GoodFellas
We help our listeners discover what it means to be a modern man. We focus on how to heal and grow past mental, physical, and emotional traumas. The goal at GoodFellas is to provide men with the tools for us to thrive, not just survive.
Episodes release weekly on Thursday at 2am PST/5 am EST.
Throughout the show we invite the audience to meet some interesting and impressive humans who have navigated some of the deepest valleys as they journey to some of the highest peaks. Join me, Hosea Chanchez, as we seek to discover the GOOD in humanity and uncover some of the secrets to living a purpose-filled life.
About the Host:
Hosea Chanchez is a prominent actor, producer, and director, from Montgomery, Alabama. Soon after graduating high school, he relocated to Los Angeles, California to pursue acting. He immediately began booking commercial roles which kickstarted his career, where he has found long-lasting success.
He has appeared on shows like Girlfriends, Black Lightning, and All American, but is best known for his starring role as the quarterback football player, Malik Wright, on the CW/BET sitcom, The Game, and its 2021 revival.
Hosea has built an impressive career over the years and a large fanbase as a result. He started his company, A Very Good Company, in 2022 to provide black men and women with luxury products, reliable services, and quality content.
GoodFellas
Ep 108: The Secret: How Molestation Shapes a Mans Future with Dr. Isaiah Pickens and Hosea Chanchez
Breaking the silence on a deeply personal and often hidden trauma, I share my story of being molested as a teenager by a trusted father figure. This episode of Goodfellas confronts the crisis of black male vulnerability and the societal expectations that can often stifle authenticity. We dive into the harrowing realities of childhood grooming, revealing the manipulative tactics predators use and the long-lasting impact of these traumatic experiences on identity and life choices. Dr. Isaiah Pickens joins us to discuss the urgent need for a supportive community for black men, emphasizing the vital role of mental, emotional, and spiritual healing.
As we unpack the disorienting nature of sexual trauma, we explore the intricate dynamics of trust, masculinity, and the often conflicting societal pressures placed on young black men. Through heartfelt conversations, we shed light on the adultification of black boys and the stigmas that prevent many from seeking help. This episode seeks to empower men to break their silence and reclaim their narratives, offering tools and insights to navigate their traumas. By sharing these stories and experiences, we aim to foster a culture where acknowledging pain is seen as a strength, not a weakness.
Creating intentional spaces for open dialogue and support, we highlight the transformative power of brotherhood and accountability. From recounting the journey of a long-standing group of men who transitioned from business talk to deep personal struggles, we emphasize that building trust takes time but is essential for genuine connection and growth. Join us as we explore how past injuries shape our present and how understanding this can lead to more resilient relationships. With contributions from Dr. Isaiah Pickens, we underscore the importance of community in personal development, aiming to build a healthier, happier society for all.
As a black man, it's difficult to talk about anything I'm going through. Who the fuck's listening to me? Goodfellas is a simple mental space to heal and grow by a black man. For everyone who's listening, I'm Hosea Chan Chaz, and this is Goodfellas. I'm Hosea Chanchez, and this is Goodfellas. Today is a very special episode of Goodfellas. I'm your host, Hosea Chanchez, and this isation into rape and consent, because ultimately, I want to provide black men with tools to navigate out of these situations and to not be victims themselves. So, as you listen to the episode today, I ask that you listen with an open heart, an open mind and, most importantly, compassionate empathy. Let's grow. I cannot think of another human being on this planet that I would rather have this conversation with than you.
Speaker 2:I'm honored to be here, and I know that keeping ourselves safe is one of the most important things that we can do, but it's one of the things we don't talk about so often in our community.
Speaker 1:It always goes back to, for me, manhood and masculinity mixing the two topics, and not having the tools to really be honest and show up as who we really are, our authentic selves, which is something you always talk about the authenticity of what it means to be a man, and at the core of that, it's vulnerability.
Speaker 2:So much of being a man is being able to show up in a way that allows you to be who you are, but do it in a way that's true to the legacy that you're trying to build, and I think sometimes we get so focused on building that legacy in the eyes of others instead of for who we are, and I'm just glad that we get to create a space where our legacy that we're building and, as we talk about being men, we can really get to some of both, like the triumphs of who we are, but also some of those areas that may make us feel at times that we shouldn't bring it to the forefront, because people may look at us different, people may not understand the journey we've been on, but that's really, in many ways, what keeps us in a lot of the pain that we've experienced, and part of being safe, part of being able to deal with the pain, is being able to find strength in the other people who are around you, who can support you through it, and so, amen, this is that space, brother yes, sir, yeah, the overall arching theme of our topic today is protection what it means to be a man and what it means to be a protector.
