Voices for Voices®

When Trauma Returns: David Solomon's Mental Health Battle | Episode 221

• Founder of Voices for Voices®, Justin Alan Hayes • Season 4 • Episode 221

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When Trauma Returns: David Solomon's Mental Health Battle | Episode 221

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David Solomon's face was partially paralyzed when he woke up two days before this recording—not from a stroke or injury, but from trauma finally surfacing after years of suppression. This raw, emotional conversation reveals what happens when survivors finally reach a place of safety and the body begins processing what the mind tried to forget.

"I thought I was trafficked, time to move on and tell my story and it won't affect you—that just isn't the truth," David shares, tears flowing as he describes how healing can sometimes look like breaking down. Through his supportive marriage and faith, David found himself in a safe enough place that his body could finally release what he'd been holding back.

The conversation unfolds David's harrowing experiences: being trafficked and forced to answer to another name, losing his mother under tragic circumstances, wrongful institutionalization, and a minor incident with a smoothie that somehow led to serious criminal charges. Through each revelation, David illuminates how systems meant to protect often inflict additional harm on survivors, and how healing remains a non-linear journey requiring both faith and community support.

This episode offers profound insights for survivors, supporters, and professionals working with trauma. David's vulnerability creates space for anyone who has ever wondered why they can't "just get over it" or why healing sometimes feels like falling apart. Listen now, and join us for part two where David continues sharing his path toward wholeness and helping others through their own trauma recovery.

• Past trauma resurfaces when the body finally feels safe enough to process it
• Being forced to answer to the name "Cody" during trafficking created lasting trauma triggers
• David's mother supported him through multiple traumas including amnesia, blindness, and paralysis
• Wrongful institutionalization after his mother's death compounded his trauma
• An incident involving throwing a smoothie led to serious legal consequences and months of uncertainty
• Multiple systems failures including police, medical institutions, and courts demonstrate how survivors face additional trauma
• Finding home and healing through faith and family support despite ongoing challenges

Join us for part two of this conversation as David continues sharing his journey of healing and resilience.

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Justin Alan Hayes:

Welcome to another episode of the Voices for Voices TV show and podcast. I'm your host, Founder and Executive Director of Voices for Voices, Justin Alan Hayes. Thank you for joining us on this and our over 215 additional episodes in our catalog. Additional episodes in our catalog. So, if this is your first episode, welcome and please subscribe, follow and share. And if this is just another episode that you've been following the whole way, we hope you'll quite the listener and viewership. We want to thank you and again, if you're able to follow, share, let your friends, family know about this. We can get closer to helping those 3 billion people over the course of my lifetime and beyond. So thank you for all the love and support up until this point and as we go forward we couldn't do this without you.

Justin Alan Hayes:

As we become accustomed to, we like to pivot and turn and talk about maybe a topic or two for what may seem like an extended period of time and that I'm sure you've noticed on the probably the last, oh geez, maybe maybe 10, 15, 20 episodes, where, where, where we're really honing in on human trafficking and again that can come on so many different levels, you know, whereas labor or sex, or there's just so many talk about grooming, and it's just all, just all incredible that people get away with this and that we we don't, as a nation, have, as of now, the right safeguards in place to help victims individuals, whether they're children or not.

Justin Alan Hayes:

Children have been a victim of any type of abuse, and that's hard enough, as it is, to go through that.

Justin Alan Hayes:

I don't know that that's like. I haven't personally been through that, but what I have been through is trauma hitting rock bottom mental health-wise, and every day is a journey. You know, since 2017, you know, we've been on the like, the upswing since then, and we just we continue to have good days and we continue to have days, and sometimes extended periods of time that are not degraded, where we have to really reach deep to do the minor things get a shower, brush our teeth, little things that some of us may overlook and say, oh wow, I can't believe they can't do that. That is so easy. Well, that may be so for a lot of people, but it doesn't mean the people are lazy if they're not doing it. There's something going on chemically in the brain that has been affected at some point and another, and so that's why we have we try to have a team of individuals to be with us, to walk with us, to give us some guidance and support.

Justin Alan Hayes:

Let us know how we're doing, if we're steering maybe in the not right direction, but in any event, to have somebody just to really talk to, and that conversation, as well as conversations I've had, is a conversation that our guest today has had by multiple conversations and he's going to share about that and it's going to be a deep dive in the mental health, mental health awareness. Once you get through a form of trauma, whatever that may be, that doesn't mean that everything's over, everything is back to normal.

Justin Alan Hayes:

There are things and they can keep creeping up back into our minds and take us back to that point in time where that trauma was really really the heaviest, and one of those words, one of those phrases, was mentioned today in the conversation with our guests where he wasn't free to do human things himself, that there were others that were dictating his every move and what he could do, what he couldn't do, and so he's going to talk about that in this episode and, if we need to, we'll go on to a second episode, but we should give a good opening to this episode so you have an idea of where, where we're coming from, that this is mental health and trauma related, but it also is related to kind of the flashback time and how not only does the individual who's gone through trauma still go through the trauma, but the extended individuals friends, family, colleagues, people, people you work with you know they they end up being part of it, whether we like it or not.

