Terror To Triumph

The Elephant In The Living Room Isn’t Paying Rent

• Alphonso Pelt • Season 1 • Episode 1

Share episode

Send us a text

The hardest part of healing is often the first step: saying what happened out loud. We open a space where that truth is welcomed, not doubted, and where survivors can trade silence for language, and isolation for community. Alphonso shares his story of childhood physical, verbal, and sexual abuse, the defense mechanisms that followed him into adulthood, and the moment therapy began to untangle patterns he once mistook for protection. No quick fixes, no toxic positivity—just honest, practical tools for reclaiming power.

 Across this conversation, we explore how silence gives harm room to grow—and how naming trauma cuts it down to size. You’ll hear why acknowledgment precedes change, how the body keeps the score of what the mind avoids, and what it takes to replace a metaphorical bandage with real care. We talk about relationships that fracture under unhealed wounds, the courage to confront patterns, and the steady work of building safety through boundaries, support networks, and professional guidance. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is highlighted for those moments when the weight feels immediate and overwhelming.

We also turn toward prevention and advocacy: teaching kids the language of consent and harm, creating trusted pathways to speak up, and becoming adults who believe the first time. Alphonso invites you into a growing circle of survivors and allies, with future episodes featuring expert guests and readings from his forthcoming book, The Terror in My Eyes. If your story has stayed locked away, let this be a gentle nudge toward voice and validation. Subscribe, share with someone who needs it, and leave a review with one insight you’re taking forward—your words might be the bridge someone else needs.

Support the show

SPEAKER_05:

Say thank you, Dad. Take it, Daddy. Take it, Muggie. Take it bad.

SPEAKER_00:

Testing one, two, one, two. Checking audio levels. Going live, going live, going live. Hello and welcome. I welcome you to Terror to Triumph, a podcast where we transform pain into power. I'm Afonso Pelt, and this is a safe place. It's a place where we can talk openly about trauma, abuse, and the journey towards healing. If you've ever felt alone in your pain, if you've uh questioned whether recovery is possible, or if you're just beginning to speak your truth, you're in the right place.

SPEAKER_03:

I heard it all.

SPEAKER_00:

Just to set the tone, this podcast isn't about quick fixes or toxic positivity. It's about real conversations, real stories, and the real work is gonna take to move from survival to thriving. Over the coming weeks and months, we're gonna explore that trauma recovery. We're going to hear from guests who have walked similar paths. And we're going to establish a community where healing is possible. Um before we go a little deeper into this thing, I was gifted only child. I want to be absolutely upfront with you. I want to be crystal clear. Okay? If you're in a crisis, if you're struggling with thoughts of self-harm, coping mechanisms to lift up, you need to reach out to a professional or crisis line. I have the National Suicide Crisis Lifeline number, and it's 988 in three simple digits. Two numbers. Dial it if you are in immediate need of some assistance or help. This podcast compliments therapy and professional support. It doesn't replace it. We're here to support each other, not to diagnose or treat, you know. This is a help and informational and a communal podcast. I want everybody who comes to feel comfortable. We're not here to point fingers or accuse. We're here to build, learn, and grow, intoxicate, and step out from the shadow of the abuse that we've allowed ourselves to succumb to all these years. This is a place where people like myself a victim of sexual, physical, emotional, and mental child abuse. And not to say that my story is worse than your story, but I am there with you, my brother, my sister. I want you to know you are not alone. Okay. Uh my name for those of you who are joining, thank you for joining. Uh, my name is Alfonso Pelt, and I myself, like I said, I am a survivor of childhood abuse. Uh, going back as far as pre-puberty through my early teens. Um, I like I said, I experienced verbal, mental, sexual, and physical abuse. For years I carried that pain and silence. I told myself I was alone. I I believed that I was alone, like nobody else could understand the suffering I went through.

SPEAKER_04:

So listen closely before you start to do it.

