So it's June 15th, 2016, a warm summer day.
I had just graduated high school
and I'm riding the euphoria of all that comes along with going away to college.
Now, most stories start off with today was not a normal day
but not mine.
Today was anything from normal, from sunup to sundown.
I cancel plans with my friends.
I decide to not go to my favorite museum with my family.
And I wash my car by hand.
All of these actions are really out of the norm for me.
For whatever reason, I was home all day.
And just after drawing off my car,
I was in my room, not really doing much.
And my little sister Allison comes in.
She asks, "Can we go pick up Maddie from Jason's house?"
I say yes without really giving a second thought,
and within a couple minutes we're driving.
A little backstory on Maddie and Jason.
Jason is a junior, goes to my high school,
and he's dating Maddie,
a freshman who's friends with my sister.
Now my sister likes to throw parties like any other teenager does.
So I've gotten to know Jason a little bit.
And what I've learned from watching him
is that he is the center of his social group.
He is the one that everyone looks to, to see what they should be doing,
and if they like it or not.
Now I've also noticed
that he can get angry sometimes and has a hot temper.
When my sister first asked if we could go pick up Maddie,
I said yes pretty quickly.
And this was for a couple of reasons.
The first was that it's kind of weird for me to pick up a friend
from a boyfriend's house.
Usually, I just chauffer for my sister from house to house.
The second was that I had heard in school about Maddie and Jason
having some relationship problems,
and that kind of set an alarm bell off.
The third was that my sister wears her arm on her sleeve,
so it's really easy to tell
that she was anxious about the situation also.
So we arrived at Jason's house
and I parked my black sedan on the right side of the street,
opposite from his house.
I opened the car door
and I stepped out into the warm cloudy afternoon Virginia air.
And I noticed that Maddie's sitting on the porch,
which is out of place.
Normally my sister's friends just wait inside for a text or knock at the door.
But Maddie walks across the yard.
I open the car door behind mine and she gets in. I shut up behind her.
Now at this point, I have to admit that I'm really relieved
that Jason is nowhere to be seen
and that there had been no incident or altercation.
So I head back in the car, buckle my seatbelt, close the door
and start a three-point turn to head home.
The first turn was the left in Jason's driveway.
I put the car in reverse to back out
and I look up at the house and noticed a figure in the doorway
that wasn't there before.
I recognized him instantly
from his red, white and blue American flag tank top.
It's Jason,
and he's holding a broom in his hand - it looks like,
but as I take a closer look,
my heart begins to thump into my chest
as they recognized the metal in wood as a shotgun.
I begin to think about what's about to happen.
My first thought is that Jason
is just trying to show that he's more manly than I am.
I can't hurt him.
And the second but scarier
is that he's going to come out and show his anger through the firearm.
And that's what I act on.
I put the car in reverse and I back out of the driveway.
I stop and I'm about to head home
and I put the gear shifter, and drive, and then park.
Chunk, chunk, chunk,
drive for getting away safely and park
for getting out and trying to talk some sense into Jason.
I choose to drive,
slowly lift my foot off the brake
and feel the car start to push into my back.
I take one last look at the house to make sure everything's still okay
and I don't see Jason anymore.
But I see red, white and blue at about waist level
and notice that Jason's bent over like this.
As I scan my eyes down,
I see what looks like a pink mist covering the door
that Jason was standing behind.
I'm trying to wrap my brain about what just happened
and I forced myself to come to the conclusion
that what I was seeing was Jason's brain matter
splattered on the door and the skylight above.
I hear a faint Joey something just happened from the backseat
and I realized that I know something the girls don't:
Jason just shot himself.
My first thought is to get the girls away.
I put the car in drive and begin to speed away
across one intersection and maybe even two.
I hear rustling from the backseat
and next to me the girls are starting to panic.
There's rustling in seats, slamming on windows,
so I locked the car to keep them in.
I grab the phone and dial 911.
The operator picks up and I have to utter the words:
"I've just witnessed a suicide"
and chaos immediately erupts inside the sedan.
As I'm trying to relay the information to the operator like
the address, my name, and for some reason my birthday.
I get a faint look from my sister with tears in her eyes
and asks if Jason is going to be okay.
