I Survived Abuse, Abandonment, and a Wildfire. This Is How I Healed
In this episode, host Irene Weinberg sits down with author, fine artist, and narrative repair advisor Christopher Wesley to explore his powerful journey of Healing Childhood Trauma. Christopher shares how surviving early abandonment, emotional abuse, and later losing his home in a California wildfire shaped his understanding of loss and self-trust. Through Anthrotonik, his story-driven healing system, he guides individuals to uncover hidden patterns of self-erasure and reclaim their authentic truth. He explains how creative outlets like painting and writing provide language for unspeakable pain when words aren’t enough. Listeners will discover how to reframe heavy personal history as a catalyst for profound personal rebirth and joy. Christopher offers practical insights on shifting internal narratives so you can move from survival into true coherence.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- How surviving early emotional abuse and familial abandonment shaped Christopher’s initial worldview and resilience.
- Christopher’s life work as a “narrative repair advisor” and his “Anthrotonik” story-driven healing system.
- The personal impact of losing his home in the Eaton Fire and the passing of his mother just weeks later.
- Using music, writing, and fine art to process unspeakable emotions and find language for heartbreak.
- Christopher’s experience facilitating art classes for cancer patients and caregivers, teaching them to create without judgment.
- Understanding how grief is not just about losing people, but losing parts of ourselves, and how to hold grief and joy simultaneously.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS CHRISTOPHER WESLEY:
- Can you tell us about your experience navigating the Eaton Fire in California and losing your home?
- What forms of healing did you pursue to recover from the severe psychological abuse you endured, and how did you begin to make peace with the pain surrounding your father’s abuse?
- What truths from your own life found their way into your award-winning short story, Regret in Triptych, and what does the story explore about grief and regret?
- How did your journey lead you to become a narrative repair advisor, and how does your story-driven healing system, Anthrotonik, help people process what once felt unspeakable?
- How did that exhibition help you combine and validate all the different creative parts of yourself, like poetry, music, acting, and fine art?
- Why do you believe healing matters for people who have carried pain in silence for years, and what wisdom would you leave them with about finding joy again?
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I Survived Abuse, Abandonment, and a Wildfire. This Is How I Healed
I hope this message finds each of you so very well. I am speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I could not be more delighted to welcome Christopher J. Wesley, who is an author, a fine artist, and a narrative repair advisor. Christopher’s life’s work reveals how grief, loss, and profound life disruption expose the hidden stories we’ve been living inside.
Through Anthrotonik, his story-driven healing system, he helps people uncover their buried narratives and recognize their survival roles shaped by trauma so they can rebuild a life grounded in truth, coherence, and self-trust. Christopher’s own journey into this calling began with surviving his own deep emotional wounds and recognizing that people often carry invisible stories long after the original hurt has passed.
For Christopher, imagination, story, and creative expression were not luxuries. They were his lifelines. As they helped him make meaning of his life and reclaim lost parts of himself, he began to understand how grief can expose the beliefs and patterns that quietly govern a life. Through fiction, fine art, and private narrative work, Christopher helps others find language for what once felt unspeakable, make meaning from what they’ve endured, and rebuild lives that feel more honest after heartbreak.
Christopher has walked through profound personal losses from childhood abandonment and abuse to the grief he later fictionalized in his award-winning short story titled Regret in Triptych, which explores the sorrow of losing a wife and the heavy weight of regret when someone you love is gone. He also enjoyed the devastation of the Eaton fire in California and the death of his mother one month later. He shares these experiences not to dwell in pain, but to offer a lantern to anyone still in the dark. He believes that even when the path ahead is invisible, there is always a way through, a truth he embodies with humility and hope.
I’m looking forward to talking with Christopher, who is joining us from Pasadena, California, about the healing power of creative expression, painting, writing, and the simple act of letting something honest rise to the surface. We’ll talk about his painting classes for cancer patients and caregivers, the moving story of his first art exhibition, and his insight that grief isn’t only about losing people, but also about losing pieces of ourselves. Healing, Christopher reminds us, is the journey of bringing those pieces back into the light.
