The Demons of Childhood Trauma | Aaron Stark | EP 405

The very first memory I have of my entire life, where I start my life, is me laying on my bloody mom's body, looking up at my dad, screaming at him, "You just killed my [Music] mom."

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today, I'm pleased to be talking to Mr. Aaron Stark. You might recognize him from his Ted Talk on YouTube, which has got about 13 million views. Um, Aaron went to some very dark places when he was a kid and a teenager and came from some very dark places. Uh, at one point in his life, he had formulated very detailed plans that related to shooting up a school, and he decided not to do it.

What we're going to talk about is how he came to make those plans, the rationale for it, the cause of those plans, and then also why he decided to back away from the precipice, and what the consequence of that backing away has been. So, Mr. Stark, you turned your life around?

“Yes sir.”

Okay, so let's go back to when it wasn't turned around. Now, you've been touring around and talking to people for how long? How long have you been in the public eye?

“Um, about 5 years.”

About 5 years. How old are you now?

“Uh, 44.”

Okay, and so, well, why don't you just tell us the story, and then I'll start delving into the details.

“Well, so I was almost a school shooter when I was really young. My, I went through a really violent, aggressive family. My, uh, first five years were like living in a Stephen King movie. My birth father was the most violent, depraved person I've ever met. Um, beatings and rapes and just violence and aggression the entire time, running from him across state to state, trying to get away.

When my mom finally escaped him, she got with my stepdad and went from Stephen King to Scarface. So it went from extreme violence to crack cocaine and crime.”

And you were about six?

“I was about five or six at the time, yeah. Um, and I had an older brother who's two years older than I was. And so, we were very nomadic. I went to 30 or 40 different schools. We were constantly moving from state to state, running away from the cops or the, um, social workers or counselors or anybody trying to intervene. I lived a very nomadic lifestyle and went from early on being a really shy, sensitive, sweet kid who liked reading comic books and superheroes and that kind of stuff, to in my early teen years really adapting that to the way to survive, was I'm going to be the aggressive one.

I, I figured out early on that I was the dirty one. I was the nasty one. I was the worthless. I was the outcast. I was the one that was pushed off early on, meaning when I was six, seven years old that myself, my older brother, you were assuming it was you?

“Oh yeah, it was me. My older brother was two years older than I was because of my family dynamic. He had a lot of responsibility. He had to be the early man of the house really early on, to the extent where he had at 12 years old to handle the um, Sheriff throwing all of our stuff in the front yard and evicting us while my parents are getting drugged out and drunk at the bar, and we can't find them for days. He has to find us a place to stay, and I was the responsibility.”

How much older than you was he?

“Two years. So, he was 12, I was 10.”

And so he was just another kid going through abuse the same way I was.

“Um, but he had to, I was a responsibility he had to take care of. So, while he was shouldering all the responsibility, I'm like the burden. And so that was kind of the identities we adapted. He was the one that took care of everything. I was the one that was the broken thing that needed to be taken care of all the time. And as that grew older, I became more and more toxic going into my early...”

Why do you think there wasn't enough responsibility also for you? Like, why do you think the rules between you and your brother had to be split that way?

“I don't know if they had to be, but that's just kind of the way they ended up being. I, I, um, he just because of our personalities, he was more of a hands-on kid. He, he, well, he, he like he was a gearhead too. His likes were more, were more physical. He liked doing things like building...”