Growing up, Terry Crews did everything he could to protect his mother from his abusive father. He delivers a tearful speech on how to overcome trauma, love yourself and own your story.
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00:00 My earliest memory is my father hitting my mother in the face
00:04 as hard as he could.
00:06 And I remember seeing her on the floor
00:09 and then looking at him, this giant of a man, who I thought,
00:14 my God, he says he loves her.
00:18 What is he going to do to me?
00:22 And all I could think is how I wanted to protect her.
00:29 How I wanted to protect her and how wrong it was.
00:35 And I said, I got to be strong.
00:37 And I got to get strength so that I can protect her.
00:42 And every time he came home, we were scared.
00:47 We didn't know.
00:48 I literally wet the bed till I was 14 years old,
00:52 because I didn't know what was going to happen.
00:54 I would wake up to glass breaking, sounds,
01:00 people screaming.
01:02 And it was a nightmare.
01:03 We lived a nightmare for years.
01:07 And I remember my mother coming into our room
01:11 and saying, we're leaving.
01:13 Pack our stuff.
01:14 We're out of here.
01:15 And we would grab everything we had.
01:17 We put it in garbage bags.
01:19 And we'd tie it up, and we'd wait to go.
01:22 And then she'd come back in, and she'd say, we can't go.
01:26 We can't leave.
01:28 Where am I going to go?
01:30 And I just remember feeling like, let's go anywhere.
01:33 I don't care.
01:33 We can be on the street.
01:36 But she couldn't do it.
01:38 And he went on terrorizing us, terrorizing us, whatever.
01:44 And it was like, what could we do?
01:47 We have to understand.
01:49 That people in this situation feel entirely hopeless.
01:55 Hopeless.
01:57 We were hopeless.
01:58 So many things.
01:59 I thought, I'll never be like that.
02:01 I'll never do that.
02:02 But then I picked up a lot of other damaging things
02:06 that come from that trauma.
02:08 A lot of other things that had been assimilated into my life.
02:12 Here I am.
02:13 As a man, I felt like, hey, it's my time.
02:17 I felt like, hey, it's my way or the highway.
02:21 I remember times with my daughter, Adrielle,
02:24 and I would yell at her as if she was a 30-year-old man.
02:27 I constantly apologized, constantly called them
02:30 and say, I'm sorry.
02:33 I'm sorry.
02:34 Daddy didn't get it.
02:36 Daddy missed it.
02:37 And that woke me up.
02:40 It woke me up.
02:41 It was a catalyst.
02:42 It changed my life forever.
02:44 Because here I was, a very successful man.
02:47 Very successful.
02:48 But what you have to realize is that success is the warmest
02:52 place to hide.
02:55 Does not matter what you look like.
02:57 It doesn't matter.
02:57 Anyone, anywhere can be victimized.
03:00 And no man, woman, or child should ever
03:04 put up with being treated as less than a human being, ever.
03:08 How did we get that far off?
03:11 When people are looking the other way,
03:14 when the whole thing is geared where you can't ask for help,
03:17 where you are going to lose your job.
03:20 Or if you bring it up, how in the world
03:23 are you going to afford an attorney
03:25 in order to fight this case?
03:27 You need three things in order to come forward
03:29 with a lot of your damage and the things that's happened to you.
03:32 You need distance emotionally.
03:33 You need distance financially.
03:35 And you need distance physically.
03:38 Coming out with your story is probably
03:40 one of the hardest things ever.
03:42 And this is one thing I love about what Safe Horizon
03:45 provides, is a safe haven, this place to go,
03:49 the services that people need.
03:51 And I'm telling you, this is my company.
03:54 This is more valuable.
03:55 I'm promoting the movies, the TV shows, the whole thing.
03:58 But I want to talk about this.
04:01 I want to talk about this.
04:03 Because it's fixable.
04:06 Understand, this is something that we can be deprogrammed.
04:11 This is something we have to speak up.
04:14 You can see it, but you have to show people
04:17 you are changing the world.
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