In order to keep myself together I have to look away.
I pull the car over and get out
because I cannot keep myself together inside with those two girls.
I know that I have to stay, at least calm and collected
to keep them there and away from that door.
I finish relaying the information to the operator and they say,
"Hang on, the police will be there soon."
And then click.
The phone line goes dead. And the operator hung up.
And I'm all alone.
I stand outside in the familiar neighborhood of Vista woods
knowing that I am the only one that knows what just happened.
The whole world is oblivious.
A car drives behind me.
Someone is mowing their lawn off to my right,
and I hear little kids playing to my left.
Everything is normal as far as the rest of the world is concerned.
But I am stuck in a different universe than the rest of the world.
In a movie when something like this happens,
the screen goes dark and ominous music comes from underneath.
But it's not like that.
I was scared
and I couldn't do anything about it.
Now I tell you that story
because today I want to tell you what it means to experience trauma.
Sorry.
So there's no real book on parenting as all parents know.
There's no textbook you can turn to, to know what to do next.
And even if there was a textbook on parenting,
I seriously doubt that any of the chapter titles
would have been "What to do when your child misses a shotgun suicide?"
So my parents did the best thing they could think of
and took my sister and me to a talk therapist in town
the very next day.
And we set up more sessions for that summer,
and throughout that summer
we told her what happened and our feelings and stuff like that.
And it definitely helped but it didn't help where I needed it,
which was in my psyche if that makes any sense.
I'm really into knowing
where people are coming from in their thoughts, actions, and words.
And I subject myself to the same analysis.
And over the summer, I was doing these intrusive thoughts
and what I was coming up with was I was milking it.
I was fine and didn't need any extra attention.
And I think a lot of people go through that.
I thought to myself:
"This event is in the past Joey; just move on and get over it."
So I start school here at Behrend in the fall
and on the surface everything's great.
But there were these little things that were happening
that showed me that everything was not great.
For instance, I would be in my dorm room or in a classroom,
I don't hear kids down the hall laughing
and instantly I would think that they were crying.
It's really amazing
how much hysterical laughter and hysterical crying sound the same.
I would blank out into this thousand-yard stare
replaying the event in my head
and would be scared over something moving or someone touching my shoulder.
And finally,
I would cry myself to sleep at night, not a sad or angry cry,
just there staring at the wall with tears rolling down my face.
So I'm a bit of a nerd
and I started researching what was happening to me.
And I learned that your brain talks
through the exchanging of charged particles
through neural pathways.
And when these pathways get used more,
it's easier for your brain to follow.
Now most people have heard of "fight or flight" and what this is,
is it's an instinct that happens when your body feels in danger.
Your amygdala which is the oldest part of your brain takes control
and tells the rest of your brain what to do and your body.
Now if there's a tiger in front of you,
you're really not going to benefit that much from thinking:
what am I going to do next?
Oh, what's the tiger going to do next?
It's a lot more beneficial for your longevity
if you fight the tiger or run away really fast.
And that's what the amygdala triggers.
Now my brain thought
that the right way to act in a sad or scary situation
was to do what my amygdala set on June 15th,
which makes sense.
It was just trying to protect me.
But what it was actually resulting in
was a torrent of emotions that I had never felt before.
Now despite all this, I was just telling myself:
"Joey, you're just a freshman.
You're just anxious about this semester starting to ramp up,
and you're homesick."
Now you know that part in a movie where things start to really get bad,
this is that part.
And the part where they really started to not get okay
were my dreams.
I was struggling to sleep without nightmares
and eventually started sleepwalking.
And one night I started sleepwalking,
left my dorm room, left my building,
and ended up eight miles away from campus,
in rainbow flip-flops.
(Laughter)
I was eventually found by the police, disoriented and confused.
And their first thought was:
"Dang, this college freshman definitely cannot handle his booze."
So he took me to the hospital and called my parents
and eventually, everyone realized that I wasn't drunk or on drugs
but I was having a PTSD breakdown.
Now this sleepwalking incident was a wake-up call
for me and my parents that I needed help,
and that I wasn't okay.
And since my dad is a retired marine,
we're well connected with the military community.
And we're pointed in the direction of EMDR
which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.