SPEAKER_00:

That uh the mental anguish that I suffered, that I tried to bear by myself as a child. I had believed that the world was closed off, and nobody could understand my pain. I want you to uh understand that it created a lot of mental things, disparities, shame, fear, self-doubt. And that followed me into adulthood. I'm 54 years old, and I'm still working to deal with it today. It's not over for me, but by the grace of God, I was able to see a therapist and start working on my my issues. The first step though, I had to realize that I had one. I kept trying to put it off. Push it back in my mind. When it would rear up, I'd try to think about something else. I would try to say it was okay, or maybe I was just thinking crazy, or wasn't in my right mind about the situation. Like I was trying to be strong enough that the pain wouldn't matter anymore. You know, trying to outrun the past and prove to myself that I was okay, that caused problems for me. It made me feel like I had to live up to an expectancy that wasn't there. Thank you for joining. I appreciate you joining. Uh, for those who have just joined, this podcast is about childhood trauma, surviving it. The name of the podcast is Terror to Triumph. My name is Alfonso Pelt, and yes, I'm a childhood abuse survivor. I don't wave that like a flag. I just want you to know I'm not cheering it on, but I'm here to share my story with you and open up a dialogue with anybody who has suffered a similar path. This is all about healing, not a substitute for actual therapy. This is not to diagnose or treat, but this is to build a community of people who are together and trying to learn and grow and overcome the fear, step out of the shadow of the childhood abuse that we've endured. And there, yeah, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. But first, you gotta start walking. And if you don't start walking, uh you'll stay in that shadow forever. And I don't wish that for anybody.

unknown:

No, I'm not with that.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm 54 years old, and it took me all the way up until last year to start fighting to come out of that shadow. I've been through relationships, and my relationships always ended on a bad note because I was dealing with my issues in negative ways. They impacted my decision making and relationships in foul ways. And I didn't realize it. I just thought, you know, I was protecting myself, but I was only using defense mechanisms that I had learned as a child. Trying to understand an adult world. See, it doesn't quite match. And if it wasn't for me seeking therapy, I wouldn't have even known that my thinking was carrying me to those areas, to those thought patterns. And you have to get to the beginning of the thought pattern anyway to understand where the problem even starts. Thank you for joining. For those of you that just joined, my name is Alfonso Pelt. This is a podcast, it's live, and it's called Terror to Triumph. It's about surviving childhood trauma. And I'm trying to build a community of people who have suffered childhood trauma to let them know that they're not alone. And there is help. Help is not far from you. Help might be right around the corner, or help might be right next to you. But first, you have to understand that there's an issue with you. You have to understand that you have suffered something, you have to acknowledge it and face it. Okay. I wrote I wrote a book that's coming out probably in the later part of next year. Um, publishers. And it's called The Terror in My Eyes. In this book, I'm describing my childhood from the innocence to the trauma to after the trauma, how it affected me, how it affected my relationships, how it turned me into something else. It was a change, a major change in the molding years of my life. So a transformation in your childhood will change the directory, the trajectory rather of the direction of your life forever. And until we can finally sit down and have an adult conversation about what's going on. It's just gonna persist. It's gonna keep going. You're gonna start develop those defense mechanisms which will manifest later on in your adult life as something else. And you're not even gonna realize how it you it affects you talking to your friends, your family, and even people you've come to love, your significant others, it affects your relationships on your job, you know, how you talk to your employer. It affects every aspect of your life. So the trauma is real. And I just want you to know that here at Terror to Triumph on this podcast, you have a safe place to come and talk about childhood trauma. In writing this book, it forced me to stop writing. It forced me to sit down and focus on every detail, every emotion, every wound, everything that I've been avoiding. In that process, something shifted. The act of naming what happened and putting words to the unspeakable, it began to break the power of silence. It began to break that power of silence, the power it had over me. I realized that my story had hard parts, shameful parts. The parts I never wanted to tell anybody, share to anyone I knew. It wasn't something to hide, though. It was something that I should have shared. It needed to come out. Because if my story can help even one person, then my story was worth that healing. The thing is, in her afterlife, staring at me. Eat dinner with us, go to bed with us, wake up in the morning with us, but never talk to it or talk about it. And that gave that elephant power in that house, which allowed probably other elephants to be developed in that household. In the world that we live in, not speaking about things, give it power. I'm gonna use something as an example. I don't want anybody to take it the wrong way. We invade because we think they had it, they didn't have it, but we invaded a whole country that I can't invade. Why didn't we march on the Capitol for that? Our silence really gave our government power. And the same thing is going on right now with our country and our government. Our silence gives our country power over us to do whatever it wants to do. The same thing in our households when abuse happens and we keep quiet about it, we give it power over us. The power to let it run rampant, to go wild, to continue what it's doing. Now we as children, we don't know. We don't know. We're too young to understand that we have power too. We didn't understand that we could stand up and say something to somebody, talk to an adult, talk to a teacher, talk to the next door neighbor to seek help. Call the police on the phone. You know, we didn't understand. We didn't know we had those avenues. And for some of us, some of the survivors were threatened not to say anything or somebody they hurt would suffer. And those threats kept power over us. Even not saying a word, but the mere fact of threatening physical violence to us is a method of telling us that if we say something, we're going to receive more violence.

SPEAKER_02:

No.

SPEAKER_00:

Not anymore. Not anymore. We have the power to talk. You can't take our power away by threatening us. And we have to realize that no one has the right to do anything to us in an adverse way, any adverse way, and threaten us not to say anything, or coerce us not to say anything, or threaten to harm others to cause us not to say anything, so they can continue to harm us. This is not a call to rebel. This is a call to be human. We were not meant to be locked in mental prisons in our own homes. Our lives were meant to flourish, not to be distilled, dissipated, discolored, or made low. Now your deity is watching and knows and doesn't want us to suffer. I I'll tell you from that aspect. I know I came from a Christian spiritual family. My uh my parents born in the oh, I was born in Detroit. My parents were actually born in the South. My mother was born in Alabama, and my dad was born in Alabama too, but two separate cities in Alabama. I believe my dad was born in Bessemer, Alabama, and my mother.

unknown:

I felt everything. I felt everybody one man.

SPEAKER_00:

I don't know what city she was born in in Alabama, but I know she soon moved to LaGrange, Georgia. With some of her family, but uh still resides down there.

SPEAKER_03:

But they had some.

SPEAKER_00:

They migrated to Michigan and started a family here.

SPEAKER_03:

Tough decision.

SPEAKER_00:

During those formative years of mine, my parents also changed. I talked to my siblings about my parents. My oldest brother is 15 years older than myself. Got to experience my parents before their transformation. So he knew them when times were good. By the time I came along, there were no good times. None. No, I mean, you had a little small good time here and there, every sparse out. You know the saying, you know, there have been more good days than my bad days. That wasn't so in my household.

unknown:

I remember looking in the mirror.

SPEAKER_00:

It was like flip-flop. You know, if I had to give a percentage, I would say it was like 70% bad days, 30% good. And I'm being very generous in my household about that. Very generous. Now I am talking about my story. I don't want to get into my siblings' story too much. They have their own stories to tell them if they want to share them. But I just want to focus on my story. And she sees me. My story, my abuse was wrought from my mother.

SPEAKER_03:

I had to learn how to cope.

SPEAKER_00:

Because it didn't all start with sexual abuse. It started with physical mainly. Then after the physical was the verbal, then the mental. And then the sexual abuse later on came about.

SPEAKER_03:

But I came to sober.

SPEAKER_00:

It was paramount that I was trying to survive. You have to imagine in a house with that much turmoil, that much dysfunction. It had to be a case of survival on a day-to-day basis. And surviving the day meant surviving physical abuse that was beyond what it should have been. As far as raising your child. And where my mother did with fire exceedingly above and beyond that. I realized that my story had its hard parts, like I said. But if I don't share my story, that means I don't give power to somebody like you who may be suffering. I don't give you the power to say, I have a chance to escape this situation. I have the power to come out from underneath the thumb that's pressing down on me. I have the power to speak out and seek help from somebody around me. I don't have to sit here and accept this abuse. You have this power. You have the power to speak loudly. You have the power to speak for yourself. You are worthy. That you are capable to save yourself. And that's that's a hard thing for a child to understand. As an adult, we can grasp that situation and the complex ideologies around what I'm talking about, but as a child, the fear can wrap around a child so tough. I'm scared. Unless they realize I can talk to a teacher in school. Can can I talk to you, Miss Johnson? Something's wrong in my family. I need to talk to you. Can we talk? And get the conversation rolling. Children have the power. You have to teach them. They have the power. You have to empower your children to know that they can speak up and speak out. You have to teach them broken pieces of ego. You have to teach your children what abuse is so they can recognize it when it's happening. Or when it's coming. No one else is gonna teach your children. Like you can teach your children. No one can reach them where they're at, like you can. Your story matters. Your pain is valid. If you have been abused, there's no belittling that. That means find somebody else who will, who will listen. Don't give up. Keep forging forward. Reach out. Keep talking to friends. Keep talking to the next door neighbor. Keep talking to other teachers. Go find a guidance counselor. Talk to the principal. You have to keep trying. You are not alone. I guarantee you that you are not alone. For those of you who have come and didn't catch the beginning, this is a live podcast. My name is Alfonso Pelt, and this podcast is called Terror to Triumph. It's about surviving childhood abuse. It's not a replacement for therapy or a diagnosis for what's happening to you. But this is an area, a safe haven for people like you and me who have suffered child abuse to come and talk and start the motion of communicating, getting it out in the open. This is something serious. It's happening a lot, not in just black children, but it's happening in every demographic. This is not something that's isolated to men or women, boys, girls. Sexual abuse goes across the board. No one's exempt. Not from any country, not from any status. Sexual abuse is real. Childhood sexual trauma is real. Physical abuse is real. Domestic violence is real. If it wasn't real, why would there be hotline numbers nationwide? People are ready to answer the call when you have help. Or need help, rather. They're there to help. And if you feel like you're in a need or you're in a crisis mode right now, I urge you to seek professional help. If you feel like you're about to cause yourself some harm, you're feeling suicidal. You're in a crisis mode. You can dial 988. That's the number to the suicide and crisis lifeline. It's a nationwide number. You can dial those three numbers. And someone will be on the line to talk to you to help you. Depending on your situation, I'm not I'm not a lifeline person. I'm just here to talk and bring the conversation to light. Because that's the first step to recovery, is acknowledging. And there's food sitting in front of you. You want to eat it. It looks delicious. But why do you want to eat it? What's this thing telling you in your body that you're hungry? Your mind has to acknowledge it. Yeah, I'm hungry. I need to eat. And then when you your mind says, Yeah, I'm hungry. I need to eat. Let me eat that. That's the same way. With any type of abuse. If you suffered abuse, you need to reach out and seek that help. You have to acknowledge it first. I've been traumatized. I've been molested. I've suffered domestic violence. I've suffered child abuse. I've suffered human trafficking. I was human trafficked. Whatever your case is, I'm saying, there's something, someone, a lifeline somewhere out there to assist you. I'm trying to give you all the help I can by bringing all the information and trying to disseminate it right here. I mean, I'm not a professional. I don't claim to be a professional. I'm an author. And I wrote a book about my own childhood trauma. My book is called The Terror in My Eyes. It should be coming out near the end of next year. It's in the publishing process right now. My publisher is Haas and Jenkins. And we're working to get the book finished. But it's a timely process. And I am here to reach out and share my story. Every dirty secret, every nook and cranny. Because everything needs to be exposed. We can't sit here any longer and let the silence smother us. That's not our story. We can't begin to rise like God wants us to rise. If we stay silent and keep the water above our heads, we're going to drown. And I've been drowning for the majority of my life. And for the first time in my life, now I'm starting to wake up and step outside the shadows. And it's empowering to know that I have control. I have a say. I have power over my destiny. And I don't let it take a hold of me anymore. It no longer has power over me. I can't declare power over it. You have to declare power over your trauma. That's the first step. Realizing you have been traumatized. Looking at it, facing it, acknowledging it. I mean, think about it. If you were in a fight and you're blind, and someone's just punching you, and you're saying, oh my god, what's happening? I'm getting sucked left and right. What's what is this? Do you realize you're in a fight? Somebody's beating you up. What do you do? You start to protect yourself. You cover up. That's that's the immediate response. If you don't know how to fight, you try to protect yourself. Well, protecting yourself is the first sign of acknowledging that there's a problem. You're either gonna do it physically or you're gonna do it mentally. And your mind manifests that protection says she recommended therapy in ways that you don't know about. And I can't say my mind works like your mind, everybody's mind is different. But the point is, the way you manifest your trauma is different from the way I manifest mine, and I have to address my trauma. Like you would have to address your trauma by first acknowledging it. Your mind's gonna acknowledge it before you can physically react to it, and it's gonna take hold and go in the direction to try to protect your sanity.

SPEAKER_02:

So imagine every other brother has been compromised.

SPEAKER_00:

Going through life from the time of trauma, from the time of your trauma.

SPEAKER_04:

So listen close before you start to petch.

SPEAKER_00:

Say the trauma was somebody took a sword and cut your stomach open. All your insides. Uh out. You're bleeding, you're gonna die. But you take a Johnson and Johnson bad day and put it over your stomach. Like that's gonna help. But the thing is, that was your mind trying to repair the trauma. You're slowly dying. Suffering, trying to live out here in this world with that trauma up here. This is transformation, not understanding how it's affecting you. Thinking because you're not trying to acknowledge what happened. You thinking everything's okay. I could just put it behind me. Let's just not talk about it. Let's listen to the take. I gotta I don't I don't want to think about it. But you're ripped open. And no one can save you but you. And that band-aid, your mind put on that big gash, bleeding, open, gut pouring slash is not gonna save you. Sure, you acknowledge the slash, you put the band-aid there. So, in some way, you do realize it happened, but you still don't address it, and you go on in life, letting your mind still fashion mechanisms to deal with the trauma and every day going forward, how it manifests dealing with future reactions and interactions with people, but it causes you so much pain and trauma all along the way because you never acknowledged it, you never truly faced it and acknowledged it. You have to, you have to for your own survival mentally and physically, because it's been known to know that our trauma can manifest physically. We know that. That's a scientific fact now. So imagine carrying this all your life, never seeking help. I'm 54 years old, and I just started seeking help this year. The beginning of this year. A divorce. 10 years of marriage, divorce. Because there's problems up here I never addressed. If I knew now what I would have known long time ago and addressed it. Mary could have been saved, it could have been healthy. We could have still been married.

unknown:

No, I know I was guilty.

SPEAKER_00:

