For most of my twenties and thirties, I lived a contradiction I tried to hide from everyone.

On the outside, I seemed to have my life together–running a photography studio, exhibiting my work, and telling jokes when I had the energy. But I kept away from people a lot of the time, because on the inside, I was a wreck. I never knew when a simple “how are you?” would send my jaw locking, my throat clenching, and my entire nervous system into a tailspin that could last weeks. I called it “hiding my tail.” It was a full-time job, and I couldn’t tell anyone about it, because to me, it was absolutely humiliating–something I had vowed to take to my grave. And to make things worse, I had no clue, no understanding of what was going on inside me.

This was the aftermath of a nervous system collapse I’d had when I was twenty-two. I now understand that is was C-PTSD, but at the time was just a nameless catastrophe that tortured me daily. And I was completely on my own with it, having no idea how to find my way back to the luminous joy I once lived.

Then in 1993, six years after the collapse, I started walking into alleys at night with a camera. I didn’t know why, but I knew the second I stepped into one of those dark, abandoned places, the anxious core of me would go very still. It took me a long time to understand what was happening. But here’s what I’ve come to believe: the ruins were echoes–I would say mirrors, but I hated looking into mirrors back then, so echoes it is. And looking into them was the first thing that gave me any real relief.

The Cost of the Mismatch

If you’ve lived with complex trauma, you probably know the feeling I’m trying to describe. There’s a constant gap between what’s happening inside you and what you allow yourself to show on the outside. The world expects–actually, prefers–a certain version of you: one that is calm, present, and engaged. Thus, you spend every waking minute trying to force this mask while a different reality runs underneath.

That mismatch is exhausting and painful in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it. It’s not just the trauma symptoms themselves. It’s the second job of hiding them. By the time you’ve performed your way through a normal afternoon, you’ve burned through more energy than most people spend in a week. Sometimes a 2-minute conversation would make me want to lie down for a week.

I didn’t have language for any of this back then. All I knew was that being around people felt like wearing armor that was slowly crushing me, that I constantly feared had too many holes where my true self was visible. I needed somewhere I could take off the facade.

What the Alleys Gave Me

The time I ventured into a dark, unlit alley alone, in Montreal in 1993, I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew I was walking into a potentially dangerous place. I should have been afraid–I was in a menacing spot, carrying expensive photo equipment, no one knew where I was; a dangerous character could have walked out of the shadows at any moment. Instead, something else happened. The city noise dimmed. The darkness wrapped around me like a warm blanket. And a soothing, peaceful calm settled inside my body.

I wrote later that I felt “a kinship with everything around me.” That’s the closest I could get. Once my eyes adjusted, I could see the brick walls were gouged and scraped. The ground was streaked with old grease and broken glass. Paint was peeling off a doorway. It was, by any normal standard, an ugly, depressing place. But to me, it felt like the first space I’d walked into in years that made me feel at home.

The alley looked the way I felt. Reviled. Forgotten. Ruined. The kind of place most people don’t want anything to do with. And because it didn’t hide any of its brokenness, it couldn’t pretend to be anything else. I had found a place where I didn’t have to pretend either, and I could finally breathe.

I think this is the part most people miss when they see my photos. They assume I was drawn to dangerous places because I was reckless, or because I had a death wish, or because I wanted dramatic photographs. None of that was true. I went to broken places because, for the first time since my collapse, I had found somewhere my outside world matched my inside world. I was alone in the dark, and the exhausting masquerade simply stopped. In a place that was already broken, I didn’t have to hide anymore.

What Happened When I Started Lighting Them

If the story ended there–broken man finds peace in broken places–it would be a sad kind of comfort: a man learning to live in the shadows. But something more interesting happened. The next day, after my first night of shooting in these rundown urban corners at night, I laid out the photographs on a light table.

I had gone out expecting to return with ugliness. I say “ugliness,” because that was the only honest response I had to what I felt inside, and that’s what I wanted to capture. But somehow, what I’d photographed wasn’t ugly. A faraway mercury vapor streetlight had cast green color over the brick. A faint sodium light had made the rust glow orange. And the moonlight had dusted everything with its own unique beauty. I’d wanted ugliness, but I’d come back with a strange blend of both ugliness and beauty.

It was fascinating. 

I went back out the next night, and the night after that. The same thing kept happening. And eventually I started doing it on purpose – bringing my own colored lights, lighting the walls and the doorways during twenty to forty-minute exposures, transforming each ruin into something theatrical and luminous. I never eliminated the decay. The cracks and the rust and the grime stayed visible in every image. I only changed the light that fell on them, and this changed how they were perceived.

That’s when I started to understand what I was actually doing.

I wasn’t just identifying with these places. I was rehearsing something. Each photograph was a small, repeatable demonstration that something broken could become beautiful without ceasing to be broken. The damage was still there. The light just made it visible in a different way. Over twenty-five years and more than 1,200 nights, I performed that demonstration over and over, in alleys and ruins, until my nervous system finally started to believe it.

What Environment Has to Do With Healing

I’m not a clinician. I can’t write a paper on this. But I’ve thought about it for a long time, and here’s what I keep coming back to:

Recovery, at least the kind I needed, isn’t only about what happens inside your head. It’s also about where your body is. The right environment may not fix you. But the wrong one – the one that demands you perform an exhausting, unsustainable version of yourself–can keep you stuck, and beating on yourself for years.

For me, the “right environment” was the one most people would have called “wrong.” Dark, dirty, dangerous, abandoned. And yet these places allowed me to breathe and to be myself. They didn’t ask me to be anything I wasn’t and that let me drop my armor. And once I could just let my real self be out in the open, something else became possible: I could start working on the broken parts instead of hiding them.