Speaker 1:Society has given us this title of protectors, and that starts when we're young right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I want to go and do a deep dive on those places and spaces in my life that I didn't feel protected, and I have a different understanding of those things now than I did when they happened. And specifically what I mean is when I was younger, I was molested, and it's a story that I've shared pieces of on the internet behind the written word, but I've never had the opportunity to really talk about what happened, and so I feel like there's no safer space to have that dialogue and that conversation. One thing about my history that is one of the most beautiful parts of my life and my experience is that my mom was a single mother. My father was not around or in my household and my mother trusted a lot of people to raise me as a young woman would and her age she was very, very young when she had me and so my village was the one who essentially had to show up, and a lot of times when women are single moms and you have a child that's in that village, there become holes in how they are protected, how your child is being handled in the places and spaces where predators are aware that there are no eyes.
Speaker 1:It had happened with a my friend's father, father who I'd looked up to as a father figure. Actually he was probably the like for young men around town. He was the quintessential man. He had all of his stuff together. He had a family. You know, his kids, his, his children were my friends and I didn't think that I was in any danger, nor did anyone in my family. When you know we're hanging out and I'm in my teens. So, you know, you think you can handle life and you know everything that comes your way. So I, what I know now is that that man was grooming me. It started with the joking and the playing around. Oh, I bet you, you know, I bet you got the girls going crazy. It's always about girls, girls, girls, and at that time I honestly wasn't sexually active but I, you know, pretended, like most of us do when we're kids. You know, yeah, you know, I'm smashing them out.
Speaker 2:It's like.
Speaker 1:Negro, you ain't doing nothing. And so, because I trusted this man and I looked up to him, he his word. He spoke to me like a father, which is another thing that we'll unpack a little bit later how predators actively search for broken families. He knew my mother was a single mom. He knew my father wasn't active in my life, and these are things that he often spoke about and preached about or talked about, and those of us who were friends with his son that had single moms. He made it a point to separate us and give us the so-called love he thought that we wanted because we didn't have fathers. And it worked in a sense. It actually worked.
Speaker 1:It lowered my defenses and I trusted him. So I trusted him because I wanted to be everything he said I was. I wanted to go to college. He was high up at a college and he and his family were academians. They were all successful and so for me and a lot of my friends they were the bar in a way, and one day he'd given me a ride home and on this ride home he pulled down a dirt road and I instantly knew I was like something's why we're doing, you know like what's up, man, and he's like I want to talk to you. And at that time all my friends called me Eli. And he's like I want to talk to you, eli. I want to talk to you about you know, your future, where you're going and what you're doing. I don't think you're being, he said. He didn't think that I was being serious about my life so much that I wasn't being serious about my life. So when he said something, I listened because I felt like he could see me and I'm going to come back to me feeling like he could see me too, because that was also another sign that he used. So I listened to what he said and so when he pulled down the road. He he pulled my penis out, gave me a blow job. I came in his mouth it was actually the first time that I'd ever come in his mouth and the embarrassment I felt. Immediately after, the shame that I felt, immediately after, um, I didn't feel like I needed to to fight him or punch him. I was actually, in many ways, I was afraid of him, um, I was afraid of what he could do to my life. And he said it. He had told me, uh, what he could do to me if I said anything, and he would do to my family and my mom. He threatened the whole entire situation and from that point forward, one.
Speaker 1:I disappeared for a little while in my buddy's life because I needed to process it, but I decided that I'm going to put this out of my mind, and I put it out of my mind for decades, that I intentionally made myself forget that it happened. And After that, a lot of things happened. My grandmother passed away, which was my grandmother, was, like you know, my everything and dealing with her death and having to deal with what had happened to me. And at this point in time I'm questioning everything. I'm questioning my sexuality, I'm questioning my purpose I'm questioning if I needed to to say something to somebody, and the best thing that I could come up with to save everybody but myself and including saving myself in my mind was to just put it away and pretend like it never happened. And so, after years later, I'm going to just skip ahead to like 2018, 19,.
