go quiet and I’ve just got to sit contemplate and and go back into balance, you know, try and avoid not going into parasympathetic dominance so that I’m not doing the swing from being completely stressed to completely depraved. And then just try to sort of somehow slightly find the balance. And what helps for me is one thing that helps a lot. is food. If I have the wrong food when I’m shitty, it just gets worse.

Dr. King 1:20:13
Did you read there’s a part in the book where I talk about contemplating suicide after a coke, a bag of Cheetos and a Snickers bar. And I don’t know if you read that part so I fly to Chicago. And so flying to Chicago, I’m doing a meeting up there, I’m feeling good about life, you know, life’s okay, first time I’ve been traveling after this whole recall stuff, and all that sort of stuff.

Dr. King 1:20:38
So I go in this hotel, it’s 10 o’clock at night, the restaurant shut down, I get a packet of Cheetos, and a Snickers bar and a diet coke and go to my room. 15 minutes later, I’m on the top floor, looking at down into the atrium, having a look out of the balcony thinking about killing myself.

Dr. King 1:20:56
And, I caught myself go hang on 15 minutes ago, you were fine, now what’s wrong? So I spent the rest of the night reading up on orange food coloring, number five, and the impact of sugar and anxiety. And that’s where I’ve started to, and that nutrition has played a vital role in my recovery, I want to maybe suggest something to you.

What Stroke And PTSD Have In Common

Dr. King 1:21:23
And maybe for some of your listeners, if you take the time, and you have a list of have a list of the conditions and the manifestations of PTSD. And compare those to what you see a stroke. Because if you hadn’t told me that you were a stroke, my feedback to you was you’re suffering from post traumatic stress. Because the visual, the oral overwhelmed of noise, overwhelmed by crowd need to feel safe and protected, needing days to reset.

Dr. King 1:21:56
All of those are classic, I mean, classic textbooks, post traumatic stress responses. So if you’re over here, and you’re trying to treat your stress at your stroke, and you don’t understand that you’re dealing with symptoms of stress that has happened, post a traumatic experience that has lasted now the effects of which have lasted longer than six months PTSD.

Dr. King 1:22:26
If you’re trying to deal at total solely as a neurological thing, then you won’t you’re going to miss out on the greatest opportunity to find healing. And everything that you have described about the things that you struggle with are exactly the things I struggle with.

Dr. King 1:22:41
Our commonality is post our stress or traumatic event that was prolonged, and in your case led to in times of confinement, which makes it a CPTSD thing. And I think it might just reframe things for you. And then open up an entire world of other resources for you. I think you’re gonna enjoy the back half of the book.

Bill 1:23:14
I don’t even know what you just said my God that’s blown me away completely blown me away. What you’re telling me has completely blew me away because I didn’t ask that question. Because of me. When I asked them on Instagram I asked it because of other people. And what you’re telling me I didn’t expect to hear.

Dr. King 1:23:35
Like pigeon toady mate in that movie Storks you ever seen that one? Greatest film ever kids film called Storks greatest movie of all time.

Bill 1:23:49
Heavy my lord all right. I’m gonna be contemplating that one. Look I’ve really enjoyed a conversation I could talk about it. I could talk with you forever You’re my kind of guy you know what I mean? And especially because we’re not talking about how that footballer is terrible at football and that cricket player is terrible at cricket you know we’re talking about stuff that to me really matters you know and I know that football is important for people in cricket it’s important for people.

Bill 1:24:26
But sometimes it’s a distraction for not having the real deep and meaningful conversations and I find myself challenged when I go there with mates when when I missed that window of opportunity to ask the next smart question to take the conversation to the next level and it’s me that misses that window and I get it you know and I’m alright with that because sometimes they don’t want me to go there anyway so I don’t.

Deal With It: Living Well With PTSD – Dr. John A. King

Dr. King 1:24:50
No they don’t, I’ll tell you something you might enjoy mate is look in the book at the end of each chapter.

Bill 1:24:56
Put the book up for a sec. Let’s just have a look at it.

Dr. King 1:25:00
There you go. Listen, if your people, just for your folks mate, to give them a discount 20%, it’ll cover shipping. If they put in the code S To S, stress to strength it’ll give them a 20% discount. If they’re in America, I’ll sign up for them. They’re in Australia so nothing I can do about that, but at the end of each chapter, Melissa talks about what it was like for her as my wife, to walk through that with me.

