James Fitzgerald Therapy PLLC

From Surviving to Becoming — My Journey of Conscious Transformation

Before this book became a manuscript, it was experiences, relationships, family, education, knowledge, and memories. A body full of sensations that didn’t make sense. A mind running too fast and too wide to be easily understood. A heart carrying the wounds of trauma, isolation, otherness, rejection, and neglect. And a spirit that, despite everything, refused to be extinguished. This is not the story of a perfect life or a seamless healing arc. It’s the story of a life lived through the cracks — and the conscious choice, again and again, to grow toward the light.

I was neurodivergent before I had the language for it. Long before I ever heard the words autism or ADHD, I felt different. Not just quirky or misunderstood, but fundamentally at odds with the world around me. My brain worked in patterns others didn’t see. I felt like an alien dropped off on Earth to study humans, always waiting for the day for my ship to return and take me home. Throughout my life, I had been diagnosed with every code you could think of: ADHD; GAD; MDD; OCD; AUD; SUD; and PTSD, but the one accurate code, ASD, somehow missing.

I had all the traits you would expect. Pathological demand avoidance. Rejection sensitivity. Extreme reactions to transitions and changes in daily routines. I didn’t allow my separate foods to touch on my plate. I completed any daily task, activity of daily living, or work duty with precise ritualistic pattern. I organized everything I owned into neat systems. My sensory world was often overwhelming. Clothing irritation, sensitive to types of fabrics, food texture, light sensitivity, noise sensitivity, shut down in large crowds. I had self-soothing “stims” and “tics.” I would constantly “fidget.” I practiced ritualistic repetitive movements with hands, feet, fingers, legs, etc. I hummed melodies that I had heard or made up. I was able to discern the nuance of different tones and rhythms in musical pieces. I had chronic bronchitis, yearly ear infections, asthma, allergies, and poor eyesight.

Social norms felt like codes no one had given me the key to. I internalized the confusion and isolation, quietly absorbing the message that I was shy, awkward, quirky, broken, difficult, sensitive, or too emotional. I was never able to form more than one friendship at a time, and I became over-attached to them. I had difficulty navigating a romantic relationship and friendships outside that primary relationship. Labels like nerd, geek, freak, or weird, were silently glared but never quite spoken. I talked to the cliques, but never fit into any one clique. In the third grade, I was reading at an eighth grade level, and when I was in High School, a part of me felt like I was somehow smarter than most of the teachers, reading at a PhD level, and the school work was boring, repetitive, mundane, and not intellectually stimulating enough. I often contemplate the reasons no one ever intervened and provided me with the support I needed. And the answer inevitably was, “masking” and an “addictive personality.”

Childhood was not safe. It was a place marked by a mother and father who were physically present but emotionally unavailable. Both my parents smoked 2 packs of cigarettes per day. They smoked in the house and in the car around me and my sibilings. Narcissism shaped the atmosphere with manipulation and control, teaching me to suppress my truth to preserve peace that never lasted. If you can relate to it, I had the “You wait until your father gets home, I’m telling him how you’re behaving” kind of mother.

My father was someone who I never truly knew, he kept himself isolated from the world after serving wartime duty in Vietnam as a US Marine. Love for my parents was transactional, devoid of joy, and obligatory. Emotions were weaponized or suppressed. Boundaries were ignored and autonomy was not nourished. No one asked how I felt. No one noticed how I disappeared inside myself. My parents would literally have to throw something at me to get my attention away from the TV. My autistic “specific interests” were dancing, fitness, karate, movies, television, books, music, and HipHop culture.

The 70’s and 80’s counter-culture helped define my self-worth and value. Pop culture helped raise me when the people who should have didn’t. Music gave me a language for pain and hope. Movies gave me glimpses of alternate lives and futures. Television taught me empathy, diversity, equity, inclusivity, and complexity long before therapists or college did. My personality was shaped by lyrics, monologues, fictional characters, and stories that mirrored the chaos and creativity inside me. I saw myself in outsiders and rebels, in artists and truth-tellers, in the weirdos who refused to fit in. Those stories saved me. They gave me a map — and now I’m writing one of my own.

By adolescence into early adulthood, trauma had taken up residence in my nervous system. Physical and sexual abuse and assault, bullying, neglect, isolation, loneliness, and rejection were now parts of me I exiled. I was neurotic, anxious, and depressed, constantly dysregulated or numb, and always performing to survive. I needed and thrived on external validation and admiration, seeking connection I could not achieve. I sought refuge in substances and addictive behaviors. At first, they were the only things that slowed my racing thoughts or dulled the sensory overload. Then they became the only things I could count on. Addiction isn’t about pleasure — it’s about anesthesia. And I needed numbness more than anything.