Speaker 1:Somewhere in there, I re-remembered exactly what happened and it had been inching its way up for some years, and I would just put it out of my mind and try to keep forgetting it, try to try to suppress it, and I hit a brick wall.
Speaker 1:Psychologically, I hit a brick wall, and in 2019 was when I wrote a play called Good Morning, which is where I first met you on Good Morning, because I felt like I needed to discuss all of the traumas and, particularly, it was designed for me to let people know that I had been molested. It was the gateway for me being honest about who I was and what I went through. Um, because for me at that time, I felt the accountability and the responsibility of my whole family. I felt that if I had said something about what this guy did to me, he would ruin everybody's life, like he said he would.
Speaker 1:We're to the place now where I have taken that scenario that happened to me and I've used it to empower myself. And I'm talking about it now because I want to empower other people to speak up, and other men specifically that have gone through this. So many of us have gone through molestation, rape and it's challenged consent in so many ways. So that's why I'm here and that's why I'm talking to you about it today, and I want to unpack more of it so I can help other men have the tools to navigate these types of things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, first of all, brother, I just want to thank you for being so honest and so vulnerable about something that had such a pivotal, pivotal impact on your life and that it took years for it to really resurface and show you how you had really pushed this down, not only to, in many ways, protect yourself, but to protect those around you, because you feared the retribution of this man who had power when you were growing up. And that's what's so devastating and insidious about. When we talk about sexual abuse, when we talk about molestation, is this often people who have power that they could use to protect you, but they use it to get their needs met.
Speaker 1:That's right, and that's what happened in this moment.
Speaker 2:It was his needs that were put as a priority over anything else your safety and the safety of people around you and one of the things that I really appreciate you sharing in that was that in the moment of traumas, when we experience them, we don't always know what to make of them. We don't know how to make sense of them. You talked about not really knowing what to make of it in terms of this event, in terms of your sexuality, in terms of different parts of who you were, and I think trauma is an event that can make our lives feel like they're threatened or that some serious harm will come to us, which that was. And the biggest thing about trauma is it's disorienting to your identity. It disorients you from how you understand yourself, because it's something often that is unpredictable and it's something that can, in many ways, make you start to think. Your story is the trauma.
Speaker 1:And, and I wonder, for you, was that something? Yeah it, it. It's a part of who you are.
Speaker 2:But that trauma becomes so overwhelming that it becomes all of how you might identify, and so, in some, some ways, you were talking about. Well, that trauma.
Speaker 1:You build all of your life's experiences off it, whether you consciously know it or not. All of my choices from that moment had changed and I can directly identify with how those choices, while how that incident changed my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it does you build off of the trauma that you get? Yeah, unless you deal with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the only way. That is the only way, and when you heal from trauma, part of the healing is being able to know that it is a part of your story and who you are and has informed it. But it is not all of who you are, and so much of you know what you're you're sharing right now. Um, I think it's so important for us as a community to talk about. I know for myself. I have family members who've experienced sexual abuse and molestation, and part of what can be so frustrating is you feel powerless to be able to make them feel safe again or to help them feel protected after it's happened, and part of that powerlessness is not knowing who to trust, because the people who are doing it are usually the people who are closest supposed to protect you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah and and you know, I think you brought up a lot when you were sharing of the signs that happen. But we not on purpose, but we look the other way because we can't believe that someone who we trust does this right right, doing things like you know, playing around about sex and like I probably specifically, I, I want us to specifically, yeah, talk about that yes yes, because I do think that this is a huge red flag that a lot of women and a lot of men miss out on, because it's hidden behind masculinity.
Speaker 1:It's hidden behind oh you know, that's what just guys do. You know the ass slapping and the talking about your penis?
Speaker 2:I'm not saying that, all of that is that.
Speaker 1:But I'm saying you have to be very conscious of your boys around other men in certain areas and a lot of times the vibrato of manhood it's just someone hiding their true intentions and sexualities. So it's something that we have to, it's a red flag that we have to address and mothers need to be more careful and fathers of their children. When you're having, when you're a grown person, having a conversation with a child about sexuality for me, Isaiah, it directly did one thing that I know of for a fact. It made me not trust men.
