Hide and Play Dead: From Memoir to Real-Time Healing - Paperback

by Michael Holloway King MD (Author)

"Hide and Play Dead" is not a book to be read.
This book is to be experienced.

This book is an unfolding adventure story that you will not want to put down for a minute. You will be emotionally moved and sometimes shocked as you read the writer's memoirs. You will enter his intimate life history starting nine generations before his birth and up through his current real-time adventure of self-healing while writing.

This book will engage you.
Whoever you are-- whatever your age, gender, personal background, racial identity, sexual orientation, vocation or social class-- you will strongly relate to some parts of this book.

This book will begin to heal you.
The book is structured to evoke the emotional states necessary to recover from oppression and teach by example the survival skills needed to stay safe from social predators.

OVERVIEW
"Hide and Play Dead" is a memoir and nonfiction novel that represents a quantum leap in writing technology, healing methodologies, and social engineering. The autobiographical work is interwoven with a real-time adventure story about my liberation from ancestral patterns based on slavery.

The flow, from the beginning and up to the joyous conclusion of the book, appears as a seamless cinematographic stream with an unforgettable true storyline. It is a riveting expos and psychological thriller filled with international intrigue and startling revelations uncovering secrets of the black aristocracy and intelligentsia, renowned educational institutions, and the field of medicine.

Real people, real discovery and real adventure into the unknown are the cornerstones of self-healing that I both experience and personify while writing the book. "Hide and Play Dead" is rich with moving anecdotes, irony and humor, innuendoes and mysterious dangling phrases, metaphor and symbolism, poetic prose and mythological references, allegorical and mystical depictions, anchors and leitmotifs. The element of shock, the mixed genres, and a stark self-revealing stance produce a level of excitement that is necessary to break traumatic patterns in the reader, as well as to create a literary masterpiece.

"Hide and Play Dead" challenges systems of social oppression, including: racism, dysfunctional parenting, predatory relationships, educational elitism, homophobia, and physician corruption under the tyranny of the business model. It highlights the ultimate threat to democracy: global neo-slavery under the rule of an insatiable corporate elite.

THE PLOT
This is my story of being a mixed-race African-American growing up as the solo child desegregationist in a conservative Pennsylvania city in the 1960's, whose dysfunctional family represents the pinnacle of the black aristocracy. I escape racial violence and domestic turmoil by going to the nation's most elite private schools, where I excel academically but fail to fit in socially-replicating my parent's own histories of being a child prodigy and abandoned half-Jewish orphan. I come out of the closet as an openly gay man while attending Harvard Medical School, and become an iconoclastic alternative healer.

I narrate my series of ten toxic marriages to narcissists and other social predators, and my work, as I witness the corruption and collapse of the field of medicine. I reach a crisis point and realize that I must write a truthful account of my history to recover from a lifetime of trauma.

Dramatic real-time events occur as I write the book, which are highlighted by the discovery of my ancestral roots, and the after-effects of slavery upon my entire life's course and identity.

Author Biography

Biosketch:
Michael Holloway King, M.D.

Michael King, MD, is a graduate of The Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, and Harvard Medical School, and he has had over four decades of experience in both healthcare and communication skills. He has a long-standing love for the social and political sciences- especially bio-personality, consciousness, and neuropsychiatry. His vast cross-cultural work and international health experience prepared him to explore a global spectrum of human nature.

Dr. King specialized in mind-body psychotherapy in an alternative medicine practice spanning thirty years; he has also worked in virtually all aspects of conventional medicine.

He is currently an activist pioneer in social engineering, and the first physician to address the core emotion of shame and the effects of social oppression- to pinpoint their physical roots and invent treatment programs to resist them.

"It is time for the healer to emerge from behind the walls of clinical medicine and tackle the social milieu where illness is perpetuated. It is time for a new and revolutionary branch of medicine to take a stand against the primary source of human suffering in the world today."

Dr. King is an expert in writing technology, listening skills, and public speaking, so writing a multi-genre, memoir-driven novel, "Hide and Play Dead," came as naturally as his self-help format and literary activism in "Overcoming Oppression: Your Guide for a Journey to a New Life."

In addition to these two original, major works, the Freedom from Social Oppression book series now includes four anthologies, devoted sequentially to the topics of the creation of a unique racial, sexual, adult, and spiritual identity. Workbooks and professional guidebooks are forthcoming.

Michael currently has a private practice in psychotherapy and brain biotechnologies in the Palm Springs area of California, where he specializes in exciting new concepts for the field of medicine: shame desensitization, abuse recognition, trauma therapy, and anti-oppression training.

His treatment process is based on high-empathy, high-rapport, client-centered approaches, along with cognitive-behavioral and somatic therapies, and the development and clinical application of several emerging neuroscience technologies.