Epilogue: A Dad’s Letter

Dear Ben and Andrew,

There is something I want to share with you as you navigate your own adult lives. This is not an attempt to relitigate the past or convince you to see everything the way I do. It is something I learned much later in life than I wish I had, and if there is one final life lesson I can give you as your father, this may be the most important one.

For most of my life, I believed that if I was functioning well, the difficult things that happened to me in childhood must have been behind me. I could succeed academically, play sports, make friends, build a career, teach, coach, raise children, solve difficult problems, and sometimes be happier than I had ever been in my life. I mistook all of that for evidence that the underlying trauma had been resolved.

It hadn't. I had become extraordinarily good at functioning around it.

The One-Two Punch

We are all, to some degree, shaped by the rooms we are raised in. From the time I was very young, I learned that I was in the way. My birth kept my mother in a marriage she desperately wanted to escape, and because of that, I became an easy target for her anger. When I was a little boy reaching for basic emotional connection, safety, or a simple hug, she would routinely turn me away with a cold, repetitive, "Not now."

By the time the full weight of her emotional rejection hit me, the sad thing was that it didn't even shock me anymore. When she eventually said things like, "When I found out I was pregnant with you, I thought about having an abortion and now I wish I had," my internal reaction was essentially, Oh, there it is. It was my birth that was in the way.

By then, emotional numbness had become my nervous system's way of surviving. More importantly, my mother's voice had begun becoming my own. The criticism, rejection, and feeling that I was fundamentally in the way became the foundation for decades of shame and negative self-talk.

It was only long after my mother's death that I finally uncovered some of the architecture behind her behavior. When Mom was born, my grandparents took the nanny whom her next-oldest sister, Andy, adored and assigned her to raise and nurture Mom. Andy became enormously resentful, and their relationship remained destructive for much of their lives. Mom's eventual mental breakdown was connected to that history.

That revelation dropped another missing piece into place. Abuela and Aunt Andy were fiercely loving and recognized that Mom was not capable of giving me all the emotional nurturing I needed, so they stepped in. They threw me a lifeline. But in my mother's traumatized mind, my closeness with Andy could also make me seem like another betrayal. I wasn't just the child she hadn't wanted; I was receiving affection from the sister with whom she had spent her life locked in conflict.

Understanding that eventually helped me understand Mom. It did not erase what happened to me. The baseline blueprint of feeling that I was in the way and somehow fundamentally unwanted had already been etched into my nervous system.

Then came the second punch.

When I was twelve years old, within a six-month period, I was sexually assaulted twice. First, my mother's oldest brother, Johnny, molested me over three weekends. Six months later, while I was gathering tadpoles at Dove Lake in Gladwyne to bring back to the creek behind my house, I was raped by a complete stranger.

Those assaults landed on top of the rejection and shame that were already there. Together they created a strange dual paralysis. The sexual trauma made me afraid of being touched, while the rejection I had learned from Mom made me afraid to initiate touch because initiating affection meant risking another rejection.

I was simultaneously afraid to be touched and afraid to touch.

That defensive armor was so strong that I could not safely navigate beyond a first date until I was thirty years old. I could socialize, make girls laugh, have friends, and play sports. The problem wasn't that I couldn't interact with girls. The problem came when I had to risk finding out whether one of them actually wanted me.

Years later, I could look backward and recognize occasions when girls had clearly been interested in me and wonder how the hell I had missed it. Often, I hadn't missed the signals. I simply couldn't trust them or myself.

For years, I thought that said something about me as a man. It didn't. It said something about what had happened to a boy.

The Places Where I Felt Safe

Fortunately, my childhood was not only trauma. Sports were my safe haven. The athletic teams I played on were where I socialized, felt seen, and felt wanted. About a mile from our house in Ardmore was a street hockey rink. Unless it was insanely cold, I would go there and practice.

I even took one of Mom's large steel mixing bowls, turned it upside down, and used it to learn no-look passes without cheating a peek. Then I turned the bowl right-side up and practiced stickhandling behind the net and flipping the ball into it. Mom eventually figured out what I had done and yelled at me, so I asked Aunt Andy to buy me one of my own.

That rink was a safe place. I would take the original Lila down there and practice firing balls off the boards and working on outlet passes. Her teeth left marks on the balls, so I only let her destroy three specific ones in order to maintain the integrity of the others when I practiced shooting. Lila was the best companion. She slept with me when I was down, and her greetings were like Dino greeting Fred Flintstone. Mom originally got her for protection, but also as a companion for me—in part so I would leave Mom alone.

By high school, the verbal abuse had largely been replaced by emotional neglect. After Mom lost her tenure at Villanova, she and I barely spoke during the final two years I lived with her. By my senior year she was out of work, money was extremely tight, I was wearing the same clothes as the year before, and I saved my lunch money to buy soccer cleats. I attended a prestigious Catholic school wearing a dress coat riddled with holes until Aunt Andy noticed and bought me an inexpensive replacement.

To be fair to Mom, she did the things moms are supposed to do behind the scenes. The house ran. Things got done. What was missing was the emotional connection.

Sports, humor, friendship, and competition gave me places where I could feel competent and connected. Eventually mathematics, teaching, coaching, intellectual challenge, and sheer busyness gave my brain places where it could thrive. Those were genuine strengths, and they became some of the best parts of me.

But they also became extremely effective camouflage.

The Guidance I Didn't Get—and the Guidance I Found

There was another consequence of having weak emotional connections with both of my parents, especially Mom, that I did not recognize until much later. I missed many of those ordinary parent-child conversations that help a kid learn how to navigate life. I didn't really have the typical mom-son or dad-son talks about choices, relationships, planning ahead, handling mistakes, or thinking through consequences. Abuela provided some of that guidance, but once I started school I generally saw her only on weekends.

That does not mean I grew up without guidance. Abuela and Aunt Andy gave me something enormously important: a moral compass. They taught me that when somebody cannot defend themselves, you defend them. If somebody is being bullied, you do not stand safely in the crowd and watch. You step in. Power isn't permission to dominate somebody weaker; having power creates a responsibility to protect them.

So I had much of the why.

What I often lacked was the how.

Dad was different in one important area. He taught me an enormous amount about the natural world. When we were outdoors, his defensive armor came down, his curiosity came alive, and he shared that curiosity with me. He taught me how to look at things, explore them, ask questions, follow evidence, and become fascinated by what I was seeing. That became one of the great gifts he gave me.

