John A. King: Trauma to Triumph by Giving a Voice to the Voiceless

Welcome to Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide?
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Tune in, be inspired, and join us in transforming the
world one story at a time. Hi, I'm Tony Mantur.
Welcome to Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide.
Today's guest is John A. King, a trauma recovery advocate, author, speaker,
and survivor who has dedicated his life to helping others
turn pain into purpose. What makes his story so compelling
isn't just the work he does, It's the journey he's lived.
Drawing from his own experiences, he now equips others with
tools for healing, resilience, and reclaiming identity beyond trauma. His
mission is simple but profound, to give survivors a voice
and help them step into strength. He has a great
journey to tell us. So before we dive into our episode,
we'll be back with an uninterrupted show right after. A
word from our sponsors. Thanks for coming on.
Thanks man, Thank you very much. I love you work.
Oh, thanks so much. I really appreciate that.
Oh, it was really touched by your work with the
autistic community. It's a diagnosis I've come through just recently.
Oh really, I mean recently recently, the last couple of months.
It was something I've masked my entire life, and it
has brought such clarity and insight and being incredibly helpful
for me.
That's good to hear your diagnosis has helped you. Can
you give us a little insight on your past and
what you're doing now.
I was trafficked and abused as a kid. I had
recall of that back in our wit. So out of
that came complex post traumatic stress disorder. And I look
back and I see authenticity has always been a challenge
to me. I had to be an extremely good liar
as a child to survive. So I bring that into
this continual masking behavior and presenting something that was very
acceptable to people. So you bring it forward into life,
and I have these implosion when I get recall of
what happened to me, So the whole walls come off,
and the last fifteen to sixteen years have been this
process of getting well, getting the hands around what I've
experienced and what I faced on a daily basis, and
out the other side of that. Very passionately involved in
any human trafficking, neurodiversity and trauma recovery. So we provisioned
for the vision. We run some of my tea companies
and we do some stuff, and all of that money
goes towards impacting and helping communities, very similar to the
sort of ethos you have towards the communities you're involved.
Can you give us a little insight on the steps
that you have taken so that you could heal and
how that has helped you moving forward?
Oh? Thank you. I read a lot of books. When
I first had recall. There was nothing available as a resource,
particularly to a man who'd been sexually abused and the
predators were female, And twenty years ago we weren't really
even talking about PTSD or complex post traumatic stress. So
I read everything. I went back to the Napolygonic Wars
when it talked about battle Heart, then into the Civil War,
and then up through World War Two, and I read
all that material and I'd started to digest and condense it,
and I really said, and then diagram and I identify
the twenty percent of things the middle intersection that would
impact eighty percent of my life Perretti's principle, and I
started to actively try and work on those twenty percent.
So over time, as I've gone on, I've constantly been
refining that and working on that to get to a
place where you know, life is life is joyous, so
you know my child would be horrendous. And I'm in
a space where I'm really I wake up every day,
I'm very, very happy to be wirried. And it wasn't
like that for a long long time.
You often talk about trauma as something that lives in
the body, not just the mind. What does that mean
in real, everyday terms for someone that may be listening
to our podcast right now.
Sure what it could manifest as hypertension, It could manifest
as an inability to sleep, It manifest as constantly being
on full alert and inability to relax, unable to just
walk into a social environment and enjoy yourself because your
body is always in this state of continual fight, and
those stresses, adrenal stress, all those sorts of things are
a constant thing you have to learn to manage over
time in order to not only have a sustainable quality
of life, but for longevity, because all of those things
I've listed are things with terminal consequences if you don't
manage them appropriately. So I think that's part of it
is understanding the mind body connection. I believe we are body, mind,
and spirit. We've got these three aspects of who we
are as human beings, and if we're not taking time
to develop each of those, then there's a wholeness of
life that we're missing out on.
What are some of the most effective ways people can
either seek out or gather information from whatever sources may
be available, and then apply what they learn in meaningful
ways to improve their lives and moving forward.
There's some simple things you can do is manage yourself,
and sometimes that can be managing your time and your environment.