Speaker 1:I went for a very long time in my life and you probably know this about me I don't have a lot of male friends because I stopped trusting guys after that had happened to me. So my life is full of a majority. Most of my friends are women. Um, and I'd always wondered that, because it wasn't that I didn't gravitate to fellas and guys. I had forgotten that. Oh, this is why I don't trust guys, and it wasn't because of anything. It wasn't because of anything that anyone else had done to me other than that guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one man impacted my entire life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and that, yeah, and what you're saying I think is so important, because not only did he impact your life, he also tried to play, or pretended to play, the role of filling the most important male figure in your life, absolutely your father and he did that, yeah, specifically, and I'm gonna talk about it because he did it specifically and intentionally.
Speaker 1:it was targeted. It was targeted and I know it was targeted because he's done the same exact things to a lot of the young men who were enrolled at the university that he was at and there are stories all over the place about the abuse that people, that young black men, and specifically and particularly with single mothers, and him threatening them to a degree about their position. Because that was an entry point, because if you're the first person that goes to college in your family, what college means to a lot of our young black men is the whole community is on your shoulder.
Speaker 1:And you're rising to be. You know it doesn't matter what you're going to school for. But if you were going to college and you were a black man and you're coming from a single mom or a broken home of any kind, if you go into college, college is a very important key and tool to getting out of whatever scenario the entire family is in. Yeah, so it's one of the tools that he used to silence a lot of young black men. Yeah, yeah, it is a predatory tool.
Speaker 2:It's very much a predatory tool to be able to use what you have power to give or take away from someone and to really, as best as you can, let them know that if you share, if you tell or even if you hint at something, I will use this power against you, but also dangling the carrot that I can use this power for you. If if you do what I want.
Speaker 2:And I think that's something that you know when you see people who are in either desperate situations or know that so much is riding on what they do. Like you were at this young man. You were going to go to college. You were going to do so much with your life. You did so much with riding on what they do. Like you were this young man. You were going to go to college, you were going to do so much with your life, you did so much with your life, but the fact that this thing could potentially disrupt that it makes people more vulnerable to the predators that are around them.
Speaker 2:And just the way you were talking about it, he read those situations and came in in a way, and the thing about it. I want to come back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of how we as a community come around, especially our young men, especially around our young black men, sexualizing them at a young age when we talk about sex, but also putting our thoughts, desires on them in terms of what they want, saying, oh, you probably want to go in, you know, hit that you probably want to do that.
Speaker 2:It, it. It really creates this expectation of the being a man is someone who is a sexual conqueror. That's right and and and. If you create that narrative, it becomes much more shameful to say that either. I didn't want sex because predators can be women too.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, you know, you've heard stories of babysitters who you know are have young men or teachers right, that's right. Who have?
Speaker 2:young men and have sex with these young men, and the narrative after that is still sometimes oh, that boy.
Speaker 1:he know how to do his thing right. He got an older woman. Sometimes we big that up Exactly and we're reinforcing a culture that supports predators, right.
Speaker 2:And so the question becomes how do we start to honestly let our boys be boys? Because that's what you're really doing. We call it adultification, where you're making them have to be older or responsible for things that really they are too young to be responsible for. And you know, we started by talking about protection. It feels like for you and you can correct me if I'm wrong after that moment, especially with this man, part of your distrust of all other men was that you had to protect yourself. You didn't think there was going to be anyone else who's there to protect you To protect?
Speaker 1:yeah, and to be honest with you, growing up the way that I grew up, I never thought that there was a man to protect me, you know, other than my grandfather, like I never thought that there was, I knew, you know, again, my life was, my life was even at that time. That's why I can't really regret it and I don't blame my mother or anybody that was in my life at the time that these things happened to me. Um, but I never felt like I was protected, ever in my life, ever. There's never been a point in my life where I felt like life has my back, somebody has my back or some man or someone like I. Never, I've never. I don't know what it feels like. I can't even imagine who I would be if I felt protected. I've never felt that yeah yeah, so.
Speaker 2:I mean I, I was feeling that in that moment because to not have any experience of feeling protected is such a weight so many men, boys carry, from the moment that they start walking to feel like I have to look out for me. I got me right.
Speaker 1:Be a man, and everyone is telling you that too.
Speaker 2:It's like you can't whine, you can't, you can't you can't cry, you can't cry.
Speaker 2:And the other thing that I think people say that you can't do that that really creates this culture of predators is that you can't be a victim, and I know this is.
