Breaking the Silence, September 13, 2026

Breaking the Silence with Dr. Gregory Williams
Different Wounds, Same Healing: Childhood Abuse Survivors Speak Out with Dr. Peter Verdin and Sonny Von Cleveland
Dr. Peter Verdin - Gold in the Cracks — A Memoir of Silence, Performance, and Repair
Sonny Von Cleveland - Sonny Von Cleveland | Author, Speaker & Advocate | Palm Springs
Dr. Gregory Williams welcomes two survivors of childhood sexual abuse, former college baseball player Dr. Peter Verdin and motivational speaker Sonny Von Cleveland, whose very different roads through trauma, prison, and healing led them to become close friends and co-authors of companion memoirs.
Football, 9/11, and a Double Booking in Houston
Dr. Gregory Williams opens the broadcast live from Houston, ribbing his beloved Texans for blowing an early lead in their season opener and checking on the Dallas Cowboys, who are about to kick off a tough road game against the New York Giants. He turns serious to mark the anniversary of September 11th, thanking veterans, active-duty service members including his own son in the Army, and firefighters and emergency responders, and says the tragedy pulled the country together with a resiliency he believes can never be broken. Williams gives out the call-in number, 888-627-6008, and his personal cell phone for anyone who needs someone to talk to, and notes the show is also streaming live on Facebook. He tells listeners tonight brings a rare double booking, a dynamic duo he promises will be nationally known soon, and explains he is skipping his usual intro segment to bring on Dr. Peter Verdin and Sonny Von Cleveland right away.
Two Survivors Connect Through a Shared Network
Verdin explains he emailed the show after searching podcasts in the trauma-and-healing space and finding Williams' book, Shattered by the Darkness, dovetailing with his own manuscript, Gold in the Cracks, written while he sat on the floor in pieces. He credits Detective Jeremy Henson, who caught his childhood abuser and has stayed a friend for seventeen years since the trial, with connecting him to Jim Cole, a thirty-year federal investigator who co-hosts a podcast with Sonny Von Cleveland. Verdin and Von Cleveland talked by FaceTime for two hours the first time they spoke, before either knew the other's full story, and later met in person in Nashville, where Von Cleveland wrote the foreword to Gold in the Cracks. Williams reads a line from that foreword aloud, noting how one man wore his pain where the world could see it while the other learned to hide behind a resume, different armor over the same wound.
A Little League Coach's Years of Grooming
Dr. Peter Verdin describes being chosen at age nine for an all-star Little League team in Northern Virginia, where the coach, John Hamilton, began giving him private hitting lessons, took him to an Orioles game, and embedded himself in the family, even earning a seat at Christmas dinner. Hamilton abused him almost daily from age nine until his fourteenth birthday, and Verdin says he told no one until a phone call from his mother during his freshman year of college prompted him to name what happened; Hamilton was later sentenced to fifty-five years in prison. Verdin went on to start for three and a half years at the University of Georgia and was drafted by the Washington Nationals before burning out. He kept the abuse buried for years while building what looked, from the outside, like a successful life, until being fired from a job and an abrupt breakup left him, four months before this broadcast, at what he calls rock bottom.
Abuse, Prison, and Years in Solitary
Sonny Von Cleveland says his abuse began at age three inside his own family and eventually involved seven men over nine years; when he disclosed his uncle's abuse at age ten and testified at trial, the uncle received fifteen years in prison, but much of Von Cleveland's family did not believe him and blamed him instead. Already caught up in the juvenile system after a felony break-in at age seven, he describes his mother trafficking him to men for drugs and money, a cycle that sent him to prison at sixteen, where he was raped by two men at knifepoint in his first week and later stabbed one of his attackers with pencils. He would spend eighteen of the next twenty years incarcerated, including five years in solitary confinement, a period he calls an absolute blessing because it forced him to sit with his own demons. A motorcycle wreck years later, after which he says he had to lose everything to gain a new life, became another turning point in his healing.
Forgiveness, the Body, and the Real Numbers
The two men compare how they manage triggers today. Von Cleveland says he has forgiven every abuser he has ever had, calling forgiveness the ultimate trigger lock that frees him rather than the person who hurt him, alongside meditation and remembering survivors who cannot yet speak for themselves. Verdin takes a different view, describing complex post-traumatic stress disorder as a physical brain injury stored in the nervous system rather than something a person can simply decide to release, and tracing a chronic back injury directly back to the exact age his abuse ended. Both men lean on movement, EMDR therapy, and journaling. When Williams raises the widely cited statistic that one in six men experience childhood sexual abuse, both guests call the number far too low, arguing it only counts men who report, leaving out boys in rural communities, cultural groups where the subject stays taboo, and the more than thirty children Verdin's abuser was found to have victimized beyond the five who came forward.
Advice for Men Who Have Never Told Anyone
Asked what he would say to a man who has never disclosed his abuse, Verdin urges people to speak before they hit rock bottom, describing how writing his own story forced buried memories to the surface and noting that friends who finally learned his history told him it made him make so much more sense. Von Cleveland adds that no one can help a person whose struggle stays hidden, quoting Viktor Frankl's line that suffering ceases to be suffering once it is given a purpose. Williams closes by pointing listeners to both books: Von Cleveland's Hey, White Boy: Conversations of Redemption, already available in print, on Kindle and as an AI-narrated audiobook, and Verdin's Gold in the Cracks, due out the third week of October and previewable at his website. He invites both men back on the show, thanks them for giving up their evening, and ends the broadcast with the program's long-standing promise that no matter how dark it gets, there is always hope.