In 2013, Brad Guy fell 15,000 feet and somehow survived.
While his body began to heal, his mental health deteriorated. The growing guilt flooded over him.
Guy initially shut his whole family out of his life after the skydiving incident until he realised the hold PTSD was having on him.
Click the link below and listen the full episode:
On today’s episode of The Briefing, Brad Guy explains how trauma works and how he overcame it to live a fulfilling life.
Guy said he was given a skydiving experience as his birthday present. He invited his family and boyfriend there.
He jumped out of the plane with his instructor and later realised the freefalling was longer than expected.
There’s just scrambling going up behind me. My tandem instructor is throwing arms. He’s grabbing things. I can hear him grunting and yelling,”
Guy said.
That’s when I look up, and I see two parachutes. Both are tangled with each other,”
he added.
Guy said the main parachute and the emergency parachute were tangled together, failing to open and causing them to experience violent shaking in the sky.
At that moment, even though I wasn’t fully aware of why it was happening, I knew that I was free falling towards the earth and death was coming.”
The chaos continued as they got closer and closer to the ground. Guy said that the first emotion coming to him was guilt.
I felt guilty because I was convinced I’d brought my whole family. They had to watch me die. I’d kind of seen them at that moment, almost like a flash.”
After the parachute incident, Guy and his instructor landed in a lake on a golf course, finding themselves half-submerged and entangled, unable to move. Miraculously, both of them survived.
However, what happened next almost killed him. The guilt and shame grew inside him, and the post-traumatic stress disorder overwhelmed him.
There is the collective trauma that we suffered as a family, and that guilt was the hardest thing to start to untangle, and that’s still something that I deal with knowing how much it was traumatic for them to see.”
Subscribe to The Briefing, Australia’s fastest-growing news podcast on Listnr today. The Briefing serves up the latest news headlines and a deep dive into a topic affecting you. All in under 20 minutes.