(gentle music) - [Benjamin] For decades, the pace and pressure of American life has accelerated relentlessly, leaving one in three Americans suffering from depression, and one in four from anxiety.

Taken together, that's nearly 130 million Americans.

Think of your friends and neighbors, your relatives, and pals at work.

Right now, nearly half of them are struggling with their mental health.

They're not alone, you're not alone.

Still, I felt alone.

(gentle music) My name is Benjamin Wagner and before the pandemic, I held big jobs at cool companies.

I played rock shows and made movies.

I had a brilliant wife, two beautiful daughters, and a big house on a leafy suburban street.

But after 25 years living and working in one of the world's largest and loudest cities, companies under duress, in roles fraught with pressure, I was anxious, depressed, and struggling.

I left my job, got myself into therapy, and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

I began to see the impact of trauma and chronic stress from our streets and schools, to our capitals, grocery stores, highways and homes, Americans everywhere are anxious, angry, scared, and confused.

What happened to me, what was happening all around me, and what can we do about it?

(gentle music) I decided as my hero, actual neighbor, and subject of my 2012 PBS documentary, Fred Rogers, always encouraged me, to look for the helpers, the friends and neighbors who are healing the deeply anxious and uncertain communities around us.

I discovered that the impact of stress is well beyond what I thought I knew.

Recovery and resiliency are not only possible, but critical.

Our collective wellness requires each and every one of us, all of our friends and neighbors.

- [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided by Someone To Tell It To, working to create better relationships through the transformative power of listening.

(upbeat music) - [Benjamin] Before being elected state representative, my friend Alonna Berry, served as Delaware's Director of Community and Family Services, and as the first state's first ever trauma informed care coordinator.

- Everybody has trauma.

It could be acute like a car accident or a death in the family, or it could be chronic.

So it happens over time, repeatedly.

- [Benjamin] Winden Rowe is the director of the Center for Change and a member of the governor's statewide trauma-informed think tank in neighboring Pennsylvania, where she works with individuals, couples, families and organizations on recovering from trauma.

- Back in the 1980s, we talked about trauma as this thing that happened that catastrophically changed the course of someone's life and their sense of safety as a result.

- When COVID hit, people really began to process in their own ways what was happening to them, how isolation impacts people, how race impacts people.

- [Benjamin] One of my Wilmington neighbors is Sarah McBride.

- If we aren't able to connect with one another, we lose that sense of home in our communities.

That lack of human connection that manifests itself as real trauma, right?

Everything from the rising incidences on airplanes of people acting out, to the US Capitol, those are manifestations of unaddressed trauma.

- [Benjamin] Stress is a healthy part of life.

It provides signals and motivation to adjust and respond to our environments.

But chronic stress and trauma, overwhelming, emotionally disturbing or life-threatening experiences can have lasting impacts on mental, physical, social, and emotional wellness.

The prefrontal cortex manages executive functions like planning, setting goals, and understanding consequences.

In a highly stressful situation, part of our limbic system called the amygdala sets off an alarm bell to let us know we are in danger and need to do something about it.

The prefrontal cortex shuts down, diminishing executive function like language processing and problem solving.

The brain signals the body to flood with cortisol and adrenaline.

Our energy level spikes.

Our breath quickens, our heart beats faster and muscles tense, preparing us to fight, flee or freeze.

If a person is exposed to highly stressful or traumatic events like an assault, or they have continued exposure to stressful events like abuse or neglect, that alarm system might become overactive, switched on as if there was a threat at all times.

Licensed professional school counselor, Lauren Scott, friend since our middle school student council days, has been teaching kids social emotional regulation for more than three decades.

- You don't walk out your door anymore and have to be worried that you're going to be eaten by a saber-tooth tiger.

That's not a threat anymore, but yet our brain still reacts to that.

Front of your brain the brainstem.

- Thumb, which is what we're going to use to identify what I would call like the middle brain.

- The limbic part of our brain, and then when we fold that over, this is the prefrontal cortex.

- In a healthy interaction, we assess the level of threat, we decide how unsafe we are, whether or not we can respond to it appropriately to bring ourselves back to a sense of safety, make decisions about what to do about that, act on those decisions, and then we hit resolve.

- It's perceived endangerment.

So the person next to me may not be perceiving it in the same way that I am, and that's dependent upon my own personal experiences.

- If we are at a heightened state, cortisol levels are up, our adrenals are fatigued because we are in constant stress, then it's going to be harder and harder for us to close our lid and to use our thinking brain and to be able to synthesize and organize all of that information.

- I might not be breathing as deeply.

I might not be exhaling for as long as I could or should.

So what happens with that is we now have a system where we're activated, we're hypervigilant.

- And that kind of repeated action over time can actually impact your heart health and impact all of these other pieces that have long-term health effects on an individual.

- [Benjamin] Adverse childhood experiences or ACEs were developed in the 1990s.

The study correlated household dysfunction and adult disease.