Christopher, you are certainly a person filled with light. It is such a pleasure to welcome you to the show.
Thank you. I appreciate being here with you.
Thank you. It’s a blessing for both of us. I was telling Christopher before we started that I can relate to a lot of his story. I wasn’t in a pleasure boat either growing up. He’s healed, and it’s so admirable. A lot of people will feel they’re being supported as they know about Christopher’s story. Let’s start with your early beginnings. Can you share how childhood abandonment and emotional abuse shaped your earliest sense of self and the story you believed you were living inside?
Uncovering the Hidden Roots of Childhood Trauma
When my mother left my father, she took my younger sister with her initially and left me and my older brother. He was five years older than me.
You were how old?
I was five years old. My father was always golfing. He was always going on golf trips. One weekend, he said he would take my brother and me with him on the golf trip. I was excited. I have always loved traveling. I always loved going to new places. Before we were going to leave, he said, “Your brother can’t go. He has something he has to do.”
I went on that trip with my dad and enjoyed myself. I spent the whole weekend trying to memorize all the different things, so when I got home, I could tell my brother what it was like. We got home. My dad put the key into the front door and unlocked it as quickly as he opened the door. I ran into the house, ran up the hallway to our bedroom, and realized not only was no one there, but all of my brother’s things were gone.
What a shock.
My father came behind me and said that my brother had moved to my mom’s house. While I had a great time over the weekend, my father is generally angry and violent. I understood in that moment that as alone as I felt and as sad as I felt, I could not cry because if I cried, I would get beaten.
Did you use to hear, “I’ll give you something to cry about.” That’s what I used to get.
I heard it enough that I knew not to even tempt it. In that moment, I understood that no one was going to save me. That shaped the idea of, “What did I do to not be saved?” I felt that there was something inherently wrong with me something that I wasn’t worthy somehow. The first opportunity I got, I asked my mom, “Can I move in with you, too?” She moved around the block from us. She was about seven houses away. In my father’s house, everything was draconian. In my mother’s house, they had their own bedroom with a TV in it.
How mean. How cruel.
In my father’s house, we would eat dinner. In the living room, we had a table that we’d sit at. My father would sit where he could see the TV. He had me sit across from him so that my back was not just to the TV, but I was close enough in proximity to his angle for the television that he could see if I turned around. I could get hit if I turned around and tried to look and see what I was hearing.
You were not allowed to be a human being in any way. Whatever he wanted, that’s what you did.
By the age of seven, I started believing in reincarnation. That was the only thing I heard that could make sense of why I was enduring this. Looking at my brother and sister and seeing this completely different life, I figured that in a past life, I had been such a horrible person. I had done so much damage.
Karma.
Childhood survival patterns aren't personal flaws; they're scripts built to protect you when you had no other choices. Share on X
This was my recompense.
Tell me. Did you ever ask your mother, “Would you take me, too?” I know you couldn’t pose it to your father, but did you ever ask your mom, “Do you realize that I’m not having a pleasure boat over here?”
She never changed her answer from the first time I asked all the way up until she died. My stepfather was not used to kids. She had pressed her luck by letting my younger sister and older brother move in with her. There was no room for me.
That was it?
That was it.
How did you get along with your stepfather? Did you have any relationship with him at all as time went on?
I wouldn’t say it was a stepfather relationship. At the age of ten, the courts took me out of my dad’s house, so I moved in with them. When my mom picked me up, we hadn’t even turned off the block I was living on before she warned me that if I caused problems in her marriage, then I was going to get sent back to my dad regardless of what the court said. For me, the entire time I lived with them, I never felt like a child. I never felt like I was somebody’s kid. I was a tenant.
That’s so sad. How did it come to the attention of the courts?
At about fifth grade, my dad sold the house that we were living in, and we moved away. He technically had custody of me. The reality was he kidnapped me. For about a year, my mom had no clue where I was. I know that’s the truth because, to this day, I still remember we would be at the public library. One of the things my dad did get right is he insisted that I read and be literate.
