It was those conversations at the Rape Crisis Centre that gave me a clearer understanding of the impact of trauma, and how it’s possible to not be treated as a powerless victim. I don’t want to be pitied. I’m very uncomfortable with that. I want options and opportunity, and I want to be listened to and respected. I don’t want anyone to do all that for me because then I’ll never learn how to do it for myself. Songwriting is very cathartic and provides a method for doing that. In those days, I couldn’t find the words in conversation to express how I felt, but strangely I could sing them.

I was fortunate to be assigned a seat next to Bill George, author of Discover Your True North and a professor at the Harvard Business School. During our dinner conversation, he told me something surprising about his experiences working closely with many Fortune 500 CEOs and high-level executives. He noticed that leaders needed to get in touch with their own deep sense of pain, vulnerability, and humility, and occasionally a deep sense of shame, in order to shift from being good leaders to becoming great leaders. At times, this was simply acknowledging the pain of being human, or the pain of feeling like they had let others down, which they had covered up, as many of us do. Other times it was the pain from difficult, imperfect childhoods, failed relationships, or traumatic events. Feeling this pain helped these executives glimpse how much more was possible by freeing up energy and

feelings that were being held close, which allowed them to be more authentic and caring leaders.

For many, that place where we’ve come to think we belong has become stultifying; it’s where we are small, unseen, unsure, and unwilling to claim our strengths, our capacities, our courage, our leadership. We are frozen by the belief that it’s just too dangerous to reach into the black bag and grab hold of the disowned, dismembered parts of ourselves.

All Loyal Soldiers then have one basic task: to keep us safe from the wars that raged in our childhood. No matter how awful these strategies have come to make us feel as adults, they were brilliant in their own ways.

While heartbreak is the early step on the path to equanimity, fear is the stumbling block leading to the sin of inaction. Fearing the dark rides of the Coney Island of the mind, we choose not to act. Fearing Paris, we stay close to home. Fearing broken skis, failed businesses, and the scars that come from skinned knees, we stay small—listening more to our Loyal Soldier’s fear-filled and protective whispered warnings than to the quickening thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump of a heart that knows how it’s meant to be.

It’s one of the great ironies of life—and the subject of millions of songs, films, and great works of literature—that the people who make us feel the most alive and who know us best are also the people able to hurt us most. This doesn’t mean that the people who hurt us are malicious, or that we are acting maliciously when we hurt others. Sometimes there is no fault. As we travel on our own unique paths, we can hurt each other without intending

to.

This is the conundrum we find ourselves in as human beings, and how we deal with challenges often defines the course of our lives. Do we face the music? Or do we bury our heads in the sand?