From Trauma to Triumph: How a Broken Childhood Wired Me for High Performance

We all have moments from our childhood that leave an invisible scar—what Eastern philosophy calls a Samskara. These are the deep emotional impressions that shape how we view the world, how we view ourselves, and how we react to stress.

For me, those definitive impressions happened right in our neighborhood and our kitchen when I was in the 3rd or 4th grade.

The Van in the Garage

When I was in the third grade, a fifth grader on our street convinced me and a second grader to go into the van parked in his parents' garage. Once we were inside, he pulled out a knife. He threatened to kill us if one of us didn’t perform a sexual act on him.

The fear and anguish of that moment carved out a Samskara so profound that my brain completely buried it. I literally cut that memory out of my mind for over twenty years.

It wasn’t until I was 28 years old that it finally uncovered itself. I woke up in the middle of the night bawling—tears and anguish unlike anything I had ever experienced. The dam had broken. For a long time, I was consumed by intense survivor's guilt. I was a year older than the other kid in that van. I felt like I had failed us both because I didn't have the courage to stand up to a kid holding a knife.

When I finally broke my silence and reported it to my mom that very night, the community’s response was completely broken. I came to find out later that he had been doing it and terrorizing our street for almost a year to multiple kids, and he was eventually taken away.

But back in the 1990s in Magna, Utah, the aftermath was handled with silence. I received no therapy. I remember telling my LDS bishop about it, and the response was essentially a directive to never talk about it again. Therapy back then was heavily stigmatized by the community; if you went to therapy, it meant something was "wrong" with you.

I’m not sharing this to place blame on my parents. Times were just different then. But the environment I was forced to navigate after that trauma only added fuel to the fire.

The Prison of "Perfection"

Right around the time of that incident, I was baptized into the LDS Church. I understand other people have had great experiences with the church, but the way it was weaponized in my household was destructive. I was raised with the suffocating rule that now that I was baptized, I needed to be "perfect" or I wouldn't go to heaven.

Imagine trying to process that standard while living in an authoritarian household run by a father who took Mormonism to its absolute extremes. The control was total, especially on the Sabbath.

I vividly remember having to get driven home early on Sunday mornings from a sleepover at my grandma’s house just to go to a three-hour church block. My cousins would all be over, and my grandma would have an entire, amazing day planned for them to go swimming, get lunch somewhere, and go see a movie. For me, all of it was strictly forbidden. I wasn't allowed to join them because I was taught that Satan controls the water on Sundays and he would drown you, and that spending money or seeking entertainment on the Sabbath was a sin. I was pulled away from the one place that felt safe and happy, forced to watch my family enjoy their childhood while I was dragged back to the pressure cooker.

I was a very emotional kid, but if I showed a single shred of emotion around my father, I was mocked and called a "little pussy" or a "little bitch." He bullied me for as long as I can remember.

Because of the constant state of fear I lived in, I had developed a binge eating disorder as a coping mechanism. Food was the only thing I could control, the only thing that felt safe—until it became another weapon used against me.

During this same 3rd or 4th-grade timeframe, we went on a family camping trip to Yellowstone in our blue Suburban. On the drive, we were listening to the audiobook of the very first Harry Potter book and snacking on a pack of Oreos. Trapped in my own head and dealing with the internal fallout of the trauma I was living through, my binge eating took over, and I ended up eating the entire package of Oreos by myself.

A little while later, my dad called for the cookies to be passed to the front.

I knew I was absolutely fucked.

When he discovered there were none left, his reaction wasn't to ask why I was hurting or why I had eaten them all. Instead, he weaponized the book we were listening to. In that first story, Harry’s cousin Dudley is portrayed as fat, greedy, and eventually gets cursed with a literal pig's tail. For the entire two-week camping trip, my dad called me "Dudley" and "piggy." There was no escape.

When we got back home, the kitchen table remained a minefield.

In one instance, I was eating a bowl of cereal. My dad, reading the newspaper, looked up and noticed I wasn’t holding my spoon the "right" way. I was gripping it with all my fingers wrapped around the handle, starting by my thumb with the end coming out by my outside pinky knuckle. He snapped. He told me I wasn't an animal and needed to hold it "civilized"—index finger and thumb holding it. He forced me to do it "his" way. I grew frustrated because I just wanted to eat, and the moment he looked away, I went back to my old ways. That’s when the mocking started. He told me I was eating like a pig, that I should just eat out of a trough, and called me a "little fat piggy."

Another time, I had just cut some cheese slices to eat. My dad was sitting in the kitchen, told me to come over, and grabbed one of the slices. He told me to lift my shirt. I was chubby at the time, weighing around 155 pounds. He slapped the cold cheese directly onto my bare belly, jiggled it, and told me that every time I ate a slice, that was exactly what I was adding to my stomach.

To experience that kind of systematic torment at 8 or 9 years old from your own father alters your chemistry. I spent countless nights crying myself to sleep, frustrated and desperate because everyone around me was thin and fit, and I was fat and chubby. Being the biggest kid almost everywhere put a massive target on my back. The first insult people would throw at me would always be about my weight.

Those moments were a catalyst. The hurt was so profound that it drove me to a dark place where I wanted to kill myself at just 8 or 9 years old. But it also birthed a fierce, lifelong vow: I never wanted to feel that way again. It is exactly what has driven me to learn everything I know today about nutrition and my relationship with food.

The Biology of Hyper-Vigilance

That early trauma led to a hyper-fixation on calories and food in general. I would drastically try to cut my calories by skipping a meal or two, but by the time evening came along, I had made myself super hungry and I would binge back all the food I had missed.

