A four-year-old boy is wrestling on the bed with his mother, laughing, when something triggers her to suddenly go still. She's playing dead. He shakes her, screaming for her to wake up, crying hysterically — and still nothing. She rolls off the bed onto the floor. He's still crying, still screaming, while his older brother tries to reach their father at work. Only once she knows the father is on the phone does she open her eyes and say she was just playing.

That was the moment Briyin's future was set on a difficult course. He didn't yet understand how a mother could do something like that and still say she loved him. As Briyin would come to learn, his father had a similar idea of what love meant — constantly being beaten with a plunger stick or a belt, the words "I love you" following each strike. It's no surprise that Briyin has spent much of his life not knowing what love actually is, carrying that uncertainty through relationship after relationship. Even now, thirteen years into his marriage to his wife Kathy, there are still moments he finds it hard to believe that she loves him.

A Childhood Marked by Survival

The incident at four years old was only the beginning of a lifetime of lived experience. One of ten children — nine boys and one girl — and the second oldest, Briyin left home at fifteen, unable to keep enduring the beatings and the cult-like environment his parents practiced under the disguise of religion.

There were six years between Briyin and his next-youngest brother; his mother had lost three babies in a row before he was born, and he grew up being told he was the reason God wouldn't allow her to have another child. At nine years old, he was told he was devil-possessed, and members of the cult chanted over him in an attempt to "cast out Satan." Later, when he came to the door to visit after leaving home at fifteen, his mother told him she wished he was dead.

"Most people who have endured what you have are not here to talk about it."

Briyin's Doctor of 32 Years

Briyin has been spared by God's hand three separate times after attempting to take his own life and having to be brought back. He can go on with endless situations from those years — and he has, sharing his story with many audiences through his speaking about mental health.

Finding the Purpose in the Pain

Briyin has come to know his purpose and his passion by turning his story from trauma to triumph, founding Today Matters Mental Health Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. More than five years ago, he describes God calling him "to be the voice for the silent."

That mission now lives through nationally known guest interviews, community resource connections, and a founder who is willing to stand in front of an audience and say the hard parts out loud — so that someone listening doesn't have to carry their own silence for as long as he carried his.