Sports provided another kind of education. Much of the executive functioning I did develop was learned there: preparing, practicing, reading situations, anticipating what came next, making adjustments, learning from immediate feedback, recovering from mistakes, and understanding that what you did now affected what happened several moves later. Sports gave those skills structure, urgency, feedback, and a reason for my ADHD brain to engage.

The problem was that I didn't understand how compartmentalized those abilities were. I could anticipate three moves ahead on a soccer field, solve a complicated mathematical problem, or disappear into the geology of a landscape while still struggling with ordinary life decisions that seemed obvious to other people. The executive-function machinery existed, but access to it depended heavily on context.

At home, I had much less scaffolding. I didn't have enough of the repeated conversations through which a supportive parent gradually becomes an internal voice: What are your options? What happens next? Have you thought this through? What are you going to do if it doesn't work? Nor did I have enough of the healthy relational pressure that comes from loving and trusting a parent whose guidance matters to you and whom you genuinely do not want to disappoint.

That created a strange imbalance.

I had internalized a parental voice telling me what was wrong with me without having enough of the parental voice teaching me how to navigate what was in front of me.

ADHD was part of my executive-function difficulty, but it wasn't the whole story. I also entered adulthood without some of the developmental scaffolding other kids had been receiving almost invisibly for years. Meanwhile, sports and the natural world had taught me that I could function extraordinarily well when the environment gave my brain the structure it needed.

Later, I began filling in some of those missing pieces wherever I could find them.

John Chaney became one of my teachers from afar. I never played for him and he never knew I existed, but when I was trying to figure out what kind of father, coach, and mentor I wanted to become, I watched him closely. What interested me wasn't merely basketball. Chaney could demand accountability from young men without making his relationship with them conditional on their success. Discipline did not require abandonment. Caring about somebody did not mean lowering expectations.

Around the same time, I was watching Benjamin Sisko on Deep Space Nine. He could command a space station, carry enormous responsibility, discipline his son, make mistakes, and still be Dad. Authority and affection were not opposites.

I didn't feel as though I had inherited a complete map for fatherhood, so I assembled one wherever I could find the pieces. Abuela and Aunt Andy had given me the moral compass. Dad gave me wonder and curiosity. Sports taught me how to operate under pressure. Chaney and Sisko helped me think about leadership, mentorship, accountability, and fatherhood.

And then I started practicing those things myself.

I learned how to become a successful high school soccer coach and mentor. Coaching forced me to read people as well as the game—to recognize when a player needed pressure, when he needed reassurance, when confidence was real and when bravado was covering fear, and when a kid needed someone to believe in him before he could believe in himself.

The field became another classroom for me. I learned how to break complicated skills into manageable pieces, how to create environments in which kids could succeed, how to correct without humiliating, and how to recognize that two athletes standing next to each other might require completely different paths to reach the same destination. I learned that leadership was not getting everybody to respond to me the same way. It was learning how to reach the person standing in front of me.

Mentoring pushed that development further. I began understanding that the behavior presented on the surface was not necessarily the kid underneath it. The angry kid might be scared. The disengaged kid might be protecting himself from another failure. The class clown might be controlling the moment because being laughed with was safer than risking being laughed at. The apparently lazy kid might be overwhelmed and have no idea how to begin.

Later, teaching gave me somewhere to put all of it together. I became particularly good at connecting with students who had ADHD, who carried shame, who had experienced serious trauma, or whom other adults had struggled to reach. I knew what it was like to have genuine ability that was difficult to access consistently. I knew what it was like to need the right environment, the right challenge, the right relationship, and sometimes simply the right person standing beside you.

In a strange way, I had spent much of my childhood trying to find the environments where I could access myself. As an adult, I became good at helping kids find theirs.

Sports taught me how to function. Coaching taught me how to lead. Mentoring taught me how to reach people. Teaching gave me a place to put all of it together.

None of that means I suddenly possessed every executive-function skill I had missed developing at home. That is the point. Human development is not nearly that tidy. I could become extremely good at scaffolding a struggling teenager while still having blind spots in my own life. I could help an athlete anticipate what came next while failing to anticipate consequences somewhere else. I could understand exactly what one of my students needed and remain confused about what I needed myself.

The abilities were real.

Access to them was compartmentalized.

Nicole and the Armor I Didn't Understand

Her name is Nicole Rothman. Had the universe not caused her unthinkable trauma forcing her to move back home to Germany, to this day, I feel that she was the one.

Nicole and I worked at the Hampton Inn in Asheville, NC on Brevard Rd. I worked the evening night audit and she worked the front desk in the morning. She was taking night classes to be a paralegal. She was born in Germany to a German mom and a Swiss Italian father who was abusive. She and her mom moved to Georgia when Nicole was 13. She spoke English with a Georgia-German accent. She was agnostic, loved Star Trek, and German heavy metal bands. She was beautiful. She had the Audrey Hepburn playful European attitude.

After work, I would flirt with her, cracking jokes and making her laugh. Then in February 1991, I said to her, "Since your birthday is on the 6th and mine is on the 8th, why don't you come over, I'll cook and we can exchange gifts." She said, "Sure, absolutely," while quietly thinking, Finally!

We agreed a couple of weeks later on a Thursday night we would have the date. I worked that night and she worked the following morning. On that night, I got everything ready, I had the food ready, and she did not show. I had to get ready for work when I realized I had accidentally unplugged the power cord when vacuuming the floor! So I called her number, left a voice message on her answering machine, and groveled like an idiot. I went to work worrying about how this hot-headed German-Italian was going to greet me.

When she got in, she didn't say much. I went to the other side of the front desk and groveled some more. Then a big smile came across her face and she said, "That's enough!" I melted. I then realized she knew she owned me! She said, "While I can't do a date next week, I can the week after." I was flying high. Again, she probably had confirmation she owned me.

The following Friday, I went to pick up my paycheck. Brenda, the hotel's GM and a friend, called me into her office and closed the door. I thought to myself, Oh shit, am I getting fired?

Then Brenda said the words I will never forget to this day: "I need to tell you what happened to Nicole." I completely froze.