Dr. King 1:25:30
And I think, you know, if you ever want to do a revisit, mate, maybe I can talk her into getting on a screen with me, because I think it’ll be fascinating for people is to hear about. So how do you do this as a couple, because I’m pretty sure in the stroke community, it’s the same as the PTSD community.

Dr. King 1:25:47
It’s seen as an individual thing, and the impact that it has on a marriage and a couple is not discussed. And our partners move into caregiver mode. And that’s why my first marriage fell apart. They move into caregiver mode, instead of staying in the wife and the spouse mode.

Dr. King 1:26:04
And you know, the thing is, when your wife becomes your mother, you can’t have sex with your wife. It totally destroys the natural order of things. And when your wife moves into that caregiver loving and you become the baby and the victim, it destroys us, particularly as a man, it just fucks it all up. Like you can’t be I’ve got enough shit mate, you’ve got enough trying to drag your Gumby leg around feeling like shit about your manhood.

Dr. King 1:26:28
Don’t even want to get a boner and get it on with a missus, which is your manhood it is your masculinity. It’s all about that. And that’s the same with me when I’m reduced to a crying, sniveling snotty mess. And I feel like I’m an 11 year old boy who’s just been anally violated, is not you know, I don’t need a mother, I need a woman who will speak to my manhood in my greatness, and encouraged me back out of that space.

Bill 1:26:54
That’s a big responsibility for that person who doesn’t have the skills is it? And the understanding of how to do that. And that’s what a stroke survivor caregiver give cops as well, whether it’s a husband or a wife, they come home from hospital with this person who they have no rulebook for, no support, no help. It’s all up to you. And it’s like, the doctors went to hospital for 10 years to know how to help somebody with stroke and you’re expecting me to do that overnight? What are you talking about?

Dr. King 1:27:25
I know mate and you know, they’ll you know, they’ll read this book. And they’ll come back and say, oh, Johnny wrote a good book. But Melissa is exceptional, it’s like, okay, but she is and it’s that reflection because what they connect with is and you put it really well mate is because when it happened to me it was like that.

Dr. King 1:27:45
And the same with PTSD, it causes this change in the brain. It causes a change in your brain with stroke which is another thing you might want to unpack Bill is stroke as a change in the brain. PTSD is a physical manifestation of a neurological manifestation a physical thing that happens in the brain.

Dr. King 1:28:05
Yeah, so amygdala, your hippocampus, your flight and fight response, all those things, which you say, well, that’s just stroke victims. It’s not mate it’s not it’s a neurological change that happens. It’s got a physical and an emotional and psychological manifestation.

Dr. King 1:28:22
And, and Mel is very adept. And we’ve worked very, very hard. And unfortunately, it was at the sake of my first marriage. But I changed. I changed on that Thursday afternoon, I went from John 1.0, to John 2.0. And, and this woman had been married to a totally different man for 20 years. 22 years. And now he is this different guy, and it’s going, well, Who the hell are you? Why are you crying all the time? Why are you throwing shit around?

Dr. King 1:28:53
Why are you losing your stuff? Why can I just go up to target and you cope with me being out of sight? Why can’t the kids visit your friends? Because if the kids visit their friends, they’re going to be raped and killed by people? Because that’s my overwhelming paradigm. And, it’s been, you know, and that’s why I totally get it. Why my first wife didn’t cope. Totally get it totally understand. I was a different guy.

Bill 1:29:18
John, thanks for everything that you do. Thanks for agreeing to being on the podcast. I really look forward to getting to know you, and to learn from you. Going forward, and I wish you all the success man, you’re doing great work, and I really appreciate it because I think I learned some things that I never knew about myself today. And I’m gonna have to think about those things as I laugh nervously.

Dr. King 1:29:48
Hey listen gain mate look, they can get it from the website, use the code S TO S and let people drop me an email. I’d like to connect with them. Now they heard about it. And I want to take this if you’re comfortable, mate, we’ve got about, we got a pretty good make work on social media. And I’ll take this and push it all over everyone mate because I love what you’re doing. And anything I can do to support you Bill going forward. You know, I’d love to be there for you mate.