Speaker 2:This is a tough topic, especially for us as men as black men is saying that I am a victim feels like I am showing weakness, I am saying something that I'm not. I am claiming something that I'll never be, and I think what that does for so many of us, especially when it comes to real trauma that we've experienced, is it robs us from the chance to say I've experienced pain that I deserve to heal from. And I think part of us separating out a victim from someone who is complaining and not taking responsibility. That's not a victim. That's someone who is not taking care of their shit, and a victim is someone who has experienced a real pain, a real injury. Trauma is an injury. It's a mental and emotional injury that people deserve to heal from. If you break your arm and you're on a baseball team, nobody's going out there and saying just go and try to pitch it depends on who you are.
Speaker 1:It depends on who you are You're getting enough money. If you're getting enough money, you got to go, just saying.
Speaker 2:But in general, when you have a real injury, people aren't saying, stop being a victim, you're going to the doctor to get a cast. Like they're saying no, you're, you're going to heal yourself. And I think if we start understanding that these injuries that are happening in our community, the way that we are responding to them, by telling people to suck it up and just keep going, we're not actually creating a victimless society, which we think we are, or men who won't complain. We're actually creating men who hold on to the pain and silence and then it doesn't come up until years later and we see this is how it's impacted all of our relationships, this is how it's impacted our whole life and we actually don't get to be the protectors that we know we can be, because we have been consumed by needing to get away from this injury that we had at this point in our life.
Speaker 1:I never thought that I was a victim. Now I approached the situation in a couple of different ways before I had the courage to really tell myself what I went through and to tell other people. It was in two stages. The first stage was the denial of me saying I'm not a victim. I used this in my life. I look at me, you know I I used it, yeah, but then it was also. I didn't want to feel like a victim.
Speaker 1:So if you didn't want to feel powerless if, yeah, if you took away the word victim and just left what the symptoms of that was. I didn't want to feel those and I think a lot of us don't. Culturally, we don't subscribe to victimhood at all, male or female, and it's very difficult for men, which is why this platform exists. It's very difficult for men of color, for us to talk about the things that have affected us in our life, not just something as extreme as molestation or rape. As a black man, it's difficult to talk about anything I'm going through. Who the fuck's listening to me? Don't be a black man with a little success, because nobody feels like you deserve to be heard. So how do we even identify with the core of what being a victim is so we can be honest with ourselves and express what we've gone through and what we our victimhood, whatever we call it? We know there are pots of gold at the end of every rainbow life. I know that in my life, and it still takes a unbelievable amount of self discipline and vulnerability for you to look at you, not for me to come on the podcast and tell somebody about it, but for me to actually say it. Let me tell you something, dude. Now that is the part that it really gets me, because what it did to my life it wasn't even being molested, that's not.
Speaker 1:That's the thing that I felt like I could navigate. As long as I was honest with myself about it. I felt like I could navigate it, but what I couldn't navigate is how it affected my life after I realized that I had been living under this veil and this lie for so long. That is the thing that really fucked with me the most, because I felt like I'd lived an inauthentic life for a very long time. So I had a lot of guilt and regret for myself at that time and a lot of shame at that time and a lot of shame. So I realize now that getting to the place where I can discuss this thing that was catastrophic in my life and how it shapeshifted who I am today, I feel like if all brothers could get here, we would be everything we all desire to be, you know, and I just hate that I had to get here in my 40s. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, brother, what I'm feeling right now, just with what you're sharing, I feel the weight of having to protect yourself from the day you're born, because you take responsibility for things that aren't your responsibility. That's what we're talking about right now the shame, the guilt, the, the feeling like you weren't living authentically all of this time for something that happened to you, not that happened because of you.
Speaker 2:That is the experience of so many men who carry this inside without having any space, let alone in a space like this to be able to unpack just how much it has weighed on them their entire life and shape the way they've navigated things, the things they've chosen to do and the things that they've avoided and didn't realize they were avoiding it, because this may remind them, this may trigger X, y and Z and they don't know that. And and I think that what you're showing us in real time is one, the healing is a process. You're healing as we speak. I see it.
