Sam Simmons

There's always that data about inheriting addictive traits.

In my community, one of the reasons I stopped practicing on a regular basis is nobody initially wanted to talk about trauma, right?

And so if I'm medicating my trauma, and historically in the community, we've often medicated our trauma.

You know, I often tell the story about my father who worked at a company called International Harvester, and his boss

Well, he went through several bosses over his 30 years.

His last boss was a 21-year-old college kid who didn't know nothing about manufacturing, but that was his boss.

We're talking about a 47-year-old Black man who's being called boy all day by a 21-year-old white kid, right?

And so now what do you do with that when you've got four kids you're trying to raise, you're trying to be a responsible black man, and you get home and you're so angry because you want to hurt this little boy.

Matter of fact, a couple of the staff did hurt the little boy out of the dock later on.

But again, he come home, first thing he reaches for is a Budweiser so he can calm down.

If he didn't get his Budweiser, it was hell to pay.

So medicating that anger, and we didn't even talk about the historical anger, medicating the anger with alcohol, medicating the anger with food, medicating yourself with sex.

And if you walk backwards, you'll start seeing certain things that have shown up in the community and you can tie them back to initially

not addressing trauma, trying to medicate that.

No.

Well, lately, yeah.

When I worked in the hospital, that was primarily why I did it.

But we also have groups of people who have been relegated to that position of caregivers because that's been their position in America in terms of the hierarchy, right?

So when you start adding things like historical trauma, cultural differences, and those kind of things, you'll see the nuances that people don't like to deal with.

You know, that shows up differently.