Raised by Wolves - How To Heal From Childhood Trauma

SPEAKER_03 0:04

This is the Beyond the Story Podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. A little bit of an unconventional episode here, ladies and gentlemen. I am sitting in a hotel parking lot in Dallas, Texas. Please let me finish. In an RV with uh four of my newest Apex buddies. For those of you who don't know about Apex, it's a mastermind group, and I'm a part of a phenomenal community. But that is not what this podcast episode is all about. These gentlemen, I'm joined by uh four other guys here. Uh there's five of us in a in a in a in a very contained space here in an RV uh recording this episode, but uh I'm gonna let each of them uh introduce themselves, uh, do a quick little roll call, if you will, and then we're gonna get down to what how this whole road trip idea came together. And it's not just a guy's opportunity to get out of the house for a few couple two tree days a week or whatever it may be. There's a bit there's a mission behind it. So yeah, let's let's kick it off. Josh, what's cracking, dude?

SPEAKER_02 1:15

Yeah, hey, my name's Josh Thomas, and uh I'm from Austin, Texas, and uh I was having a conversation with the next guy here that you're gonna meet uh that kind of kicked all of this off.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Hey guys, how are you doing? I'm Adam Miller. Um you know, interestingly enough, my wife introduced me to Apex. I didn't know who Ryan Stuman was. And uh the first live that I came down to, I met with Josh Thomas, and I think he overheard me talking about a book that uh I wanted to write called Raised by Wolves. And uh next thing you know, I'm writing it with him and two other great guys, and I've got another gentleman who I'm gonna introduce right now, James Giles.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Hey guys, this is James Giles. Um, so what happened for me was I was uh working one day and Josh gave me a phone call and said, Hey, can I talk to you for a couple minutes? Yeah, man, what's going on? How was your childhood? I go, it was good, it was fine. He goes, No, man, how how was your really how was your childhood? Well, now that I think about it, there's probably a couple spots that sucked. He goes, uh, well, harness that energy, and then uh he goes, I have an idea, and I said, I'll commit. I'll commit to whatever it is. I committed before I knew what it is. He goes, So you know how you have that new RV? Do you want to go on a road trip with us to Apex Live? And I said, Yes. Um, so that's how I got into the story with Josh and Adam, and I'm gonna introduce my buddy Steve. I can't say his bleeping last name, and he's a phenomenal guy. He joined the group as well, and he's been the uh the missing piece the whole time. Thank you, thank you. Uh, I'm Steve Apadaka.

SPEAKER_04 3:04

Um I was one day, I was watching a live of Josh uh where he was talking about uh one of the reasons he was writing this book uh and taking this trip, and his story resonated with me enough to where I reached out to him in private and I wanted to throw my name in the hat just to be a part of it, not necessarily to be in the book, but just to kind of make their uh ride a lot smoother so they can focus on harnessing whatever message and energy that they needed into the book as they were traveling. Um, so I came on or I offered my role more as a support, but they said, you know what, screw that. You're just as part of the team as as we are. Um, you have a lot of value to bring to the table, and we want you to be uh an equal partnership in this. And so uh I, same thing, I embraced it. I actually I signed up, I've I volunteered for this. It wasn't um something like I overheard or anything.

SPEAKER_02 4:02

We didn't we didn't like tie him up and throw him in the bag. That would have been great, actually.

SPEAKER_03 4:06

I was like, if you if somebody would have been like in the middle of dinner and just barged in and just kidnapped one of you guys.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

We we tried to, but we went to the wrong house.

SPEAKER_02 4:18

Yeah, actually, that did happen. And some some dude, we thought we were at Steve's house and like knocking on the door at 5 30 in the morning, and some guy opens with no shirt on, and he's like, What's up, guys? Uh is uh is Steve in there? And he was like, No, that's not what happened. That's exactly what happened. But you know what we noticed as as we're kind of going around here, it was like this this patchwork team that we created. Yeah, and uh we all kind of took on these roles, if you will. I'm I'm kind of the implementer, Adam's the technician, if you will. We've decided that James is the heart, and I was trying to figure out well, what's Steve? But then I realized when we were going through here, Steve's the glue. Steve's is the mortar that puts everything together because each of us had these kind of raw ideas, and Steve came in and he was able to put them into words that none of us had.

