Episode Details

Content note: This episode includes discussion of childhood abuse, sexual abuse, addiction, and trauma.

What happens when the silence that helped you survive becomes difficult to leave behind?

Author Rich Dunning joins Melvin E. Edwards on Stories from Real Life for a deeply personal conversation about memory, identity, survival, accountability, and the decision to finally tell his story.

Through his memoir, Silence Was My First Language, Rich reflects on a childhood marked by poverty, abuse and instability; the role alcohol played in helping him cope; and the long journey toward sobriety, healing and understanding the ways his past followed him into adulthood.

The conversation also explores the people and places that gave Rich hope, the family he built as an adult, why he chose to take his wife’s last name, and his effort to turn painful experience into something that can help vulnerable children through the First Language Foundation.

Topics include:

* Why silence became a means of survival.

* Childhood abuse, poverty, homelessness and addiction.

* The complicated relationship between trauma and achievement.

* Baseball as an escape and a path toward opportunity.

* Sobriety, accountability and breaking generational patterns.

* Writing honestly about memories that are difficult to revisit.

* Family, fatherhood and the remarkable story behind the Dunning name.

* Supporting vulnerable children through the First Language Foundation.

* And the unexpected return of Rich’s teenage rap persona: Sir Rock.

CORRECTION: During the interview, Rich refers to a book as 10,000 Hours. The book he was referencing is Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which discusses the idea that extensive deliberate practice—popularized as the “10,000-hour rule”—can contribute to high levels of expertise.

Explore Rich’s work: Rich Dunning’s websiteLearn about the memoir: Silence Was My First LanguageLearn about the initiative: The First Language Foundation

Stories from Real Life website

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