She said Nicole had a friend who was estranged from her husband stay over at her apartment. Her husband, strung out on acid and other drugs, broke into Nicole's apartment and stabbed and bludgeoned Nicole 30 times, and stabbed his wife even more, taking his wife's body to dump off the side of the road in Candler. Nicole was in the ICU in critical condition.

I had no idea what to do; we weren't dating yet. I was in a feedback loop.

Luckily for Nicole, her apartment was literally 150 yards downhill from the Mission ER.

Nicole survived. She moved back with her mom in Duluth, Georgia. She went to Emory University for plastic surgery to repair her face and other scars from the attack. She had permanent nerve damage underneath her left eye.

Nicole had no insurance and no money to pay for the surgery. A major benefactor and influencer at Emory gathered other people with deep pockets to help pay for Nicole's surgery.

That man was Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter is one of my heroes. I have read most of his books. To me, Carter was a true servant. He helped people without any thought of converting them or expecting anything in return. He believed that doing Jesus's work on Earth brought him closer to God.

When Nicole's PTSD became a problem, she and her mom decided that she needed to return to Germany to get away from the incident. Brenda held a going-away party, and I brought Nicole a gift.

Nicole came up to me quickly and gave me a hug.

And I reciprocated.

My little PTSD bubble usually freezes in situations like that. I normally don't reciprocate unexpected hugs. But this time I did. I reciprocated in kind.

Right then and there, I knew she felt for me what I felt for her.

And right then and there, I knew she was the one.

Occasionally, even now, I search online and on Facebook to see if Nicole is okay and if she somehow became whole. I have never been able to find out how she did. The EU is very protective of personal information compared with the United States.

But there was another part of what happened to Nicole that stayed with me for years.

Because of shame, I defaulted yet again to believing it was my fault. It was a Star Trek thing. Had I not unplugged that cord, it could have created a series of events where Nicole possibly or probably wouldn't have gotten harmed.

And that stuck with me until I met Dr. Dodson years later. When I had that episode in Colorado, he said to me, "You're compassionate to seven billion people in the world minus one. You need to learn to be compassionate to yourself."

I said, "This is about shame, isn't it?"

Dr. Dodson said, "Yeah."

I said, "So forgiveness deals with guilt, but self-compassion is what you use to deal with shame."

Dr. Dodson said, "Exactly."

It was at that point that I was finally able to resolve the whole thing. Up until then, I still felt responsible because of that causal connection: had I not unplugged that phone cord, I could have had a life with her. More importantly, she wouldn't have been harmed.

Your Mom and Two Uncalibrated Nervous Systems

Your mother belongs in this story, but our marriage does not need to become the story.

We were both carrying things we did not fully understand. My unresolved trauma, ADHD, and rejection sensitivity often collided with her need for order, predictability, and control. Neither of us had the diagnoses, language, or tools to understand what was happening underneath, so behaviors rooted in fear and dysregulation could be interpreted as lack of effort, lack of care, selfishness, or intentional opposition.

My nervous system was already primed to experience criticism and rejection as threats. When I felt judged, corrected, unwanted, or as though I was in the way, some of the oldest patterns from my childhood could come roaring back without either of us understanding what had just happened.

Your mother had her own history and her own internal machinery. I understand that far better today than I did when we were married. Understanding it has allowed me to let go of a tremendous amount of resentment. It does not mean everything that happened was okay, just as understanding my own trauma does not make everything I did okay.

Our attempted reconciliation is a good example. Your mother sincerely told me, "Even though you are not a Christian, you are a good man and I think I can live with that." I now understand that she meant it as acceptance. My rejection-sensitive brain heard something completely different: I'm settling for you.

During that reconciliation attempt, I was constantly calling her, but she wasn't calling me back. For a man whose own mother never called him once during college—and who, whenever I called her, suddenly had to go to the bathroom three minutes into the conversation, as if hearing my voice were the ultimate diuretic—that dynamic hit a very old nerve.

Eventually I decided I was done. I genuinely intended to sit down with your mother and tell her face-to-face that the reconciliation was over. Instead, in an impulsive moment driven partly by my desperate need to feel wanted, I put myself on Match.com and quickly connected with somebody else. I completely fucked up the proper order of ending a relationship. I needlessly hurt your mother, and that is a mistake I own completely.

Trauma and ADHD can explain why I reacted the way I did. They do not make every reaction right.

When PTSD Met the Difficulties of Marriages

What I did not understand then was how poorly my PTSD was reacting to the difficulties in marriages.

The one-two punch of childhood had already established the architecture. First came my mother's verbal abuse, emotional rejection, and negative self-talk, which taught me that I was unwanted and in the way. Then came the two sexual assaults at twelve. By the time I became a husband and father, I had spent decades building a functional life around injuries I did not understand were still active.

That meant the present could collide with the past without my knowing it. Criticism could connect to my mother's criticism. Feeling unwanted could connect to the little boy who repeatedly heard "not now." Emotional distance could activate the expectation of rejection, while difficulties involving intimacy could collide with sexual trauma I had never resolved. My nervous system was often responding not only to what was happening in front of me, but also to everything that had happened before it.

This does not mean every disagreement was PTSD, and it certainly does not absolve me of my own behavior. It means I was trying to navigate marriage and fatherhood with a threat-detection system calibrated by experiences neither your mother nor I understood.

All three women I married carried unresolved things of their own. Shame influenced whom I chose as much as it influenced how I behaved once I was inside those relationships. In some ways, broken felt familiar to broken. I needed scaffolding and steadiness, but it is very difficult for two people to scaffold each other when neither one can consistently scaffold themselves.

Too often, we were asking dysregulated nervous systems and a significant, unresolved baggage of shame to provide each other with the stability neither one had learned how to reliably create alone.

A Father's Regret

That lack of understanding sometimes bled into how I parented and coached you.

Andrew, one of those realizations came years later while I was living out of my car and working out at a Planet Fitness in Las Cruces. I was badly out of shape, but when I ran through a circuit, I realized my calves, quads, glutes, and obliques still retained immense natural strength. It turned out my Cuban ass was largely all muscle.

A trainer there didn't believe me when I told him I could max out the Life Fitness leg press at 350 pounds for 25 reps. I warmed up with 20 reps at 250 pounds and then knocked out 18 at 350 without much strain. He stepped onto the machine afterward and couldn't push a single rep.

From that night forward, he called me "Glutes."

