After Learning To Numb, Aaron Johnson Taps Into His Tears

TW: We mention suicide and deal with an incident in this episode that some may find disturbing. 

OPENING: 

Aaron Johnson remembers when he was a teenager walking in on his dad with his head in his hands. One of his dad’s co-worker’s had just died in a welding accident.

Seeing his dad grieving Aaron wanted desperately to comfort him to give his dad a hug but his arms wouldn’t move. 

AARON: I remember just wanting to be with him and I don't know how to be with him. He was just very much quiet just in the room, kind of sitting that, holding it and trying not to feel. 

Aaron then worked up the courage to reach for him.

AARON: I just gave him a hug... And I felt overwhelmed …it felt very painful to even try to support, because I just knew that we were just gonna be quiet about it. And so for me, it felt this kind of hollowness, hopelessness. 

They hadn’t hugged in years, not since he was five. 

LAUREL: And how did he deal with sadness or grief?

AARON: He numbed it. He just held it. I was there when his mother died and all the situations he showed very little, he just, just LAUREL: Shut down? AARON: Yeah, and for me, how it sits in my body is you go numb. 

As Aaron discovers it’s an issue that’s especially prominent among Black men and is often passed down from one generation to the next. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

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Aaron Johnson had four brothers and sisters. The family was close. Each time a baby was born Aaron’s mom would pull the older brother or sister aside.

AARON: When the child comes home from the hospital she would bring in the new baby to the, the oldest child above that child and say, this is your baby. This is your baby. And for the rest of your life, you're I'm encouraging to be in relationship with this child. You know, you love all your siblings. This is one right under you, is your baby. For me my little sister Alilia is the child under me. And so of course, when I was of age, my mother brang Alilia back from the hospital and said, Aaron, this is your baby. And of course I took it very seriously. I asked my mom, you said Alilia was my baby. Why can’t I nurse? Mind you my mother’s a conservative Christian pastor. She’s like how are you going to do that? I grabbed my navel and said, right here. (laughter)

Aaron and his brothers and sisters were raised by two preachers in a small farm town in Southern California called Phelan (FEE-luhn). They played under big blue skies among the Joshua Trees in the high desert surrounded by mountains in every direction.

When his dad wasn’t preaching in a Christian church he was working as a welder in a warehouse several miles from their home.

AARON: ​Inside the warehouse it might be 120 degrees in there cause he had leathers on welding machines are going. He would work in there for seven hours a day. He would get carpooled up the mountain because only had one vehicle. He would oftentimes have to walk another five miles to make it home. He still kept enough love for us, not ‘I’ve been working all day…’ So he worked Monday through Friday and then did church work from Saturday through Sunday and back to work at four o'clock in the morning on Monday. 

As the pastors Aaron’s mom and dad were the people members of the congregation would turn to when they were in crisis. Aaron remembers helping one person who was trying to escape their abusive relationship. His dad woke him up in the middle of the night 

AARON: Twelve O'clock he knocks on my door. It's time to go. He gets me up. We go to the person's house. We help them move out of the house. Cause they're trying to sneak out. So their partner wouldn't be tracking them. We move them out. We get done moving them out of their house at four o'clock in the morning, he goes if you can drive me to work drive to my ride? He’s going on two hours of sleep, right? He never said, this is hard. This is impossible. I am sleepy.

In his role as pastor, Aaron’s dad absorbed emotion constantly from the congregation but at home he never expressed his own sadness, anger, or pain. Aaron really loved and admired his dad but this kind of wall came up between them. 

He says even though his dad wasn’t big on hugs, he showed his love in other ways. 

AARON: My dad would always say, if you get stranded anywhere, I will come and get you LAUREL: Did you ever take him up on that? AARON: Oh multiple times we were broke so we had used vehicles so we were always breaking down somewhere …That behavior says, I love you son. I love you. Cause I'm a model, my best behavior, even when I'm exhausted, confused, and homeless and we're fighting for everything we have, I'm still gonna make sure I remember my commitment.

His parents were often overwhelmed with taking care of the congregation. So they didn’t have a lot of discussions about their African heritage. But Aaron had other family members to lean on. He had 13 aunts and uncles just on his mom’s side and dozens of cousins.