Compounding the issue was the environment I lived in. Walking on eggshells around my father kept my body in a high-alert, sympathetic nervous system response almost all the time. I was dealing with chronically high cortisol from a lifetime of my dad's mental illness issues coming out on me in the form of physical, emotional, and psychological abuse. Biologically, that stress response is why I had really bad belly fat and looked stocky everywhere else, despite trying to starve myself.

The turning point for me as an adult came when I was recommended a book called The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk.

That book affected me more than anything I have ever read because of what it uncovered about my past. It validated the exact biological prison I was trapped in. In his research, Dr. van der Kolk details how child abuse and molestation are drastically more prevalent than society leads us to believe—studies show that roughly 1 in 5 children experience some form of sexual abuse before adulthood.

What the science reveals is a profound, undeniable link between childhood sexual trauma, eating disorders, and weight gain:

• The Nervous System Hijack: When a child experiences severe terror, the brain shifts the nervous system into a permanent fight-or-flight state. Chronically high cortisol signals the body that it is under constant threat of survival, causing the metabolism to slow down and preferentially store stubborn belly fat as an energy reserve.

• Food as a Shield and Armor: For a child feeling completely powerless, food becomes the one variable they can control. Binge eating develops because highly palatable food triggers a temporary dopamine release, numbing the psychological anguish. Furthermore, the subconscious mind often uses weight gain as a protective shield—unconsciously building a larger, heavier body to look strong, intimidating, or invisible to potential predators.

When you look at it through that clinical lens, the shame completely evaporates. I wasn't weak-willed, and I wasn't a "piggy." My 8-year-old body was running a highly sophisticated survival program to keep me alive.

Reexamining my past through this scientific perspective taught me the real truth about nutrition and trauma:

• Food is fuel, not a coping mechanism, an armor, or a punishment.

• Extreme starvation or crash diets are bad and completely counterproductive to a body already flooded with stress hormones.

• True transformation requires moving out of survival mode and into sustainable, repeatable habits.

The "Straight A" Mental Software and the Math of Consistency

My parents held my siblings and me to an unforgiving standard: it was Straight A’s or bust. That expectation hardwired my brain’s software to want an A, not an A-. We are talking 94%+ or it was a failure.

When you apply that rigid, high-standard mentality to your personal goals, you can achieve incredible things. It’s what drove me to play national-level basketball as a teenager. Team sports are incredible—they teach you camaraderie, altruism, and raise your emotional intelligence in ways nothing else can. That grit got me a walk-on scholarship to play junior college basketball and compete at a high level.

Eventually, though, my personal passion waned for the game. Because of the chaotic powerlessness of my childhood, I craved an environment of absolute control—one where input strictly equals output, free from human politics and outside variables. No one in my family had ever played college level, let alone high school, so we had no idea what needed to be done statistically to get to where I got. I wanted a realm where my success sat entirely on my own shoulders.

And I found that exact control in the weight room.

I’ve studied Stoic philosophy over the years, and it anchors back to what Aristotle said: We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

If you have a sizable gap from where you are to your top goal, it’s going to take days upon days, weeks upon weeks, and eventually years. If you party on the weekends or take a “break,” look at the mathematical impact on your long-term goals through the micro-breakdowns:

• 5 out of 7 days = 71% (A C- grade)

• 6 out of 7 days = 85% (A B grade)

• Elite Execution = 94%+ (An A grade)

To get the "A" in your life and body, you have to execute on the daily habits over and over again.

Challenging the Mountain

The ultimate irony of my life is that I learned my passion for weights from my father, starting from when I was as young as I can remember. I even have a photo of myself between 4 and 5 years old lifting them.

4 Years Old

From ages 3 to 8, we lived mostly in my grandma's unfinished basement. My dad had a weight setup down there with metal weights and dumbbells up to 100 pounds. I remember watching him lift. My dad was 6’3” and always around 220–235 pounds with a lean, muscular build. He and his older brother loved bodybuilding and even competed locally. He could lift the biggest dumbbells—the ones I would see action icons like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Lou Ferrigno lifting.

I had a big mountain to climb, made worse by a horrible body image exasperated by a father who was always lean, fit, and muscular.

By the 6th grade, I was fed up with the abuse. I challenged my dad. I started training in that weight room with a singular, burning focus: I wanted to train to be able to fight him and win the next time he had a psychotic episode.

Final Thoughts: Rewriting the Code

My father gave me a warped body image, but he also inadvertently gave me the blueprint for physical strength. The trauma of my childhood forced me to develop an elite, unbreakable mindset.

I tell this raw story to show the absolute importance for a man to look at his life under a microscope. Examining our past trauma isn't about dwelling on the pain; it allows us to see exactly how and why our emotional "software" and cues were coded in the first place.

By recognizing when our current moment is being hijacked by past experiences, we create space. Each time that negative feedback loop manifests itself—or as Eckhart Tolle says, when the "pain body" comes to feed—we can put more and more distance between the trigger and our reaction.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus once noted that if you can go thirty days without losing your temper, you have broken the habit and weakened the vice. That is what self-mastery is. It is the conscious breaking of the automatic feedback loops installed by our past.

We cannot change the software that was violently installed in us during our childhood. But as adults, we have the power to debug the code. You take the high-alert energy that once kept you alive in an abusive household, and you redirect it toward building a body, a mind, and a life of absolute excellence.

Your past is fuel. How you burn it is entirely up to you.

P.S. If you want the full story on that sixth-grade incident I mentioned above—the moment I finally drew a line in the sand and challenged my dad—you can read that specific piece of the puzzle right here: [The Day I Faced the Dragon: Breaking the Samskara of Fear]