The Chair Movement - Hidden in Plain Site

I remember the night I first met the chair.

It was past midnight in our house in Beaumont, California. My two teenagers were asleep upstairs. I lay in bed with headphones on, handful of frozen dark chocolate chips crunching beneath my teeth to mask the earthiness of the dried magic mushrooms. I bit down, closed my eyes, and let the walls dissolve into the vast black chamber of my mind.

Over the previous four years, I hunted for hope. I’d sat across from EMDR specialists, bipolar‑informed psychiatrists, child‑abuse counselors, and couples therapists—each offering tools that soothed symptoms but never touched my core trauma. I listened to books on tape: Facing Codependency, Healing Your Lost Inner Child, Feeling Great, and now The Body Keeps the Score. I’d spent time in and out of therapy my whole life—once in a mental hospital in Tampa at ten—collecting coping tools in every session.

My trauma therapist explained how psilocybin could grow new neural pathways in a brain scarred by PTSD. Most of my pathways were locked around fear, primed to dissociate at the slightest thought. With careful, intentional use of mushrooms, she said, I could forge new routes to face and heal buried memories. The idea terrified me—letting my mind wonder often sent me tumbling into dissociation itself—but I was determined to try.

Session after session, I stood barefoot before a trembling black egg hovering over an empty floor. That egg held three and half years of childhood I could not remember (1988–1992), years I’d sealed away to protect my sisters. I screamed at it, clawed at its shell, and deployed every therapy technique I learned, all to no effect. Each attempt dissociated me back into my bed.

One night, battered and raw, I noticed that the moment I stared at the egg of trauma, I was expelled. So, I decided not to look at the trauma. It was then I understood that if I did not look, I could stay in the room. I then started to look around the vast dark room. As I was looking around, I heard a calm voice ask, “What color is the grass?”

In that moment I got an understanding! I could slowly unlock my trauma in this dark room. So I bent over and said, “What color is the Grass?”

As soon as I said it the floor burst into blades of Kentucky bluegrass, each glistening with dew. I reached to touch it, feeling new neural connections sparking beneath me—but before my fingers brushed a single blade, I was yanked out so hard it physically hurt.

Once I came too, I realized that I had not been fully dissociated back to my bed, but instead was in my head outside of the room. Rage ignited. I kicked in the wall. I screamed and threw every tool I’d learned—all at once. Nothing even scratched the trauma. I screamed punched, clawed and ripped myself apart in pure rage so loud the chamber echoed my fury. I sank to my knees, gasping, convinced I was doomed to roam that void forever.

Then another voice, calm and unwavering, said: “This is a problem. Overcome it.”

In my hand appeared a simple White Plastic Chair—spotless, weightless. A tether I realized. I placed it down in the darkness facing it away from the trauma. As I sat, I instantly felt grounded and anchored. The chair hummed with steady energy, holding me present through the fear.

With this confidence that if I sat in the chair, I could not get lost again back in my trauma. So, I said again, “What color is the grass?”

Green flooded the chamber—and this time, I stayed.

That breakthrough changed everything. As I let my mind wander, new pathways formed around the old trauma. Week by week, the black walls receded into fields of green, flowers bloomed, and warm sunlight filtered in. Memories surfaced—laughter, fragments of songs, the comfort of a sister’s hand in mine. And gradually, I realized those faint voices guiding me were my alters—my hidden selves doing their best to survive.

When I finally opened my eyes back in my bedroom, dawn was breaking. I wiped tears and sweat from my cheeks, as I laid beside my wife. My kids slept, unaware their father had navigated the deepest shadows of the mind—and returned.

In February 2025, after healing myself to co‑consciousness, I sat with a trauma therapist who gave my journey a name: Dissociative Identity Disorder. The diagnosis took three days just to start the questions and a month before I could grasp any meaning. DID—affecting about one percent of people—carries a stigma so unreal that many clinicians still dismiss its existence. I knew more about DID than most doctors I’d seen. It was profound to discover I’d been a prisoner inside my own mind for thirty‑five years.

DID is real. It traps children, soldiers, kidnapping victims, cult survivors—anyone whose brain forged a life‑preservation mechanism few know about and many deny. The more people learn, understand, and believe, the more prisoners we can bring home.

Now, when I photograph empty chairs for my “The Chair Movement” series, I think of that White Plastic Chair. Each vacant seat stands for a survivor hidden in plain sight. Let’s save lives by education—and begin “The Chair Movement!”