Welcome to Back from the Abyss. I'm Dr. Craig Hecock. I did the final content edit for this story last weekend while I was flying home from New York City.

I was sitting there with my headphones on, looking out the window at the billowy clouds.

And I was smiling and laughing out loud at times, wiping away some tears.

And I thought, this story is such a good one.

There's so much courage and resilience and wisdom here.

And this is exactly why I started the podcast to share stories like this.

I've been thinking about how I would introduce this story of Micah and her beautiful, awful, heroic journey. But I think she tells it so much better

than I ever could. So I'll just say that I'm very happy that Micah found back from the abyss

and me, and that we were able to create this episode for all of you to hear.

I think my dad was a really traumatized little boy in a man's body.

And he still is.

Now an old man's body, you know, and it's sad.

I think I spent a lot of time as I got older trying to wake him up to see the success that he'd made, like, in his professional life,

to try to get him to snap out of the trauma trance so that he could just be okay but to no avail and I think at some point probably around the time of becoming a mother I

realized it wasn't my job to raise him up. Mom was the good guy of the two.

She liked to do a lot of retail therapy.

And that was her way of trying to make it better.

But mom did not actually do much protecting

because I think she was herself quite terrified of him. And, you know, I think

in a lot of ways she kind of put me in the middle. I remember spending a lot of mental

bandwidth as a kid trying to think about how to navigate between the two of them.

You know, like modifying stories to tell her, to tell him, so that they could just be okay

...