Speaker 2:I see it happening as you're talking Um, because to be able to even say out loud, I lived in authentically, or I felt like I lived in authentically because of this is something that so many of us are so afraid to say, because we have to keep up the facade that we've created, because of this thing, because otherwise we have to talk about this thing.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And and when you take that down and you actually create space to deal with the thing that was at the root of all of this, all of a sudden, you are looking at the authentic self and some of the things you may not like, you may want to keep and you may want to change, but you may feel ill-equipped to do it. Feel ill-equipped to do it and I think that that's part of the lesson with so much of this. Healing from trauma is about developing skills to sit with these really tough emotions. And as you're sitting with those tough emotions, instead of running away from them, you're embracing them and looking to understand what purpose have they served.
Speaker 1:How have they?
Speaker 2:put you in the place that you're in now, and so what we're doing right now is that in real time. I know people want to know what healing looks like. How does it happen? We're doing that because, instead of you running away from the anger, the frustration, the feeling of inauthenticity, you're sitting with it. And not only are you sitting with it, you're sharing it no-transcript.
Speaker 1:The other big thing that was an epiphany to me was the power of the mind. This is when I learned the power of your mind. If you can possibly live your life and intentionally forget decades. You forget an incident that happened because you put it away. Now we know it never goes away. You know, we know it compounds and it builds and you make choices and decisions off of it.
Speaker 1:But I was fascinated by how I could decide that I was going to forget an incident and I had forgotten it. So what that does for me is it and I don't have the worst life on the planet. I don't work harder than any man on the planet. I won't pretend like I'm out building buildings and doing something that's extremely difficult, like most men do, or something that's very, you know your hands are, getting, you know, really tired from it.
Speaker 1:I can't imagine what another brother who may be watching this, who has, you know, children, families, responsibilities in their home every day and still going to work, not making enough money to feed your family or yourself.
Speaker 1:I can't imagine that there is a place, in a space, in a time, where a man with those circumstances can unpack his trauma. So that's what I really want us to do is give some man who's watching this, that has been touched by this story and what we're discussing right now, give him the tools to help him unpack what he's going through. Because the men who already know that they're there, they already know that they're there and you already know that you got to do the work to get where you got to go to. But I'm talking about the brothers who have put it away, like like myself, for decades and years, whatever it is, but it's never leaving you until you actually deal with that trauma and that pain. So I want us to provide ways for us to unpack those, and that's what we're doing in real time. As you were saying, as we unpack these things. This is no different of a platform than what any brother may have with another brother.
Speaker 1:A friend, goodfellas, is in your home yeah it's, it's in your community, it's with people that you trust, and worse comes to worse. Just turn to the podcast. But I want us to be able to identify the trauma, because, if we intentionally forget, you got to know that it's there in order to heal it, right, yeah? And then, once you uncover and discover it, you figure out a way to get identify it, I think, is the first step, but also the hardest step, because so many of us men feel that the moment we identify it, it becomes real and I become a victim.
Speaker 2:And that's not the case of the trajectory or who we become, and part of being able to identify it is being able to start having power over it. Yeah, and I think we don't always see it that way we see it as it starts to have power over us as opposed to us having power over it. But the moment you identify it, you start to have options with how you deal with it and I think you also gave a great way is to reimagine what victimhood is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the way you broke it down, it's a tool, it is. You know what I mean. Absolutely, but you have to recognize it, but you can use it as a tool in your life versus being a victim to it your whole life.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and the reason why it's such a powerful tool is again this idea of understanding that you experienced an injury, an injury that deserves to be healed. Once you do that, you're now in a position to be able to say what are the things that I can do or that I can connect with that? Allow me to begin to not only heal, but be able to understand how has this changed or impacted my life over the course of my life? Because I think what happens is so many of us, particularly as men, especially when we've experienced trauma early in life, feel like life has happened to us instead of life happening and for us for us, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Happening for us, and and I mean you said it right at the beginning when have I been protected, when have I been cared for, and when you have that experience time and time again, one you have to think about.
Speaker 2:I'm always responsible for myself, but you also think I have no control over what happens in life, Like things are just coming at me, you know and I got to take this job because this is where the kids are at and you know I get angry really quick, so I can't work in customer service. All these things that come up that you may feel life is happening to you. When you are able to identify the injury of trauma that's happened, you're now able to say these things have happened because of what has happened around me and now that I understand what's happening around me in a different way, I can respond to it differently, differently.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think that part of this because I love what you were saying about you know, the folks who are at home who have so much pressure. They got kids, they got pills. Where do you find men who can give you space to unpack some of these things? I think part of it starts with us being able to have a regular and intentional space with men in our life that we can just the dialogue alone.