Saying no to things doesn't make you impolite, it makes
you the captain of your own shit. Sometimes there's environments
that I can go into and there's environments that I
can't go into. So part of that nuance is is
it best for me and my family if I'm not
in a situation where I'm hip of vigilant, So therefore,
let's not go into that restaurant or let's not go
to that event. So part of that is managing that.
And then the other issue is self discipline, you know,
getting up at the same time every day and going
to bed at the same time every day, Constantly working out,
you know, three to five times a week, making sure
that you don't eat red food, coloring number five, you know,
little things like that, and that it's the micro management
and the understanding that trauma, like any other neurodiverse factor,
is not going to go away. It's a lifetime of
managing it, you know, depending on this trauma and this
trauma you know, big t, little tea, but you know,
it's a lifetime of committing to managing it to be
a better person.
You just mentioned you were recently diagnosed artistic just in
the past few months. You to go that route to
get a diagnosis so you could see what it could
actually be.
Man great question, and I've never had to answer that
question in my life. So let me stumble around in
here with I'd gotten to a point in my recovery
where I had done as much as I believe I
could have, and yet there was still things that I
didn't understand, and there were reasons I was hesitant that
didn't make sense anymore. And I started to ask questions
because there have been times that people have suggested back
in the day when we're on the spectrum or off
the spectrum, and people have suggested, look, you need to
sit with someone and have a conversation about, you know,
possibly being autistic high functioning autistic. They were particularly talking
about masking autistic behavior for social acceptance. So we started,
my wife and I started to unpack that. And you know,
we went through a stage of talking to a few people,
you do the online thing at three am in the morning,
and then it came down to it, I want to
start to really understand this and talk to some people
about it. And it did. It was very high on
the mask score. I think it's one hundred and seventy four,
and it was one hundred and forty seven. And so
we started to unpack that as a couple. What it
did was make sense to me. Again, back to ven diagram,
is there's a series of behavior that had been put
off and said, look, this is one thing. And for me,
it wasn't an excuse for behavior. It was a reason
for behavior, because I'm the sort of person if I
understand something, then I can go about managing it and
making it work for me. Really, that's what it's been for.
As I said, Tony, I'm only fresh on this aspect
of the journey. It's amazing. But once you get inside
and tools you can realize you go, ah, crap, I've
been doing that for sixty years. Now, I understand why
it's like that.
Now you just mentioned the ven diagram. There's many people
out there that might not know what it is. Can
you expand and explain a little bit about it and
how you used it to help you in what you
was going through in your journey.
So what it did for me was give me Okay.
So we've got an internal measure, and we've got an
internal set of feelings, and those internal set of feelings
and measures are often imposed on us. We spend a
lot of our life living from the outside in. We're
supposed to behave this way, do this thing, act this way,
believe this, or from the outside in. It comes a
point in our life where we have to live from
the inside out. So that's very important in a recovery process.
Is at authenticity very important. So what this did for
me was make me realize that there was whole aspects
of my life that I was living and behaving in
such a way because it was a construct to how
I thought people perceived me or what they wanted from
me to accept me. And I've realized that for most
of my life, I've lived in such a manner as
to please others and put themities at the cost of
myself and the things that were very difficult. So in
order for me to go into a social environment make
sure everybody else is comfortable cost me a lot personally.
So what this measurement did was helped me identify those
things and put a handle around those things and go okay.
So I'm obviously masking a series of behaviors to make
other people comfortable, but that's causing me to be internally stressed.
That's caught in cortisol dumps. That's why I can't sleep
at night. That's another reason why I have nightmares. A
nightmares aren't only about what happened to me in my past.
It's about the concerns about the social interaction I have tomorrow.
So what it did was just help me understand this
is why I'm behaving the way that I'm behaving, as again,
a reason, not an excuse.
Okay, As we know, healing and recovery is not linear.
So let's say you have a bad day. What does
a bad day look like after years of healing? And
how do you personally move through a bad day if
you should have one? Now, good question.
So had I had something happened last week? So let's see.