But while talking with him, I had a much more important realization. I suddenly understood that virtually every Division I athlete probably has at least one area of athleticism that is pure baseline—something natural that gave them an easy entry point into sports.

For me, it was my core.

And in that gym in Las Cruces, my heart sank because I immediately thought of you, Andrew.

I remembered visiting you in Colerain and trying to help you with fielding for Little League. I had become needlessly frustrated because I wasn't smart or mature enough at the time to understand that the natural baseline strength that allowed me to drop into athletic positions effortlessly was not necessarily your baseline. You had a different body and a different physical starting point.

Instead of recognizing that we needed to build the foundations first, I projected my baseline onto you. I am deeply sorry for that.

Never mistake your own baseline for somebody else's starting line.

There is another decision involving you, Andrew, that I regret even more. When you were eleven, you told me you wanted to live with me. Hearing that gave me a wonderful feeling, but at exactly that time Dad was deteriorating rapidly with severe dementia. Knowing how stressful our family environment had already been, I became terrified that I lacked the emotional capacity to handle both situations without putting you into another chaotic home.

Instead of sucking it up and finding a way to make it work, I let fear make the decision. I called your mother and told her about your request and said that with Dad in his final arc, I couldn't meet the moment.

I wish I had made a different decision.

Finding Out I Wasn't the Only One

Then the family history I had spent most of my life not fully understanding began to open up.

The first person in the family I told was my cousin Luisa. I trusted her. She was nonjudgmental—hippie, liberal, Philly Cuban—and she had always looked at me almost like an older brother.

I told her, "Johnny molested me over three weekends when he was living at 609 Overhill Road."

Luisa: "You're not the only one."

Me: "What?"

Luisa: "There are others."

Me: "There are others?"

Luisa: "Yeah. I can tell you one. You want to know?"

Me: "Uh, sure."

Luisa: "Johnny attempted to rape my father when he was 12 years old."

Me: "He attempted to rape his youngest brother?"

The shame and guilt that had been directed inward began flipping into anger. It was the first little crack in the armor that had contained everything for decades, and I did not yet have the tools to manage what was beginning to come through that crack. From that point forward, anger management started to become an issue, and it slowly grew—drip by drip by drip.

It was also when I began doubting my family. Luisa had told me there were others. I had no idea how many. I only knew that if there were other boys Johnny had molested, then somewhere there had to be an adult whose child had also been violated and who had said nothing.

Later, somebody shared a family photograph with me that I couldn't let go of. I cropped it and zeroed in on one small part of the picture. Mom is sitting next to her father, my Abuelo. Beside him is Abuela, comforting her youngest son, Nino, with her hand resting on him.

Sitting immediately beside Nino is Johnny.

The photograph was taken after Johnny had attempted to rape Nino when he was twelve. Abuela was unwittingly comforting her youngest son through the consequences of what had happened to him. She didn't know why he needed comforting.

And she didn't know that the reason was sitting right beside him.

It exemplifies a darkness that would eventually be revealed to me ten years later.

Eventually I learned the scale of what that sentence from Luisa—"There are others"—actually meant. Of the eighteen male first cousins in my generation, nine had been sexually assaulted by Johnny. His youngest brother, Nino, had been his first known victim.

Ten boys in one family.

But I did not know that yet. That knowledge came piece by piece over years, which meant that for a long time I was living not only with what had happened to me, but with the uncertainty of how far it extended and who might have known.

While I was caring for Mom during her battle with pancreatic cancer, she told me about a moment years earlier when her brother Luis heard the women in the family casually talking about Johnny always "playing" with the nephews. The blood drained from Luis's face. He immediately said, "That is a bad idea, it's a real bad idea, and it needs to stop right now."

Uncle Luis deserves enormous credit. He recognized the danger and said something when others did not.

Then came Aunt Andy.

This mattered enormously because Andy had been one of the great sanctuaries of my childhood. She had protected me, bought the coat when I needed one, provided some of the affection I wasn't receiving at home, and had been one of the people I believed would always have my back.

While Mom was in hospice, Andy called her, and the two sisters beautifully resolved their lifelong differences. Mom was crying. She handed the phone to me after bragging about how well I had been taking care of her. Andy told me how proud she was of me, and I broke down crying.

In that moment of profound vulnerability, I decided it was finally time to trust her with the truth. I told her, "When Johnny was living on the third floor of Abuela's house at 609 Overhill Road, he molested me over three weekends."

Her response was immediate.

"You're lying. You're making that up."

I became incredibly angry and told her Johnny had also attempted to rape Nino when he was twelve.

Again: "You're lying."

I told her, "Nino visits you once a week. You can ask him yourself."

She hung up.

The woman who had had my back throughout my childhood completely rejected me when I needed her most. On October 4, 2014, I tried calling her on her birthday to let bygones be bygones. There was no answer. I texted Gerry to check whether she was home, and he confirmed she had been sitting by the phone all day.

She had chosen not to answer me.

The Time of Darkness

Two days later, I spun out completely. The combination of the family revelations, the loss of Andy as a sanctuary, and a lifetime of locked-away trauma overwhelmed my nervous system. I erupted into self-harm severe enough that I concussed myself. I had never done anything like that before.

There is a Justin Hayward solo song called "Raised on Love." Every time I listened to it, I saw an image of my beloved Abuela. Suddenly I couldn't listen to it anymore because I felt like a fraud if I did.

Much later, during that dark period, I watched Spotlight. As I watched the survivors of childhood sexual abuse describe what had happened to them psychologically, I recognized myself. The chronology was different. My defensive armor had held for decades before finally splitting open in my fifties, but I recognized the same mechanism.

I took that realization to Dr. Llinás, and that was when I was formally diagnosed with PTSD.

When Home Stopped Being a Safe Place

Linda had been there during the beginning of that darkness. After the first enormous episode following Andy's rejection, she was calm with me and wanted to help me. That matters. What happened later should not erase the fact that there were times when Linda was exactly the person I needed beside me.

We married in 2018. What neither of us fully understood at the time was the sheer weight of what we were both carrying into that home. When two people live under the same roof with their own unresolved childhood trauma, deep-seated shame, and undiagnosed neurodivergence, creating a shared sanctuary is extraordinarily difficult. We each had completely different, competing mechanisms for trying to feel secure. For me, navigating severe PTSD and ADHD meant I desperately required an open, calm, and controllable physical environment to regulate my nervous system. When an environment felt cluttered, unpredictable, or beyond my control, my internal threat-detection system interpreted it as claustrophobic and unsafe. For her, safety was tied to preserving possessions and holding onto things that carried deep sentimental meaning.