I’d be in the library, picking out books, and my stepmom would come get me and say, “Your mom is on the phone.” This is between ‘77 and ‘79. There were no cell phones. Everything was payphones at this point. I would think, “How did she know I was here?” My stepmom took me to the phone. My dad was holding the payphone in his hand, and then he gave it to me. He would stand over me the whole time I had a conversation with my mom.
That kind of thing would happen. We would be in these random places out in the world. He would call her collect, so she couldn’t trace where we were in the world. He would let me talk to her, but he would stand over me while I spoke. It was understood I needed to be very careful what I said. Anyone who lived in that era remembers. No one stepped in. Your parent could beat you down in public, and nobody interfered.
Did you end up sharing a room with your brother?
When I moved in, we were all three in the same room because my stepfather did not want to give up his den.
Your mother married a narcissistic man. We won’t get into that one for the interview, but that’s my observation.
There were two bathrooms in the house, a full bath and a half. My sister was treated differently, but my brother and I were not allowed to use his bathroom. His name was NC. It was like, “That’s NC’s bathroom.” We would have to walk past his bathroom to the other bathroom to use that. We were taking showers and baths that always depended on his schedule. Usually, we were relegated to washing up in the sink.
I am completely relating to every part of your story from my own experiences. If your life wasn’t challenging enough, we have the story of the Eaton fire. Do you want to tell everyone a little bit about that?
On January 7th of 2025, my wife and I had finished watching something on streaming. I don’t remember what the show was. We said, “We’re going to go to bed early.” Before we went to bed, both of us checked our phones in separate rooms and realized we’d gotten texts from friends saying, “There’s a fire. Are you okay?”
After seeing the text, I went and looked. I could see the glow from our living room window. I calculated it was maybe about three miles away. From where we lived, we were about one mile away from wilderness. At that time, that evening, we had what’s called Santa Ana winds. That night, they were hurricane-force winds without the rain. We found out later that the winds were so strong and carried embers up to three miles.
You were one of the lucky ones.
People say that television is still the boob tube. Due to the programs I watched on television, when I saw where the fire was and calculated with the winds, that was the exact reason. I immediately told my wife, “We’re getting out of here. Grab some stuff now. We’re not waiting for someone to tell us to evacuate.” From watching a couple different shows, I understood that there was potential for traffic.
Navigating Crisis Through Trauma Resilience
There was potential that the wind was carrying embers over our heads and starting fires on our escape route if not now, if we wait, potentially then. Within fifteen minutes of getting those texts, looking out the window, and seeing the fire, we had packed both of our cars with a few things, checked on the two neighbors that we did not see actively evacuating to make sure that they were at least aware, and we were out of there.
You lost your home, and then you had a housing shortage. Where’d you go after that? A month later, you lose your mother. Where did you live if there was a housing shortage and you lost your home?
This is one of the interesting things about what we call family. We were taken in by my stepmother, who has not been married to my father since some time in the ‘80s. My dad got with her when I was about 4th or 5thgrade. She had a boy and two girls. Those are my siblings, even though they’re not blood. The closest I’ve heard is soldiers that have been in combat together.
You were in combat together.
After the fire, she took us in. My stepmother did. I only say the word step for clarification, so other people understand who I’m talking about. The problem there was she was, depending on traffic, two hours away from Altadena. My mother-in-law was still in the Pasadena, Altadena area on hospice. My wife traveling daily, two hours each way, was a lot. This is one of those times when I was grateful for having endured so much in life. I was able to tap into how I’ve navigated very hard situations before while still being able to take care of myself. I was driving it. I was very aggressive about finding a place to live.
Nine thousand structures in the Eden fire alone were destroyed. We had a housing shortage before the fire. Those of us who have survived trauma and learned how to take care of ourselves and how to find joy again, there’s still this part of us that is able to calculate, like, “What’s the real danger? How do I adapt? How do I move through this?”
I’m the same way. It’s a similar trauma. I can relate.
The calculating part of me was like, “We’ve got to find a place now,” while people are still in shock.
You’re huffing it. You’re doing it.