I mean, I'm packing it at the moment, so this
could be mess so it may not be a linear
answer for you. Okay, So I had something happen and
I sent an email. And normally when you send an
email and someone doesn't like that email or they respond,
it was they were on a list that I run
because we reach out to a lot of people. They
were incredibly rude and insulting and it hurnt on a
very deep level. So because and I would have just
at one stag said that's because I'm just oversensitive but
now I understand it's because I'm so desperate to be accepted, wanted,
and seen as normal for whatever that phrase means, that
it really kicked me into a spiral. So I've spent
this whole week looking at that emotion, going Okay, there's
some of this I can own, and I apologize to
the person and so I, you know, I didn't mean
to upset you by you getting on an email list,
but after that response, the person came back incredibly harsh again.
So now what I'm trying to do is sit with
these emotions and I have to see this person tomorrow
and eye suit with these emotions going, I'm just not
going to own these feelings. These feelings are coming outside
of me. It's really not because of anything I've done.
So I'm wrestling with understanding that. So I'm in the
process of just sitting with it, unpacking it, owning my part,
and once I've owned that part, then just developing the
skill to put the rest to one side, which is
a very very difficult thing, as you would know. Just
putting it to one side and saying that's not my responsibility.
That is tough because no matter what, you still have
that emotion attached to it. Yeah, it's not like you're
just putting it on a shelf like you would an
old toy and walking away and forgetting about it. It's
still going to be in your memory.
Yes, that comes into some of the neuroplasticity things I've
worked with. Is a the moment you say stop to
a feeling or a word in your mind that comes up.
Negative thinking comes up again and again, and often people
just dwell in that space. But the moment you say
stop to that voice, that idea, or that feeling, you're
actually starting to rewire a whole series of things. Again,
So neuroplasticity is a beautiful thing. You say stop enough times,
and at some point your brain will develop a new
way to work within that environment. So for me, when
I saw this thing come at me for the first
time in my life, I recognize it for what it is.
So I understand, based on neurosilence, that I'm actually in
the midst of this uncomfortable process of developing a whole
new way to think about it, program myself and respond
to things. So the feeling, I now see this as
a very good thing, this uncomfortable feeling. I've been able
to rebrand it as this is process and change, and
there's going to come a time very soon with these
sorts of things won't ever have that impact on me again.
Yeah, Now, your work is very personal. You've gone through
many things in your life. You have definitely had to heal.
What moment in your life made you realize you just
didn't want to heal, but you wanted to help others heal,
just like you have.
I do a lot of podcasts. This is probably my
most enjoyable one. You're a tremendous interview.
Thank you, Oh thanks, I really appreciate it.
There were two times. There were fifteen years apart, fifteen
sixty years, but the first was when I went looking
for support as a man who had been sexually abused
by the females in his world, and there was nothing,
and I tried to go to support groups rape support groups,
and I was told that I was a predator and
not a victim, that I was a pretender, and basically
this horrible vitriolic behavior manifested it. And I came away
from that thinking, Okay, that's just the way of the world. Now,
if I, at any point can get better with living
with this, then I want to do something for someone,
and I wanted to help me in particularly men, because
there's very few advocates for men that I deal with
a lot of news. So that was number one. But
then I spent fifteen years concentrating on me because I
didn't want to be that person that you know, you
get twelve months into recovery from something and all of
a sudden, you're starting a website telling everyone how to
do it, and two years after that you're back on
the bottle. We've all seen those horror stories. It will
be those horror stories too, probably, and then it's really
just recently two years ago, I stopped a turn sixty.
I stopped and I thought, I'm feeling pretty good. I'm
enjoying life. For the first time ever, my feet are
up under me. I was able to go back out
in the workforce because in oh Wait, I lost everything.
I lost my business, my family, and my children. I
lost it all when I got sick, and I felt
like my feet were under me for the first time.
And at that point that's when we started the Phoenix
Collective and we took all this teaching, these fifteen years
and three hundred thousand dollars we've spent on getting well
and we put it into a form where people could
hopefully stand on someone else's shoulders and move forward. So
that we've been developing that over the last two years.
So it really has been that first decision that and
I started writing poetry. If my poetry can help one person,
then that's fantastic. Up to now, when it's a very
focused effort to do something to be helpful and useful
and contribute.
Now you just brought up something that totally makes sense
and unfortunately it is part of the world. My question
is going to be how do you see us changing this?
