“I am surprised you are still alive.”

A.D. Thomason wasn’t expecting his therapist to say that. Coming from a large African-American family in Detroit, with an absent father and various other traumas, Thomason was very familiar with pain. Like many African-American men, he had been taught to keep all those things in, that “we don’t talk about these things.” With more therapy, he came to understand his own pain and find ways to heal from it. He describes what that journey looked like, and his discovery that he didn’t have to keep his problems bottled up or dissociate from his past by buying into a majority American culture ideal that denied his ethnic roots. As he tells his story, Thomason gives readers “Cheat Codes,” summarizing the lessons he learned that led to new freedom.