Neither need was ill-intended. But the tragedy was that the very ways we each instinctively sought safety directly undermined the other’s ability to feel safe.

Meanwhile, what I was learning about Johnny and the family was becoming much more specific. Luisa had told me years earlier that there were other victims. By late 2019, I had begun learning who some of them actually were. Knowing there were others in the abstract was one thing; learning their identities was another. Each name made the horror larger and heavier. Sinking deeper into a vat of shame and losing my ability to tread water, I did what my nervous system had been conditioned to do when overwhelmed: I disconnected. I withdrew from almost everybody—from the Cuban side of the family, from relatives who had done nothing to me, and even from Luisa.

Yet during this exact same period, I was working at Kids Community College as the instructional technology manager, and professionally, I was functioning at an exceptionally high level. Work had become another sanctuary, much like sports had been during my childhood. It provided structure, purpose, clear problems to solve, and an environment where I could reliably access my strengths. In 2020, I was named district Employee of the Year, largely because I had a gift for connecting with kids whom other adults struggled to reach. Having lived behind defensive armor for so long, I could recognize when a student’s oppositional behavior was actually fear, shame, or self-protection.

The profound irony was that I had become exceptionally skilled at recognizing and navigating trauma in children while remaining largely blind to the severity of my own unhealed wounds. Even being named Employee of the Year became another layer of camouflage. Ray Thomas’s song "Painted Smile" resonated deeply with me then; I knew what it meant to present one face to the world while quietly bleeding underneath.

At home, the dynamic deteriorated into an agonizing feedback loop:

feeling an inability to control my environment >> PTSD/RSD activation >> dysregulation >> even greater need for a safe place

By 2022, that feedback loop reached a crisis point. Years later, looking back at that period and the patterns that defined it, the anatomy of almost every major PTSD episode I ever suffered became painfully clear. They all shared the exact same toxic formula: I was on guanfacine, but I wasn't on Adderall, I was running on two or more days of severe sleep deprivation without recovery sleep, and I ran headfirst into an acute trigger I lacked the neurological bandwidth to manage. The reality is that when you are that sleep-deprived, no amount of Adderall is going to fully compensate anyway. But that triad—missing Adderall, zero recovery sleep, and an overwhelming trigger—was the secret sauce that repeatedly broke through my defenses.

That was exactly what happened. My emotional dysregulation had been peaking, compounded by an acute nationwide shortage of Adderall that left me without it for about a week just as my stress levels and sleep deficit were boiling over. During an acute episode, arrangements were made for me to be transported to a psychiatric hospital. In the parking lot of the Publix where I had gone hoping to finally get my prescription filled, I was taken down in front of bystanders and transported. It was one of the most mortifying experiences of my life.

The facility initially attempted to diagnose me with bipolar disorder. Dr. Llinás tried reaching them, but because they wouldn't speak with him for nearly seventy-two hours, the physician who actually understood my longitudinal history of trauma and ADHD was locked out of the conversation. What grounded me during that stay was a psychiatric intern who took the time to simply sit outside with me. Just as it had always been with Dad, being outdoors allowed my nervous system to settle. I explained that I had an upcoming job interview I could not afford to lose, and they discharged me.

Shortly after, I faced a career crossroads. I had completed a final interview for a promising position at Western Carolina University, but I chose to accept an offer in Colorado instead. That choice was intentional: I knew I desperately needed access to Dr. William Dodson. Dr. Llinás had been an invaluable anchor for my longitudinal care, but I needed Dodson’s specialized expertise in adult ADHD and late-emerging childhood trauma. Moving to Colorado was a deliberate effort to put myself within reach of the clinical help I required.

The timing, however, was brutally difficult. I arrived in Colorado only two months removed from a psychiatric hospitalization, nowhere near the best version of myself, and stepped into an environment managed by a supervisor whose intense micromanagement clashed with my fragile state. To make matters worse, the school was facing severe under-enrollment, eventually resulting in a budget deficit of over $300,000. When budget cuts became inevitable, I was an easy cut.

After returning from Colorado, things did not improve, and we eventually separated. Linda moved to help care for her mother, and for a time, I went from living out of my car to occasionally living out of a motel for recovery sleep. Once I secured employment, I rented a studio room.

Living alone did not instantly cure me, but it established the essential condition for recovery: an environment I could control, where quiet was possible, and where my nervous system wasn't perpetually under siege. The physical space did not do the healing, but it finally provided the safe harbor where the real work could begin. About a year and a half after that separation, the Big Pivot became possible.

My Father's Trauma Became Part of Mine

My father's undiagnosed PTSD was also part of my childhood trauma. His episodes could be sudden, explosive, and terrifying. As a child, I had no framework for understanding what I was seeing. I did not know that he was reacting from trauma he had carried since adolescence. I only knew that someone I loved could suddenly become frightening and unpredictable.

Those experiences became part of my own threat-detection system.

Then, in 2003, when I told Dad that I had been sexually assaulted, he told me something he had never told another human being: as a tenth grader at Girard College, he had been serially sexually assaulted more than a dozen times by older boys. Dad was two years ahead of his class and had not yet gone through his adolescent growth spurt, leaving him small and defenseless against the juniors and seniors who trapped him in the public boys' showers.

For the first time, I had an explanation for some of what I had experienced as a child.

But explanation is not the same thing as resolution.

I could understand intellectually that Dad's explosions came from severe, untreated trauma and still carry the fear those episodes had created in me. The frightened child inside me did not suddenly disappear because the adult finally understood what had happened to his father.

That part took much longer.

Bilateral Pneumonia and Ben's Graduation

There was another example of how shame and unresolved trauma could distort my thinking without my realizing it.

When you were seven, Andrew, you developed bilateral pneumonia. On Friday night you had run out of your inhaler, so I told your mother you could share mine. By the next day, I developed a low-grade fever and scratchy throat that quickly escalated into a high fever and severe sore throat. You were coughing and running a fever of your own. By Sunday morning you looked grey. I went to Urgent Care and was diagnosed with strep throat while you were rushed to the ER and diagnosed with bilateral pneumonia.