The fire happened Tuesday. We found out Wednesday afternoon that our house had burned down. We signed a lease on the place we’re staying at, a two-bedroom back house, the very next Monday.
Other people started saying, “We can’t find a place to live. How did you do this?” It was because you’ve learned how to anticipate what’s coming down the path. You smell it. You know it.
It was very hard because landlords were raising rent. There was gouging all over the place. I know people that were standing in a room with other people trying to rent, and they were bidding cash to get the place.
Ask yourself what your character would be in a loving environment, then let that answer become your new guiding code. Share on X
Unbelievable. Let me ask you. You go through all of this stuff. Look at what you had to come through. I could list all of mine for about four days. What forms of healing did you pursue to recover from the severe psychological abuse you endured? Did you ever begin making peace with the pain surrounding your father’s abuse and with your father, even?
It started around age twelve. Early on, when I was still ten years old, and I moved in with my mom’s house, I understood deep in my bones that I was messed up. It was in a very bad way. I asked for therapy. She said she was not paying for someone to tell her it was her fault. For those couple of years, I was still withdrawn, angry, and reactive.
Around the age of twelve was when it occurred to me that I could potentially reverse-engineer what I understood that my father had done to tear me down psychologically. Aside from the abuse, he was very good at manipulation. He gaslights like nobody else I’ve ever met. I began deconstructing the types of things he would do.
Deconstructing Internal Scripts to Reclaim Selfhood
By the age of fourteen, I discovered what I think is the most important question I ever asked myself and answered, which was, “If I had grown up in a loving household, what would my character be?” That became my North Star. With no role models in sight, that answer became the role model for me. It became the code that I began living by. That, for me, was one of the foundational pieces.
At the age of fourteen, I found the guitar. You had talked about hearing a voice and having a drive that didn’t come from you. It came from a divine presence. That was me with the guitar. I did not hear a voice, but one afternoon, I’m sitting and watching videos on television, and it hits me, “I need to learn guitar. That is my ticket out of this.” I obsessed over it. I don’t know if you remember the Sears catalog.
I remember it very much so.
I’m a teenager at this point. I carried that thing around the house because it had a guitar in it for about three months. I managed to convince my mom to buy me a guitar for my birthday.
She wasn’t going to give you therapy, but she’ll give you a guitar.
Using Creative Expression as Emotional Medicine
That, in turn, turned out to be therapy because that was my introduction to using creative practice as a means of healing. With the guitar, I was able to express things that I did not have words for, and I did not understand until I picked it up and started playing and letting these things out that I had never had a vehicle for release.
That is another parallel to my story. Not that this is an interview about me, but we have so much in common. My instrument was a violin. I remember being very talented and running around, playing my violin. My father said to me, and it’s typical you’re going to laugh, “You seem to have a musical ability. What do you want to do with it?”
I’m very extroverted. I said, “I’d like to take the piano, or I would like to learn how to dance.” He said, “We have a violin in the house. You will take the violin.” Does that sound familiar? Being the resilient kid I was learning to be, I said, “I’m going to take the violin.” I excelled in it. The guitar was more your passion and choice. The violin was never my choice, but, as you did, I made the best of it. It made him happy, and it quieted him down. It was also a release.
I never will forget when I played those big symphonies and all the release of the emotion. When I was releasing pain, no one could have any idea how much more that was doing for me in that way. It is the same type of thing. I want to ask you about Regret in Triptych. It is an award-winning short story. You fictionalized grief in the emotional weight of regret. What truths from your own life found their way into your story? What else would you like to tell us about Regret in Triptych? Where is triptych? I have never heard of triptych.
In the art world, a triptych is usually a piece of art that is three panels. You’ll see it most often with religious artwork created for a church over the years. I used triptych because it’s a short story told in three chapters. Each chapter is a panel that begins on the outside, then moves into the interior, and then the third and most intense chapter. It goes even deeper inside.
This wasn’t even on purpose, but after writing it and having someone edit it, I realized that the main character, Andros, spends the entire story on the cusp, watching these other two people have the life that he wanted. I didn’t write that piece on purpose. In my mind, it was more about losing his wife. He lost the heart of him in life. At the same time, during his loss, he is watching other people live his dream.