SPEAKER_03 5:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:08

And and that's really the way that all of this happened. What what it how it works, and uh I'll let somebody else kind of jump jump in here, but how it basically worked is we're rolling down, we've got our Zoom H4N, uh, and we're just talking. We had a list of things that we had come up with in a meeting before, and we're just talking through and we're sharing things. Each of us has a signature story, and then we had a bunch of topics that we wanted to cover, and we just started talking, and then all of the similarities and the trends really just kind of started to come out. Yeah, I love it.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

And we definitely, I would say, pushed each other to open up on certain stories, stories that we were holding back from each other, and stories that we were holding back from others. We had to kind of sit there and dig and dig and dig, and then we really kind of uh opened up a lot of experiences that we all went through to put us on the path that we're on, because we're all on different paths, um, but we're all successful in our own ways.

SPEAKER_03 6:07

Yeah. And you got that common denominator too, that the past, right? We've all got this common denominator that it's it's common, but it's different. Yeah. Uh, you know, at the same time. And I this is where the conversation really started. Uh, you called me, we're chatting podcasting, and just getting to know each other. And uh you told me the road trip idea and uh, you know, troubled childhood, and I immediately my ears immediately perked up and you got room for one more? No. The answer is an absolute no. And I my mind immediately went to, well, you know, let's just roll that fucker in the parking lot and and uh have a conversation about what you guys, you know, are doing here. I actually completely forgot about the fact that you guys were gonna be recording the whole way and just unpacking the past on there. And it's incredible to and that's not normally said, right? You can go out in the middle of the desert and sweat with a bunch of fucking Indians and do all kinds of crazy shit and like ceremony and all of this other stuff, self-discovery, if you will. Um, but it's never recorded. We're documenting next. Yeah, I was gonna say we're not we're not documenting, like, I don't even know if you're allowed to document going out to the middle of the desert and smoke peyote with a bunch of Indians in a teepee and sweat for two days.

SPEAKER_02 7:27

Yeah, well, speaking of, uh well, we didn't do that per se, uh, but a couple of the things that we did, and uh the the main thing is this we all had different variations of what you would call a broken childhood. Yeah. And that has left a permanent imprint on us as men. Sure. For better or for worse. And what we realized is ultimately, in order for us to become the people and the men that we are, and to create any level of success in our lives, we had to overcome that programming in some way. Yeah. And we had to basically defeat our destiny to create our own. And some of those things still haunt us. And you can tell if you spend enough time around somebody that is traumatized, it doesn't matter how many masks they put on. It's still there. Right. It's still there. And uh what we wanted to do is we realize that there are hundreds of thousands of men, maybe millions of men right now who are in the exact same position as us, but haven't figured out how to overcome it. And there are millions and millions and millions of the next generation that are going to be put through the same trials and fail. Sure. And what we wanted to do is we wanted to reach that handout and say, hey, you're not by yourself, you're not alone. Here's a way out. It's not the way out, but it's a way out that may work for you. But even if it doesn't work for you, I just want to let you know, you know, scared little boy or scared little girl, you're not by yourself. Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 9:02

And I that it is, and I I think it's becoming less taboo to start having these conversations, especially with with men. You know, because women can talk to the cows come home, and that's just the nature of the beast. Men, we crave community and we crave uh uh time with other men, but it's not uh socially acceptable or masculine per se to say, you know what, I just want some bro time, but real authentic bro time, not getting shit faced and watching the game. We can do that anytime, but it's like, let's get down to the brass tax of things real quick and talk about you know how how you live and how how is life. I recently went through a a masculinity program on the back of a breakup. I got back and I'm like, I got a phone call from a trusted friend, like, hey, it's three-month program, uh, take you from prince to king. And I'm like, I'm in. And I didn't understand any of that stuff before. I didn't know even know what I was getting into, but it was they got into the different archetypes of, you know, magician and and and and lover and king and like how all these different traits come out in our personality as men and the underlying of being, you know, our masculinity is our is a powerful tool to have, but it also can work to our disadvantage because at times it's you know too proud and too cool uh to really want to talk about you know life or unpack these things. But you said generations to come are gonna experience similar challenges. They are, but shit like this going down, and who knows, I you know, I just caught a vision that I think this is gonna turn into a retreat style thing, that this crazy idea started on a fucking road trip in an RV and ended up turning into a movement now where we take guys to crazy parts uh of the world uh and unpack stuff and build a community through all that. I think there's something really big that's gonna be on the on the tail end of this. So I'm I'm I'm glad to I'm glad to now be in the guy I weasel my way right up in this thing. Welcome in, bro.

SPEAKER_04 10:59

No, and I think uh I think what's really special and unique about this is that um we we broke down those traditional barriers that men tend to put on each other uh subconsciously, right? There are certain things that you don't cross. Like you said, usually the bro time is shooting pull or drinking or something else, but there's like this unspoken imaginary line that you don't cross. And we we crossed it, right? We humbled ourselves, we broke those barriers down, and um, and it brought out messages that are gonna be important for generations to come for the people who uh do resonate with some of the things that we've gone through. And uh it was just it was awesome to open up to other men that were willing to take the non-traditional route into into healing, but also sharing with uh not only each other but with the world now uh what you know what practical things helped us and worked for us and what um techniques and and and systems that we've put into place and used to help us get through those times when maybe we didn't have anybody there with us. Right. Um and I know a lot of people that are gonna be in this book, they're they're gonna be at different levels, but a lot of the times they're gonna feel lonely and they're gonna feel like those barriers exist for everybody around them. And uh, you know, part of the goal here is for us to tell people it's okay to break down those barriers. Um take off the mask. Exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 12:20

And I don't think a lot of people understand the the the the freedom that's available on the other side of that and being able to I always say the vulnerability is a superpower, and it really, really is. If you've got, if you can, as a man, if you can man up long enough to take the fucking mask off and be vulnerable, it's incredible what happens. And it's not just the change that happens in our own life and our own belief system and our own thought process, but those around us start to change when we shift, and we don't have to do a fucking damn thing for that to happen. And I think that that is just an incredible, uh, not only an incredible thing, but it's also something that that that it's a gift, man. We're able to pass, you know, pass the torch, if you will, of healing to those that we care about, those around us, people, people that we come to know, um, without doing anything other than focusing on healing to the become the best, absolute best version of ourselves, which I think, you know, we've only got a lifetime to figure this out, gentlemen. Right. You know, and I tell myself every single day as I turn the shower nozzle to ice cold at the end of it, the least favorite part of the day. And and and I and I repeat to myself, I'm I'm committed to the work every fucking day for the rest of my life. Because when I shift, the world shifts. And I just think that that is just an incredible superpower that we all possess if we're willing to take the fucking mask off long enough.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Yeah, it's interesting. When we were driving down, I kept thinking, I don't believe any one of us could have done this by ourselves. No way. There was there's so many Yeah, there's so many different characters. I mean, you know, with Josh being very forward-thinking in terms of, you know, hey, getting the job done and keeping your eye on the ball and focusing on the task, I think it's so important to recognize that the other side of that is he doesn't have what I have, which is, you know, the thing I've been praying about for the past five years is discernment among men and being able to communicate openly without having any tragic, you know, misalignment for sure. And so, you know, and Steve, we hit it off like immediately. He reached out to me several months ago and we started working together. And I just you can tell if you vibe with people or if you don't vibe with people. And and for me with James, I mean, he's just the guy that you want to be around because he's he's always hopping and skipping and jumping, and he has that same internal energy of for perhaps my children, right? Yeah, and so that's that's the greatest thing ever. You're a man child, me too. Me too. Me too.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

I love it. We had this conversation last night. She's like, so you're 35, but I think you're acting 17 right now. And I'm like, Yeah, let me go jump over that fire pit real quick. Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 15:22

Watch me, honey, watch me. Watch me. That that did happen. He did jump over the fire pit. Yeah. So you know, there's an interesting comment that you made, Adam, because this is this is your baby. And it was an idea that was sitting there in your head. And you probably could have eventually done something with that, but I think it kind of took me saying, Well, fuck it, let's do it. Yeah. And then you're like, all right. Well, the funny thing you you returned that energy back to me, which in turn like charged me back up, and I kept going. And and yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

And the funny thing is, is I'll be the guy to hold us to the deadline on when it's gonna release, right? The reality is I was gonna do the book anyway, but I was like, I found four other people, three other people, now four, that I could uh, you know, really just live out what I had been praying about, which is hey, like doing this with other people, right? You know, as you said earlier about uh this could be a retreat. Well, I've already got a tab on the land. You know what I mean? So that's a wrap. But I really just love being in a room. And and when my wife brought me here to Apex for the first time, I just like, wow, this is the room, this is it, this is home. And um, and now I can see that that is infallibly real for me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:48

Well, I mean, you you've been praying about it. You definitely, yeah, that's that you're definitely starting to see that come to fruition. And I think that you know what what you really have been praying about is to say, you know, so what does it look like to to be a fisher of men? What does that look like in 2021? Because it ain't what I was taught when I was a kid at the Southern Baptist Church, you know what I mean? I took a lot of unraveling out of that to understand, you know, the the the real idea of life and what what exactly the big picture, like what does the gospel look like in 2021? And it's a it's very, very different. But you know, like they have it. I don't know if you guys have seen this new series, The Chosen. But dude, it it portrays Jesus exactly like I would have imagined him. Like he literally went out and started tapping guys and said, Hey, go home and talk to your wife because we're bouncing in the morning. And the wife's like, This is a huge opportunity. It's Jesus for crying out loud. But you see the character they play. In fact, they filmed a majority of it here, oddly enough. It looked like it's supposed to look like the the the Holy Land. But it's interesting to see, and it's non-Hollywood related, all self-funded, all completely. They want to keep it out of Hollywood. Daryl Eves is behind it, big YouTube guy. And um, but it's funny to see that modern day 2021 uh the the portrayal of today's gospel is is what you would envision. Not brimstone and fire, not guilt, and a leverage tool. I don't know about your childhood, but there was a lot of leveraging my parents could utilize to you know try to fear you in in into line versus you know loving you into a space where you're supposed to be.

SPEAKER_04 18:30

So I think uh part of this too is also us showing people that it's it's like it's getting back to the basics. Sure. Those basic fundamental things that that men and women women are supposed to do and be, you know, we've convoluted so many things as human beings and made things so uh incredibly confusing and destructive, right? And so when you go back down to those innate natural things, not natural, but those innate things that make human beings survive, or I'm sorry, thrive, like effective communication. We did a ton of that today, right? Yeah, think about the world's problems like wars, like fights between your spouse, friends, strangers, it's always just a miscommunication because two people couldn't understand each other. Why? Because they couldn't do the most basic thing, which is communicate, right? So it's things teaching those basic things that we can go back to as human beings, like effective communication, uh being a man of man of your word, having integrity, sure, right? Not you know, following the golden rule, right? And uh self-improving, doing better, being being better today than you were yesterday, even if you failed as long as you failed forward, we hear that all the time. Right. Those are basic fundamentals that so many people are overlooking in favor of complicated things, and then then you wonder why there's so much miscommunication out in the world. So we want to teach that. Look, you can go back to the basics, like in the 50s, hop in the on Route 66, go across the country, have some effective communication, some um, some tolerance, rational thinking, uh, love, compassion, um, uncon, you know, unconditional love just to say, hey, talk to me here. You know, wow, what that worked for you. I didn't even think of that. Maybe I should try that, right?

SPEAKER_03 20:18

Well, that's that is the whole idea. That's exactly what I was taking. This is relatable stuff. Right. You're either gonna relate to it in in in in in um by yourself, which is great, however it gets to you, or it's it's gonna relate to you and you're gonna go, I I want, I want, I want a part of it. Right. I want to be able, and that's that you know, the the ripple effect. Somebody told me one time the ripples become waves, and they and they certainly do. You guys have definitely been making some the the ripple effect has begun, let's let's just say with with you just this past week and since this trip has has started. Well, I'm fired up. I'm I'm stoked to to see what's to come uh with the book. I I feel like I I I knew about it before. I've been following the travels and all the stops and the country western shoot and the whole. So I feel like I've almost been there. So I'm just grateful that we got an opportunity to sit down and uh before this whole uh a sight unseen for me, Apex Live, but I'm told it's uh it's quite the experience over the next four or eight hours. So I look forward to hanging out with you guys and meeting some new familiar faces. And I can't wait for what's next. All these guys' links and all the updates on where you guys can find out what's what's going on next gonna be available in the show notes. So if you're thinking I wanna, I wanna I wanna get in the mix here, you want an introduction to any of these guys, the whole team, uh, don't hesitate to reach out and we'll be able to facilitate something through the show notes where you'll be able to know who you should be talking to. But gentlemen, I tell you, I love it. I think this is the beginning of something gigantic. And I think this is the the you we're all gonna look back one day and go, remember the RV? It all started with that. Maybe the next book. It all started with an RV, you know? It might be.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

It all did start.

SPEAKER_02 21:55

We four dudes in a white van with candy.

SPEAKER_03 21:59

And puppies, and puppies, and puppies. Well, guys, uh keep keep doing work that matters. Thank you so much for having us. Great to have you here. Absolutely. Thank you. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story Podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Be sure to appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, LaunchLab.com studios. We'll talk to you next time.