Then your oxygen levels crashed and you were transferred to the Pediatric ICU.

I felt completely helpless, but worse, I felt completely responsible. I convinced myself that I had somehow given you the illness that put you in that hospital bed. When you already carry a baseline of shame, the brain can weaponize helplessness against you and turn something terrible happened into I caused something terrible to happen.

I silently beat myself up over your hospitalization for years.

Then COVID arrived.

When Ben's graduation came during the lockdown, there was no vaccine. As the ceremony approached, I hemmed and hawed while increasingly severe panic attacks took over. I was thinking about Linda's underlying health conditions, but above all I was thinking about you, Andrew, and the scar tissue left on your lungs from the bilateral pneumonia. The thought of contracting COVID, becoming a carrier, and bringing it near you froze me.

I know how my absence could look from the outside. Inside my head, however, I was a father paralyzed by the ghost of an earlier tragedy and terrified that my presence might once again put one of my sons in danger.

There was another reason I had deliberately gone to Colorado.

I wanted to be near Dr. Dodson.

Dr. Llinás had known me longitudinally. He knew my ADHD, my history, and my baseline. His background in pediatric psychiatry also meant he understood the developmental side of ADHD extraordinarily well. I stayed with him because, frankly, I consider much of adult ADHD psychiatry piss-poor, and I trusted him.

Dr. Dodson brought something different. He had spent decades working with adults with ADHD, including adults whose childhood trauma could suddenly reopen much later in life.

The two of them were also both Cuban American, both Star Trek fans, and both had trained at Johns Hopkins. I trusted the intellectual horsepower. Johns Hopkins is basically the Caltech of medical schools.

Dr. Dodson did not replace Dr. Llinás. He supplied another piece of the puzzle.

Years later, when I was in Denver doing contract work, I went to see Dr. Dodson specifically because I wanted to understand why I had such difficulty letting go of things. When I finally told him the pneumonia story, he stopped me and asked, "Did it ever occur to you that the incubation period of pneumonia is much longer than that of strep throat, and your son may have actually given it to you?"

The sheer clinical obviousness of it hit me.

After decades of carrying that crushing guilt, I responded, "I guess I need to give him my medical bills!"

For years, my emotions had been completely real. The story I had built to explain them was wrong.

Ben, You Were Part of This

Ben, there is something I never want lost in this story.

You helped save my life.

In late 2025, I was living alone and trying to rebuild my relationship with both of you. I became a finalist for a position at East Carolina University and was given only about four days' notice for a face-to-face interview.

I arranged to fly into Raleigh-Durham and take the train from there to Rocky Mount. I deliberately built in a four- or five-hour cushion because I did not want travel problems to cost me the interview.

Then the train was delayed, and delayed, until eventually it was going to be about six hours late. There was no mathematical possibility that I was going to make the interview, and I had a public episode.

All of the frustration, shame, financial pressure, and feeling that another opportunity to rebuild my life had just collapsed came crashing together, and suicidal ideation returned.

I hurt you by canceling and going home.

But you did something important afterward.

You took the initiative to contact Dr. Dodson by email.

At the time, because both of my parents had suffered strokes in their sixties and because medication shortages made me nervous about running out, I had been rationing my Adderall and refusing to take it on weekends.

Dr. Dodson's response was blunt:

"The frugality of your taking your Adderall is ruining your life."

When I followed his instructions and began taking it consistently every morning, including Saturdays and Sundays, the constant background suicidal ideation disappeared. You did not perform the Big Pivot for me. Nobody could. But you helped give me the neurological stability that eventually allowed me to do the deeper work myself.

Parents spend years believing they are supposed to throw the rope to their children.

Sometimes the child throws Dad the rope.

The Big Pivot

I did not stay trapped in the darkness.

During the last weekend in March, after using Spotlight again for a couple of weeks—this time deliberately as a trauma-informed tool to confront the enormous elephant that had remained trapped in my head—two monumental pivots happened over a Thursday and Saturday night. I redefined what family meant to me and finally accepted the absolute reality of what had happened to me as a child.

The following Monday, I went in to teach, and everything had changed. I got my voice back. I got my confidence back. I got my Tigger back. I looked in the mirror and realized, I haven't felt like this in more than thirty years.

The people around me noticed it immediately.

Then I put on "Raised on Love," and I saw Abuela again.

That was when I knew I was going to be okay.

By the mother of all coincidences, Justin Hayward was performing the following week, and there happened to be one ticket six rows from the stage. I bought it. During a medley, he played "Raised on Love," and I completely lost it.

The Big Pivot also allowed me to look at Mom differently. During the final five weeks of her life, all the armor and weaponry between us finally came down. For the first time, I experienced a mother who could freely look at me and tell me she loved me.

The only memory I have of Mom ever kissing me happened when I wrapped my arms around her to gently lift her onto the porta-potty in her hospice room. She took that fleeting opportunity to kiss me on the neck. It was a little awkward, but it was the moment I had waited for my entire life.

It was that version of Mom who bought me my 2012 VW Passat. That car became a physical connection to the absolute best version of her. Because that connection worked so powerfully, I later bought my 2013 Passat knowing that the memory of her best self could remain a companion with me on the road.

When I went to see Dr. Llinás, I proudly showed him the car and explained how it had helped me dismantle the lifelong baggage of shame. Back in his office, I shared the healing blueprint I had been constructing because I hoped it might someday help somebody else.

He couldn't stop smiling.

I looked at him and asked, "You have never seen this version of me, have you?"

"Not at all."

I told him how incredible it felt finally to be me again and that I believed I was well on my way to becoming the best version of myself.

I could see that he was proud of me.

I suddenly gushed a tsunami of tears rivaled only by the Tom Brady strip-sack in Super Bowl LII.

My Father and New Mexico

There was still one final piece of my childhood trauma that had not completely resolved.

Dad.

Growing up, Dad's PTSD episodes could be terrifying. One morning when I was around nine years old, Mom was riding him because he had made the coffee too weak. He got up, made another pot, and she complained again. Dad picked up the full coffee pot and threw it across the kitchen, smashing it against the wall. Shards of glass and boiling water missed me by inches.

By 2003, I understood why those episodes happened. I knew what had happened to him at Girard College. I could understand intellectually that the frightening father I sometimes experienced was also a traumatized boy who had grown into a man without ever resolving what had happened to him.

