#12 – Corey McCarthy: Overcoming trauma, finding meaning, changing the self-narrative, & gratitude

The detail that grounds this as protocol rather than anecdote: Corey describes lying in his prison bunk at 5 AM and hearing another inmate make a noise of contempt as he walked past while Corey was stretching. He jumped in the bed and hid under the covers. The insight he took from this was not to stop practicing but to stop letting external shame govern the choice. 'Why am I afraid to be good? Why am I afraid to take care of myself?' Today he still gets up and 'takes time' — he distinguishes this from formal workouts, framing it as a daily internal calibration.

Corey brought his prison journals on the flight to New York and read them en route. He describes them as 'kind of interesting, sometimes frightening to read' and notes some entries are in code because he couldn't write certain things openly. The entries show he was 'trying to be better' from early in his prison term but without yet connecting the dots between substance use and the inability to sustain that improvement. Key entry example: 'I had an outburst today — how can I see that coming? Not in the moment, but days ahead. How does my attitude shift before I punch somebody or challenge a guard?'

Corey's AA meeting of choice is a 7:15 AM group in a Jewish temple — 'a straight-up tribe of really cool men' who joke and help each other in the community. He frames his continued attendance not as dependency but as choosing humility: 'I like the humility of the situation — I like to realize that I've been there and I can go there.' The structural steps he endorses: admit fault (I cannot handle this), ask for help, believe change is possible, take inventory of harm done, repair what can be repaired, help others.

Corey developed this framing himself and uses it with the men he mentors. He illustrates it with his own medical ledger: 'do you have a car with a check engine light on, or do you have a car — that's so much better.' The same framing applies to his brain surgeries, his years in prison, and the abuse he suffered. He notes it also helps explain the seemingly irrational behavior they observed at Kern — a man three days from release attacking guards — because from the man's 'bad list' the behavior is logical. The reframe only becomes available when someone models a different list being possible.

Corey credits 'preparation' as what eased the fear: getting busy doing the work of securing himself before release. The parole officer who recognized him from the childhood rehab — the first face he saw on release — saying 'as long as you stay clean this will be a breeze' was the transition gift that not everyone gets. Corey explicitly notes: 'going back — not everybody gets that day right. That doesn't happen to everybody where it's a familiar face and he's kind and he says you can do this.'

Corey describes selecting 'endure and overcome' as the phrase that got him through his prison term — and distinguishes it from his current orientation, which is now more about connection and meaning than mere survival. 'A lot of times that's just like okay put your head down and keep moving your feet forward — and we do that in life and we do that when we meet each other and we don't say hey I've been hurt and so we're not able to connect.' The implication is that the anchor is most useful in the early survival phase, and that connection becomes the more powerful longer-term driver once basic safety is established.

The enmeshment category is particularly underappreciated: a single parent who confides in their child as though the child were a partner — sharing adult relationship problems, sex life details — inflicts a wounding that looks nothing like classic abuse but produces the same shame response. Attia notes that abuse and neglect 'always go hand in hand' in children: even loving parents cannot protect a child 24/7, and when injury occurs the child's emotional response blames the absent protector. The four branches are not morally distinct: a person addicted to work and a person addicted to alcohol are on the same tree, but society rewards one and criminalizes the other.

Corey describes the second predator as 'the cool dad' who provided everything — car keys, employment, housing, cocaine, a peer reference in his own son — before the situation 'wasn't comfortable anymore.' The framing Corey uses is: 'it's kind of like pimping somebody — here's everything you need in life but none of it's yours. As soon as you walk out the door you're done.' Attia extends it: 'you give them something that they are missing — typically attention — and then you can exploit them.' The implication for parents and clinicians is that the risk window is the period when a child's primary wounds are visible and unaddressed, particularly the window between first wounding and effective therapeutic response.

The two friends arrived on Father's Day, same day as a drug delivery, and said nothing prescriptive: 'they didn't do any of this — they just loved me and they were like we're not selling ourselves.' Corey describes them noting he looked 'torn' and admitting he was afraid that cycling in and out of prison was simply the rest of his life. Their response: 'dude, if you don't do drugs you won't come back here — you're a good guy, you're just buried.' He describes buying it 'for like a minute' and it being Father's Day as the hinge: he has not had a drink or drug in 11 years from that point. The journal entries he brought on the plane show that even in those first sober months he was tracking: 'okay, I had an outburst today — how can I see that coming days ahead, not in the moment?'

Attia introduces the concept explicitly: 'the narrative you tell yourself.' Corey's first response to his mother's encouragement in prison was: 'the sooner you realize that this is who I am — that I'm gonna get out and rob people — the sooner you'll feel better.' That was not cynicism; it was the sincere belief of someone whose shame had become identity. The tools that shifted it were not primarily therapeutic but testimonial: seeing the girl from his neighborhood who'd overdosed on cocaine now selling insurance in Maine with her picture on bus stops; hearing the biker from Queens repeat 'you don't have to live like this'; watching a white kid similar to himself return to prison for five years after one drink. Each story modeled a fork in the road. Attia's clinical translation: 'it's that form of connectedness that undoes the isolation — not necessarily who you're around but the vulnerability itself.'

Corey describes the pattern: 'somebody would hand me drugs on a Wednesday afternoon and I would forget to call her.' He would realize at 10 PM, coming back from the yard, that he'd missed the call — and instead of calling, he went to solitary and wrote his father asking him to tell McKenzie the phones were broken. His father's refusal is the hinge: 'I'm done lying to her for you.' That accountability — no longer being protected from the direct consequences of the choice — was a prerequisite for the Father's Day sobriety decision. His daughter's later statement, 'I thought you were never going to leave,' written in her college application essay about that experience, closes the loop.