Children who experienced physical or emotional abuse and neglect, witness violence at home, have a parent with substance or mental health problems, live in a household with instability due to death, divorce, separation, or incarceration, or live in a community wracked by violence, poverty or racism are exponentially more likely to develop and sustain chronic health, mental illness and substance use problems in adolescents and adulthood.

ACEs increase the risk of addiction, injury, and a wide range of chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and suicide.

- Whether it was my parents arguing or bullying at school, often as a child, it's harder to process what's happening around you because their brain is still growing.

It's still developing.

- We don't have parents that are safe in the world.

They can't regulate.

They're living in a constant state of stress.

So if you're in an unsafe environment, you are going to be kind of always waiting for something to happen, it's not safe to be in my body.

It's not safe to be settled, so I'm going to be on guard.

- 80% of kids that I'm talking with are showing some sort of anxiety.

- Anxiety is the body's ongoing, uninterrupted way that it disregulates as a way to cope, to keep the body on guard for a lack of safety.

Our muscles are tense or we clench our fists or might curl our toes.

The heart races, it looks like an inability to be calm and in the body.

- These are little people that are dealing with big, big stuff.

- Depression's a little bit different.

Motivation is really hard.

There's a lot of melancholy, low mood, low affect, isolation, disconnect.

- The more that we try to keep things quiet and we say that your experience and your feelings are shameful and that you should not be speaking them out loud, that creates all kinds of residual issues.

- Our children are basically these little canaries in the coal mine, right?

And they're singing to us, they're chirping right now saying it's not okay, it's not okay, it's not okay.

- [Benjamin] The impact of trauma, say a loss of a parent or emotionally neglectful parent can be passed down between generations by their DNA and behavior, and can persist for multiple generations.

As a result, children of parents with higher ACE scores are a higher risk for their own adverse childhood experiences.

(gentle music) Which is why I had to understand my own story to better understand all of our stories.

And so I drove West to learn more about where I came from and revisit and maybe resolve some of my most persistent traumatic memories.

Those memories began well before I did in Waterloo, Iowa, where my parents were born just after the end of World War II.

My father's father was an infantry man on D-Day who never, ever spoke of the war.

My mother's father was the prosperous proprietor of a women's clothing shop downtown.

My grandparents, members of the Greatest generation, experienced childhoods that included the loss of parents, alcoholism, war, economic uncertainty, and chronic disease, none of which was ever discussed.

(gentle music) - I really was the baby, mom was much, much less effusive than my father.

I think she was a little bit depressed, so mother would be sitting there having a cigarette, and she didn't want much to do with me.

She certainly did seem preoccupied.

We were a specialty store, we had furs.

We had high-end stuff for Waterloo, Iowa.

There was a lot of money in Iowa because those farms were very lucrative in the '50s.

- Growing up, money was tight because my dad worked at John Deere's and it was a damn good job.

But still, you're supporting a family of eight.

My dad talked about his father being verbally abusive when he was drinking, and maybe that's why my dad did things he did, and he had a short fuse.

He could lose his temper over stuff, so it was not a very good feeling.

- I don't remember having long, deep discussions, that just didn't happen.

It was a very busy household.

There were always a lot of people around.

- My dad would raise his voice.

Boys were not supposed to express feelings.

Sometimes I would cry, and I wasn't supposed to do that.

Suck it up and be tough.

- Dad worked too much and he smoked.

- [Benjamin] A few weeks after her 19th birthday, my mother's father died suddenly, leaving her, like 25% of children in America, fatherless.

- I went back to school, I think I was in mourning.

It wasn't a time for me to be sitting there musing over how sad I was, even though I was.

I had to get on it.

Mother did for a year or so close her tent, it wasn't that she wasn't there, but she wasn't there.

It was a big deal, it was a huge loss.

So I just dove into my work, that's how I coped.

I had seen David freshman year in college and a little bit of sophomore year, and then at the end of junior year, that's when I started seeing him again.

- Was never very stable from day one, from the time she gave me the engagement ring back our junior year in college, to not wanting to get married.

No, no, in retrospect, it was not.

- [Benjamin] In the spring of 1968, my mother discovered that she was pregnant.

My parents decided to get married.

- We got married in July of 1968.

In August of 1968, I graduate.

Vietnam is at its height, so I decided to enlist, but I failed the draft physical.

So now I am back in Waterloo, unemployed with a wife.

Chris was born in November.

I'm back at the wastewater treatment plant.

Your mother didn't like me working a menial job.

Her husband needed to be more, a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer.

- We had some money, but not enough to take care of us.

It was very stressful, and that's when the arguments became very intense.

The first time it happened to me, I was pregnant with you.

- She was screaming at me and I slapped her.

- I still think you felt that in your body like I felt it in mine.

Those memories are so visceral, it's not just your amygdala.

Your whole neurological system just goes, that's why this is so hard for me because it's like reliving the whole thing.

I was starting not to feel terribly safe.