But explanation was not resolution.

There was also another Dad.

My father loved the natural world. Nature was his absolute safe place. During his summers working at Girard College, he escaped into the Pocono Mountains. When he stepped into the wild, his defensive armor came down. The volatile, traumatized man I sometimes encountered at home could disappear, and underneath him was the Dad I loved: decent, goofy, generous, endlessly curious, and completely fascinated by biology, geology, astronomy, and the natural world.

That was also where he knew how to teach me. He didn't give me many of the conventional father-son conversations about navigating relationships, choices, careers, or life. But put us in a national park, beside a geological formation, under the night sky, or somewhere with an animal we had never seen before, and Dad came alive. He showed me how to observe, wonder, investigate, ask questions, and follow curiosity wherever it led.

One year, Dad took Mom and me on a massive road trip across the country. We saw Meteor Crater, the Grand Canyon, the La Brea Tar Pits, the San Diego Zoo, the California redwoods, Mount Lassen, the Oregon coast, Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and eventually Craters of the Moon in Idaho.

For a nine-year-old boy trying to navigate an unpredictable domestic life, Craters of the Moon was the ultimate jungle gym—cinder cones, spatter cones, lava tubes, raw pahoehoe lava. I fell completely in love.

Volcanoes became my passion.

By the time we reached Dinosaur National Monument afterward, I certainly thought it was cool, but my reaction was basically, Eh, it's not Craters of the Moon. That is a pretty strange reaction for a nine-year-old standing in front of giant dinosaur fossils, but volcanoes already owned me.

After my parents separated and Dad moved to California, we spent two weeks every summer touring the American West: Yosemite, Yellowstone, Devils Tower, Banff, Jasper. Whenever we got anywhere near Idaho, I would ask, "Dad, can we go to Craters of the Moon?"

He never once said no.

Those trips gave me something enormously important. They gave me sustained access to Dad without as much of his armor. The natural world became the place where he could be himself and where I could simply be his son.

Then, decades later, I came to New Mexico after a devastating career setback and began exploring the regional geology. Eventually I stood inside Valles Caldera, one of the most breathtaking supervolcanoes on Earth, and I literally wept the tears of that nine-year-old boy whose dreams had somehow come full circle.

Something happened there that I had not expected.

I realized that the memories of Dad at his absolute best—walking beside me through volcanic fields, petrified forests, mountains, and national parks—had finally become larger and more powerful than the volatile episodes that once dominated my memory of him.

The terrifying PTSD episodes did not vanish from history. I did not rewrite my childhood or decide that because I now understood their origin, they had not traumatized me. But those memories finally lost their power over me because the love, curiosity, and sanctuary Dad had given me in the natural world had outgrown the fear.

That was what New Mexico gave me. The disclosure in 2003 had given me an explanation for my father's behavior. New Mexico, decades later, finally gave me the emotional resolution that explanation alone could not provide.

I did not have to erase the worst version of Dad. I finally had enough room inside me for the best version of him to win.

The Happiness Standing on Paper-Thin Ice

During graduate school, I was crazy, stupid busy. I was playing sports constantly while maintaining a 3.56 GPA. I had finally found an intellectual environment that fit me, I was succeeding, and I was happier than I had ever been in my life. My GRE scores reflected what my brain could do when it was fully engaged.

For years, I pointed back to graduate school as evidence that I had once been completely fine.

And the happiness was real. I wasn't secretly miserable while pretending to be happy. The intellectual challenge, sports, friendships, competition, and constant engagement genuinely worked for me.

But there was one hell of a caveat.

The unresolved childhood trauma was still there, heavily masked by success, high intellect, athletics, and constant engagement. I had become extraordinarily good at creating an environment in which my brain could flourish while the old wounds remained largely undisturbed underneath.

There was also another consequence of that trauma sitting right in the middle of those graduate-school years.

As I told you earlier, I had never been able to get safely beyond a first date. Nicole probably would have been the first person with whom I actually had a relationship. I was twenty-seven years old. For the first time, that door seemed to be opening—and then she was nearly murdered. After Nicole returned to Germany, I essentially stopped trying to date for the next three years.

Then Johnny died.

I didn't understand the connection at the time. I only knew that something changed. At thirty years old, for the first time in my life, I could get beyond a first date. I could date. I could have relationships. An entire part of life that had been effectively inaccessible to me since adolescence suddenly opened.

That was wonderful.

It was also, for an undiagnosed ADHD graduate student, the mother of all distractions.

Most people begin navigating dating and relationships gradually during adolescence and early adulthood. I was encountering that world at thirty with all the novelty arriving at once. Until then, mathematics had been able to command enormous amounts of my attention because it was challenging, stimulating, and endlessly interesting.

Suddenly, math had competition.

Looking back, even if your mother and I had not gotten pregnant, I doubt I would have finished the PhD. I probably would have completed the master's degree, tied up graduate school, and moved on. Becoming a father certainly changed the trajectory of my life, but it wasn't the only thing pulling me away from mathematics. Something wonderful had finally become possible for me that should have become possible much earlier.

The irony is that finally being able to experience that part of life created its own instability. Trauma had kept the door locked for almost two decades. When the door finally opened, my undiagnosed ADHD brain ran through it.

The happiness was real, but it was standing on paper-thin ice.

Looking back, I can also see something else. Graduate school and sports were environments in which many of the executive-function abilities I had developed were accessible. There was challenge, urgency, feedback, structure, intellectual engagement, competition, and a clear objective. Those environments fit the way my brain worked.

That helped hide the compartmentalization. I could function at an extremely high level in one environment and still struggle with ordinary life decisions in another. From the outside, that inconsistency could look ridiculous. From the inside, I had no idea why the same brain seemed extraordinarily capable in one setting and unreliable in another.

That is the danger I did not understand. Feeling better is not necessarily the same thing as healing, and performing well is not necessarily evidence that every underlying executive-function problem has disappeared. Hyper-achievement, athletics, high intellect, strict routines, religion, work, or simple busyness can all become extraordinarily effective scaffolds. They can help someone function beautifully while leaving an old wound—or an underlying developmental deficit—untouched.

Functioning is evidence that you are functioning.

It is not necessarily evidence that you have healed.

One More Thing I Learned While Writing This

There was one more realization that came from writing this letter itself.

