Unbroken
- Dr. Tom Wagner
- Apr 19
- 9 min read
Even in the worst conditions, the human spirit finds ways to survive. This article explores how those small acts of survival can become the foundation for healing.
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Unbroken
Over the years, I’ve collected resilience stories to include in a book that I hope to get around to publishing one of these days. In the meantime, the article you’re about to read this week is one of my favorites. I first published it four years ago, right after my lengthy interviews with its subject, “Larry.” He’s a man of unmistakable resilience. This quality took root and grew in the harsh terrain of a childhood where brutality and violence were a near-daily experience. This week, you’ll read about what protects the human spirit from harm. A follow-up article next week will show how a soul builds back and recovers after it has been harmed. Be forewarned. It’s impossible to tell a story like this one without including the brutal context that gave rise to it.
An Introduction to Larry
If you were to meet the current version of Larry, in the large, suburban Catholic Church where he is active, you would encounter a man of few words, and a ready smile. Chances are good that he would be accompanied by his wife of thirty-two years, Lizzie, who is his best friend, and helpmate. Together, they raised his two boys (in their forties), and her son and daughter (in their thirties). They’re currently the collective grandparents of ten. “My biggest plus is having Lizzie,” he confided. Nothing about this man, or his—successful-by-every-measure—life gives a shred of evidence of the poverty and brutality that marked his childhood.
You ever noticed how guys that make their living in a trade, who also own a pickup truck, have a hard time saying, “no” to helping someone? This retired electrician is like that. What’s the phrase? “Salt of the earth?” What made him agree to sit for an interview that would take him back to the worst experiences of his life? Why not let these sleeping dogs lie? It’s because he believes (and I believe) that there’s a power in his story to provide a hand, or a foothold to someone else in a similar tough situation. If he could help someone else through letting me interview him, he was on board. Through the course of our interviews, I kept checking in on his central nervous system to make sure he was okay. I took it as a barometer of his healing that at each bend in the narrative road, he assured me that he was good to go.
It is his hope and mine, that you will find, in his story, tools, techniques, and strategies to assist you in whatever brand of brutality life has presented you. Larry’s story is a powerful testimony to the natural resilience that is woven into the human spirit.
South of Eden
As I listened to the story of Larry’s parents' terrible divorce settlement, over sixty years ago, I couldn’t help but think of that biblical story in Genesis, of humanity being cast out of paradise. Family Research was in its infancy when the judge’s gavel dropped on Larry’s childhood. The father of two boys (three and four years old respectively) would only be allowed to welcome them to his stable, nurturing home, once a month, from 10:00 am on Saturdays until 5:00 pm on Sundays. That was the framework that allowed the proverbial snake into the garden of Larry’s childhood. That snake’s name was “Dick.”
It would take a very thick volume to contain all of the episodes of cruelty that Dick visited upon his wife (Larry’s mom), her two boys (Greg, 6; and Larry, 5), and Dick’s own two live-in sons (Will, 8; and Rob, 7). In order to map the terrain of Larry’s childhood, just a few significant landmarks of Dick’s cruelty will be provided. Embedded within these stories, we will locate profound elements of resilience that will shine all the more for their contrast with the dark backdrop of cruelty and poverty.
First Blood
Even an average-sized man, like Dick, would have quadrupled the size of a four-year-old boy, like Larry. Despite this consideration, and perhaps because of it, the new boyfriend felt entitled to physically menace a toddler without compunction. Larry’s first remembrance of Dick involved an incident where he was standing and playing in the back of his mom’s convertible. As usual, he was enjoying bouncing up and down, while she went into the grocery store. Her new boyfriend in the passenger seat ordered him to sit. Unaccustomed to the snake that had made its way into his life, Larry behaved like a four-year-old. He continued his bouncing and playing in the back. For the first of many episodes, Dick’s high school ring struck Larry square on his four-year-old skull—hard enough to knock him on his back. Larry remembered lying there, “staring up at the blue sky.” Had he been a bird, he would’ve flown off into its azure freedom. As it stood, he would remain tethered in a cruel cage with a striking snake until the balance of his boyhood was spent thirteen years later!
A “Typical” Christmas Story
Holiday stories turned chaotic and violent are common among the children of abusive/alcoholic parents or step-parents. Larry remembers one particular Christmas standing out amongst the others. Dick returned home from a Christmas Eve party drunk, and enraged.
“He went wacko destroying every dish, and every pan in the kitchen. Then he went after the Christmas tree and all the presents. As usual, on the morning after one of these tirades, it was like nothing happened. We woke up to the wreckage. The four of us always had to clean up after him. He never said he was sorry. He would never clean up after himself.”
Larry and his brothers shared a small room off the kitchen where the bulk of the Christmas Eve mayhem took place. “We heard all of the commotion,” Larry said, “but we stayed quiet on the other side of the wall.” Just like the survivors’ reports in Japanese or German death camps, the inmates of this house tried to escape his notice at all times. “He was always looking for a place to put his anger.” Larry said. “You just tried to not have him notice you. You didn’t talk. You just sat there.”
Dr. Seuss’ imagination wasn’t dark enough to create a Grinch quite like this one. After he tore up all evidence of Christmas, “mom tried to re-wrap her presents with anything she could find around the house. That year, she had gotten my brothers and me walkie-talkies.” In a scene that was as tender as it was crushingly sad, on Christmas morning, Larry recalled that “she handed me an oatmeal box. I opened up that box, and poured out the pieces to a broken walkie-talkie set.”