- You were born Saturday morning, September the fourth, two o'clock on Sunday, September 5th, I took off for Maryland.

Was there stress, you damn right there was stress.

- I was living in a complex with people I didn't know without a car with a three, four walkup, with a baby and a two-year-old and the washer and dryer in the basement, and the next year we moved to Waldorf, and of course then again, we needed to move and we moved to Chicago.

(gentle music) - She wasn't real happy because it wasn't a two story, 4,000 square foot house.

It was what we could afford.

- You were afraid of a lot of things.

- You were a lot of fun and eager to learn, and you were happy and outgoing.

- [Benjamin] I remember a childhood spent playing wiffle ball and flashlight tag, building go-karts and forts and chasing fireflies, and I remember an uneasy peace, unpredictably shattered by raised voices and slammed doors.

- Our marriage was at loggerheads.

That's when I got the job of a lifetime.

I was the bossy pants, I had a big office in Chicago.

- She would be gone for four or five days during the week.

One thing led to another and she was meeting different people in her travels and overheard a conversation about how she didn't love me anymore, and she loved this guy and wanted to be with him.

- If you're in a marriage that is completely frightening and you're on the road, which I was doing my business, and somebody says, you're really a lovely person, you know, you do kind of go, oh, am I?

- And that led to some very, probably loud arguments over the course of the next six to nine months, possibly even a year, until she went to Washington DC for the summer.

- My job had moved from Chicago to DC and I went there for a couple months to get them settled.

- [Benjamin] The weekend before my 10th birthday, my dad put me on a plane, by myself.

- It was going to be a fun thing for you to be able to do.

Go see your mom in Washington, DC and it was tough to let you go, but you were I thought, capable of handling it.

Watched you go and hoped that everything would turn out okay.

- [Benjamin] Everything did not turn out okay.

After a long weekend with my mom, I climbed aboard the return flight and began sobbing.

I wanted to get off, to run back, and when I finally mustered the courage to unbuckle my seatbelt and race towards the jetway, the doors closed.

My heart raced and ached as it did on the dozens of unaccompanied flights I took between my parents in those early years and on every flight ever since.

- You kind of would watch me, and of course I'd say I'm fine.

Well, you know, you weren't stupid.

And that's when we started the joint custody or whatever we called it.

It was awful, it was just awful.

- [Benjamin] As the arguments and outbursts grew louder, rougher, and more frequent, I retreated into my parents' Magnavox stereo and began thumbing through the pages of Rolling Stone Magazine, reading about rock stars whose childhoods seemed a little like mine.

In those pages I felt seen, and in those headphones I felt safe.

Still, nothing could drown out the sound of my parents' constant conflict.

- David stopped me by the front door where the coat closet was, and I'm not going to go there.

- [Benjamin] What I remember is a scene that has replayed over and over in my mind for more than 40 years.

My parents were screaming and pounding like giants.

The house shook on its foundation.

I cowered in the corner and fled to the basement where I hid under a pile of winter coats till my brother Christopher found me there, wrapped his arms around me and whispered, it's okay.

- [Speaker] Yes, I would raise my voice.

- He shoved me in the closet with his hands on my throat.

- I would say I had a temper.

- When he finally stopped and I could get out of the closet, I said, this has got to stop, that was the end for me.

(gentle music) - [Benjamin] By Christmas, my parents were deep into divorce proceedings that they narrated across now separate dinner tables.

- It's Christmas Eve in the midst of all of this, and you kids were going to spend half the holiday with his family.

- I had drove you guys to Benton, Iowa.

Your Uncle Jack drove from Cedar Rapids.

We shook hands and you got in his car and he took you back to Cedar Rapids.

I went back to Waterloo with tears in my eyes the whole way.

(gentle music) - Jack was just trying to be the good guy and be sure there was no conflict, so your kids wouldn't have a horrible memory of Christmas and it didn't work, I guess.

- [Benjamin] Christmas was never the same.

For years, shuttling back and forth between my parents, I would flash back to that 1977 Oldsmobile and an empty feeling of hopelessness and isolation.

- I was sure that I had up your lives, it was totally my fault and it was very hard for a long time.

- [Benjamin] In those early months after the divorce, I began writing screenplays that Chris and I would shoot on my dad's eight millimeter film camera.

I kept a journal and began to think of myself as a writer, a discipline that eventually led me here to my friend, children's author, Michael Tyler.

- Whenever I think about my mother and father as a couple I see my mother laying on the floor on her back, head in a closet, legs extending from the closet, and my father, on top of her choking her.

My parents divorced when I was 12.

I felt like my household for a while was a landmine.

When you don't know what word is going to trigger an explosion, you don't know what word is going to set something off and the next thing you know, you've got a complete breakdown in your household, that tension was something that actually became internalized.

Many of the lessons that became the foundation of how I live, how I think, came from one of the most brilliantly funny people I've ever met in my entire life, Jimmy Rivers.