Justin Alan Hayes:

So, david Solomon, thank you again for joining us on on the Voices for Voices TV show and podcast.

Justin Alan Hayes:

Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Uh, yeah, you just want to really just dive right in uh you know, we had a conversation earlier and yeah, so our listeners and our viewers.

David Solomon:

Yeah, you know I've been going through a series of healing. About two days ago I woke up and part of my face was paralyzed In fact it still is and I learned from the doctor that this is all caused by trauma that you want to forget and put aside, and it cost me dearly two nights of no sleep and not being able to eat straight because of it. I talk to other survivors and this does happen when you get in a relaxing state, when you heal. Over time it can hit you Like a lupus flare-up that my wife has, or a flare of arthritis that you go through and it won't get better until your body accepts the fact that it's over. So it's just been a humbling experience to go through that and learn through that, and I couldn't do it till now because I wasn't in a healthy place. My wife and my son have given me that, that place of healing and that place of belonging and that, that home. You know, no matter where I am, no matter if I, you know, in a in another foreign city and doing a project, I can always come home to my best friend, my wife Amanda, and she will always be that home. And so I realized that I've been home Despite all the stress and all the trauma, and when you finally get to a relaxing place, so to speak, you destruct emotionally because your body can't process things and that's a very hard thing to deal with.

David Solomon:

A hard thing to deal with. I think you know, before we're talking about trafficking and talking about what happened to me and other people it wasn't easy, but I could put it in the past and other people. It wasn't easy, but I could put it in the past. I could cry for hours and then say this happened and I'm okay and I can't do that anymore and and I can't do that anymore. And that's a little challenging to learn. You can only put the problem to bed so many times before you face the Goliath and have to slay it like David did mentally, spiritually, physically. Heartbreaking to learn that. So I got tears just from saying that. So I guess I thought you know it happened.

David Solomon:

I was trafficked, time to move on and tell my story and it won't affect you and that just that isn't the truth. I forgave the person that trafficked me and that didn't stop it. I did everything right that a Christian young man should do to prepare for being a husband and a father and, more importantly, a leader of the household, but also other people that look up to me too, and I've been mocked for it. I have, but I follow God. A lot of people may laugh at that, but I I do no matter what. If he says run, I will run. If he says walk, I will walk. If he says stay, I will stop.

David Solomon:

And from the beginning of two days ago, I faced the reality that God wants me to go through this and all the hurt and all the pain. He wants me to learn from it, because that pain and that suffering can help someone else who has either been trafficked or caught or beaten or bruised in a rough place. There was someone on YouTube a year ago who said I don't break down with emotion, and it's true. I buried that. I wanted to be strong, I wanted to be a rock, I wanted to be a soldier, I wanted to live in the future and not the past, and the problem is you can't run away from your past anymore. So I want to share what I'm going through, and I imagine half a million writers right now are going to have a similar reaction reaction. So I already had a lot of trauma, that I was trafficked and we don't need to go into names or details, we can just say it happened. We can just say it happened.

David Solomon:

The real trauma came when I came back to my town in Oregon City. You see, my traffickers called me Cody and they wouldn't let me pee, use the bathroom unless I said I was Cody. And I made the blatantly stupid mistake of saying fine, I'm Cody, let me use the bathroom. And that was my stupidity. So when I escaped, it was a small town and anywhere we went Fred Meyer, blockbuster, a restaurant, wendy's, the grocery store it would start creeping in that things were on hold for Cody. And then there would be calls for Cody and then police would do welfare checks for Cody. We would have the Oregon City Police show up for a welfare check about every two days for a period of four months, seeing if Cody was okay.

David Solomon:

And it just got overwhelming when I went to my own church, overwhelming when I went to my own church and my friends and my church family turned their back and said you're a Cody, you're a liar, you're a cheater, you're a loser and go die. And that was manipulation at its best and it hurt. My mom had just beaten terminal cancer and she was weak. She needed help. All we got was abuse. So the trauma that people talk about with Cody is true. It did bug me that people call me Cody because I'm not Cody, and when you call someone that and you torment them, every time someone calls me Cody, I think of being locked in that cage and being raped Because that's what they would do. I had an individual call me Cody two days ago and that's part of what set this off, and they knew that that was a sensitive subject and they knew that it wasn't true, but they did it anyway to annoy me as a bully, because they didn't like something I said. That's not a true friend. That's not a true friend, and so I want to make it clear. It's not because it's a name Cody, it's because of the memories of Cody that just traumatized the living brains out of me.

David Solomon:

Fast forward to 2020. My mom was very sick. She had been poisoned. I rushed her to the emergency room and I didn't even get to say goodbye. I didn't get to. I didn't get to see her again. I was tackled to the ground by about nine Panama City police. I was beaten, I was knocked unconscious.

David Solomon:

I woke up in a police cruiser and I said where's my mom? And he said she's gone. And I said why am I here? I want to see my mom. And he said you're never seeing her again, you're under arrest. And I said what? Where are we going? And he goes we're going to go somewhere, you'll figure it out. I can't tell you how loud I screamed in that cruiser. I can't tell you how loud I yelled. I can't tell you. We got to the place.

