The Shape of Him Part 2: What Rejection Built In Bryan Kohberger

This week, on a special episode of WebMD's Help Discovered Podcast, we're taking a closer

look at a common form of lung cancer that accounts for 85% of all cases.

When I first heard the words, you have lung cancer.

I was in shock.

It's a diagnosis that changes everything.

So what does it really mean to advocate for yourself when you're living with non-small

cell lung cancer?

Want to help discovered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts?

Hey, it's Cole Swindle, and when I spend 200 days a year rolling down the highway, the

bus can start to feel smaller than a guitar case.

Everyone wonders how I stay chill while the hours crawl by.

Truth is, one good luck spent on chamba, and suddenly the trip does a whole lot shorter.

Finding your space even when there isn't much to spare.

Need some chill?

Let's chamba.

No purchase necessary, VGW Group voidware prohibited by law, 21 plus TNC supply, sponsored

by Chamba Casino.

It's tax season, and by now, I know we're all a bit tired of numbers.

But here's an important one you need to hear, $16 billion.

That's how much money and refunds the IRS flagged for possible identity fraud.

Here's another one.

One in four honest, hardworking, tax-paying Americans has been a victim of identity theft.

But it's not all grim news.

Lifelock monitors millions of data points per second for your personal information and

alerts you to threats you could easily miss on your own.

If your identity is stolen, Lifelock's US-based restoration specialist will fix it, backed

by another good number.

The million dollar protection package.

In fact, restoration is guaranteed or your money back.

Don't face identity theft and financial losses alone.

There's strength in numbers with Lifelock identity theft protection for tax season and

beyond.

Visit lifelock.com slash iHeart and save up to 40% your first year.

That's 40% off at lifelock.com slash iHeart.

Terms apply.

Hey, it's Bubba Wallace from 2311 Racing.

You know what it feels like forever?

Sitting on a plane waiting for takeoff.

Good thing, I've got Chamba Casino.

With daily boost in social casino games on tap, this is a kind of fun that makes time

fly.

We're not turbocharged downtime.

Play now at chambacasino.com.

Let's jump up.

Sponsored by Chamba Casino, no purchase necessary.

VGW GroupFord, where prohibited by law, 21-plus terms and conditions apply.

This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brusky.

Here now, Tony Brusky.

Brain Cobrager grew up in a small town in Monroe County, Pennsylvania.

Chestnut, Township.

Chestnut Hill Township, I should be.

Accurate on that.

The kind of place where everybody knows everybody, which sounds nice until you're the kid,

that everybody knows that nobody really wants to spend time with.

He was heavy.

He was awkward.

He was by multiple accounts bullied through his school years and not in the loud dramatic

way that gets noticed and addressed and turned into an assembly about kindness.

In the quiet, daily grinding way, the way where nobody does anything specific enough

to get in trouble for, but everybody understands the rules.

And the rules say this kid doesn't belong here.

That's not a phase.

That's a formation.

Because here's what happens when a kid spends years being told not in words, but in every

small social signal available to children who are very good at this that he doesn't belong.

That there's something wrong with him, but the room he just walked into was fine until

he walked into it.

He stops trying to fix it out right away.

Verse he tries.

He adjusts.

He pays attention to what's working for other kids and tries to replicate it.

He reaches and gets back nothing and reaches again because his hope is still alive.

He still believes that the right year is coming that somewhere out there is a room where

the math works out differently, but the right year doesn't come.

At some point, the nervous system makes a decision that the conscious mind doesn't authorize.

Wanting something you consistently can't have starts to cost you more than just not

having it.

So the system stops reaching, starts protecting instead, starts building something interior,

something private, something that doesn't require anyone else's participation to exist.

Because out there has never been safe enough to actually live in.

We're going to break this down into no ways.

Is this an excuse for Brian Cobrager to make you feel sympathy for him for anything?

What's so ever?

But if we're going to be intellectually honest about this case and everything that's

gone on with it, we have to be intellectually honest about what built the person that

perpetrated the crime.

And we have to look at it as more than just, he was icky, he was weird, he was kind of

an elk.

Well, yes.

Yeah, he was all of those things.

Let's talk about the environment that he grew up in.

Let's talk about how kids treat one another.

And in no way am I saying here, because everyone wants to jump onto that area that will

of fubu.

It's not the fault of him being bullied that he turned it, no, it's not.

But there is death by a thousand cuts.

And sometimes a personality like Cobrager, if he gets a thousand cuts over here, turns

into something very monstrous over there.

Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, there can be cause and effect in these sort

of things.

Does it mean that those kids are bullying newies going to do this?

No, not at all.

But if we want to do better as a society, if we want less Brian Cobrager's out there

in the world, or people who are just a step or two away from becoming one, maybe we should

take a closer look at how we interact with one another and how we label people and how

we treat people and how we deal with things and how we deal with red flags, all of that.

What a wise idea, what a crazy thing to think about.