Jimmy Rivers, my mother's first cousin, and he was a police officer.

He was a huge personality.

He gave me the philosophies of life by which I live.

When I was 15, he came to me and said, I want you to start taking a crazy 15.

And he said, at the end of the day, right before you put your head on a pillow and go to bed, I want you to get a notebook, piece of paper or something, and I want you to write for 15 minutes, even though you don't remember what you're processing, your brain stores it all.

And if you don't make sense of what your brain is storing outside of the information that you're actually focused on to store, it can drive you crazy.

And if you're going crazy, you will never have the sanity to find your destiny, okay?

So you got to write that crazy out of your head.

You got to literally write it out of your head in order to gain the clarity and the sanity to see the path to your own destiny.

So the things that we are impacted by, the traumas, our brain is processing that, and then if we don't have a way to deal with it, stores it somewhere.

So since it's storing it, that means it's never gone.

It's still within us.

And if it's still within us, we're still involving that in our judgements, in our interactions and our decisions whether we realize it or not, the body doesn't forget.

And until you learn to unload those burdens, you will always feel the weight of them.

(gentle music) - [Benjamin] The body, as leading trauma researcher, Bessel van der Kolk, says, keeps the score.

Hiding away overwhelming experiences like landmines, developing a sense of our interior lives through language, journaling, songwriting, can provide a vital pathway towards understanding, healing, and disarming those mines.

Not that I knew that then.

When the divorce was final, my mom loaded our things into the station wagon and pointed it east towards Philadelphia.

My father remained behind.

- I tried to call you every day or every other day, and then you would come out for a couple of days of around the holidays.

The arrival was good, but the departure was not good.

- [Benjamin] My mother was often at work.

My father lived 1,000 miles away.

Like many in what's come to be called the latchkey generation, Chris and I were often alone and left to make all sorts of poor choices.

I got drunk for the first time, as an example, when I was just 13 years old.

I gained some confidence in student council and on the high school paper and in musicals.

Still, I was often bullied.

- And I'm going to interview just for like two minutes and I'll interview you for like athletics.

We'll be like journalists, it'll be great.

- Oh my God.

- Is they recording it, all right.

- [Benjamin] Matthew Tousignant was one of my best friends in high school.

Today he's a somatic psychologist who combines movement with psychology to help patients connect mind and body.

Matt and I have spent many mornings across the last few decades walking the southeastern Pennsylvania woods.

It was on one of these walks just a few years ago that Matt first introduced me to how trauma shows up in the body.

- The body has an organismic wisdom to it.

So that wisdom knows, oh, this can't be handled now.

So it tucks it away, it actually protects it.

- Right.

- We want to actually figure out how to connect more.

Sounds great, right, but then you start feeling, and then it's not so great.

(person laughing) - It hurts.

- Then you're on the way to the fridge for a beer.

- Yeah.

- Right, or the fifth or whatever, you know, or you're buying that thing you don't really need.

- [Benjamin] Matt also happened to be present on the night of my single, most acute trauma.

- It all happened so quickly.

- Totally.

- That was the thing that surprised me.

It's almost like it was like a like a hit.

- It was like a hit, I remember the sound and I was like, what the just happened?

- Yeah.

- [Benjamin] What happened was we were out celebrating the last day of our junior year.

We'd stopped at a local convenience store to satiate our munchies.

I was sitting in the backseat of Matt's car when a pair of very large hands reached through the window, unlocked the door, and ripped me out by my collar.

Blur, crash.

Then, in the blackness, I heard the voice of a classmate with a mutual love interest.

He fled before I gained consciousness.

The moment I came to, I was like, my jaw's broken, 'cause it was like this.

- Yeah.

- And I was like, like if you drank, you know, pint of blood and spit it out.

My jaw was fractured in two spots and dislocated from both joints.

My gums were torn where a tooth had been.

The ER doctor relocated without anesthesia and the blood began to gush again.

I woke from hours of surgery with my mouth wired shut and a pair of scissors around my neck.

If you feel like you're going to throw up, a nurse said, cut the wires so you don't choke.

So I had like a month to get my together and walk back into my high school senior year like I'm healed.

- Yeah.

- Like so it's a little wonder that I started getting high every day because it hurt so bad.

- So that was part of your escape.

- 100%.

- And understandably, 'cause you didn't really get the help and support you needed.

- Well, I had to basically button up, like literally and just walk back into the world as if everything was fine.

- Right, 'cause you have to do something, I would say somatically, like physically to sort of like button up, tighten up, you know?

And that reduces feeling, which is how you get through certain things, right?

- Right.

- But then if you're like this your whole life, you're not able to step into life.

- [Mom] I've always kind of thought in my heart that it broke part of your spirit.

- [Dad] You seemed scared and severely traumatized.

- [Mom] You started withdrawing.

I figured probably you were doing pot.

I didn't know what else you were doing.