David Solomon:

I was shaking, I was throwing up. I had just lost my best friend Basically died in my arms who stuck by me through everything when no one else did, who comforted me through all the car accidents, who helped me through the six-month coma, who gave me strength and showed me what faith was. And when I didn't have any friends, that visited me in the hospital and when I lost my memory, when I had amnesia, when I was blind, when I was paralyzed, she was there and no one else was. I was taken to a maximum facility psych ward. I was denied food, they put me in a coat, they locked me in a padded room and that is how I spent the night, processing that I had just lost my best friend. Next morning I got up I had never seen anything like it. All these people were just on drugs and it was so. I've never touched alcohol To see that People shaking and convulsing.

David Solomon:

So, Horrible, horrible. I got bullied for being the only white person in there, so I got beaten up pretty good. I was held for seven days. I couldn't find anything wrong with me. The police said I was dangerous because of my color and my religion. They marked me as a terrorist, radical sociopath, murderer and I was charged with the manslaughter charge on my mom. And instead of going to a prison I would spend my life in psych courts with no advocate, no lawyer, no one. It was COVID. Nobody cared. Everybody wore a mask, but not in there. Mask was a weapon. That was a harsh reality.

David Solomon:

Those seven days. Those seven days, I got one phone call. So I asked for a phone book. I said yes, sir, yes, ma'am. Nobody said two words to me because they had never seen anything like it and the staff even knew I didn't belong there. I would sit in a corner and cry, keep to myself and be terrified. And I was terrified. And a lawyer I finally got a hold of on the seventh day. He got me released, but it came at a price. They took my mom's belongings, her vehicle and everything else. That was no thank you. There was no apology, I guess, for getting the wrong person. The charge was reversed, Phone was taken from me. Everything was never returned, except one thing my mom was cremated behind my back. I was denied the right to see her even till now. That was just the beginning of the trauma that I've been through. I made a stupid mistake six months later and I legally wasn't supposed to talk about it until about two months ago. But a person called my mom the C word.

Justin Alan Hayes:

I was in.

David Solomon:

Maryland and I was grieving. Somebody made fun of my mom. I lost my temper. I threw a smoothie at their face. I lost my temper. I threw a smoothie at their face. It hit their chest.

David Solomon:

That is sexual assault, armed and battered and attempted manslaughter in the state of Maryland, and I was arrested and detained in a jail, at first for about an hour, never been in trouble my whole life freaking out. And then I was taken to prison Maryland Max Prison state prison. And then I was taken to prison Maryland Max Prison State prison. I was charged for attempted manslaughter in the third degree and it was something Again COVID. The police thought that the blueberry and strawberry smoothie on the person was blood and it wasn't so. But the person that I threw it with made a whole thing and said that I'm bleeding now and help me. And they were drunk and high on drugs, which was stupid of me to even carry on a conversation with that person, but I don't do drugs and I've never drank. That is the stupidest mistake I've ever made in my career in my life. So I went to prison for 12 hours. I got out by a miracle of God, literally, but they weren't going to let it go.

David Solomon:

It went on for nine months. My own lawyer would not represent me once he found out about my trafficking case. Some people testified that I was a dangerous person that I have named for millmakers actually, and they were going to put me away for 40 years, stayed in Maryland for what I did 40 years and the judge had never seen anything like it in his letter. The person lived in another state and the court was willing to pay them to come out to prosecute me and that has never happened the way it did. They were willing to pay that person to come out. So nine months of hell, nine months of hell, I had to wear an ankle bracelet or ankle monitor. Sorry, I had to be terrified. People don't want me talking about this because at the end of the day it was let go and it was a mistake.

David Solomon:

And because of COVID, again people made mistakes, people assumed things during COVID and it was wrong. Do you think I got an apology? No, I got a criminal record for two years and then an apology two years later. Oh, we're sorry that happened. So I haven't been able to talk about this legally until this ended because legally until two months ago they could still take me to prison for the freaking smoothie that I threw.

David Solomon:

So when people blast that on YouTube, that was traumatizing because people look at that and go, oh, he's a criminal. He's a criminal, he has a criminal record, he went to prison. I did for 12 hours. You neglect that. That's the trauma that has paralyzed my jaw.

David Solomon:

That's the trauma that has made me sick During that. It drove me to death because in the prison I got a hold of a nasty infection because they don't wash anything and because it was COVID. They didn't give us masks and they just threw us in a cell that was dirty and nobody cared. So I got sick. I ended up hospitalized for that. After the fact, about a week after Couldn't keep any food down for about three weeks, got pretty bad. It got to the point where my doctor, who's a man of God, he similar circumstance. He said the hate in my heart for the person that trafficked me was so great and if I was going to go to prison because of a smoothie and a court was willing to do it and no matter what anybody did, no matter what letter was written there were 400 people that wrote letters on my behalf as a character. 400, think about that number. I was crying.

Justin Alan Hayes:

Why don't we cut this one short at the end and we'll come back to continue this conversation? That's fine, great. Thank you, our viewers, our listeners, for checking out this episode, and please come back for the second part of this conversation. Until next time, be a voice for you or somebody in need.

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