AARON: For me Blackness was my family. It was my dad, it was my cousins, it was the preachers and pastors I knew. I didn't get infiltrated until high school college where I started to see the magnitude of mainstream culture hollywood, the things shaping hip hop at the time. But up until that point my family was still a defining force when I think of blackness African heritage growing up. My parents were really overwhelmed. They were raising five kids plus they were pastoring a small black congregation navigating poor black people trying to find healing. So there wasn’t a lot of time to have debates and conversations about it. My siblings and I had more time to talk about it definitely had the biggest influence on my definition of Blackness or being Black.

Aaron describes his hometown as racist. He was one of six Black people in his high school graduating class and the only one in choir. 

Aaron remembers one choir practice when two white girls got in a fight.

AARON: They were like aah, and one girl says to one, I'm gonna kill you. 

One of the students went to the office and brought back the campus police officer.

AARON: …So I'm sitting there like I'm trained to do from birth to pay attention. And he looks at me and goes, you got a problem with me? And I'm like, no, sir, I don't have a problem. You have a problem with me. He’s up in my face. And he’s like, you got a problem with me! Right. He's determined that I got a problem. So I just said, no, sir, I don't have a problem. 

At first Aaron was confused.

AARON: Then I realized after all my answers were getting him more and more angry and because I wasn’t reacting aggressive towards him I realized it was a direct attack to me. It reminded me that police officers have often times made conclusions about me before they could get information. So for me it was first confusion, then clarification, then a quiet rage that I knew better even in eighth grade not to let out and not to let him see.

Aaron came home from school that day and just like every other day told his mom what had happened. The next day she arrived at school in her Sunday pastor clothes.

AARON: Why is my mom's station wagon parked the school? Didn't think much about it. And she wasn't there. And she said, I would like to talk to the Dean or the officer that yelled at my son and find out what's happening. I just wanna find out if Aaron's acting up, I'm the first one to discipline him. But if he's not acting up, I'm the first one to figure out why he's getting yelled at by officer. My point is they were expecting my mom to come in there, maybe with some rollers on and, and like in a house dress angry. And she came in with her preacher clothes and Sunday hat, preacher clothes. She did all by design, right? And she came in there and just checked this. 

Dealing with people who profiled him and treated him like a threat was hard. But he was taught to keep his rage and sadness quiet. 

Not being able to reach for someone to be held was this constant ache. While Aaron always knew he was loved, he was no longer hugged or cuddled. When he was five years old, he remembers being told he was too big for that. 

He dealt with bouts of depression as a result. And at 13 he even felt low enough that he wanted to end his own life. So often Aaron turned to his dog Toby for comfort.

AARON:  I had a dog named Toby, who was a lifesaver, literally a lifesaver for me…  I cried with the dog. I spoke to the dog that I cuddled with…And so I remember a particularly depressed date. I was gonna kill myself. That was one of my goals. I was gonna kill my myself. In that 13 year old mind, I got up and ready to prepare myself to, to kill myself. I said, who's gonna take care of Toby. Who's gonna, who's gonna take care of Toby. And I said, I can't, I can't die.

Aaron also turned to music to help fill the void. 

From an early age he felt held by singing like it was a safe place to express his emotions in church and in public. It was healing. That’s why he joined the school choir. Aaron and his siblings all loved to sing. The five of them even formed an acapella group called Fivacious. They would sing mostly gospel music at church, at the hospital, and just whenever his mom thought people might need it.

AARON: I look at music as medicine. And I really understood that singing music was something that was used not to perform only, but to use, to help these people transition over to heaven or off, over to eternity or, or help somebody in their fighting for the darkest time in life. Song was embedded in that experience.

The first time he felt music could heal he and his siblings sang for his cousin Dejanay who had congestive heart failure.

AARON: And I recall we didn’t know she was about to pass away but she asked us to sing. Her favorite song was one of the only songs I led at the time. It was called All the Way. I remember singing that song. She was pretty low, she was pretty sick and her stomach was extended. She’d open her eyes and she’d say sing it again. We’d sing it again. She opened her eyes and say sing it again about three minutes. And we’d sing it again…we probably sang that song 10 times. By the tenth time I literally felt the roof of the building lift. It felt the sky open up. I felt the room shift. And so for me I realized for the first time it wasn’t about chords or harmonies. It was really a spiritual experience.