- [Benjamin] I've dealt with dozens of procedures since, skin grafts, implants, bridges, my jaw hurts every day.

(gentle music) I spent much of my time in college stoned and secretly afraid of being assaulted.

I started a band and began writing, recording and performing songs.

I spent my weekends in front of the crowd, but never in it.

I drank and drugged a lot.

Still, I graduated with a solid GPA and dual degrees in journalism and creative writing, but I had no idea what to do next.

I was mortified.

So Chris and I moved to New York City.

When the boxes were unpacked, we stood on the corner of 56th Street and ninth Avenue, all rushing traffic, sirens and horns, people whizzing past, and I said, "I'm not sure I can do this."

We walked back to our apartment and got high.

I stayed high for the next five years.

My goal was to be on the cover of Rolling Stone, or at least write for the magazine.

I got my first assignment, a Weezer show in Central Park two months later.

The next year, I landed a gig at MTV News where I stayed for nearly two decades, slowly climbing the ranks from web producer to senior vice president, immersed in the unpredictable 24/7 news and corporate business cycles, the pressure building steadily.

Every few weeks I played a rock show.

Every few years I dropped a new album.

To the fuel of this record.

Typically populated with songs rife with sadness, longing, and broken things, with just a wisp of optimism.

(upbeat music) As I approached 30, I quit smoking pot, prompting years of nightmares about plane crashes.

In 2001, I channeled those nightmares into the album "Crash Site", with songs like Down, Bone and Go Back to Sleep.

♪ Remember the crash site The title track was about my parents' divorce, at the time, nearly 20 years prior.

♪ ...Could not escape the wreckage Nothing safe, nothing is precious.

Nothing but our world crashing down, leave my body where it was found.

♪ Leave my body where it was found ♪ Two weeks before the album's release, I met America's favorite neighbor, Fred Rogers.

He asked about my parents' divorce.

I was so moved that he made space for my sadness and loss that I spent the next 10 years making my first documentary, "Mister Rogers and Me".

A week after we met, I watched the Twin Towers fall from just a few dozen blocks away.

(gentle music) By then I was in therapy and like more than 20% of Americans, taking antidepressants.

I was also prescribed Xanax to remedy the panic attacks that greeted my increasingly frequent cross-country business trips.

At work, I was fully functional, succeeding even.

But the 24/7 always on nature of the news business rendered me always anxious.

Rarely more so than in 2008 when we were forced to lay off four dozen colleagues in one morning.

As my career accelerated, so too did my self medicating.

I managed social anxiety with alcohol and dealt with day-to-day work pressure by secreting Xanax.

Still, there were so many good times.

I met my would-be wife, we got married and had two beautiful daughters.

I ran marathons, climbed mountains, learned to scuba dive, plus so many countless wondrous moments in between.

If I kept busy, I was mostly okay, but the dull hum of depression and anxiety was always buzzing below my skin.

And sometimes when the city was too loud, the flights too bumpy, or the night too quiet, my chest would tighten.

My heartbeat spike.

My breathing turned short, and my thoughts raced and catastrophized.

(gentle music) I visited numerous doctors throughout my 30s and 40s for all kinds of ailments.

Chest pain, palpitations, back aches, ringing ears, twitchy eyelids, each and every time, the doctor asked, are you under stress?

To find out why, I sat with integrative medicine specialist, Dr.

Zachary Mulvihill, from nearby New York Presbyterian Hospital, where both of my girls were born.

- If you're chronically stressed out and you're not sleeping properly and not letting your natural circadian rhythm, trying to bring your nervous system back into balance, people are chronically stressed out.

You can see it everywhere, it might get so bad that you actually, you're trembling.

So your nervous system is burning you out in this way.

And then I won't be surprised when you come to me and say, doc, I have problems with my digestion and I have insomnia.

I think the root cause of a lot of diseases that we're dealing with comes from the fact that we're totally divorced from the natural reality that we evolved in.

Back in the day, you'd wake up when the sun came up and you'd go to bed after the sun went down.

Nowadays, we have artificial light and electricity, and it's the most extreme in a place like New York City, right?

With this extremely artificial environment.

Now we're the city that never sleeps.

- [Benjamin] Yeah.

- And I see patients all day long who have anxiety and insomnia and it's not a surprise to me.

Okay, 'cause we're out of sync with the natural rhythm.

- [Benjamin] I left MTV News in 2014 and joined Facebook, then at the height of its growth.

When a product I led there became front page news, it wasn't true, but it didn't matter.

I was activated for weeks and turned to Xanax and alcohol.

When the 2016 elections put a global spotlight on the company and found me traveling from Seattle to Singapore, Houston to Hong Kong, it all increased.

The cortisol, the coping, and then some.

- The problem is when people get stuck in a situation where you're always working, you override your body's ability to bring itself back into equilibrium.

If I took a lab rat and put it in an artificial situation where it's not able to regenerate itself, it'll develop a disease.

When you experience trauma, the brain through the pituitary stimulates the adrenal glands to make too much cortisol, epinephrine, norepinephrine, which are pro-inflammatory.

They help you maintain a blood pressure, they help you fight infections.

But for most of us, this is being hijacked, so then we're internalizing the external chaos is becoming chaos within you.

The normal reaction is that it's painful and it feels too painful to bear.

If we can't process it and we can't handle the pain, we want to numb the pain.

So we have normal numbing behaviors such as binge eating, binge Netflixing.

- Yeah.

- And binge drinking and drugs.

People are self-medicating.

When you're chronically stressed out in a literal way, and if it goes on for too long, then you might end up in this situation where you were working really intensively for a number of years and then you just hit a wall.

- [Benjamin] Yeah.

(gentle music) I hit that wall when I left Facebook in 2021.

That Fall, I wrote an album loaded with lyrics too real to ignore and too true to rewrite.

I wasn't sure I could sing them out loud and admit that I had a problem.

I thought, again, of my friend and mentor, Fred Rogers.

- If we can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.

(gentle music) - [Benjamin] I decided to take one last trip back to Iowa to visit my friend, singer songwriter, music therapist and trauma counselor Kelli Rae Powell, to learn more about how music helps us cope and heal.

- Music is helping because it's lighting up the whole brain.

It's making it harder for the amygdala to run the show.

As a patient, you are going to report a lower number on the pain scale because your brain can only process so much information at a time.

- [Benjamin] I always loved music, my mom was learning guitar when I was in the womb, which I think just me inside, it's like coded in to be.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well, and it's coded from your mom herself, you know?

She's coded into you literally, yeah.

- [Benjamin] By eight or nine when it's getting chaotic at home, conflict, I put on headphones and start putting on records.

- Something really big happened to nine-year-old Benjamin.

- [Benjamin] Yeah.

- And it was so big and so painful that your brain thought, we better flag this memory to protect him.

As we continue to grow, that dissociated, separate trauma memory, it stays the same as if you're still nine.

So something about what happened maybe activated that memory and your heart starts beating because that memory's still nine and that nine-year-old memory doesn't know that you're a grown ass man.

You're grown up, that you're safe.

You have all these great friends and resources that you didn't have when you were nine.

You are in charge now, not your parents.

I would imagine nine-year-old Benjamin was a highly sensitive guy, otherwise you wouldn't have access to all the creativity.

These are gifts, but they're also going to make you more available to things that can hurt you.

So a little T trauma to Benjamin might be more than a little T trauma would to a different kind of kid, born with different sensitivities.

Infants are born with a certain level of sensitivity or anxiety and you know, that trauma could play a part in that too, like 'cause there's in utero trauma and pre-verbal trauma, but it's not only what happens, it's who it happens to and what culture they live in.

- Benjamin Wagner, everybody.

- Hey, hello Des Moines, here we are.

- We're both from Iowa, so it's like stick it inside, pull up your boots straps.

- [Benjamin] John Wayne.

- Yeah, John Wayne!

that's not okay here.

- It's from a record coming out soon.

It's called Constellations.

♪ Tear the curtains down - The New York City us, we might talk about depression, but other cultures talk about it somatically.

Feelings are almost perceived as like a violence.

They're so intolerable and so unallowed, which is just like the perfect recipe for trauma.

Your body can't ever heal itself.

It can't ever express itself.

♪ Spend your whole life just looking ♪ ♪ for what was always here ♪ ♪ Oh no... ♪ How can you not be traumatized if you're not allowed to experience your full emotional orchestra?

- Thank you Des Moines, thank you Mike.

(audience cheering) (fireworks banging) 70% of adults in the United States have experienced some type of traumatic event at least once in their lives.

So many of us are chronically dysregulated from generational trauma, adverse childhood experiences, economic, political and climate uncertainty.

The news cycle, social media, the list is long and growing.

As a result, more than a third of all Americans and 56% of 18 to 34 year olds say they feel completely overwhelmed.

We are increasingly isolated, agitated and hostile, and coping with drugs, alcohol and whatever numbs the pain.

So what do we do to begin to heal?

In 2014, Newsweek called my new hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, Murder Town USA, the city has come a long way in the intervening decade.

Delaware declared itself the nation's first trauma-informed state in 2018.

Still, devastatingly adverse conditions exist just a few blocks from my leafy suburban address.

my friend and neighbor, Logan Herring is doing his best to help meet the basic needs of his riverside commute, which, like 130 million Americans, struggles to afford food, housing, and healthcare and has suffered from structural racism, wealth inequality, and systemic neglect.

- The CDC did a study and we were the most violent city per capita in America.

And every time a young person is shot, that's a family that's affected, that's a community that's rocked.

We're addressing the affordable housing.

We're addressing the quality housing in safe communities.

For the Cradle and College career pipeline, we're going everything from birth all the way up to college and career.

- My name is Clarissa Crippin, I was born in Riverside.

- So starting here at Kingswood Community Center with our Early Learning Academy, then East Side Charter for K to eight, and then The Warehouse for our teams in the community.

And then when you think about community wellness, we now have primary care here on site.

We have access to healthy foods, just realistic, practical solutions for complex problems.

- Moving, today's moving day.

- You can't have communities without families.

If we don't build stronger families and stronger communities, we're not going to be resilient to any oppression or any barrier that we face.

- I was at a terrible time in my life, laundry.

I wasn't working and I just admitted myself to rehab.

And then when I got out the Launcher Program for Business Classes came up in our conversations, it really just gave me a plan.

- 87% of households being led by single women is a key indicator for a lack of social, economical resources, future generations ending and divorce, high school dropout rates, teenage pregnancy, and that's generational.

- I'm so happy, oh, come on, trucks, come on, trucks.

I'm really just excited for the kids.

We were homeless, but now they getting like, oh, mommy gets the new house.

Maybe we'll be here for a long time.

- You have to be proactive to break the cycle.

It just doesn't happen.

We're very deliberate, intentional about how we break that.

And so yeah, you have the holistic approach with the housing and the education and the health.

- The next chapter of my life will be leveling up.

I'm so excited, start anew, keep going.

- But it also more importantly, means that we have to develop relationships in the community.

I want to help restore a neighborhood to where it once was, where people see promise, hope, and have faith that they can achieve the highest of heights.

- They really got me on the right track.

Everything's like really fallen into place.

- And so that's the name of the new neighborhood, called Imani Village.

And Imani stands for Faith and Hope in Swahili.

(gentle music) - [Benjamin] From Faith and Hope to gratitude, my friend Anne Kubitsky's Look For The Good project, provides mental health programming for elementary schools across the country.

In the end, the program helps parents, teachers, and administrators too.

In a little over a decade, Look For The Good Has helped nearly half a million kids in 35 states, generated nearly three million notes of gratitude and demonstrated that healing requires all of us.

- The most important part in any trauma healing process is making the body feel safe and comfortable.

What we're doing with the Look For The Good project is we're helping a community, specifically in elementary school, feel more safety and belonging and connection together.

We're doing it through a collective curiosity campaign, that connects each child with at least one safe adult.

We're trying to expand that child's capacity to be curious, even when they're facing stressful emotions.

We have a group of student leaders and they kick off the campaign for the entire school and then the student leaders will then explain, okay, we're going to write a sticky note about what we're thankful for each day, could be anything at all.

They'd make a big gratitude wall to inspire each other and help each other collectively look for the good.

- I'm grateful for my mom 'cause she takes care of me and people walk in and step on it and when one person sees another person steps on it, everybody just wants to come step on it and share what they're grateful for.

- They'll also pass out kindness cards and so it helps them give compliments to each other, so it becomes easier to connect with one another and say, hey, thanks for opening the door for me, or thanks for helping me with my homework.

- I used to see a lot of mean behavior in our school, I feel like it's more relaxed and calm now.

- And that sort of preps them for the biggest part of the project where the child picks a safe adult, any adult in their life, they share a letter of thanks with them by reading it out loud, and so that helps them practice vulnerability with that person who is that safe person for them, that then sets them up to feel like they have somebody to go to when they're feeling mad or sad or icky or afraid.

Gratitude really kind of becomes the glue that makes it okay to finally feel your feelings.

- When you express how you're feeling, if you're feeling let down or anything like that, it can like, it helps you like overcome the feeling.

- When they talk about gratitude, they also talk about some of the deepest, hardest things in their life because gratitude is that magic resource that helps people reframe and find meaning in that challenge.

(upbeat music) - [Benjamin] I wondered if I could show up as my authentic self when so much was happening inside and with a secret I'd kept for so long.

I turned to my neighbor, the first openly transgender statesperson and highest ranking transgender elected official in the history of the United States.

If she could find her way to speaking her truth, maybe I could as well.

- I have known that I'm transgender my entire life, but I buried it deep inside and I remember just looking at my mom and my heart sinking and thinking, I'm going to have to tell you this someday and you're going to be so disappointed and scared.

And that moment of shame just continued to play out time and time again.

The closest thing that I could compare it to was a constant feeling of homesickness, just an unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that would only go away when I could be seen and affirmed as myself.

As I grew up and as I had experiences that I hoped would distract me or heal me, in reality, they only focused my mind more on the incongruence and they only exacerbated the pain.

That desire to find home is one of the most universal, one of the most human desires you can have.

(gentle music) - Sarah, then a rising senior and president of student government at American University, came out in an op-ed penned for the student newpaper.

- It was like the world lifted off of my shoulders.

To watch my parents go from devastated, to being some of the fiercest advocates really is a beautiful journey to have witnessed and I think for me, provides a model that if you're willing to extend some grace, people can grow.

Before we can extend grace to other people, we have to extend some grace to ourselves.

