Is Your Life Out Of Control?
Let Herman Inspire You To Deal With It
Do you sometimes feel that you cannot take it anymore? If so, let the experienced, real-life role model Herman Neuman demonstrate that you do not have to feel that way. You can be healthier and emotionally much stronger than you might think. All it takes is patience, discipline and the right attitude. And when you enjoy life, it is also easier to achieve your goals.
How does Herman know? From years of extremely brutal personal suffering and subsequent triumphs over unbelievable odds. He had to crawl out of his early-life hell, single-handedly and without one mentor. Because he did not buckle under, he learned many unusual lessons from his terrorized childhood and deepest poverty. Thereafter, he worked his way through college to become an independent world traveler and independent, intuitive thinker.
By the time he was only eighteen years old, Herman had to endure killer illnesses, including a chronic ear infection that oozed pus for years, starvation, war, bare-buttocks floggings, school failure, homelessness, culture shock, extreme social isolation, extreme judicial injustice, and true slavery. *
As you can imagine, Herman freaked out. He lost his cool and went berserk. He became a great paradox. Strangely, he did not become what is commonly accepted to be the most likely result of growing up in an exploded family and being tortured and exploited: a rapist, a wife beater or an angry, violent criminal.
He became the exact opposite. Benjamin Franklin said: "To be thrown upon one's own resources is to be cast into the very lap of fortune...." This wisdom proved to be very true for Herman and that made him, as someone said, " an unusual man."
For example, after his new wife and he graduated from college together, they saved enough to travel around the world for six months. They have now been married over forty years. Also, because God has blessed him in so many ways, Herman has a great desire to help people that are innocently suffering.
Herman's satirical, blunt-truth memoir, Heroes from the Attic: A Gripping True Story of Triumph, reads like bizarre fiction and includes a chapter about their low-budget travel adventures.
It's a hard life wherever you go. Amazingly, a hard life is quite often preventable, because such is mostly man-made or self-inflicted. Episodes in your life that are not preventable can be dealt with through patient endurance, because they will, more often than not, improve again.
After his almost terminal ear infection as a toddler, people thought that Herman had become an idiot, and he also had to learn to walk again. It also caused proud flesh, that is wild meat, to grow in his head during more than a dozen years thereafter. He may be the only human being during recent Western history that has ever done so. And as if all of those problems were not enough, one of Herman's masters also made him live in a shack, in which he had stored dynamite. Unbeknownst to anyone, this explosive became highly unstable and dangerous. A bomb disposal expert later stated that Herman should have exploded.
Herman patiently endured his first two dozen years with immense loneliness and patience, because after the Nazis, his parents were his worst enemies. There was absolutely no one to help, console or guide him. Even so, he is now obsessed to still seek out harsh reality, wherever he may find it in order to help improve it.
Readers and audiences cannot believe that Herman is still sane or even alive. They continue to report that his story"...is one of the best books I've ever read," and that "this book should be in all schools."
As a child Herman "turned the other cheek" thousands of times, so to speak. And literally all four of them too many times. However, do not be saddened by his beginnings because in spite of, or because of, his long sufferings, he has received many unusual blessings. Some of these are described in the book Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal, by psychotherapist Belleruth Naparstek, LISW, BCD. Its last chapter, “Surprise Blessings: Gifts in the Rubble,” describes them to be: Generosity, Joy, Compassion, Heightened Creativity, Survivor Power, and Spiritual Connection.
People frequently ask Herman questions like, "How were you able to deal with your stresses? How did you manage to survive?" After having thought about this for a long time, he had to conclude that it could only have been through the guidance and protection of God. It could not have been any other way. The odds of his survival, or remaining sane, had been so low that he now challenges anyone to demonstrate how it could have been otherwise. His conclusion is being affirmed by many of the people who have learned his story: "The human potential seems to be infinite!" and "God's plan for you is to inspire."
Herman earned a five-year engineering degree from Washington State University and
an advanced degree in Soul-Crushing Suffering and Enlightened Wisdom. He is a
volunteer chaplain at the
St. Luke's Magic Valley Regional Medical Center
and at its Canyon View Psychiatric and Addiction Services (Recently renamed
Behavioral Modification Facilities). He received nominations for the Jefferson Award for Public Service. He is a
former member of The American Academy of Expert in
Traumatic Stress, a past chapter president of Toastmasters International, a former member of a chamber of commerce, a planning and zoning commission and a long-time board
member of the Hagerman Water Users Association. He also was the founder and
president of a corporation and a homeowners association.
* Herman's master forced him to work in mud and manure and would not allow him to bathe or shower under the threat of physical punishment. His brother testified before the Everett, Washington, District Court that they had been "slaves" to their relatives.