Speaker 1:Dialogue.
Speaker 2:It's like life saving and have a real conversation, because it doesn't happen all at once.
Speaker 2:I have a group of men in my life. It's a group of us, four of us who've been meeting for 10 years over um, monthly and we started talking kind of business, you know, talking about things we're doing professionally, all of that type of stuff. But because we built such a strong relationship with each other, we began to bring in things about dealing with our wives, dealing with finances, dealing with feeling like not being a man, because feeling like a man, because of how we might be showing up with important people in our life, the point of it, of what I'm saying, is All that didn't come out in our first year, two years. It takes time and patience to be able to build this with the men in our life, and I think one of the things we can do as men is really start to create spaces where we're connecting, we're building, but we're also doing a real check-in that we don't have to spill all everything right now, but we can let others know.
Speaker 2:I know there's more than what I see in front of me and I want to know from you what's really going on and and and and. I think it's accountability to yes, like brotherhood, accountability to brotherhood, yeah, and. And part of that accountability is being the first to go. Yeah, are you going to be the first to? Because if you, if you're someone who's experienced this, I, I it could be so hard to share it with anyone, but you don't have to share this event, you can, or or that trauma, yeah right, you can generalize or you don't even have to share anything related to it.
Speaker 2:If you're afraid of trusting important men in your life, start with something small and test out whether that can be something that's trusted but what I'm saying?
Speaker 1:I would actually just say jump. I would actually say a part of that voice is a part of the problem, because you have people you can trust. We just don't feel like we do, yeah. That's the thing about this experience that we have that God created there's always somebody to talk to. A lot of us just don't feel safe. Yeah, speaking to people, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I think, I think that's so just jump.
Speaker 1:I agree, don't test it out Just jump.
Speaker 2:I mean sorry, but as someone who has seen so many people, I think jumping can be great. But so many people who jump and they have had bad experiences and then it reinforces that same narrative that I knew I couldn't trust anyone and I knew this was going to happen, and so, if that's you there, another way, right, there's options, right? Some people just need to jump. You've been waiting too long. There's people around you, love get off the bench.
Speaker 2:Just somebody, somebody, but some folks have, like, had real things that have hurt them, people that have hurt them, and they have to rebuild.
Speaker 1:They have to learn not only how to trust others but how to trust their own instincts, because that's part of what trauma does as well, it makes you distrust your own instincts, you second guess it and you're like is this the right person?
Speaker 2:can I trust this person? And that creates this cycle of you really isolating yourself because you feel like you can't trust anyone and lack of trust.
Speaker 1:Yes, a lot of us have a lot of black men have trust issues, and a lot of those issues that we have are stemming from our childhood traumas that we have unresolved. And so we take this issue, this huge trust issue, into our relationships with our wives and our kids and our families and we don't even know why we just don't trust certain things or certain people and I would take it, and it rarely stays in one box if you have trust issues.
Speaker 2:You have them all over the board, yeah generally, yeah, and I would take it a step further we pride ourselves in not trusting people.
Speaker 1:I don't trust them. I don't trust them. Shit, and a lot of that says more about you than it does the individual person. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's the thing about trauma is it can distort your reality.
Speaker 2:And so it can make it seem that people or things are trustworthy, that actually are trying to help. In fact, intimacy can be a trigger to not trust people, because you think in your situation, the moment someone starts getting close to me, they're going to try to take advantage of me in some way, and so when you get close, I'm getting away, because I know this is a sign of what's coming next, and and, and I think when we start to understand that, it helps us make so much sense. So I used work at rikers island jail. I worked in a bunch of different places with with men who and boys who were, who were dealing with some huge issues, and one of the things you always saw is the moment that you got a real connection with them and they were transitioning out. Maybe they were leaving or you you had to transition. They would push you away, and it was almost this like preemptive you're going to abandon me.
Speaker 1:They know you're leaving.