PLAY AARON SINGING

Aaron could feel the song vibrating in his chest. He felt the potential to heal himself but didn’t fully recognize that until years later.  

In 2007 Aaron graduated from Cal Arts with a degree in photography. Most of his friends were getting jobs and moving to LA.

AARON: I remember those three years, I was trying to move to LA and be like a superstar and be like, whatever all my peers were doing, but I couldn't get a job in an apartment in 2008, the economy was about to collapse on us. So I moved back home and those three years … And I had the privilege of time to drive him to a small church in Los Angeles, drive him every other son that LA I would drive an hour and a half there an hour and a half back. As a pastor who was very skilled, um, for him to get done preaching and say, how was it, how was it, how did it go? Anything I can think about? And I might share a couple of simple pointers of things that I saw or said, okay, great. He would still even look for my feedback as he was a veteran pastor at that point. 

So for those three hours driving back and forth to LA Aaron got to know his dad in a new way as an adult and really took in his message at church. Aaron cherished this time connecting with his dad.

Three years went by. It was 2010. Aaron was at home with his brother, sister, mom and dad. His dad was outside changing the fuel pump on his truck. The sun had gone down so Aaron went out to check on him. The first thing he noticed was the lights were out. It was dark. Something was wrong.

AARON: It was a horrific scene. The majority of his body was burned. The only thing that was left that was cloth on his body was his boots. Um, and his tongue of his boot was on fire. That's what I saw. It was a little like candle kind of burning and smoldering when I got out to him. It was dark because when the lights shorted out, it knocked the breaker out. The lights were all out so I saw a fire 15-20 feet from where the truck was. He had been rolling on the ground, trying to put the fire out. Um, prior to he had rolled about 15 feet away from the truck before he stopped and passed away. And so when I got to him, I said, daddy, daddy, daddy. And the third time, um, I felt, and all I could describe it is as a spiritual hug. What was happening was I was having a complete mental collapse. Realized how much pain he was in my brain collapsing. This energetic hug came up and this held me and it held me there for maybe I don't know, a minute. 

He had a lamp, a light that he was looking at and that light shorted out, had a spark. What I didn’t know but learned from his death the fumes from a gas tank are burning hotter than the gas itself. That spark from that lamp caught the tank on fire and eventually caught him on fire and he burned to death. He probably burned for 10 minutes he passed away by the time I got to him. 

Aaron stood there frozen for a minute. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then he realized he was the one who had to tell his mother.

AARON: And I knew that I opened my mouth at the house to be changed forever. PAUSE And I remember saying, mommy looked at me I had to look at my face of terror and horror. She said, Aaron, what's wrong? I said, daddy is dead. That’s all I said, daddy is dead. And she just screamed. She just screamed for maybe a full, I would say minute, she just screamed. And I just stood there. I wasn't crying. I wasn't having any emotions. I wasn’t having any emotions. I had been trained to just lock this feeling in. 

After his dad died Aaron felt it was his duty to step into his father’s role of taking care of the family and community.

AARON: When I stood over his dead body, I wasn't confused on what I needed to do. Right. I knew if I had to take care of my mother. I knew I had to take care of my sister. I knew I wasn't gonna move outta the high desert like I was planning to do. I was gonna stay right there in the carnage. I didn't have to say daddy what do you want me to do? I knew he wanted me to stay supportive of those folks in our family and how to do it properly. Even though I was unequipped, unready, I had the raw material.

A couple years go by and Aaron is still living in the tiny town of Phelan (FEE-luhn). He accepted that this was where he was going to stay. And at Cal Arts a professor turned him onto earth home building so he was living in a house made of essentially mud. 

He wanted a girlfriend but he hadn’t met anyone he really connected with so a friend convinced him to try an online dating app. He created an OK Cupid profile. But Aaron wasn’t finding anyone who really got him.  

AARON: So people look at me, ‘oh Aaron, he's pretty cute. What's going on?’ And they’re talking to me, I'm like, yeah, I'm building this earth dome. They’re like, oh, this brother is crazy. We can't <laugh> My dating game was smothered. I'm choosing to live on the property as my mother I'm building an earth dome. And I think natural building is a high point. As much as my pictures will get them in, but how much I’m explaining my natural living and minimalism, they're like, nah, no, I'm good. Love you. But no, I'm not living in no dirt house with you.’