And it's a way to help our brains deal with trauma.
So I took a three-week leave of absence from school to go home to Virginia
and start EMDR therapy.
The first session was about an hour and a half
and the therapist went over all the science of everything,
which again I was into.
She told me that EMDR is based on the research of REM sleep
which is rapid eye movement sleep.
And what happens during REM sleep or what's theorized at least
is your eyes are moving back and forth rapidly and randomly
and you're filing away all the information from the day.
So if you had a stressful day at work,
your dreams might have some relation to that.
Now REM sleep is almost like the visualization of what's happening
and those come out as dreams.
What was happening when I was dreaming
was I was seeing June 15th in a different light.
Now your brain during REM sleep
is moving everything from your short-term to your long-term.
And it kind of reads what it is, labels it and then sends away for filing.
And it doesn't always come across exactly in your dreams.
What was happening in my dreams
was I was replaying the event over and over and over again
because my brain couldn't file it.
It just kept trying to refile and refile.
But it just wasn't able to.
Now the way a typical EMDR session would go
is the therapist would hold their fingers about six to 12 inches away from my face
and swipe from my left peripheral to my right peripheral, back and forth.
And they call this bilateral stimulation,
because it stimulates both hemispheres of your brain.
She would tell me to put myself back into June 15th,
back into the sedan
and let her know what I was feeling and what was happening.
And when I came to a part where I was upset
or didn't really understand what was happening or angry,
she would input a sentence or two, and then we would swipe on that.
And now I kind of cement that thinking into my head.
Now there were two really big problems that I was having with June 15th.
The first was that I felt responsible for what the girls had seen.
Now if you remember I turned left,
but there's a way to get home straight.
And I thought that because I turned left
that that was the reason the girls saw what happened
that I was the reason they saw it.
If I would have gone straight they would be fine.
The second was that I felt like I could have helped Jason.
I don't know what I could have done
but I just wish I would have done something better for him.
What EMDR helped me do was realize that I could have done nothing better
and that situation went the way it was going to happen.
Now with traditional talk therapy,
you can say oh I'm fine; it wasn't my fault; I'm okay.
But you can lie;
you can lie to the therapist and you can lie to yourself.
What EMDR does is it really
forces you to believe what you're saying and thinking.
Now one way to show this is when I've been researching EMDR,
I found that people would start crying out of nowhere during the swiping.
And I thought, no, no, that doesn't happen to me.
It happens to me.
(Laughter)
We would be sitting there swiping back and forth
and I would just start crying uncontrollably.
It was like someone had taken a champagne bottle
and pop the cork
and all of that was coming out
was everything that I had bottled away on June 15th.
And now it was finally escaping.
Luckily, I only needed two EMDR sessions.
Part of this is due to the fact of the neural pathways
that I mentioned earlier,
and how when one gets used more it gets easier to follow.
Now in my brain,
the trauma only had time to set up a walking paththrough the woods
that my brain could follow.
But in other trauma victims,
like someone who's been to war
or someone who's in an abusive relationship,
they might have a highway that's been formed.
For me all we had to do is take a rake and brush the leaves back over
and my brain would forget it was there.
But for someone else,
you may need to take a jackhammer to it and plant trees and wait for them to grow,
and that takes time.
Now, a little statistic on EMDR to show that I'm not just like a poster child.
After on average of six 50-minute sessions,
100% of single trauma victims
and 77% of multi-trauma victims
had zero signs of PTSD after.
Now EMDR is just one of the ways that we're learning about trauma
and the way our brains process it.
And who knows what science is going to bring us
in five, ten or 20 years.
What I do know is
that before this event happened to me
I thought that trauma was just something you need to get over,
just accept it and move on.
But what I realize now is
that we have to help ourselves if we truly want to get past something.
For months I was wanting to know why this happen?
Why did Jason take his life?
Why those two girls?
And what I've learned is that some events in life
just feel like a crappy movie,
one where the last scene ends with more questions than answers.
And do we want those answers?
But we can find peace
even though we know we will never get those answers.
I hope that you think about trauma differently than you did before
and have a better understanding
about how your brain process the world around you.
And just remember that sometimes it needs a little help.
Thank you.
(Applause)