#2 Overcoming Severe Grief, Mental Health Struggles, and Trauma as a Family

Has life ever dealt you such a challenging hand that you not only didn't know how to play it, but you didn't know if you could play it? If so, me too!

Today, I share with you the story of how my family lost everything we had, including our mental health, and also how we recovered, overcame, and climbed out of it as a team.

And here's a trigger warning: 

Although I'm the happiest, most resilient person I know, this is a story of how I got here from rock bottom. And when I say rock bottom, I mean being millimeters away from killing myself, which I share in explicit detail in this episode.

Although your struggles might be different from my struggles (and I hope not as brutal), you are not alone. 

You’re tougher than you know, and capable of handling way more than you could imagine. 

This story is proof that there’s always room for hope, and there's beauty and growth to be found in even the most painful circumstances. 

And if you are in the middle of a struggle right now, please hang in there. You have got this.

Key Highlights

• I share my wild experience getting mental health counseling for the first time and what I felt after expressing the uncomfortable, suppressed emotions that came up while working through my grief and trauma.

• As a firefighter, it was crazy to see how brave we were to run into burning buildings, yet we were too scared to investigate or express our feelings and emotions.

• Chronic pain caused by my injuries at work were accompanied by a sudden, unwelcome retirement. Within a few months, my whole life and my family’s lives fell apart

• (TW) Suicide - Suicide and suicidal ideation isn’t selfish. It’s not logical or rational, it’s a manifestation of extreme pain. One deep breath was what saved my life…

• My wife and I started working on our mental and emotional health in new, more powerful ways, and we included our kids in this endeavor. 

• I took meditation masterclasses for stress and chronic pain reduction. These mental and emotional exercises are what catapulted me into a journey of cultivating inner peace, taking control of my pain, and processing my grief and trauma.

• At the end of the day, love wins and life DOES get better.

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Episode #2 Transcription

Today on the show, I'm gonna take you on a little journey into what I can only describe as paradoxically the absolute most difficult five years of my life. And yet at the same time, the most beautiful five years of my life. It's a time period when my family and I pretty much lost everything we had for a little while, including our mental and our emotional health, and also how we climbed our way out of that as a team.

And buckle up because there's a lot of emotions involved in this story, and I can't quite say exactly how it's going to affect everybody who hears it, but what I can definitely say for sure are what my intentions and my goals are as I set out to tell it.  My first goal is to be as raw and authentic as possible so that I can really connect with you, because although your struggles may be different than my struggles and your victories may be different than my victories, we are all in this human experience together.

And secondly, I'm really hoping to shine a little bit of a light into your darkness and to let you know that no matter how bad it gets, you're definitely not. And you're certainly capable of handling more than you could ever imagine. And also that there's always room for hope and there's beauty and growth even in the most painful mess.

And at the end of the day, love wins. Stick around. 

Hey guys. I just wanna offer up a quick disclaimer before you listen to this episode. I share raw and explicit detail, my very near miss with suicide and a lot of grief , and it gets pretty heavy. Plus, I swear, quite a bit, , so please use discretion when listening.

When I was 21 years old, I graduated college with a bachelor's degree in criminal justice and I got hired onto the police department right away. And for a couple of years I really enjoyed doing that job. I really liked the adrenaline rushes and the fast pace and the team building and the camaraderie and stuff, and.

In 2005, I was on patrol and I got into a pretty bad car accident, I struck the side window of my patrol vehicle with my head, and I lost consciousness and sustained a brain injury and also bulged a couple of discs in my neck.  Almost immediately after that accident, I started having some really weird symptoms.

My neck started pulsating and spasming, and my eyes started spasming as well. Kind of like if you've ever had an eye twitch. But this was in both eyelids and on both sides of my face relentlessly. And so I got diagnosed with something that's called dystonia, and I had never heard of it. You probably haven't either, and you don't need to know anything about it for this, but it comes into play later on in my story, essentially the area of my brain that got damaged in the accident.

Controls certain functions and motor neuron muscle control on my face and my neck in my neurologist,  he explained to me that these muscle spasms and eye twitches, they can be controlled with Botox injections and that it's a progressive disorder and that it may stay where it's at, or it might totally be under control with these Botox injections, or it might get worse as time goes on.

And quite honestly, at the time of that explanation, I was young and I didn't think too much about it. I just went into the neurologist's office every three months and I got these injections around my eyes and in my neck, and that kept the spasms OB Bay and I went about my life pretty much as normal.

I had some chronic pain in my neck from the disc issues, but I started doing yoga and physical therapy and chiropractic stuff. So a couple more years went by on the job and.

Honestly, I was pretty thankful to have learned all the lessons like grit and conflict resolution and communication and just different life experiences that I had gained on my time in the police department. And I loved the adventure and being out in the public and helping people and shift work. And I knew I never wanted to write a desk.

But quite honestly, there was just a little bit too much conflict and chaos in that job for me. And part of that reason I think, I mean, it's my natural temperament, but also I grew up with my dad being a third degree black belt in the martial art of Aikido. And I practiced Aikido on and off from my childhood up through my early adult life.

And Aikido is loosely translated into the art of. It's really not so much a fighting martial art. It's all about philosophy and creating harmony and redirecting negative energy into positive energy and restoring balance and harmony. And so I've been a really longtime meditation practitioner and art of peace practitioner, and I've done yoga for a long time, so it just wasn't quite the right fit for me.

And so at 25 years old, I transitioned from my career on the police department to the fire department, and that just really felt like home for me. I was thankful for all the friendships and the experiences that I had had on the police department, but with firefighting, it was like all the puzzle pieces fit together.