That’s when he met Camillea, a special ed teacher living in northern California. She had clicked on Aaron’s profile. 

CAMILLEA: Aaron was a 95% match. There wasn’t a whole lot of content on his profile but he did have links to his youtube channel SNIPPET OF YOUTUBE VIDEO HERE (laughs) I didn’t watch them all at once (laughs) I watched a couple videos of this person I’ve never met before. I was really intrigued by his passion, his vision for life. He has charisma you don't have to be in the same room with him to feel.

AARON: Camillea clicks on my profile and I'm like oh snap. She had this like natural hair vibe going on. I'm like, oh snap, I need to reach out. And so I reached out and it went really well. And I could tell that she was suspicious of my natural building and, and living in this earth house. And she lived in this beautiful home, uh, apartment in Fort Bragg, which is Northern California maybe two blocks from the beach. And I remember getting to her house the first time. I'm like, oh, this is a hard sell…

Aaron arrived with four questions to really get to know someone.

CAMILLEA: What are four topics that would make your heart rate rise? When do you feel your most sexy and confident? What are you looking for in a potential companion? And tell me about your spirituality. So pretty deep for first four questions.

AARON: One of the questions I asked her is there are four topics that, um, you would feel uncomfortable talking to me about. Um, and she went through four and she reverses to ask do you have four topics. And one of my topics was the death of my father. I said, I will talk about it but it’s heavy. It's hard for me to talk about. So she says, Aaron, tell me. She said, tell me what happened. And so I told this story and I told her very detached. 

CAMILLEA: There was no change in his emotions. 

LAUREL: Do you remember what you told him? 

CAMILLEA: I remember asking him are you able to feel what you’re saying to me and h e didn’t answer at first. Few weeks later maybe a few months later he came to me and said I’ve been sitting with that question and no, but I want to.

So every Thursday night Aaron drove an hour and a half to two hours in traffic to see a  therapist in LA. 

AARON: And she noticed that where I would have to pause to take a breath was when I say, I told my mother, my father was dead and I would pause, and the tears would kind of, kind of come up and I would finish the story.

After so many years of locking away his emotions, Aaron was afraid to release the floodgates. But he had made a promise to Camillea and to himself. He felt it was critical for his personal growth and for his growing career as a Black community leader. 

After about a year and a half of therapy Aaron went to a workshop in LA where his therapist was also participating. A Black woman leading the group of about 25 mostly people of color was helping a woman tap into her own grief. Then the facilitator asked the group to break into twos.

AARON: And so I’m like oh, how can I get outta this room? I'm like, oh, I'm about to cry. I haven’t cried in like 20 years. And of course my, my counselor comes up, Hey, Aaron, you wanna do the session? She knew she knew I was running from this. And so she sits down with me. She says, tell me about how your father died. And I told the story and I get to that point when I said, daddy is dead. I said that part of the story. And I like, hold my tears. And this is probably the hardest time I ever held it. She listened to the end of the story. She goes, tell me again, what you told your mom. I started crying. Bam she knew I was, I was fighting. I started weeping and weeping and she didn't clap or cheer oh my God, Aaron, 50 years of black oppression and 50 years of patriarchy, she said I’m right here. I'm right here. 

It had taken him three years since his father’s death but Aaron could finally access his grief. PAUSE

LAUREL: Did other’s notice a difference in you?

AARON: Yeah. I mean, my wife, she saw this evolution happen overnight. It was almost overwhelming for her. She was like, oh my goodness, who is this? I love him. But man, he's a different human being. He's evolving so quickly. My family definitely, I mean, I'm known in my family as the strong one in quotation marks. Like if some carnage happens, I'm the one that shows up. I'm the one that holds it without having any kind of emotions. Um, that's my actual MO. And so for me, they oftentimes notice how much weeping and sharing I did, how much I open discussion around touch, how much I was thinking about by living in my family, how I fought for touch and didn't get it most of the time. So it was a huge conversation that took place in my family structure as I kind of evolved.

Aaron felt such a profound shift that he thought maybe he could help others. He even posted a video about it on youtube and went to another workshop in Seattle, this one specifically for Black men. There were probably 20 people in the room.