I think a lot of people in recovery are looking for a place like this without knowing it. I don’t recommend you start hanging around alleys and ruins at night for 25 years, but maybe your place is a forest, a garage, a kitchen at three in the morning, a long drive with no destination. Whatever it is, it’s the place where you don’t have to waste energy pretending.

For twenty-five years, mine had broken windows and graffiti and the smell of wet rust. And every time I walked into one of those places, bringing light to the darkness, a little more of my buried light–hiding deep inside of me–started to find its way back.

Photo Credit: Author

Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

In 1987, I walked into a job interview in Montreal and couldn’t say my own name.

I was twenty-two. Two days earlier, I’d been at a party with friends, cracking jokes, feeling like the world was mine. Now I was sitting across from a man who’d asked me the simplest question in the world, “Your name is?” and something was blocking the pathway from my brain to my mouth. My jaw locked. My throat clenched. I started sweating. I finally squeezed out my name, terrified, though I had no idea of what.

That was the beginning. Within days, my ability to hold a simple conversation was destroyed. People became a source of dread. My face would contort, my eyes would twitch, and every interaction was like trying to keep calm while a tarantula was crawling on me. It became impossible. The outgoing, confident guy I’d been my whole life appeared to be dead.

I saw psychiatrist after psychiatrist, but nobody could tell me what was wrong. They treated me for depression and anxiety, but nothing stuck, and nothing made sense for whatever had broken inside me. The condition I was living with didn’t even have a name yet. C-PTSD wouldn’t be a term until 1992, and the WHO didn’t officially recognize it until 2018. The doctors were working with an old map.

So like many others before and after me, I was on my own.

Into the Dark

Six years after my collapse, on a spring night in 1993, I grabbed my camera and tripod and walked out into the city. I had no plan. I was still in the grip of the trauma, and I needed to be somewhere alone, and the darkness of the night just helped me to disappear.

I ended up at the foot of an unlit alley in a rough part of town. I should have been afraid; it was a menacing spot, I was alone, carrying expensive gear in the middle of the night. But something strange happened. I walked in, and the deeper I went, the better I felt. The city’s noise dimmed, the darkness thickened around me like a blanket, and for the first time in years, I felt calm. It was a deep peace I had long forgotten.

In that dark alley, I didn’t have to perform for anyone. Nobody was there to see me struggle. The constant exhausting effort of pretending I was okay simply stopped. In a place that was already broken, I didn’t have to hide anymore.

I set up my camera, and a 25-year practice began.

A Ritual I Couldn’t Explain

I went back the next night. And the next. Over the following weeks and months, going out into dark, forgotten urban spaces with my camera became the only thing I wanted to do. I started seeking out the ugliest, most abandoned places I could find – alleys, ruins, crumbling corners. Something about matching my surroundings to what I felt inside brought relief.

It took me 20 more years to finally understand this was more than photography. I was performing a ritual.

Each shoot followed the same pattern. I would enter a dark, frightening space alone, stand in the darkness until my eyes adjusted, and I could see. I’d carefully compose the crumbling space in the camera, then I’d step into the scene with my lights, and over twenty to ninety minutes, I’d bring color and light to the wreckage, section by section. When I was done, I’d step back, close the shutter, and leave.

Enter the dark place. Stand in it until you can see. Decide how to frame the damage. Then bring light to the darkness, and find ways of making a frightening reality into something beautiful.

I was rehearsing my own recovery in physical space, over and over again, without knowing that’s what I was doing. The camera was recording evidence that the transformation was real. Each photograph was real proof that something shunned and forsaken could become beauty, that you could enter the wreckage and come out with something worth keeping.

The Paradox That Made It Work

One of the strangest things about those years is this: I was not afraid of what everyone else feared, and yet deadly afraid of what everyone else shrugged off as life. A brief conversation could trigger a tailspin that lasted weeks. But standing alone at 2 am in a place where gunshots had just rung out? I was perfectly calm.

It took me a long time to understand why. The danger in the alleys was external, concrete, something I could respond to. The danger that crippled me – social interaction, being seen, being asked to speak – was internal, invisible, and nothing I tried could touch it. In the alleys, my hypervigilance, the constant scanning, became an asset instead of a symptom. My broken wiring was, for once, perfectly suited to my environment.

I’d found the one context where my damage was useful. And without realizing it, I was using that context to slowly repair the damage.

What I Know Now

I did this for twenty-five years. Over 1,200 nights in more than thirty cities. The photographs were exhibited in galleries and museums, covered by the New York Times, PBS, NPR, and ABC. People responded to the images without knowing the story behind them, and that’s how I wanted it. I planned to take that story to my grave, until it became more important to me that the photos be fully understood.

Only while writing my book did I finally learn the name for what had happened to me in 1987. Only then did I begin to see the pattern – that I had accidentally invented a practice that addressed my specific injury with eerie precision. The repetition, the controlled exposure to fear, the physical engagement, the mindfulness in darkness, the transformation of something broken into something beautiful – it mapped onto things clinicians now describe as somatic regulation, graded exposure, and meaning-making. I had no framework and no clinical language. My body just knew what it needed, and it dragged me to the places where healing could happen.

I’m not a therapist. I can’t tell anyone what their body needs, and I certainly don’t recommend the risks I took, which seemed to be calibrated to my specific injury. But I can say this: if you’ve found something that calms you and you don’t know why, pay attention. If you’ve built a ritual that doesn’t make sense to the people around you but keeps you upright, don’t dismiss it. Your body may be solving a problem your mind hasn’t caught up to yet.

I spent twenty-five years not understanding what had happened to me, or what to do about it. But my body knew, and kept telling me.

Photo Credit: User Supplied from their Book: Alley’s & Ruins.

Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer