When the Parts We Suppress Become Our Strength: Trauma, Spirituality, and Learning to Trust Yourself
I just do not wanna live scared anymore.
“I was always a scared little kid.”
In this episode of Spiritual Friction, I sit down with Nahum Vizakis—author, combat veteran, bodybuilder, executive coach, and medicine man—for a deeply personal conversation about fear, survival, spirituality, and the experiences that transformed his life.
Nahum's story begins with a version of himself that looks very different from the man he is today.
He remembers being scared from an early age. By the time he was a teenager, that fear had become so significant that he had developed a stutter. At just 13 years old, he found himself feeling alone and navigating circumstances no child should have had to figure out alone.
Those early experiences shaped him.
But they didn't become the end of his story.
“I just do not wanna live scared anymore.”
At some point, Nahum began making a different decision about the way he wanted to live.
“I just do not wanna live scared anymore.”
His transformation didn't happen all at once.
Bodybuilding became an important part of his journey. After growing up feeling weak and struggling with what strength and masculinity meant to him, building his body gave him another way to experience himself.
His life would eventually take him through military service and combat, profound personal challenges, plant medicine, spiritual exploration, and experiences that continued to reshape his understanding of who he was.
Nahum also speaks openly about coming close to death numerous times throughout his life. Rather than separating those experiences from his spiritual life, they have become part of the way he understands purpose, mortality, and his relationship with something larger than himself.
There is a sense throughout our conversation that his transformation didn't come from one singular moment.
It came through layers.
When the body finally feels safe enough
One of those layers led us into a conversation about the body and what happens to the emotional energy we carry after difficult experiences.
We may survive something and continue with our lives while our bodies are still holding pieces of what happened.
Nahum shares an experience of finally feeling safe enough for something in his body to release—an experience that changed him profoundly.
We talk about the ways animals naturally move through survival responses and physically release activation once a threat has passed. Human beings, on the other hand, have an extraordinary ability to interrupt that process.
We keep going.
We push through.
We adapt.
Sometimes those adaptations are exactly what allow us to survive. And sometimes, much later, we find ourselves in a place where we finally feel safe enough to begin listening to what has been there all along.
For Nahum, that process became part of finding his way back to himself.
The part he suppressed became his superpower
Perhaps one of the most powerful moments in our conversation comes when Nahum reflects on the part of himself he had spent much of his life suppressing.
What he once experienced as something to fear or push away eventually became something very different:
“That part of me that I was suppressing for my entire life ended up being my superpower.”
I love the complexity of that.
Because sometimes transformation isn't about becoming an entirely different person.
Sometimes it is about returning to parts of ourselves we learned to abandon along the way—and discovering that there was strength there all along.
For Nahum, that return has also involved learning to trust his relationship with spirituality and the direction his life is taking.
As he shares:
“The universe is guiding me. I have to trust it.”
There isn't a perfectly mapped destination at the end of his story.
There is trust.
There is curiosity.
And there is an understanding that there will always be more to experience, more to learn, and more ways to grow.
A life transformed
The scared little boy Nahum describes at the beginning of his story is still part of him.
So is the 13-year-old trying to survive.
So is the bodybuilder searching for strength. The combat veteran. The man exploring plant medicine and spirituality. And the person who eventually began understanding his experiences through an entirely different lens.
His story isn't about erasing those earlier versions of himself.
It's about what happened when he began integrating them.
When fear stopped being something he simply had to outrun.
When his body found places where it could begin to feel safe.
When what he had suppressed became something he could listen to.
And when he began trusting that the life unfolding in front of him might have a purpose he couldn't always see ahead of time.
🎧 Listen to my full conversation with Nahum Vizakis on Spiritual Friction: A Space for Deep Feelers.
