Helplessness: The Brothers Who Carry the Unspeakable

In this unflinching conversation, we sit with Keeper Catran-Whitney - author, survivor, brother, and truth-speaker - about his memoir Helplessness: What Happens to Brothers When We Learn Our Sisters Have Been Molested by Our Parents. This isn’t just another story about trauma - It’s a crucible of emotional truth where guilt, silence, familial betrayal, and the destruction of being left unseen. 

Keeper opens the door on what most families never speak about. Helplessness is his forty-five-year journey through shock, shame, paralysis, and finally toward a fragile kind of hope - born not in denial but in the courage to face what was buried and forbidden. This memoir foregrounds what brothers experience when systems, culture, and love itself tell them to shut up, stay strong, and carry on, even as their world collapses. 

In this episode, Keeper and I delve into the emotional architecture of silence,  how not talking becomes its own prison, how guilt morphs into a lifelong companion, and how reclaiming voice is an act of resistance and healing. We talk about men’s emotional health in the shadow of unspeakable pain, the absence of spaces that hold brotherly experience with tenderness and depth, and the grand societal myth that resilience means never breaking.