Jeremy G. Schneider has published numerous articles on his experiences as a father in both the US and other countries around the world. He has used his Master’s Degree in Family Therapy to help individuals and families.
But maybe the best use of his degree has been to help himself.
When Jeremy was 17 years old his parents divorced. A year-and-a-half later, his mother cut him out of her life and he ended up in the emergency room.
And he couldn’t imagine how his life could get any worse.
What he didn’t yet realize was that it already had been worse and despite his not remembering, it was haunting him every single day.
This is the story of his intensely personal and emotionally challenging journey of not only remembering what happened to him and how he survived it all, but realizing that surviving was no longer good enough.
How does a man feel the love in his present
without being consumed by the pain of his past?
It is a story of a man, somehow believing life could be better than what it was, who made a commitment to his life – and his family; a vow to be the last in his family to experience abuse. This terrible tradition was going to end with him.
The Road
Jeremy had always known something was wrong growing up – he just always believed it was him. It wasn’t until college when he began to suspect that maybe the problem didn’t lie with him, but with his parents – especially his mother.
By the time he finished graduate school, getting a literal and figurative master’s in family therapy, he remembered most of what had happened to him. But it wasn’t until after his kids were born, reading Harry Potter once again, that he started re-experiencing and re-living his childhood, while still trying to continue living in his present.
Jeremy essentially grew up in therapy – he started when he was nine years old. He has been working on himself for as long as he can remember. By the time that he had sunk into a severe depression, his Two Years of Darkness, he had been in therapy for more than 15 years. When he recovered he thought maybe that was it, that he would spend the rest of his life wary of depression, but that he had beaten it.
It turned out he had beaten depression – he hadn’t yet beaten his past, however. He was still spending most of his life in Survival Mode, just getting through every day, missing out on the beauty, the love, the experience of being alive. The next step was another major one, Integration. How to become more integrated as a person, combining both his past and his present and learning to experience his life – both good and bad – and still be able to function in society. With a wonderful wife and beautiful boy-girl twins, he knew he should be happy, but didn’t feel it. How do you get over what he went through? How do you overcome your past? He found that instead of trying to hold down his feelings, he needed to embrace them, to experience their ferociousness and release them. Somehow. No matter what it did to him.
By doing this he found that a whole new world had opened up for him. It was a world that included a wide range of emotions – all of them overwhelming at first – from the worst pain he had ever felt to the most phenomenal joy – an intense joy so profound he never imagined it even existed.
Jeremy has now been married for over 11 years (they’ve been together for almost 20) and is a father of 8-year old twins. While his life is by no means easy and he still has struggles, he had no idea he could be this happy, that he could feel such love in his life, that he could experience the world around him so acutely. It is the accumulation of his life’s work, the result he needs to share in the hope it might make a difference in the lives of others. The lessons he has learned are lessons we can all gain from; overcoming our past or painful experiences, accepting and expressing our feelings, and focusing more on living in the moment rather than just hoping to get through it.
For everyone who has experienced trauma and pain, for those who believe life can be better than it is right this very moment, Jeremy’s story is not about surviving life, but a story of how you travel from surviving to truly experiencing all that life has to offer.
Because, no matter what we’ve been through, we all deserve to experience the joys we have in this life.
For more information on In My Rearview Mirror, please visit the website, InMyrearviewMirror.com.