We should actually look at the behavior and environments in which we raise these people

and then go, hmm, but that didn't work out.

That rest should be failed.

And instead of everyone saying, we did our best.

See, this person didn't turn out that way, yeah, great.

This one did.

So what's going on?

And yes, there's a big piece of this where sometimes it is just, it's going to do

always going to do.

His brain's broken, things are wired the wrong way, and this was, was there any guardrails

that would eventually stop someone like Brian Cobrager?

I do not know the answer to that question, but let's, let's just, for the sake of the

argument, have the conversation and take a closer look at the pot at which he was

brewed in.

And then what was poured out?

Some kids who are in that sort of a situation where the exterior world, they, they just,

they don't find a way to belong in, they don't fit, it's not their jam.

I know I was one of them.

Some end up looking internally and some kids find something beautiful in there.

The interior world becomes their whole life.

They become writers, artists, high podcasters, people with a depth and originality that the

kids who always belong to every room they walked into never develop because they never

needed to, nor were they capable.

And some kids built something that hardens, that stops grieving what it lost out there.

And starts resenting it instead.

There's a difference between those two things and it matters enormously.

Grief says something is wrong with me.

Resetment says something is wrong with them.

And resentment when it takes root in someone who has spent years absorbing daily wordless

rejection doesn't announce itself.

It doesn't show up on a report.

It doesn't generate a call home from school.

It just quietly reorganizes the way a person sees the world, the way they move through

it, what they believe they're owed by it.

Nobody around Brian Cobrager appears to have caught that shift.

Or if they did, they didn't have the language for it or the tools to address it or the

authority to really do anything about it.

So the formation continued.

Now here's a part that doesn't get talked about enough.

The behaviors that come from years of this kind of pain are often the exact behaviors

that produce more of it.

Think about that.

A kid who has spent enough years on the outside doesn't walk into rooms the way other people

do.

He's tense, scanning for threat because threat has been more reliable than welcome for

as long as he can remember.

He's awkward.

Not because he's anything inherently broken about him, but because being natural and relaxed

in social situations requires a baseline of feeling safe and he has never had that baseline.

He's intense because the interior world, he's been building to survive and real and complex

and meaningful in meaningful ways that don't translate easily into casual surface conversation

with people who have always felt at home in those sort of rooms.

And those things make people uncomfortable, so they pull back, which deepens the isolation,

which reinforces everything he already believes about himself and about them.

Saying it's right, saying it is what it is, it makes him harder to reach.

There's plenty of people out there listening right now going, yeah, I can relate to

that, and they didn't murder people.

But they went through a childhood like this, or maybe they're still living a life like

this, even in adulthood.

A closed loop, no exit, and no single person inside it is a villain.

The people pulling back aren't cruel, they're just responding to something that makes them

uncomfortable.

And he isn't broken, he's responding to years of damage, the only way the damage taught

him to respond.

But the loop keeps returning, and nobody breaks it, and the formation keeps going.

At some point between his school years and adulthood, Cobrager lost a significant amount

of weight, rebuilt himself physically, reinvention, basically.

The transformation was dramatic enough that people who knew him before might not have recognized

him after.

I want you to think about what that kind of transformation usually means, not a gradual

lifestyle change.

A total exterior rebuild, the kind where the before and after look like two totally

different people, it means the inside felt unfixable, so he started on the outside, because

that was the project he could actually do.

Change what people see first, change the thing that has been wrong this whole time.

Maybe if the container looked different, what's inside gets treated differently.

It doesn't work that way.

The people around Cobrager, after the transformation still describe the same thing, the same texture,

the same quality, they couldn't put language to, the same low level pull to be somewhere else.

He built everything on the outside and people still felt it, still pulled back, still found

reasons to be on the other side of whatever he was standing, because the inside hadn't

moved.

It was still there, exactly where it had always been, doing exactly what it had been

doing since those years, in Monroe County, just wearing a different body, living in a

different state, carrying new credentials, same formation, same wall, same loop, and nobody

around him, not in Pennsylvania, not at the sales, not at Washington State had anything

adequate to address it.

I'll talk to the moms right now, because I know who's listening to this.

I know some of you are listening to this while thinking about your own kid.

Maybe you are that kid listening to this and watching this.

When it comes home, a little quieter every year, not dramatically, not in a way that generates

phone calls or emergency meetings or anything that qualifies as a crisis requiring action,

incrementally, steadily quieter.

The story of some school getting shorter, the friends mentioned less frequently, the

door to the bedroom closing earlier in the evening.

You've reached for them and felt something that is in hostility and isn't quite distance,

but is the specific experience of someone who stopped expecting that other people reaching

in is going to change anything.

So they've stopped leaving that door open, not as punishment, just as protection.

You told yourself it's a phase, adolescence is hard for everyone, they'll find their

people, you found yours eventually, they will too.

And there's a quieter voice underneath that one that has been asking questions about

that explanation for longer than you want to sit with directly.

