Hey.
I’m Aaron. And Welcome to UNf*ck Your Voice.
My story begins where most good stories about singers begin: sex and stardom. Unfortunately, this story does not start well.
chapter one: Sex and STARDOM
This is me at 19, professionally thriving as a young opera singer and holding a world of pain inside.
My story begins with a act that would define the rest of my life: beginning to experience sexual abuse from multiple abusers starting at the age of three.
In order to cope with the pain, I began to black out memories and compartmentalize my experience more and more.
In short, I ended up developing multiple personalities.
And one of these personalities became a youth opera sensation at the age of fifteen. National competitions, radio shows, singing with full orchestras, you name it, I did it. I was the number one “draft pick” in the country, and ended up with a full ride to the best music school in the country.
I was on top of it all, I was miserable, and was so fragmented that I did not even know the reason why.
And then something inside of me started to rebel, and I lost my voice. Shut down almost completely. For every hour I spent singing, I spent a day in silence. The identity I had used to hide from my pain and my internal experience was starting to crack.
chapter two: New Identity in The New Age
I was becoming less and less okay and I started looking for something to navigate that experience: I found bodywork, shadow-work, meditation, nature, and spiritual bypassing.
I enrolled in a four year somatic embodiment teacher training program, I started doing parts work, men’s work, started talking to trees, tapping into intuition, inner child work, and started to let parts of myself live for the first time in my life.
But I was still completely unaware of how fragmented I was: I would go hours, sometimes days living from different parts of myself, all without remembering that experience. And I still experienced sexual abuse.
And in the New Age world I moved into more pleasure, embodiment, and understanding my psyche. As I did, I started to notice more and more discrepancies, more and more details that pointed to one thing: I was not who I thought I was.
Chapter three: Ego death and travel Trailers
I remember the day I first contemplated taking my life as an adult. It was a cold December evening, my woodstove quietly heating my Philadelphia townhouse.
Looking back, I realize that the self-deception I practiced daily felt unsurvivable. I still had no idea how truly fragmented I was, but I knew I could no longer continue as I was. And I thought that suicide was the only way.
After looking for help in the wrong places, I spent time involuntarily in the psych ward. And where before I was suicidal, now I just wanted to kill everyone else. And everywhere I went only seemed to make these desires and sensations worse.
And then I met the mystic who would save my life, and the person who would become my wife. Her name is Annika.
I was immediately drawn to Annika, and terrified.
In retrospect, it was because she knew me and could see me better than I could see myself.
When I met Annika, I truly began to heal. Because I could finally see how much of a monster I had become.
Because of her radical honesty and near-limitless commitment to seeing me as lovable as I was, I began to see not just how fragmented I was, but how much harm I caused as a result.
Threatening behavior. Emotional callousness. Physically fleeing our travel trailer home.
This is what I saw myself doing, realized I had been doing my whole life.
It was horrifying, realizing that in many ways I was harming Annika just as much as others had harmed me. And the realization that I could be loved like that by another person began to shatter the hatred of my abusers which had kept me trapped in fragmentation for so long.
And so, on a sunny afternoon in September, I finally found a primary sense of grace and a core commitment to the value of “there is nothing wrong with you”.
Chapter four: passing it forward
Through Annika, I received a priceless gift: the discovery that even a fragmented monster of a man can be loved and discover love into wholeness.
And now it is my time to pass on this gift: I now know it is my calling to show those who are that there is nothing wrong with them, especially in the places where they cause harm and are harmed by others.
And there is no greater place to teach that then through the voice. The voice is where all of our parts come together. Perpetrator parts and victim parts alike share this magical instrument, and every iota of our goodness and our perpetration, dissociation, and pain shows whenever we speak or sing.
My mission is to show you that you can and will Unf*ck Your Voice, by learning that there is truly nothing wrong with you, just as you are.