INDESTRUCTIBLE: TWO RESILIENCE TOOLS
#1. Imaginative Play:
What came next in this story contains a universal symbol of a stout kind of grit that is the birthright of every mother’s child. After they cleared the wreckage, and salvaged Christmas gift pieces, Larry and his siblings went out to play [emphasis added]! They ended up playing with [again, emphasis added] those walkie-talkies—”like pretend,” he said. Abundant research from the field of play therapy has demonstrated the healing power in play for children who have suffered physical or emotional trauma. For Larry and his brothers, who were constant targets of violence, play was a profound act of soul-salvaging resistance in the face of injustice and cruelty.
As Larry shared this story, I visualized his abused mother on that Christmas morning, looking out the window and glimpsing her sons’ innate superpowers in action. I can see her observing broken toys made whole with the magic of childhood imagination. At that window, I can picture her breathing just enough hope for one more day. With her own eyes she could see that, while he could break their toys, he couldn’t break their spirit that knew how to imagine, and knew how to play. Outside, on that Christmas morning, I’m imagining little boys creatively expending stress hormones, and beaming themselves to imaginary places where bad guys get what’s coming to them, and children get to be children again.
# 2. Companionship: “Just Them Being There With Me Was Comforting”
Another thing that Larry’s step-dad couldn’t get his destructive hands on that night, was the solace that Larry felt in the company of his three older brothers who yoked themselves, like a team of horses, sharing the weight of a heavy burden.
“Just them (i.e. his brothers) being there was comforting. It was helpful because you were all going through the same thing. You knew what they were thinking and feeling; they knew what you were thinking and feeling. You didn’t have to say anything.”
At a very young age, those boys already knew something, that widows or widowers of advanced years, discover in grief support groups. By the age of ten, they knew a truth that every AA member encounters, when confronting their baffling, cunning diseases. What is that truth? When two or three are gathered under the load of a shared suffering, something Transcendent and stronger than destruction manifests. Dr. Peter Levine’s convincing research has shown that the presence of supportive people, in the midst of a traumatic event has the power to regulate the central nervous system. The power of this one ingredient has been shown to prevent the onset of post-traumatic stress disorder, even in impossibly difficult situations, like the one Larry and his brothers repeatedly lived through.
Preventative Medicine: Play + Companionship = Resilience
The mixture of play and companionship together provided a kind of preventative medicine for these beleaguered boys. Indeed, this band of brothers maintained a standing weekend ritual. “Saturdays were our days to go to the dump to see what we could find.” Larry laughed as he recounted those mornings.
“We’d always have some bike that we’d cobbled together, a 26-inch front tire, a 28-inch one in back…one pedal that was a stub. We all had bikes. We were handy like that. During the summer, from sunup till sundown, we would be out. We didn’t want to come home until we absolutely had to.”
A Spiritual Takeaway from Larry’s Story
In his book, The Healing Path, James Finley described his own childhood experience of ongoing brutality. His path to wholeness wound through the terrain of contemplative spirituality that he stumbled into at the age of fourteen. It would take many years for Larry to formally and regularly make conscious contact with his own spiritual approach. Nonetheless, Finley’s theological lens is useful in considering Larry’s childhood. Echoing ancient spiritual masters, Finley maintains that there is an unlimited, inborn source of resilience at the core of each human being. As a spiritually informed counselor, I’m intrigued by any process that assists people in recognizing and making contact with that. It seems to me that Larry and his brothers made anonymous contact with that solid inner ground in their companionship and play with one another. For anyone who has suffered abuse, stories like Larry’s, provide an important antidote to the pernicious lie that abuse survivors are damaged goods.
One of the great privileges in my practice of psychotherapy is to work with people like Larry. In these instances, I actually get to play, kind of similar to the way that Larry and his brothers played at the dump. I get to look for treasures that are hiding in someone’s past—a past that was thought to be nothing more than an ugly junk yard. In locating bright spots in that dark past—like imaginative play, or faithful companionship—I get to draw those elements into the foreground. My job is to help these clients see previously unseen strengths and capabilities. Little by little, a past that was thought to contain only humiliation, gets reframed to highlight an inner core which remains unbroken, stable, and strong.
Dialogue and Discussion Questions:
Longtime SMC readers know that “the Dialogue” section of this article is set aside for a good conversation over a cup of coffee—with a friend, with a group, or just with yourself! As always, feel free to share your reaction or reflection in the “Comments” section below.
If you have ever suffered damage, what has helped you counter the sense of self that can go with that experience? Does that sense ever resurface, and if it does, what do you do with that?
Have you ever had the experience of telling the story of a difficult time in your life, and having your story-listener reflect back strengths that they saw (or see) in you, even in the darkest of times?
Can you think of a time when a supportive person made the difference in a hard time? Can you think of a time when you were the person who made all the difference for some in their challenging situation?
What role has “play” performed in your life? Can you locate a couple of stories of when imaginative play was essential for your well-being? What are the current contexts where your playfulness shines out of you?
Please share with the SMC community your thoughts and/or reflections in the comments below.
Great tune to accompany this. I remember seeing this live.... Cheers to Larry and his brothers. Cheers to you, Tom.