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, and support for those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
From Stress to Strength – a curriculum for the overcomer in all of us.
What if one day you woke up and everything you knew was destroyed?
I don’t mean a little disrupted, I am talking about biblical proportions, Job-like destructive Complex Post Traumatic Stress.
That’s what happened to me. At 3pm. On a Thursday. In 2008. Total recall of over a decade of sexual abuse by my parents and their friends that I had suppressed…and the walls came tumbling down.
ALL GONE. Marriage. Career. Health.
When I told a therapist, she burst out crying and said she couldn’t cope with what they had done to me, it was the worst story she had heard in 30 years of counseling, and I thought…WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT.
So I did what my old boxing coach taught me. I tucked my chin and threw punches, refused to quit. I wasn’t going to die broken because of what someone else did to me—screw that.
The result is that I wrote a book of poetry anonymously called No Working Title – a life in progress. It is dark, raw, honest and definitely NSFW. I wrote it anonymously because my kids were young, and I was pretty sure my business contacts and parishioners would not have coped.
Out of this journey grew the Give The A Voice Foundation. Our aims are Advocacy, Resourcing and Rescue to those that have been abused and trafficked and those that suffer from Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Along the way, in response to every person I met who said, “Why are you not MORE crazy,” I wrote #dealwithit: Living Well with PTSD. It is a summary of the lessons I learned and the principles I had to re-teach myself to move from John-Aggedon in 2008, to once again being a contributing human being. It is an honest account of the highs and lows of building a life from the bottom up, but this time with 50-odd years of knowledge and several lifetimes’ worth of experience.
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Cheers,
John