Bill 1:30:18
Thanks for being on the podcast.

Dr. King 1:30:20
Cheers, mate.

Bill 1:30:21
All right, thanks for getting to the end of the episode. After the interview ended, John and i continue to speak for a little while. And the few minutes more of conversation that we had was worth listening to. So I’ve included it at the end of this episode. And please feel free to listen to the end of this next conversation. What we share is really useful.

Bill 1:30:47
That’s a wrap man.

Bill 1:30:54
Oh, my God what conversation. You have just absolutely just changed my life, I reckon. Because I didn’t know that that’s probably what I’m going through. I just did not know John, no way of knowing.

Dr. King 1:31:07
Trauma post the impact has lasted more than six months.

Bill 1:31:12
Yeah. And a physical manifestation and a physical change in the brain.

Dr. King 1:31:20
So I was in hospital for all bunch of shit mate like heart attacks, I had commit suicide, I mean a bunch of stuff. I had a mesenteric thing down in here. And it was interesting, the comment you made about the medical stuff and dentist, they go to school, I went in there, and I had to tell these doctors very seriously, you know, listen, I have this challenge.

Dr. King 1:31:43
And you guys need to understand that this is a challenge that I have. And according to your Hippocratic oath, you need to be aware of what and I had this comment, you need to be aware of what’s going on. And you need to cater your plan care to what my needs are.

Dr. King 1:31:56
And they were, you know, these are the best of the best. I’m literally like 14 hours away from dying, and they were like, well, who are you to lecture me I’m telling you, you put your hand under this nightshirt no matter how sick I am, I’m going to beat your ass. So just be very fucking careful. And we had a couple of things like that happened.

Dr. King 1:32:14
And at the end of it, this head surgeon came down said, Listen, I think we need to have a conversation. We’ve got no idea of the impact of trauma. And I said, No, you don’t you guys don’t have a clue. And I think could you imagine if the doctors in the stroke community understood that this was actually a traumatic thing. And there was part of the care, the healing package on the other end was going to be to confront PTSD. Just think just think in your situation, how that would have sped up your recovery?

PTSD After Stroke – Dr. John A. King

Bill 1:32:47
I think you’re you’ve just, and I’m glad we haven’t stopped recording, because I’m gonna include this in the end, I think you’ve just said something that’s amazing. There’s no doubt about it, that in the stroke community, there are survivors of stroke that are also survivors of childhood abuse. So this has not made it better for them.

Dr. King 1:33:11
No, you already have PTSD. Now, if you’ve got an underlying condition, a marital thing, a sexual abuse thing, you’re a police officer, a veteran. But you can’t deal with this up here, without unpacking what’s down here, you know, you only get good fruit off a good tree, you can’t get good fruit off a bad tree. So unless you’re prepared to address the issues of the heart, because out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Unless you do this, you are never going to get good fruit off that tree.

Bill 1:33:41
Yeah, yeah. I totally, totally get it and I suppose that’s kind of what I needed to understand about so I think it’s also my responsibility when I’m dealing with stroke survivors to understand that the post traumatic stress is not shallow, it’s not just Are you had a stroke and you’ve got post traumatic stress that is multifaceted and deeply layered, and therefore in the past, and and if they’ve not been, then I haven’t an I don’t know how to facilitate them in any way about that, then I’m never going to achieve what they hope to achieve, which is a full recovery from stroke.

Bill 1:34:19
And when I’m talking about a full recovery, they might still be limping, they might still not have use of one of their arms, they might still not be able to listen to through one of their ears, but I’ve got deficits that are invisible and I struggle with that because it’s hard to describe to people what the stroke has done to my body because they don’t see it right. So I’m like, but I still consider myself fully recovered from it. From the stroke, not from what it’s done to me.

Dr. King 1:34:47
And I think that is going to be your biggest personal insight is when you have a look at it and you understand that what you actually dealing with and have been dealing with with a majority of the time in your recovery as not been your stroke, it’s been your PTSD. Because Okay, so you’ve got a limp. You’ve got a gammy leg, your arms, oh, fuck, whatever.

