I Wanted to Save My Mother | Terry Crews - video Dailymotion

Goalcast

Growing up, Terry Crews did everything he could to protect his mother from his abusive father. He delivers a tearful speech on how to overcome trauma, love yourself and own your story.

Transcript

00:00 My earliest memory is my father hitting my mother in the face

00:04 as hard as he could.

00:06 And I remember seeing her on the floor

00:09 and then looking at him, this giant of a man, who I thought,

00:14 my God, he says he loves her.

00:18 What is he going to do to me?

00:22 And all I could think is how I wanted to protect her.

00:29 How I wanted to protect her and how wrong it was.

00:35 And I said, I got to be strong.

00:37 And I got to get strength so that I can protect her.

00:42 And every time he came home, we were scared.

00:47 We didn't know.

00:48 I literally wet the bed till I was 14 years old,

00:52 because I didn't know what was going to happen.

00:54 I would wake up to glass breaking, sounds,

01:00 people screaming.

01:02 And it was a nightmare.

01:03 We lived a nightmare for years.

01:07 And I remember my mother coming into our room

01:11 and saying, we're leaving.

01:13 Pack our stuff.

01:14 We're out of here.

01:15 And we would grab everything we had.

01:17 We put it in garbage bags.

01:19 And we'd tie it up, and we'd wait to go.

01:22 And then she'd come back in, and she'd say, we can't go.

01:26 We can't leave.

01:28 Where am I going to go?

01:30 And I just remember feeling like, let's go anywhere.

01:33 I don't care.

01:33 We can be on the street.

01:36 But she couldn't do it.

01:38 And he went on terrorizing us, terrorizing us, whatever.

01:44 And it was like, what could we do?

01:47 We have to understand.

01:49 That people in this situation feel entirely hopeless.

01:55 Hopeless.

01:57 We were hopeless.

01:58 So many things.

01:59 I thought, I'll never be like that.

02:01 I'll never do that.

02:02 But then I picked up a lot of other damaging things

02:06 that come from that trauma.

02:08 A lot of other things that had been assimilated into my life.

02:12 Here I am.

02:13 As a man, I felt like, hey, it's my time.

02:17 I felt like, hey, it's my way or the highway.

02:21 I remember times with my daughter, Adrielle,

02:24 and I would yell at her as if she was a 30-year-old man.

02:27 I constantly apologized, constantly called them

02:30 and say, I'm sorry.

02:33 I'm sorry.

02:34 Daddy didn't get it.

02:36 Daddy missed it.

02:37 And that woke me up.

02:40 It woke me up.

02:41 It was a catalyst.

02:42 It changed my life forever.

02:44 Because here I was, a very successful man.

02:47 Very successful.

02:48 But what you have to realize is that success is the warmest

02:52 place to hide.

02:55 Does not matter what you look like.

02:57 It doesn't matter.

02:57 Anyone, anywhere can be victimized.

03:00 And no man, woman, or child should ever

03:04 put up with being treated as less than a human being, ever.

03:08 How did we get that far off?

03:11 When people are looking the other way,

03:14 when the whole thing is geared where you can't ask for help,

03:17 where you are going to lose your job.

03:20 Or if you bring it up, how in the world

03:23 are you going to afford an attorney

03:25 in order to fight this case?

03:27 You need three things in order to come forward

03:29 with a lot of your damage and the things that's happened to you.

03:32 You need distance emotionally.

03:33 You need distance financially.

03:35 And you need distance physically.

03:38 Coming out with your story is probably

03:40 one of the hardest things ever.

03:42 And this is one thing I love about what Safe Horizon

03:45 provides, is a safe haven, this place to go,

03:49 the services that people need.

03:51 And I'm telling you, this is my company.

03:54 This is more valuable.

03:55 I'm promoting the movies, the TV shows, the whole thing.

03:58 But I want to talk about this.

04:01 I want to talk about this.

04:03 Because it's fixable.

04:06 Understand, this is something that we can be deprogrammed.

04:11 This is something we have to speak up.

04:14 You can see it, but you have to show people

04:17 you are changing the world.

04:20 [MUSIC PLAYING]

04:23 [WIND BLOWING]

04:26 [MUSIC PLAYING]

04:29 [WIND BLOWING]

04:33 [BLANK_AUDIO]

I Wanted to Save My Mother | Terry Crews

Category

Transcript

Recommended