Keyon Dooling on How He Found Healing Following Sexual Trauma

Keyon Dooling: Hey, what’s going on everybody? My name is Keyon Dooling. I am a former 13-year NBA basketball player. I am a wellness counselor for the NBA Players Association, and I’m a author and a life coach.

So for 25 years, I went through my life navigating holding on to a secret. That secret was that I was sexually abused at seven years old. Never told anybody, and got triggered at 32 years old, and had a battle with PTSD where I spent four days in a mental institution.

After I left the mental institution, I got into therapy, and really found my healing journey. Not dealing with things you go through early in life, they don’t go away. They just have a different impact on you.

So I suffer from anxiety. I suffered from depression at a point in my life. I had PTSD at a point in my life, and also sexual dysfunction, and so I just believe if you internalize it, it doesn’t go away. It just…you act out in different ways that you may not understand. It wasn’t until I got to therapy and started healing, that I was able to understand what I had experienced.

If you’re somebody who has gone through something, encountered something, endured something in your life, and you’re ashamed of it, embarrassed about it, and you’ve pushed it down, I understand because I’ve been there. I’m going to tell you that you have something in you that can potentially trigger you, and so if you don’t do your work around what’s bothering you, you don’t take the power back from the person who might have hurt you, the people who might have let you down.

So I would say that the biggest room in your life is the room for improvement, and so just because you’re going through something, doesn’t mean you can’t get through it. So I want to encourage you to do your work, find that prayer friend who can help pray you through it, find that therapist who can help you get through it from a scientific standpoint, and then surround yourself with good people, because we need love.

Therapy is one of the biggest gateways to healing. Look, if I have a tooth that is out of whack, I go to the dentist. If I have a ligament that I need to be repaired, I go to that surgeon who can repair that. So if your heart is hurt or broken, if your head is out of what whack, if you’re grieving something, if you’re missing somebody, if you’re dealing with something, don’t neglect yourself. Go get help for it. You can heal from it. You don’t have to be stuck in that trauma.

Faith played a big role in my recovery. I started in prayer. The first thing that I did when I recognized what I was carrying, what I was dealing with, is that I brought it to God in prayer. I said, “Hey Lord, I’m not strong enough, help me. I’m going to lay this burden on you.” That was the first step. But after that next step, I went and got therapy. I believe that if you go through something, you need the right antidote to help you get over it. For me, that gateway was therapy.