But the fear the fear of acknowledging that trauma, how deep the trauma is. How it clings to the bones trauma. It manifests so deep. Then when you start breaking down and started talking about the actual trauma of the situation and how it's affecting you now, I said no, it can't. You could be realizing that you've been hurting people all your life. But I can blow the image of my queen that I can't even have to all your life. We have to start talking about it. We have to. Not just for myself, for you. For your next door neighbor, for your co-workers, your classmates. You never know who's suffering because they keep silent about their trauma. We have to start a dialogue somewhere. And if everybody's too afraid to start talking about it, the healing will never begin. The healing has to start somewhere. And I'm willing to start the healing by sharing my story. If I have to be the martyr, if I have to fall on the sword so that somebody can be healed, I'll fall. I'll crash out for that. It's worth it's worth dying for. If if I just imagine what I went through, I could think about all the years I went through in my life suffering. Nobody to help me, nobody to talk to, nobody to reach out and say, I can help you, I can see something's wrong. Come here, let me talk to you. But going through life with no one and stuffing it all down, trying to keep it all inside, never sharing it with other people, except for maybe once or twice. And when you do share it with someone, it's probably gonna be the wrong person the first time. They just look at you like whatever, that didn't happen. Because they don't want to acknowledge it. It's a fear of I'm acknowledging my friend was traumatized. How am I gonna address that? Are you serious? That happened to you. We think about that. We don't want to deal with that. That's too much for me to deal with. I don't want to I wanna deal with you and your trauma. So we reject it. We reject the person's trauma, and we say, Oh, that ain't happening, you make a comma, keep them with God. But the person is reaching out for help. And you slap them in the face with that statement. Not here, not in this podcast. We're not we don't we're not doing that. This podcast is to bring everybody to the truth of the matter. We need to start talking about it. Sexual abuse happens in everybody's home. I'm not saying everybody, as far as saying every individual in the United States, but I can guarantee you it happens more often than you think. You might not think so. But I'm pretty sure you know some people whose children have been sexually abused, they don't even know it. That's why it's a very bad situation. We're so unaware of how it's affecting us. We're so unaware of how it's affecting our children. Our children can't even decide to say, Mama, something happened. Because they're traumatized. They're so scared to even talk about it because they feel a retribution will come. This podcast is my commitment to creating that safe place for you, for me, and for everyone brave enough to come and speak their truth here. Tell your friends, hey, this guy you might need to listen to. This guy got something for you to listen to. Even if you have a friend that might not want to hear it, just tell him, hey, go check out this guy on TikTok. Go look at his podcast, tear the triumph at buzzsprout.com every Thursday. Go go check him out. We gotta start the conversation. People, we have to start talking. We have to open up the dialogue. In the coming episodes of this podcast, you'll hear a deep dive into different aspects of trauma recovery, how abuse affects our relationships, our self-worth, and our ability to trust. That's a big one right there. Both of the actually, all of those are big ones when it comes to trauma, childhood trauma. We'll have conversations with guests who've walked their own journey, people who are willing to chime in on the podcast and talk to us. People who are professionals in the field. Eventually, we'll have them to be on the podcast and share their stories and give us their professional opinions. I would like to also invite book club discussions around the terror and my eyes, my future coming book, and other healing-focused literature. This space, this is a space where vulnerability is strength, it's empowerment, where your story is honored, where healing is the goal. I want to hear from you. I want to hear your story. It matters, and I want to amplify it. In order to share your story, if you're comfortable, you can reach out to me and share your journey. You can reach out here on TikTok. You can send me a message here, or you can go to uh Buzz Sprout. Again, that's terror to Triumph.buzzsprout.com. And you can leave your story there. And I will get back to you. And your voice could be the one that helps someone realize they're not alone. And that's empowering our community. One voice at a time. Connect with me here on TikTok at Black Hay Cool. I'm Black High Cool. I'm the only Black Haiku here. Uh but um you can come and join me here. Uh, where we can build our tribe. Yeah, we can we can be a strong tribe, the tribe of survivors. Triumphant survivors. Subscribe on Buzz Sprout, um, which is where my podcast will be held. This is the first live podcast, so my podcast will eventually be posted uh on Buzz Sprout Thursday. So my first podcast will be there. Be an hour-long podcast. You can engage and share by leaving a comment for this podcast. You can like, share, and uh lock me in. You know, hit the hurt button or hit the plus button or you know, subscribe to me. Tell your friends, tell your family, bring everybody, tell the community. We all gonna rise up together. We all are going to rise up together. I want empowerment for our entire community concerning this issue, and it begins with me and you. This is just a beginning though. Together we're building this movement. Wow. Look at that. We're building a movement from terror to triumph. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your courage. Let's heal together. Love y'all.

Contributor

Storm

Co-host