Episode 122 - jay whitney
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122. Taken, Renamed, Erased - A ChildHood Taken with Jay Whitney
Episodes Release from: 30th August & 1st September 2026
Some stories arrive and change the temperature of the room.
Jay Whitney's is one of them.
Born in Manchester in 1981 to a white Irish father and a Black mixed-race mother, Jay's early years carried a complexity that the world around him was not ready for. When his nan took him to South Africa in the 1980s, the consequences of that move were immediate and dangerous. Arriving in the height of apartheid, authorities warned his parents to keep Jay hidden. His mixed-race identity was not just complicated in that world. It was considered a threat.
But the danger outside was not the only danger Jay faced.
The woman who took him there, the woman who was supposed to be his greatest protector, was slowly erasing him from the inside. Jay was taken from his family, given a new name, and built a childhood on a foundation of lies that would take 35 years to fully unravel. His nan told him she saved his life. Jay came to understand the truth. She had not saved him. She had put him in a box and kept him there for two decades, calling it love the entire time.
The impact of that erasure ran deep. Physically. Mentally. On every level of who Jay was. He grew up not knowing his real name, not knowing the full truth of where he came from, carrying a weight that belonged to someone else's choices.
It brought him to his knees. There came a point where Jay describes being at his lowest, mentally and physically dying, trapped in a darkness he could not find his way out of alone. And then, at the bottom of everything, a hand reached in. His wife. One person choosing to show up. That single moment of human connection became the turning point that changed the entire course of his life.
What Jay did with everything that was done to him is what makes this conversation so extraordinary. He did not bury it. He did not perform a recovery he did not feel. He sat down and wrote it all out in a book called A Childhood Taken, a raw, honest, and deeply courageous account of a life that was taken from him and then, piece by piece, rebuilt on his own terms.
His mission now is simple and clear. He wants no one to carry what he carried alone. He wants the people who feel invisible, unnamed, and unworthy of their own story to know that there is a way through. That the truth, no matter how long it takes, has a way of finding the surface.
This conversation is not always easy to hear. But it is one of the most important we have had on Leading Our Own Way.
Tune in from Sunday 30th August at 8:00PM on YouTube and from Monday 31st August at 4AM
on all other podcast platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Episode 122. Part 1 and Part 2.
Some stories deserve to be heard. This is one of them.
This is what leading your own way looks like. Raw. Real. Unfiltered.
Spotify, Apple Podcasts & YouTube
Full episodes Monday, Tuesday (Tuesday Truths) & Wednesday this week at 4:00AM AEST
YouTube early release night before at 8:00pm
Tuesday Truths: Now drop with some of the guests important parts from the full episode - Tuesday 4:00AM AEST
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