A lot of men still feel silent when it comes
to abuse and trauma. It's the stigma that goes along
with it. Just like autism has stigma, mental health has stigma.
These things still have a stigma, which I prefer the
word perception. It's still attached no matter what. So how
do you see us changing that?
I think unfortunately with diavol we're at a time in
our nation and many parts of the world where the
ability to critically sink is no longer valued and things
have been placed in small pockets around a genders and
social engineering that are held as opposed to having conversations
and evolving as a species. We're in an unfortunate position
where it's okay to talk about women and girls being
sexually abused or raped towards traffic, but we are not
in the same place when it comes to men, because
we've made that issue of the sexual abuse and trafficking
a gender issue as opposed to a human issue. And
when it comes to things like autism and mental health,
particularly in America, we don't do well as having conversations
about mental health in places in Europe and even in Australia,
conversations about mental health in the workplace, in the community
of commonplace. In America, we seem to still be behind.
We're ahead in so many other things that we're behind.
We don't want to do that. You can't tell someone
that you're autistic and you have a trouble in crowds.
When it comes to getting into a congested airport, you've
got to get a wheelchair. You've got to get a
wheelchair because then I'll put you in a wheelchair, or
you've got to get a walking stick, or you've got
to get emotional support, can or something. I don't know
what it is. It doesn't see. And you know, there's
a lot of people that unfortunately live in this victim
mindset and they want they want all accommodations for things
that really don't need to be accommodated for. And then
there's the other extreme of people who really do need
some help that've got very little leverage to be able
to ask for that help personally or community. And so
we're caught in that place where people don't seem to
want to have on it. They want to talk a lot,
not have honest conversations.
You just mentioned something I think is very important, and
that's the victim mentality. Yeah, a lot of victims that
do survive, they struggle, from what I understand, with identity.
They often will say, am I broken? Or am I
becoming something? How do we help people reframe that inner narrative,
because this narrative has to be changed so they can
feel better about themselves moving forward with their life.
A couple of decisions I made in my journey that
my past would either define me or refine me. I
was always going to have to carry it. Was I
going to be known as John the victim or not?
Would there become a stage in my life where people
would look at me and not know that I was
a victim of anything because I just was. I had
no handles around this thing. So defining and refining the
second thing is ownership. I found at some point scars
of shame had to turn into medals of honor. I
had to be comfortable enough with what was done to
me as a child to say, hey, look at this,
this is just who I am. Isn't this great? I've
dealt with this. Afflicted or infected. Either things done to
you are going to inflict you or infect you going
to be one of those. So those series of thoughts
came to me when I was about four or five
years into this process, and I realized that I could
never allow myself. Very early on, I recognized that I
could never allow myself to be call myself a victim
of anything, because that was a death sentence. And I
think when people get into the they put it on
their bios, on their social media account, and every time
when they go there, those words are defining them. And
they even going to support groups. And now this is
a challenging one because I would encourage everyone to go
to support groups and to get help, but is that
support group nurturing you to a level of wholeness or
is it celebrating your brokenness? And only you can be
big enough to make that determination, because there's a lot
of support groups that you can go to and a
lot of therapists when what they're doing is they're just
actually enabling behavior and keeping you indebted to them on
an ongoing basis. And I don't think that's a very
positive thing to allow yourself to be caught into.
Okay, let's expand on that if we could. If someone
listening has this inner feeling that they have stuck, they
feel like they've tried everything they can do, what's one
small but powerful stout. You believe almost anyone, no matter
what stage they are, can do to help them get
themselves back on track for their lives.
I've got I've got four things that over these fifteen
years and three hundred thousand dollars, you boil it all down,
it comes down to four things for me. Number one,
be authentic. You know Mission vision values. We teach that,
but it's a reality. It's like, am I being true
to the person that I know?
Now?
Very important? So that's your starting point. The second thing,
and the hardest thing to do is imagine the future
you want to inhabit. What does tomorrow look like for you?
And people say that and say, well, that's a great
fridge magnet. But it's the hardest thing I ever do.
Every day I find it the challenge to imagine a
positive future when all I've ever know it is negativity.
The third thing is then on being who I am.