Dr. King 1:35:08
But in here, you can come to terms with that, well, that can get better. But in here, this is if you’re not dealing with this, you’re not, you’re not going to get completely Well, I think that’s probably going to be one of your biggest paradigm shifts. And I would imagine, I think this would be great to have a conversation doing like an Instagram Live or something or Facebook live and get what see what people’s feedbacks are.

Dr. King 1:35:33
Because I think, if they can understand this, what’s happened in here has not been a stroke, because even a stroke by my understanding of it limited that it is, is physical. So it’s a physical blood clot, it causes something. It’s a physical ailment, we address the physical, but it’s actually caused a neurological change. And that neurological change is a stroke.

Dr. King 1:35:58
Is it going to be long term effect? Yes, it is. But they’re going to be physical. But this neurological thing, this hippocampus, the fight and flight the adrenal gland is this lack of moral compass so here I am made a Christian preacher. Okay, got a very strong moral compass. PTSD, I have no moral compass, I got none. That still small voice that people talk with, I didn’t have it anymore.

Dr. King 1:36:26
I could do whatever I want to sleep well at night, it disappeared. I lost all inhibitions, total immerse moment in risky behavior, loss at all. And it because it was a physiological thing. We’ll it’s just Satan. I said no, it’s my brain is totally different. And I think if people can understand that I think you’re going to do it, you’re going to help a lot of people Bill. You got to help a lot of people in this space man.

Bill 1:36:53
I hope so man, I do hope so John, thanks so much.

Dr. King 1:36:56
Pleasure, man. peace and much grace, bro. Go well, go and sit in the park outside in the middle with a whole bunch of tremmies and piss someone off. Just because bless you.

Bill 1:37:11
Thanks so much for joining me on today’s recovery after stroke podcast. Do you ever wish there was just one place to go for resources, advice and support in your stroke recovery? Whether you’ve been navigating your journey for weeks, months or years, I know firsthand how difficult it can be to get the answers you need.

Bill 1:37:28
This road is both physically and mentally challenging from reclaiming your independence to getting back to work to rebuilding your confidence, and more. The symptoms don’t follow a rulebook and as soon as you leave the hospital, you no longer have medical professionals on tap. I know for me, it felt as if I was teaching myself a new language from scratch with no native speaker insight.

Bill 1:37:51
If this sounds like you, I’m here to tell you that you’re not alone and there is a better way to navigate your recovery and rebuild a fulfilling life that you love. I’ve created an inclusive, supportive and accessible membership community called recovery after stroke.

Bill 1:38:06
This is an all in one support and resource program and is designed to help you take your health into your own hands. This is your guidebook through every step in your journey from reducing fatigue, to strengthening your brain health, to overcoming anxiety and more. To find out more and to join the community. Just head to recoveryafterstroke.com. Thanks for listening and see you on the next episode.

Intro 1:38:30
Importantly, we present many podcasts designed to give you an insight and understanding into the experiences of other individuals opinions and treatment protocols discussed during any podcast are the individual’s own experience and we do not necessarily share the same opinion nor do we recommend any treatment protocol discussed.

Intro 1:38:47
All content on this website and any linked blog podcast or video material controlled this website or content is created and produced for informational purposes only and is largely based on the personal experience of Bill gaseous the content is intended to complement your medical treatment and support healing. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on as health advice.

Intro 1:39:09
The information is general and may not be suitable for your personal injuries, circumstances or health objectives. Do not use our content as a standalone resource to diagnose treat, cure or prevent any disease for therapeutic purposes or as a substitute for the advice of a health professional. Never delay seeking advice or disregard the advice of a medical professional, your doctor or your rehabilitation program based on our content.

Intro 1:39:31
If you have any questions or concerns about your health or medical condition, please seek guidance from a doctor or other medical professional if you are experiencing a health emergency or think you might be, call triple zero in Australia or your local emergency number immediately for emergency assistance or go to the nearest hospital emergency department.

Intro 1:39:49
Medical information changes constantly. While we aim to provide current quality information in our content. We did not provide any guarantees and assume no legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy currency or completeness of the content if you choose to rely on any information within our content, you do so solely at your own risk. We are careful with links we provide. However third party links from our website are followed at your own risk and we are not responsible for any information you find there.