Throughout my journey, relationships didn’t last, jobs were changed frequently, without any exaggeration, I have worked at over 40 jobs in my lifetime, 3 attempts at college in 1987, 1994, and 1996, marriages ended in divorce, and intimacy was something I never truly grasped. Was love reciprocal or transactional? No one taught me. There was an automobile accident due to impulsivity and inattention that I shouldn’t have survived, 3 marriages, 3 divorces, raising 2 sons from a distance, death of my grandmother, death of my sister, death of my father, death of my step-father, unemployment, underemployment, surviving suicide, poverty, and homelessness. These events altered the course of my life forever. There were days I didn’t know if I’d make it.

And yet.

Something in me refused to stay buried. A part of me — my Self, though I didn’t yet have that word — kept reaching for life, for meaning and purpose, for freedom. That part whispered that there was more than this. That part dragged me to therapy — again and again. Sometimes it helped, sometimes it didn’t. But I kept going. I kept trying. I started meditating again. I danced. I moved my body. I went to twelve-step meetings. I sat in rooms full of strangers and told the truth for the first time in my life. I cried. I prayed. I wrote. I worked. I learned. I sweat. I listened. And slowly, something shifted. I wrote my “life’s plan” and started implementing it.

At 43 years old, I walked back into a college classroom. Not to escape, but to rebuild. I studied psychology, sociology, web-design, biology, psychiatry, pharmacology, health psychology, neuroscience, business, writing, literature, health science, fitness, nutrition, environmental science, law, politics, economics, and philosophy — trying to understand what rules us, what makes us tick, what breaks us, and what heals us. I wanted to know why we believe what we believe, do the things we do, think what we think, and feel what we feel. I earned my undergraduate degree with the hunger of someone who had waited too long to be seen and heard. Then I went further. I finished graduate school, clinical training, internship, supervision, testing, licensure. I earned my stripes not just through academia, but through decades of lived experience.

I worked in residential and crisis intervention programs with people fighting for their lives. I worked the night shift at an inpatient psychiatric unit for a hospital, watching the rawest moments of mental health crises unfold under fluorescent lights. I worked at a designated agency’s intensive outpatient program for my Master’s Degree internship. I offered compassion and presence when little else was available. I helped run groups in community centers, volunteered for public health campaigns, and supported people navigating substance use, trauma, and homelessness. I became an outpatient MAT clinician, offering care and harm reduction in a system often marked by judgment. I built a private practice rooted in integrity, intersectionality, and deep respect for the people I serve.

And throughout it all, I practice what I teach.

Mindfulness is not just a technique I teach. It’s the core of my survival — and my liberation. Self-care is not selfish, it is self-compassion. It is how I cultivate and nurture friendship with the different parts of my Psyche. Yoga, physical activity, and exercise is not just a wellness suggestion. It’s how I regulate my nervous system, process emotion, and reclaim ownership of my body. Nutrition is not about aesthetics — it’s about sovereignty, about knowing how to nourish myself with care and intention. Every chapter of this book reflects a principle I live by. Not perfectly, but persistently. Because the work I offer to clients is the same work I return to every single day in my own life.

I’ve learned that healing isn’t linear. It’s cyclical, spiraling, sacred. I’ve learned that transformation doesn’t come from force or performance, but from confidence, creativity, curiosity, compassion, patience, discipline, perseverance, and actions aligned with values. I’ve learned that it’s not about fixing what’s wrong — it’s about remembering what’s right, what’s true, what’s whole. I’ve learned that we cannot separate the personal from the political, the inner from the outer, the psychological from the structural. That therapy without justice is limited. That justice without healing is unsustainable. That both are essential.

I am a paradox, a contradiction, and a divergence. My interests, like my Psyche, exist on a spectrum: from Marvel to DC; from Star Trek to Star Wars; from A-Team to Golden Girls; from Jazz to Rock; from Stephen King to Karl Marx. This book is the culmination of a life lived in pursuit of wholeness. It’s a love letter to the neurodivergent, the traumatized, the sensitive, the recovering, the seekers, the misfits, and the revolutionaries. It’s a guide for those who know there has to be another way — and are ready to walk it. Every lesson in these pages was earned. Every insight is lived. And every word is an invitation: not to be like me, but to be more fully yourself.

Because you, like me, are not broken. You are becoming. You are already whole. You are worthy of a life that reflects your truth. And it is not too late. This book may turn out to be a manuscript for the rebellion and resistance. Welcome to the beginning. The book you’re reading is the map. You are the captain. I am your navigator. “Engage.”