Once I had the car and finally had the means to travel more easily, I came up to visit, meet Madilyn for the first time, and be there around Ben's birthday. When I was around her, though, I froze. I wanted to play with her, but I couldn't seem to make myself do it.

In an earlier draft of this letter, I blamed that reaction on feeling judged by your mother. That explanation stayed in my head because it seemed to fit. Then, while reading a more recent draft and replaying that day in my mind, I realized I had been wrong.

Andrew, it wasn't really your mother's judgment I was afraid of. It was yours.

Because of the distance that had developed between you and me, and because I knew how much your daughter meant to you, I was terrified that I would pick her up or try to play with her, she would cry, and you would look at me as though I had somehow failed with the person who meant the world to you. Underneath the hesitation wasn't a lack of desire to connect with your daughter. It was how desperately I wanted not to damage what remained between you and me.

So I froze.

When I finally understood what had actually happened inside my head that day, I started bawling. I had spent all that time believing I was afraid of being judged by your mother when the person whose judgment actually frightened me was my son.

Until I went back through that memory carefully while writing this letter, I hadn't understood it myself. The fear had always been real. I had simply been wrong about where it came from.

The Life Lesson I Want to Leave You

Both of my parents lived much of their lives carrying wounds they did not understand, and some of what they carried reached me. My father's hidden horrors from Girard College shaped the frightening PTSD episodes I experienced as a child. My mother's own trauma shaped the rejection, anger, and emotional absence that became part of my internal architecture.

There was an important difference. With Dad, the natural world gave me long stretches with the best version of him. I knew the frightened, volatile man his trauma could produce, but I also knew the decent, goofy, curious father who walked beside me through mountains, volcanic fields, forests, and national parks. I never had an equivalent sanctuary with Mom. I did not get long stretches with a version of her in which her own trauma fell away and I could simply experience being loved by my mother.

I spent decades carrying my own childhood trauma while mistaking survival, achievement, intelligence, athletics, humor, and sheer functioning for evidence that I had resolved it.

I also spent decades judging some of my choices without understanding all of the machinery behind them. ADHD was part of it. Trauma was part of it. Shame and rejection sensitivity were part of it. And part of it was simply developmental: there were things other children learned through hundreds of ordinary interactions with supportive parents that I had to figure out later, often through trial and error.

At the same time, sports and Dad's natural world had given me remarkable strengths. They taught me how to observe, practice, anticipate, adjust, persist, solve problems, and learn through immediate feedback. Those abilities were real. The mistake was assuming that because I possessed them somewhere, I could automatically access them everywhere.

That is something I wish I had understood when I was raising you.

Some of what Dad carried reached me. Some of what Mom carried reached me. And some of what I carried reached you. That is the part of generational trauma people sometimes misunderstand. Nobody has to consciously decide to pass it along. It can move quietly through fear, shame, negative self-talk, relationships, expectations, missing scaffolding, and decisions made by people who believe they are simply reacting to whatever is happening in front of them.

I finally learned the difference between shame and regret. Shame says that because I made mistakes, I am a mistake. Regret allows me to say that I made decisions I wish I had made differently, understand why I made them, take responsibility for them, learn from them, and continue moving forward.

Regret teaches. Shame imprisons.

That is what I want both of you to understand. If there are things in your own lives that repeatedly generate shame, fear, anger, isolation, perfectionism, negative self-talk, or reactions that seem much larger than the events immediately in front of you, don't simply become better at overpowering them. Get curious about where they came from.

And don't assume that struggling with something means you lack the underlying ability. Sometimes the ability is there but was developed in a different context. Sometimes nobody helped you build the bridge that allows you to carry it from one part of your life into another.

You may discover there is nothing underneath the struggle. Great. But if something is there, deal with it while you still have decades ahead of you. Do not make the mistake Dad and I made and assume that because your life works, everything underneath it must therefore be resolved.

Trauma can hide behind functioning. Shame can masquerade as character. Coping can masquerade as healing. Ability can hide behind inconsistent access. What remains unresolved in one generation can affect the next even when nobody intends to pass it down.

I finally saw the chain. I started breaking my links. I'm giving you everything I learned so you can break yours—and so your children don't have to.

It Is Never Too Late

There is one last part of this lesson.

I learned all of this late, but late is not the same thing as too late.

For most of my life, I was embarrassed to tell people that my IQ is 154 because I never felt that my life reflected what I was supposedly capable of doing with it. Instead, if it came up, I would tell people about my 1992 GRE scores: 790 out of 800 on Analytical Reasoning, missing only one of sixty questions, and 780 out of 800 on Quantitative. At the time, that was one of the highest GRE scores in the history of UNC Charlotte's graduate mathematics program. The GRE was later changed, so scores from the different versions can't really be compared. And then there was my 490 Verbal score, which we don't talk about.

Only now, in my sixties, do I feel as though my IQ has finally realized its potential. My ADHD brain sees connections, patterns, contradictions, and nuances that other people sometimes miss, and I have been able to put things together in ways that can actually help ADHD and AuDHD kids. According to Dr. Joseph Llinás, some of the connections I have brought to him are things he has not seen anyone else put together. Many of the articles on the ADHD Escape Room website reflect that way of thinking, and this book is the culmination of it.

For the first time in my life, my IQ doesn't feel like a measure of unrealized potential. It feels like it has a purpose, and I am really proud of that.

Again, it is never too late to become the best version of yourself.

I am starting a new chapter in my life. I am now exploring opportunities that bring together parts of my professional life that have always fit me well—instructional technology, IT within education, web development, digital content creation, and teaching.

I cannot change what happened to me. I cannot undo the mistakes I made before I understood what I was carrying. I cannot go backward and become the father I might have been if I had understood at thirty what I finally learned much later.

But I can decide what I do with the years still in front of me, and I can continue trying to become the best version of myself.

That is what I want for both of you. Not perfection. Not a life without mistakes, scars, or regret. I want you to understand yourselves well enough that whatever happened in the past does not quietly make decisions about your future.

Understand yourselves. Deal with what needs to be dealt with. Keep what is good. Forgive what you can. Own what is yours. Give yourselves—and your children—the chance to live without carrying baggage that was never theirs to carry.

It is never too late to try to become the best version of yourself.

I wish you peace and a long life.

LLAP!

With all my love and pride,

Dad

and Madilyn's Abuelo