First thing, you are not failing.

Second thing, and it's harder to hear, the tools available to you for this specific situation,

the systems, the institutions, the clinical frameworks are genuinely not built for what

this requires.

There is no mechanism that catches a child who is hardening instead of acting out.

Nothing doesn't look like a problem, it doesn't generate an incident, it doesn't qualify

for intervention under any framework that currently exists.

From the outside, it just looks like a quiet kid, a loner, maybe a little intense, probably

fine.

And there's no prescription for belonging, there's no clinical protocol for what years

of constant social rejection does to a child's nervous system.

There's no surgery that goes in and removes the accumulated weight of being the kid nobody

chooses.

Year after year, in the years, when everything about who you are and whether you're worth

knowing gets established, there is just you across the dinner table, trying every door

you can think of feeling the wall, telling yourself, it's probably fine.

What can you do?

Keep the door open even when they stop walking through it?

Not because they'll use it right now, because knowing it's there matters even when they're

not using it.

Say what you see without making it a verdict.

Not what's wrong with you, but I see you, I notice you're carrying something, I'm here

when you want to talk about it, get them support, not because you believe they're dangerous,

but because they're in pain.

And quiet pain still does damage whether it makes noise or not.

Release the idea that your love alone should fix this.

Your love matters more than you know, but this wound needs more than love to reach.

Leading help is not failing your child, it's being honest about the scale of what this

requires.

Most kids who walk this road don't end up, we're Brian Cobrager ended up.

That needs to be said clearly and kept in front of us.

Most of them become adults who carry the weight of those years in the way they trust and

connect and move through the world quietly, sometimes painfully, sometimes they turn

podcasts out that talk about life and the experiences and they have an uncanny way of relating

to the stories they are sharing.

They live their lives and they love people, but no one ever gets hurt.

They figured out ways to continue in life without going to the dark side.

Not everybody does though.

The retrospective story around a case like this, flattens all of that, makes everything

feel premeditated, makes the outcome feel like it was always the only possible outcome

for a kid who looked like this, who moved through the world like this, who gave people

that feeling.

It wasn't.

The people around him weren't equipped to see where the road was going.

Not because they weren't paying attention because the resources for this, the actual practical

tools for interrupting the slow-quiet formation of a defeated self and a child who is in pain

but not acting out don't really exist.

We respond to incidents.

We don't respond to the years before the incident when the shape is being built.

That's not a failure, not yours, not its families.

It's a collective one, a structural one.

One that belongs to all of us.

The shape he took was built in a gap between what he needed and what existed to give it

to him.

That gap is not unique to Brian Coburger.

It's in living rooms right now, at dinner tables right now, in the bedrooms of kids coming

home a little quieter every day.

While the people who love them try every door they know to keep hitting a wall.

Those families deserve better tools than they have and those kids deserve someone who

knows where the door is.

Even after the kid has stopped leaving one open.

I hope this made you think and maybe relate, giving your thoughts in the comments section

on substacking YouTube.

I hope to continue the conversation there.

Wherever you're at, press subscribe so you don't miss any of our coverage of this and

the medications we follow for you, right here.

Until next time, I'm Tony Bursky, we'll talk again real soon.

At chambacasino.com, let's chamba.

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing.

The rush of racing, nothing beats it.

But chambacasino comes close.

Chamba's got fast spins, fun games, daily bonuses and all the action you can handle.

Now that's all right.

Ready to hit the throttle, get in the driver's seat and head to chambacasino.com.

Let's chamba.

Sponsored by Chambacasino, no purchase necessary, VGW group void where prohibited by law, 21 plus

turns and conditions apply.

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing, another checkered flag for the books, time to celebrate

with chamba.

Jump in at chambacasino.com.

Let's chamba.

No purchase necessary, VGW group void where prohibited by law, CCNC, 21 plus, sponsored

by Chambacasino.

No purchase necessary, VGW group void where prohibited by law, CCNC, 21 plus, sponsored

by Chambacasino.

It's tax season, and by now we're all a bit tired of numbers.

But here's an important one you need to hear.

$16,000,000.

That's how much money and refunds the IRS flanked for possible identity fraud.

But it's not all grim news, life lock monitors millions of data points per second and alerts

you to threats you could easily miss on your own.

If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed.

Love up to 40% your first year.

Visit lifelock.com slash iHeart, Terms Apply.

Here's the truth.

You could literally be adored by everyone and then come home and still get completely

ignored by your own cat.

It's classic cat behavior.

But new Chiba premium puree is a lickable treat that changes all that.

Their protein rich, made with bone broth and have the smooth creamy texture cats go

crazy for, especially when it's hand fed.

Yeah, it's more than a treat.

It's a fast pass to favorite human status.

So feed your cat Chiba and go from totally ignored to truly adored in just 12 days guaranteed

or your money back.

Learn more at chiba.com