AARON: The facilitator comes in the room and says walk around and when you see a black man, I want you to stop in front whatever black man you happen to be in front of I want you to look at him and say, black man are good. What is this? This is the most bogus workshop I've ever been to? What kinda facilitator is this? And I'm walking around. And I stop. And I look at him and I say, black men are good. He looks at me. He says, black men are good. And then I hear someone in the, the corner room start crying. I was like, shoot. And now I'm holding it in. <laugh> Within 20 minutes, we're all weeping, just weeping and holding each other, going black men are good… The facilitator gave us an opportunity to just see each other. And we remind ourself of a message that we never get of that container, which is black men are good. 

CAMILLEA: It’s not safe in our society, especially in public spaces. That message is conditioned very early on for them.

Today Aaron travels around the U.S. to facilitate workshops that explore racism, oppression, and privilege in schools and businesses. 

On the family farm in Phelan he and his now wife Camillea raise dogs, of course, along with ducks, turkeys, and chickens. 

A couple they’d met living in Compton south of LA reached out to Aaron and asked if their 18 year old son could come live with him, would Aaron be willing to work with him? He’d been in and out of trouble and needed a fresh start. So Aaron and Camillea opened up their home to him. 

Now they have three young men they mentor. Part of the program is giving them a consistent routine and getting them back to nature. And in Phelan that means they help take care of the animals.

Recently Aaron was getting ready to facilitate a workshop and came to say goodby to one of his mentees.

AARON: Young man, you muck the pen, I'll be back a couple days, takes you about two hours to do, but I'll give you three days to do it.

Aaron comes back and he can tell the duck pen hasn’t been cleaned. So he goes to his mentee and asks him, did you muck the pen.

AARON:  He's like, yeah. I mucked. It just lying. Right. And I'm like, now I've been raising ducks for like two years. I know that he didn’t clean it. And they just, they just messed it up before, got backs, lying badly. Like it not even good lying. 

Aaron was getting frustrated but knows yelling at him isn’t going to help. 

So they went back and forth until finally his mentee got up to leave.

AARON: I said, you, if you go out the back door, you'll have this chore for as long as you live here. But if you stop and come and talk to me for five minutes, you'll never M a duck pin again in your life. And I saw his body go from like, Ugh, froze, shoot. 

Aaron walked to the living room sat down and waited for him. 

AARON: I said, when was the last time you had three minutes in the last 12 months where someone platonically and thoughtfully held you physically. He looked at me, he thought for a minute. And he said, I can't think of three minutes in last 12 months where I was thoughtfully held. And I said, boom. If I asked him, when's the last time you were physically assaulted? When's the last time you had handcuffs on? When's the last time he could just rattle off hours and months of physical assaults upon his body. …I said, how far back we gotta go. We went all the way back to five years old, no surprise on his grandpa's lap. And as he was telling me, he went back to that moment. And he, I saw his face just light up when he started to remember being held thoughtfully platonically by his grandfather. And I looked at him, I said, are you open to give me a hug right now? He said, no, no, no. Don't gimme a hug right now. I said, are you open to talking about it? He said, yeah, we can talk about it but don’t touch me.

So the next morning Aaron checked in with him.

AARON: Every morning we had we'd call check-ins every morning, eight o'clock. We would sit the table and I ask the same questions every morning. How you doing physically? How you doing mentally? How you doing spiritually? And I would say this, can we talk about touch? That was a routine. I thought we could do that for maybe three months. And then in three months I would have worked through his trauma story enough that we would get to him, able to actually receive safe, touch from another black male in a platonic way and start working on his trauma stories around that. And that was not the case. It took 12 months 

It wasn’t until a whole year after that initial conversation when Aaron was getting ready to leave.

AARON: I was about to go on a trip to Oakland to do a workshop…and I said, oh, I'm gonna leave. He says, great. Can I have a hug? Now I could have screamed. I could have Ah, oh my gosh. I could have did that. But I had to remember, remember the counselor helped me. Like it goes normal. Just like holding that simple. I see all of you. He gave me the best side man hug I have yet to receive in my life. He gave me the side hug and I was like, oooh? PAUSE

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

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This episode was produced and hosted by me, story edited by Camila Kerwin of the Rough Cut Collective, music from Blue Dot Sessions. Annie Gerway creates original illustrations for each episode. You can see them at 2 lives dot org or on our social sites -- Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @2LivesPodcast.