January 8, 2022 (Reposted from his website, dated December 9, 2021)
“Music can heal the wounds which medicine cannot touch.” – Debasish Mridha
Music has a profound way of touching us in so many ways. For myself, the power of music has given me great joy, hope and healing. Music has been a lifesaver for me and that is not something I throw around lightly. I would like to share with you how it has affected my life in so many positive ways – I am forever grateful to have the gift of music in my life. Music continues to help me in healing from the effects of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, mild traumatic brain injury and serious back injuries due to abuse I have suffered.
I was born in Boston, Massachusetts and lived there and in Cambridge, MA till the age of six. My family then moved to the small town of Billerica just twenty miles outside of Boston. I was the oldest of five children, four boys and one girl. Our life was hard-my parents were cruel and abusive in just about every way one can imagine. They and several of their friends should have been arrested and thrown in jail for what they did to children–they were pedophiles. Sadly, they were never caught, so my siblings and I all paid a terrible price for that abuse-it would affect all of us for the rest of our lives.
Thankfully, there was music, and it gave this young boy the greatest of joys to just sit and listen to someone singing on the radio or on TV. My friend’s dad played the guitar and he would sing all of his favorite country and western songs and I would be mesmerized just watching and listening to him play. I thought how nice that would be if I could do this. Though it was a secret desire to play the guitar and sing, it was something I kept to myself due to my low self-esteem and reinforced by the ridicule I heard from both of my parents when they heard me singing along to a record or the radio. They would shush me and tell me how terrible I sounded. My father told me, “You sound like a castrated hyena.” So music wasn’t an option for me to consider learning how to do.