Leckey Harrison
I am not the man I used to be. At all. Not physically, not emotionally, or cognitively, definitely not romantically, nor socially, or relationally. Even spiritually I am completely different. Healing one’s trauma has that effect!
I have a motto: To learn, to do, to teach. This is what has driven me most of my life, and I created the motto in an Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counseling program I was in at the University of Minnesota in the late 80s. It is why I became the co-director of Whidbey CareNet, co-founded Raise Your Resilience, LLC, and TRE Washington.
Bullet points, right? It's easy to just post bullet points of things I’ve achieved. The stuff that would make you trust me well enough to invest in the Raise Your Resilience program. What it lacks is any meaningful context. There is no story. No emotion.
In a nutshell, I was born and lived in Milwaukee for 10 years, moved to Chicago for 15 years, then to Minnesota for 22, and then finally to Whidbey Island. That still doesn’t say much does it? My parents were both veterans of WW2, and my Dad had undiagnosed and unacknowledged PTSD from combat, and my mother may have as well. Both were Lieutenants in the Navy, both had survived the Great Depression. I experienced non-malevolent emotional neglect, and the impact that has on a developing infant and later child. Which led to my not having anyone to talk to about being sexually abused before I was 10, and not feeling safe or connected enough to talk about it, even while living in a family. I felt lost and afraid.
After moving to Chicago, still in that same emotional void, I was sexually abused again, and then started doing drugs at age 13. That escapade, which featured hallucinogens heavily, didn’t end too well, though I did manage to dodge the bullet of psychosis and overdose by and large. Scars, but nothing permanent. However, I couldn’t dodge the confusion, the rudderless feeling. The loneliness. The fear. I turned to alcohol…
When that failed, I got into religion. I was morally wounded by that point. “Burnt out” is the common phrase. I turned out to be a poster child for “religion is the opiate of the people.” And I was a sterling poster boy! After moving to Minnesota, I was teaching at a ministry training school, I was preaching from the pulpit, and I was leading the largest home group in the church. Bullet points! And my Christianity was indeed an addiction, another behavioral addiction, because nothing inside had really changed. Not so bullet pointy, and a much fuller picture now, isn’t it? Then when I needed God and His church the most, there was complete failure. Desertion. Abandonment. A complete pull-the-rug-out-from-under-my-feet experience. To have everything I was committed to and loyal to, and believed, all proven a lie. And piled on the aforementioned emotional state and experiences.
If you’d like, you can venture guesses as to what a growing boy learns while in a state of fight/flight/freeze. The behaviors I learned over the years to try and get love and acceptance. First from family, and later from females, from counter culture hippies, from church leaders, from fire department leaders. Other behaviors I learned were to prove how individual I was, because I never experienced that self-regulation/autonomy stage. How I fell in with the people because they provided the “attaboys” that my family of origin didn't. You’d be right. Heck, we strove to be individuals unlike our plastic parents that lived in suburbia, in houses that “were all made out of ticky tacky, and all looked just the same.” I also learned to excel at things I could master somewhat “intellectually,” a wounded cognitive bias, or “dark” curiosity as it is called. As a boy I read voraciously, and I was great at spelling bees. In my hippy days I read album and liner notes, not just for songs and lyrics, but who produced it? Who engineered it? I read the tech data on all my stereo equipment, and everyone else’s; I knew the fine details, the esoterica, when really folk just wanted to party. In my religious addiction I memorized word for word, out of the Bible, Galatians thorough 1 Timothy. I could recite it end to end, and read the entire Bible five times, when none of my pastors or elders had. I did all this stuff just to be loved and recognized for who I was - And none of it worked. What I needed was for someone to push it all aside, and just hug me as I was. Whatever it took to feel worth something, when my inside hell said the exact opposite, and more convincingly.
Let’s now add to that context the many jobs and the financial instability over the years, a family which had strife and conflict, and one can easily understand then how it was easy to volunteer in community theater, and then, because on top of the day job and family, and community theater, I decided with all the extra time I had to become a firefighter. A little more context, no? Anything to stay busy, occupied, feel needed and wanted.
I was a volunteer in two small communities, so I went to everyone’s worst day, 24/7, for 16 years, witnessing life’s vulgarity of those I knew that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and managed along the way to earn over a dozen more certifications from state fire schools and FEMA, including the Professional Development program at FEMA. Bullet points!
Yea, I did all the things that I learned to do, and kept them going for almost six decades. The learning and doing part? I had it down, although this thing about living a lie (the inner hell against the outer appearance of functional) is that the hell finally wins. I had learned all these survival behaviors, and then they’d fail to work, and I’d adapt and make new ones, still and always unable to actually find that “magic” that would make me whole, help me feel loved and accepted for who I was.
No matter where I moved, I was always with me. All that crap was piling up. And on Christmas Day, 2011, I experienced the straw that broke this camel’s back.
I had learned, I had done, and I broke. I broke into a million pieces.
That breaking resulted in the end of a 37 year marriage, estrangement from my sons (which had been years in the making), unemployable, and reduced to living in a tent for the summer of 2012.
I had to figure out just what the hell happened to me, and how I was going to fix it. And in that fixing, I realized a lot more about the why of the learning and doing I did until Christmas Day. Then I had to learn how to heal it. Going all the way back to my infancy. That set the stage for my Great Unraveling in 2019, when I lost, in succession over two months, my primary relationship, place that I lived, the vehicle I drove, my job, the Krav Maga class I was teaching, the death of a high school friend, and my mother-in-law. Despite the grief that was piling on, I secured a new place to live, a vehicle, and employment. That employment which I was able to quit later, to better serve myself. And then yet a better offer came along, that served me even better, so I moved on. I was capable of handling all this because of the capacity and resilience I had developed while healing.
Oh yea. That bullet pointed list? It’s based on those 58 years of lived experience that has ample reflection, and then application of what I’ve learned over the years, to my own healing. That healing which has reverberated to my own sons, and the relationships I am currently in, and to my ability to serve, albeit in different capacities. And that bullet pointed list cannot at all come close to describing what it feels like to be a fully functional, connected, pleasure-able man. I have pummeled my former self-limitations, and to this day continue to learn, to do, and to teach.
Now to the bullet points, and mix the two together:
served as a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician in Minnesota and Washington State for 16 years, and retired to cure my PTSD. Along the way I earned over a dozen certifications from state agencies and FEMA, in such things as confined space rescue, leadership, and emergency management.
is a certified Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises provider. This required two years of study and clinical work, and the clinical work was 100% supervised, year 1 being individual clinical sessions, and year two group clinical sessions. I already knew how trauma felt in my body and psyche, and I got to see in my own healing experience first (required), how to apply tremoring and other techniques to the healing process.
Papers were required on recommended and required texts to insure a proper cognitive understanding of the process of traumatization, and how the body heals from it, and what to look for in clinical settings.
was an American Red Cross volunteer, specializing in Staff Wellness and Staff Training
has a purple belt rank in Advanced Krav Maga, and is a certified instructor in Core and Advanced Level A Warrior Krav Maga and NWSDE Krav Maga (Wingate)
has practiced meditation for 15 years.
has presented at conferences and led workshops.
has decades of experience in manufacturing and construction.
is an avid reader and creatively expresses himself through writing, drumming, and photography