Speaker 2:Yes, You're going to abandon me, so I'm not even going to entertain the idea that I can trust you and this relationship is going to keep going and so I'm going to do something to disrupt it. And the reason why I say that is sometimes the same things that we're seeing from our friends, from our brothers, from our family, who we think you just want to push me away, are the most important things that they're doing, saying I need this connection.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I want to see if I can trust you enough to fight for this relationship, and so many of us like it's not worth it. I'm not taking the time, and so the question becomes can we create space to fight for these relationships that are are so important and that I think sometimes we don't fully know whether we can, uh, uh, stay present and with them when they are, um, seeming like they don't want us there? And, and I think we have to shift our like we as us, as as men and as, as you know, black men, our community. I think sometimes the things that we interpret as this person wants nothing to do with us is just a sign that they've been hurt in the past and understand that this is something that is bigger than you and them, and, and go beyond taking things personally, um, you know, I think that this is probably one of the biggest reasons why it's hard for us, as men, sometimes to have relationships is we can, so we're so sensitive to disrespect.
Speaker 2:The moment we think someone's disrespecting us. It's time to fight. It's like what are you doing right now? Who do you think you're talking to, and the more that we can. I'm not saying folks need to just go and get disrespected, but the more that we can really sit with. Is this really disrespect? Or is this someone trying to protect themselves? Or is this someone embarrassed? Or is this someone who's feeling shame the more?
Speaker 1:we can identify.
Speaker 2:Yeah, shift that lens of what we're seeing from them. I think the more we're able to have the, the, the ability to stick through tough relationships, because we don't see the disrespect being a reason we need to leave the relationships that's deep yeah, it's hard as men too, because you don't want to be disrespected, right, and and I think it's hard for us to to look past that. But I'm asking and I have to do this myself is is I, I want us to not look past it, but but but look through it differently?
Speaker 2:see what was differently, what's really in there and what are they trying to do for themselves and what are they trying to communicate? And I think the more we can have that lens, the more we can sit with relationships that take work and that are tough.
Speaker 1:And it all starts within. It's the first piece of your pie as a man to understand what it means to be you in your body. You not what everybody else thinks, but what does it mean to be you? And a lot of those deep dives that we have to do, we uncover. For me, I was doing a deep dive in my life. I was about to turn 40, you know, in a few years or whatever and I knew that I needed to assess what life's meaning was for me, as a lot of us do get to those epiphanies at certain ages. You know 40 was getting going into. 40 was one of those enlightening times for me and that's when I did the deep dive to figure out all the things I needed to work on within myself. And then that's when I have a breakdown.
Speaker 2:It kind of goes like that.
Speaker 1:That's how it works.
Speaker 2:Deep dive breakdown. Here we are.
Speaker 1:Exactly, but my breakdown ended up being the biggest breakthrough in my entire life because I learned so much about myself, about my past, about my present, and it helped to reshape my future. More importantly, because I was conscious and cognizant of all the things that I had gone through in my life, that I had been running from, I had been hiding from, I had been in denial about, I had just downright forgotten, and the things that I had been ashamed of, and most men it doesn't matter what your race is can understand what it means to experience all of those things. So thank you, dr Isaiah, for being here with us today. Today was a very robust conversation and I hope and I pray that we allow people to have the tools that they need to go forward in their lives and be more accountable to themselves and to their family and friends and loved ones. I pray that my story can help motivate someone else to share their story, because we all do know that when we share our stories, other people can heal, because that's really what life is all about, and the shame and the embarrassment and the manhood feelings that we all encounter on this road. Those feelings shouldn't be denied and they shouldn't become who we are as a whole, all pieces of us is what makes us who we are. So thank you so much for tuning in to Goodfellas and I'm going to put some information on the screen in case you, your family members, somebody may need to talk to somebody. If you've gone through any of these situations, similar to the ones myself and Dr Isaiah were just talking about, or any issue that you see on this show, we want to provide tools for you to be your best self, to be happy and healthy mind, body and spirit.
Speaker 1:Goodfellas is a simple mental space for men to heal and grow, by black men for everybody who's listening. Thank you, by black men for everybody who's listening, thank you. I'd like to thank you guys personally for watching today's episode, and I'd also like to ask you to spread the word about our community. We're small and we're mighty, but we're healing and growing as men, and thank you in advance for helping share that. I'd also like to thank Dr Isaiah Pickens for coming through and just being a brother, being a sounding board and a friend, and everybody needs that in their life. So if you want to help us keep the conversation going or if you need to have a chat yourself, you can always reach out to us on our Facebook, our Instagram or our TikTok Fellas let's grow.
