A quest for healing, one adventure at a time

On a childhood canoe trip, 12-year-old Brad Wetzler and his dad were thrown from their boat into a raging Kansas river.

Wetzler’s father swam to safety, but his son was swept away.

When Brad got stuck on a submerged tree and believed he was drowning, he could see his father standing onshore, doing nothing. 

After Brad was rescued and returned to safety by another boater, his father dismissed everything. “Get up, son. You’re fine.”   

Wetzler disagreed, seeing the incident as representative of an entire childhood of neglect and abuse. “And there’s a real way I would never be fine from that day forward,” he writes in “Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing” (Hachette Go). 

A straight-A student and captain of the basketball team, young Wetzler appeared to have it all.

In reality, he was “a skinny, lonely preteen suffering from anorexia, insomnia, and depression.” It didn’t help that Wetzler’s father often drank so much the boy had to help him to bed. 

After college, Brad landed his dream job at Outside magazine and eventually launched a career as an adventure writer.

He traveled to exotic locales like Greenland and Russia and was published in periodicals including GQ, George, Men’s Journal, and The New York Times. 

But always, Wetzler struggled with what he called “The Abyss,” the depression that periodically haunted him.

He took more than 20 prescription pills a day, including Lithium, Prozac, Wellbutrin, Dexedrine, Fluvoxamine, Lorazepam, and Trazodone. 

None of it helped, and soon he began sleeping his days away and missing deadlines. His career eventually waned, then ended.

He bought a shotgun, for what he called “obvious reasons.” 

Wetzler looked for help in the ways of Christ, even going to Israel to hike the 40-mile Jesus Trail.

He writes he was on “the path out of Nazareth and into the next chapter of my life.” 

But a PTSD flashback to seeing the “cold, blue body” of a friend who’d committed suicide sucked Brad right back into the darkness. “I was trapped in what David Foster Wallace called ‘our little skull-shaped kingdom.’” 

Wetzler eventually found solace in Eastern traditions, which recognize life is “rife with suffering.” He became a yoga teacher and in India was given a rap on the head by a 100-year-old yogi, a blow that unleashed a waterfall of tears.

That would be explained when a therapist eventually diagnosed Wetzler with undiagnosed, complex PTSD which resulted from his emotionally barren childhood. 

He continues to try to find peace in his world, but maybe the best advice he received came not from a swami but from a Boulder yoga teacher. She advised him to take control, saying “if someone hands you a steaming bag of dogs–t, hand it right back to them.”