I'm looking at my future and saying this is who
I want to be, and then allowing that to set
goals for my life, being in a place and big
enough to go you know what, These are really the
things that I want to go after, not what people
are telling me from the outside in, but from me
from then. The third and the final one is to
Sue and tatoo I've got on my arm. Here is
that finish word that means white knuckled courage in the
face of overwhelming odds, Sue. The spirit of Sasue manifests itself.
It's very very hard to define that word, and for
me that means relentless resilience. And so what I find
is that if I'm being true to myself, I've got
an idea of who I want to be. I'm a writer,
and I allow that to set my day in my calendar.
I spend every time every day writing, every day, editing,
every day talking to people, and then I just determine
that I will relentlessly and resiliently pursue those things that
nothing will get in.
One way, I believe that over the years you've finally
got to the point of where you created a foundation.
Is that true?
Yeah, yeah, we did. We founded to give them a
voice foundation.
Can you give us a little information on it?
So give them the voice was simply because there was
a group of people at the time when I started
it that had no voice, and it was men and
boys who had been abused in traffic. And then it
came down to then it moved into people in general
because we were working with a lot of military people,
tip of the spear pipe Pitter's police law enforcement, and
these people were committing suicide at a horrible rate, and
the majority of those that do that are men. So
again we overlap. And then his last phase of things
has been again giving a voice to people with a
neurodiverse background and an everyday experience. So the aim of
to give them a voice is to be able to
provide tools and opportunity for people to be able to
grow and develop coaching resources in a very accessible manner.
And that's where we came up with the Phoenix Collective.
So it all sits together under this one hub of
working with people who feel they don't have a voice
in order to give them a voice and give them
the tools so they can live a productive life.
What's the best way for people to connect with you,
whether they want to follow your work, reach out, or
support what you're doing.
If they go to doctor Johnaking dot com, I'll find
a bunch of links on the front page there. You know,
with our material, I don't like subscriptions. Everything is subscription now,
you know, nine dollars, so this lip toys me out there.
So we made it ninety nine dollars for life. But
if they've heard your podcast and they go on it
and they join the Phoenix collevit it's like twenty seven
bucks or something. It's ridiculous, but it's for life. So
you've got fifteen years and three hundred thousand dollars worth
of mental health coaching and support. Twenty seven bucks. It's
the cost of a meal, man. So we're trying to
make it as obtainable for people as we can. So
they yeah, So I reckon, they go there. I've got
over one hundred videos on YouTube, all that materials in there.
We hold free workshops eight times a year for people
to come.
To Looking ahead, What does the next chapter of your
work look like? What kind of legacy do you hope
that it leaves for those that you've worked with and
future survivors.
When I had recall, I went from John one point
over John two point zero. John one point I was
very gold driven, determined out there guy John two point
I wanted to write poetry and smoke cigars, and the
two never really got on. I couldn't. We had no
interest in what John point one O was. But now
I'm up to a stage where John three point oho
has turned up and John three point I was going
to spend the next thirty years of his life being
a writer. So for me, I feel like I'm gathering
all this stuff that John two point zero John one
point I went through the John two point I thought, bloody,
how I need to solve this And now John three
point zero gets the benefit from it. So I'm trying
to bookend this material. That's why I came up with
the Phoenix Collective. I want to give all this middle
stuff away to help other people because I want to
go on and write. I want to write about military
sexual trauma. I want to write about human trafficking. I
want to write, you know, obtainable heroes doing imagineering things
and conquering the universe, because just because it's fun.
Yeah, and that's what you have to do. Enjoy your
life a little bit. Well, this has been great, great information,
great conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to
join me today.
Well, thank you, Tony. My agent has got two books
shopping at the moment with publishers. When I get at
I'm going to hit up a mite and come back
for a virtual book tour. Yeah, come back to Love
to Latch with books on your podcast.
Yeah, that would be fun. I think it would be
great to hear what you're writing and what you're doing
and just reconnect again.
So yeah, for sure, I appreciate you man. You do
a great job. You've got a great SHD. To love it.
You've got a great SHD. I love your ship. I
like talking to play with good shids. Thank you mate,
bye boy.
Yeah, I've really enjoyed it. Thanks again, thanks for taking
time out of your busy schedule to listen to our
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