The revelation that he has in the final chapter is one of those things that I had to learn, especially in regard to thinking that all the punishment that I was getting in life was my own doing. It was somehow my fault. I could not figure out why. When I sought counsel from members of my parents’ church, no one ever gave me sufficient answers. The people who knew that I was undergoing all this abuse did nothing to intervene.
Regret In Triptych
I can relate to that, too.
There’s understanding that it was not my fault. I did not do something to earn it. It opened up the world for me where I was like, “That means I can get better. I have to work for it. I have to figure things out.” I learned that that is an actual option. Up until I picked up the guitar, I saw no future. People talk about college. I’m like, “I’m going to wind up dead, or maybe I’ll go to jail first and then die.”
We talk about why people don’t take advantage of X, Y, and Z. Sometimes, people aren’t taking advantage of an option you see because they don’t see it as an actual option for themselves. That’s what I mean when I talk about the stories that are working against us quietly in the background. It’s not surfacing. You’re not thinking, “This could never be for me.” It’s blanked out.
Let me ask you. This brings me to the question. You’re a narrative repair advisor who has to do with all those stories that you blank out from. How did that take place in your life? I’ve never heard of a narrative repair advisor. That’s a very different way to heal through your modality. Would you like to tell us about that?
It was an accident.
There are no accidents. You know that.
That’s true. It was an intersection of two things that initially were not deliberate. Healing myself put me early on, on the self-help track.
You were playing the guitar. Were you also doing therapy? Were you more on your own? Were you, at the time, relying on the music and your resilience?
I was working through resilience. At that time, I was still not far away from suicide, but I was not suicidal. I understood that it was close. I felt I could still figure things out. Throughout that, I was paying attention to self-help stuff and started moving to transformation. I’ve always been in that realm. A lot of that has to do with mindset, neuroscience, and things like discipline and motivation. These are all words that you hear a lot in that realm. That intersected with storytelling.
After writing Regret in Triptych, I started a novel called The Gospel of Wolves. I got about sixteen chapters in and realized the story I’d promised in those sixteen chapters. I did not have the skill to complete it or fulfill the promise that I began. I found a writing coach. I worked with him one-on-one for almost eight years. He wasn’t just teaching me how to write a novel. He was teaching me how we as humans use story like a technology.
He was another surrogate for you also because it was a different relationship with a man, I’ll bet you. That’s what I’m perceiving.
The person you’re talking about is a different mentor. The storytelling one, in teaching me how we as humans learn from story, how we connect to stories, and why the formula we use, for instance, that is used for motion pictures, like the three-act motion picture, was not an accident. That formula came about because it takes full advantage of the way we process stories to help us understand the gravity and weight of what we’re meant to learn and take away from the story.
Rewriting Your Narrative with Anthrotonik
As I’m going through this to work through my own writing, I started realizing, “These things apply to my life. Now I’m starting to catch on to certain things.” When they talk about discipline in the transformation self-help realm, there are certain things I wasn’t able to get. In time, I understood this isn’t a discipline problem or a motivation problem. There is an internal script running in the background of my brain, and it is holding me back. I dig deeper, and I understand that the internal script that’s holding me back used to protect me.
You were working on being a little invisible. It kept you under the radar a little bit.
That is exactly it. When you look at a person that’s a people-pleaser, you’re like, “Why do they keep doing this?”
It’s because they want to stay alive.
There is a script running in them, saying, “This is how I stay safe.” As I developed it to get me through all these things that keep happening in my life, like the fire and my mom dying, I started hearing the vocabulary that other people use and then realizing it’s not because you’re not disciplined. You’re not able to get this because there’s something inside you keeping you safe. When you figure that out, you have a different choice then. You have to figure that out. You have to make that voice understand it does not need to keep you safe for this before you can overcome that obstacle.