We have to admit when we're hurting, to admit who we are and to allow ourselves to grapple with that pain, to do what we need to heal that pain for ourselves.

(gentle music) - [Benjamin] As I continued my own healing journey, I began to find my own way home.

Why would I at 50, be experiencing viscerally and physically an experience that I had when I was 16?

- The body is a repository for everything you've experienced your entire life, but in a traumatic experience, the memory gets deposited separately in the mind, body and the feelings, but to heal it, you have to find a way to bring those three back together.

When they come together, it gives you something that heals the experience.

- Healing is giving yourself permission to reconnect with that part of yourself you had to ditch when it wasn't safe to be who you were.

Feeling your feelings and knowing what those feelings are when they come, and then developing your own personal process for being with them.

Everyone has a place in their heart that they go home to.

My big go-to tool is EMDR.

- EMDR is treatment for trauma.

- [Benjamin] Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing reduces the emotional intensity associated with traumatic memories and changes the way the memory is stored in the brain.

- Once we have someone very relaxed, bring the trauma in, and then we change the experience, perception, and story around the trauma, the person comes back into their own trauma, but now they get to be the hero.

I'll walk people as adults back into a trauma that they experienced in childhood, and they'll basically pull the child out of that trauma and then be a safe place for them.

So we're helping kind of bring the self back to the self.

It's the perception piece.

If this mammalian reptilian brain starts to get the signal that, oh, that's over, oh, it's over, oh, I can put that in the filing cabinet now.

It doesn't have to stay out on the desktop.

(gentle music) - [Benjamin] As I turned towards home, I saw clear as day the imperative to continue to heal myself, to break the cycle of trauma and to share my story, this story, our story, so that maybe others will share theirs.

I began to see my parents and theirs before them as what they were then, hurt kids, activated and dysregulated and doing their best to manage stress, anxiety, grief, and depression with whatever tools they had.

And by showing up for this, they're helping to break the cycle too.

I'm still anxious sometimes, but far less, and now I know why.

I was born into intergenerational trauma and experienced multiple adverse childhood experiences, domestic violence, divorce, assault.

I chose a city and a career that saw that resulting hypervigilance, continuously raised it and kept me quietly coping, until even with all the privilege, resources, and community around me, I hit a wall.

I'm sober for years now.

These days I feel all the feels.

I've processed many of those unresolved feelings and practice new, healthier ways of coping.

I'm in therapy sometimes multiple times a week, including EMDR, where I've safely revisited those intrusive memories, surfaced long repressed feelings and visualized myself as the hero in my own story, rescuing that hurt little boy and carrying him to safety.

I visit the gym a few times a week to help my nervous system restore balance by burning off adrenaline.

I meditate and do yoga every morning to help me slow down, focus on the present and better connect my mind, body and breath.

I write, record and perform music to make sense of my life, sing it out loud and in tune with other people.

Every night I log at least three things I'm grateful for.

When we're grateful, it's impossible to be anxious, and when we reflect on gratitude as a practice, we rewire our brains to look for beauty, wonder and awe instead of danger.

And I look for the helpers, the people who are healing the anxious, uncertain communities around us because when you look for the helpers, you know that there's hope.

We can normalize trauma, address it with empathy, and understand its impact on ourselves and each other.

We can have the courage to show up for each other and for difficult conversations.

We can get to know ourselves and to really feel our feelings.

We can be vulnerable and give each other permission to do the same.

We can meet everyone's basic needs and balance the impulse to do with the intention to be and to be the helpers our kids, friends and neighbors so desperately need.

- We have to become an America that we have never been, and we have to become so profoundly altered in what we become that we can never again be.

- Until you do that deep inner self work, it's going to be hard for you to process what's happening to you and to help you deal with that in a way that's both supportive to yourself and supportive to others.

- If we allow ourselves to be openly vulnerable, we not only then allow ourselves to heal, but we give other people permission to be vulnerable.

- You start to get settled and centered, and then you're able to really find that silver lining in your trauma and it becomes meaningful and it's so powerful, I can't even describe it.

- [Benjamin] For me, the silver lining is this, for the first time since I was a little kid, I'm wide awake.

Everybody hurts, but feelings aren't facts.

There's signals to help us find safety and our way back home to ourselves.

- If we're kind to ourselves, then we have a greater chance of being kind toward other people.

- Your life is a series of breaths.

Stay in the breath, not in the circumstances around it.

- If you can positively affect one person, you're making a difference, and so we can all make that difference.

- The great changes that lead to the masterful transformations all begin with one person.

Rosa Parks was one person.

Abraham Lincoln was one individual.

It all began with one person.

- The truth is inside of us, and it's wonderful when we have the courage to tell it.

Loving people and the world we all live in is the most important part of being alive.

- [Benjamin] We come home to ourselves and each other and we begin again when we pause and just... ...breathe.

(person breathing) (gentle music) (kids laughing) - [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided by Someone To Tell It To.

(gentle music) (upbeat music)