Undercover Angel Podcast

Sarah Sunshine was a hippy girl with dreads who was the one who I loved after Lilah. She fit the template of trauma-bonding like all of the rest up until now.

I fell in love in my first semester with a girl who was a couple of years older than me. Sadly, she decided that we wouldn't work and I experienced many years of heartbreak as a result. This was, you guessed it, more trauma bonding and a complete soul abandonment.

I managed to recreate the dysfunctional party crowd that had become toxic by the end of high school. There were kids going camping and doing great things. I was drunk in a dorm with cheap vodka.

The consumption of Robitussin was a regular thing amongst my friend group toward the end of high school. I found it disturbing and disgusting. Those who "Robo-tripped" insisted it turned them into vampires. I couldn't get down with it.

The Grateful Dead are still in my opinion the greatest band to ever exist. The experience I had at Soldier Field in the Summer of 1992 changed my life forever.

What is teenage rebellion? More often than not, it is rooted in the dysfunction of the family system. The rebel kid realizes things aren't right on the home front and then lashes out at society.

My friends and I bonded as a result of our collective and individual woundedness, similar to trauma bonding but distinct phenomenologically. As I say in the book, "It's like our wounds became friends."

LSD is a potent and powerful substance that we, as kids, had no business messing with. But we did. The fact that most of us survived is still beyond me.

There is essentially what amounts to a psychic change that happens in the life of a person who gets addicted to drugs. There was very little that could be done to hide it. My entire aura shifted as I basically turned into a stoner.

The first time I got stoned it was in so many ways just a continuation of that which had begun long before. Before the intoxication on the part of illegal substances, there was the emotional intoxication produced by the chemicals in my child and adolescent brain. In so many ways it seemed destined from the very beginning.