Your old defense mechanisms kept you safe in the past, but updating those stories lets you step into true freedom now. Share on X
I can so relate to every word you’re saying. They’re so important. It’s very enlightening. The other thing that I love studying about you and learning about you is that you have painting classes that you teach to cancer patients and caregivers. That must be amazing. They’re having all this trauma, and they’re frightened. God knows what their history is. You’re teaching them through painting to understand themselves better. Could you tell us a little bit about that? How did that happen for you? How lucky and how fortunate that you’re so gifted.
This started because I was part of this artistic community. One of the women in that community would teach creative classes at a cancer hospital. She was going to be on vacation, so she wasn’t able to host one of the classes. She asked me if I would step in, and I did. Typically, I’m not a painter. I do fine art, but it originates as photography, and then I manipulate it inside the computer.
Creating Without Judgment in Healing Spaces
What I wanted to teach the patients was not how to paint. I was using paint as an excuse to deliver what I wanted to teach. That was no matter what they put on the paper, so long as it was honest, it was valid and worthy. The first thing I always do in every class is I ask them to leave everything they think they know about talent and about what it is to be an artist. I’m like, “All of that, you leave outside. There’s no place for any of that here. That’s noise. In here, you have permission to just be.”
I would help them through the painting. Like the paint and sip classes, we would primarily focus on the same painting, but if they chose to do something else where one person is like, “I don’t want to paint a tree. I want to paint the ocean,” then I would distribute my attention between teaching the people that are doing the tree and the person that’s trying to do the ocean.
I know that there’s a terrific story about your first art exhibition. That was part of your healing journey in a way, right?
It was. Over the course of years, I’ve expanded. I started with guitar and moved to piano, voice, audio engineering, music production, acting, working on independent films, both in front of the camera and behind the camera, and doing sound design. I acted on stage. I was a performance poet and all these different things. They had less to do with talent than they had to do with finding new ways to express myself because the previous thing, something broke in it.
I do want to name the writing coach. His name was Art Holcomb. Tim Sweeney is the mentor I’m talking about now. He took me under his wing. He was the first person who helped me accept all the different parts of me and combine them. The part that broke for me. He gave me access to go back and revisit it. Without him, I never would have written Regret in Triptych.
In fifth grade, even though I was reading books from my stepbrother’s junior high library at home because of my father, in my actual class, they were telling me I was reading at a third-grade level. I’ve spent my entire history with school, all the way through high school, being told that I was dumb and that I was not up to the grade level I should be. I was always, in their eyes, behind. In junior high, I wanted to be a writer.
Tim gave me access to revisit that and to write. The first book that I wrote won an award. That opened me up to art. I did take an Art class as a freshman. This was pre-guitar. I thought, “I have a future with this,” because I was a good illustrator. That teacher graded me down because he felt I didn’t have to try as hard as the other students, which turned into an incident because I reacted to that. I wrote a poem about him on the desk, and that got me suspended for three days.
You had to assert yourself in your life to keep overcoming this and that.
Working with Tim, I was like, “I can revisit art, music, and all these things.” I brought all of those things together, the poetry, the video stuff, the music, and the fine art, into this single exhibition. That was the first time I was publicly my full self.
It went very well, right?
Yes.
That was the first time in your life you were validated for who you were and what you could do, probably.
It was.
Tell me. You’ve got Anthrotonik, a way of storing creative expression, helping people process what feels unspeakable and begin rebuilding a life that feels more honest after heartbreak. Was that art exhibition a part of that for you?
Before I had the vocabulary for it, it very much was. The term anthrotonik, I created that myself. It’s taken from the words anthro, meaning human, and tonic being something that soothes. The meaning behind those words is a tonic for the human condition. No matter what life delivers or puts on your doorstep, with imagination, you can turn it into something beautiful.
That’s fantastic. When you think about rebirth, which is what you’ve done in your life, where you’ve rebirthed yourself. What did you have to release? The first thing I would say is it had to be a lot of trauma, but what else did you have to release in order to return to yourself, and you didn’t even know who yourself was yet? You were using it to discover yourself. You’ve transformed yourself. That’s rebirth.
Holding Grief and Joy Simultaneously
The most important point for me is that, in that grief, I’m mourning something that’s no longer there. On the other end of that, I need to figure out how to find joy in the new relationship with what it was that I lost, because I lost something of meaning. Oftentimes, if we take the time, we can find a new relationship with that thing that is no longer there in the way we were used to it being there. We find a new connection to that and find the joy in that. We don’t have a word for it in the English language. Other languages around the world have words for this, where you hold grief and joy simultaneously. That complexity is part of, for me, the grief process.
Let me ask you this also. Do you have a special offer for our audience? I’m sure a lot of people are very moved by your story and may want to learn more or experience more of what you do.
Everyone, I’m gifting the short story, Regret in Triptych. Read that. That’s a great introduction to the way my heart moves through the world. From there, if you want to continue the conversation with me, there are links in the book where you can choose where and how to continue to engage with me.
That’s wonderful. For people who have carried pain in silence for years, what wisdom would you like to leave them with about how healing matters? Some people have never experienced joy. It helps you begin to allow yourself to have joy in your life.
Expression is medicine. How you express yourself can take on a million different forms. It’s as varied and vast as your imagination. It can be through your clothes. It can be through something you put on a piece of paper with a pen or a crayon. It could be as simple as coloring in a book. It can be as big as writing a book.
It’s important to remember that whatever it is that you create and however you express yourself, you don’t necessarily have to share it. First, it has to be for you, and then you can choose to share it when you’re comfortable. The idea is it needs to first heal you, not put you in another position where you’re vulnerable and not feeling safe.
That makes a lot of sense. Do you have anything else that you’d like to share with us before we close? I have a wonderful few words in closing, but is there anything else in your heart that you’d like to tell people?
The type of coaching that I do for people is centered around the idea that the answers you need are within you. It’s not going to be found in somebody else’s concepts or anything like that. Basically, it all comes back down to you. Once you can start understanding and accessing your stories and how you relate to those stories, that is where you start to heal. You can start finding the true joy that is yours to have. As you do that, people will notice. You may not know that they’re noticing, but going down that path, you give other people around you permission. That is a very beautiful thing that not enough people talk about.
When people heal, as you have done, and come through all of this, the literal vibes around them change and invite other people to also do their healing work. They’re like, “I’d like to get to where he is and heal myself.” That’s part of it. As we change, people sense it, and then it helps them. It inspires them. In closing, I want to thank you for bringing such essential insight, honesty, and compassion to our audience.
Through Anthrotonik, the tonic you created to bring the human story back into alignment, you’ve shown us how story art and imagination can become medicine, helping people find language for what was once unspeakable, reveal the patterns of self-erasure grief often uncovers, and begin rebuilding a life that feels honest, integrated, and self-authored.
Your own journey from childhood abandonment and emotional abuse to profound adult losses, the Eaton fire, and the emotional truths woven into your award-winning short story, Return in Triptych, reminds us that people often live inside stories they never consciously chose. Yet, you’ve taught us that story is how humans survive, how we make meaning, and ultimately, how we return to ourselves.
Most of all, thank you for the light you bring to others. You speak about your experiences, not to center pain, but to offer a lantern to anyone still in the dark, reminding us that evil and the way forward aren’t always visible. There is always a way through. From my heart, I wish you abundant blessings always. In the informal way of who I am, good for you.
Thank you so much. This has been such a blessing to get to meet you, speak with you, and have this conversation.
Thank you to both of us. As I like to say, to be continued.
Guest’s Links:
- Christopher J. Wesley
- Connect with Christopher J. Wesley on Instagram
- Connect with Christopher J. Wesley on Facebook
- Connect with Christopher J. Wesley on Substack
- Regret in Triptych
- The Gospel of Wolves
About Christopher Wesley
Christopher J. Wesley is an author, fine artist, and Narrative Repair Advisor whose work explores grief, reinvention, and the stories we build to survive. He is the creator of Anthrotonik, a story-driven approach to healing and self-reclamation that helps people uncover hidden patterns of self-erasure and return to a more coherent, truthful way of living. Through fiction, art, and private narrative work, Christopher helps people find language for loss and meaning for what comes after.