It was such an incredible way for me to create harmony in a disharmonious world. Like if somebody has chest pain and you go to their house and help them out, or their house is on fire and you put that fire out, there's just really no other helping profession like it. It's incredible. And so as I climbed up the ranks in the fire department, I started getting hit with some of life's challenges.

This happens to all of us from time to time. One of my very best friends since I was a baby, died of an accidental overdose, and then shortly thereafter, within the same week, my first dog and my grandma both passed away literally within just a few days of each other. And so I was pretty overwhelmed with the grief of all of that.

And then all of these calls that like never really bothered me too much, like drownings and shootings and stuff. I mean, I didn't like 'em, but they never really affected my wellness. Well, they started manifesting in my dreams. I would wake up gasping after having a super vivid dream of a drowning call that I'd been onto and where I had been doing C P R on a kiddo.

But then like in the dream, it would flash over and it would be my daughter or my son's face that I was doing C P R on it. It was rough. And so I started having some emotional difficulties that up to this point in my life I was really unfamiliar with. And so I kind of took an uncomfortable leap and I got into counseling for the first time in my life and I had a really wild experience my very first time there.

 I'd never been into a mental health facility in my life other than like on calls and stuff. And I met this guy, Mike, and he was just incredible right out the gate. His demeanor, I don't know how to explain it, like his aura. I was just like, So comfortable talking to him.

Like I've been to lots of different counselors since then, and not everybody's like Mike, and at this point in my life, I had never talked about feelings that I could recall. And so he started asking me like what was going on, and just because of his amazing demeanor and the way he was questioning me, and I think where I was at in my life, being overwhelmed by all these feelings, I just started opening up to him about all of this stuff that I just mentioned a few seconds ago.

And he started asking some really provocative questions about how I was feeling about my friend who had passed away. And I started sharing with him that I was just having these vivid, real hard, visceral flashbacks of seeing my best friend in a hospital bed with an innovation tube sticking up out of his mouth.

And these calls that I've been on and these dreams I was having with my kids and the pain I was experiencing with the loss of my grandma and how she was just such an incredible role model in my life. But, She died before I had the foresight to really piece together what an influence she was on me. And before I was really able to share all of that with her.

And as crazy as this sounds, some people don't get it, but if you know, you know, I was having such intense pain and grief over my sweet dog, Roxy. I got her right when I turned 21. And I don't know, man, for 11 years she had been like by my side through everything. We were just ride or die homies. I never had a cup of coffee on the front porch without her.

My wife brought her to the fire station so she can hang out with me while I was on shift. And so anyways, I just started talking to Mike about all this stuff and then all of a sudden I started crying. And I mean, like I wasn't crying. I was like sobbing, guttural, snot coming outta my nose. Just the most ridiculous guttural tears, and I honestly don't think I had talked about feelings or cried that I could recall since I was a little kid. And so I think I just had like years of emotions and trauma and pain and stuff stored up in me that just like had become uncorked. And at that moment, crying was so unfamiliar and uncomfortable to me.

I looked over at the counselor and I was like, what is happening to me? What is this? And I was snotting and blowing my nose and he just had this cool, gentle, soft smile and like in a totally like kind and loving way. He just said, Joey, this is grief and sadness. And it's yours and you have it stored up.

And he explained to me how these tears are. They're the cost of loving hard and losing loved ones that you've loved so hard. And those tears are not something to be avoided. I'll never forget, he put it in such a beautiful way. He said, this pain and these tears, and this crying and this talking here, this is how you bring honor to those relationships.

And so we started working through some grief exercises there that day and talking about different stuff. And like two hours later, it was an hour long appointment, but he stayed with me for two hours and while I was in his office, I felt super jarred and like it was painful and it was uncomfortable, but I'll never forget it.

I got into my car and I started the car up and I kind of like caught my breath and right there in the parking lot about to leave. I just felt like there was a 10,000 pound weight on my chest or my shoulders that had been lifted off, and I didn't even know that that weight was there. I mean, I knew that I was struggling or that I was having some challenging feelings, but I just felt so good and so light and so right there in that parking lot, I'll never forget it.

I was like, this is uncomfortable and this is new, but I feel good man, and I don't think I felt good for a long time. I wasn't even aware of how shitty I had been feeling because I think it had become my baseline. I was a pretty happy, jovial dude, and I smiled and I laughed a lot and I worked hard. So I don't think I even realized that I had all sorts of pain and trauma like brewing up inside of me.

And so that experience  in the counselor's office was really just the beginning to my deep exploration into wellness. I had already been meditating a lot as I had mentioned, but I started getting really into meditating. I started learning all of these different emotional exercises from my counselor, a lot of which I'm gonna share with you in this podcast.

And I got really healthy, like I had some weaknesses that have been exposed and shored up. And I became super aware of all of my feelings and how to process them. And I learned that feelings are feelings. And it doesn't matter how tough you are or what kind of a warrior mindset you have, feelings are part of the human experience and we all have them.

And in fact, It's not brave or tough to ignore them or suppress them. It's quite the opposite with these hard feelings, the only way out is through, and it really takes an emotional brave warrior to go through these feelings and investigate them and unpack them and stuff. So time went by and I climbed up the ranks in the fire department and it just kind of became my forte to be honest, and like fearlessly and authentically share my feelings, which in that environment is pretty uncommon.

And it was pretty wild because the first few times I was kind of nervous about it, but I started getting some amazing responses. Like a few of the guys were not so into what I had to say about it. But more often than not, I would start opening up at the table, you know, around coffee or after a rough call or whatever.

And it would be like that moment in the counselor's office, some of the guys would start opening back up to me and then all of a sudden we'd be sitting around the table and guys would be like crying. Sharing P T S D or grief experiences or like difficulties with their marriage or whatever. And as hard as it was, it was like incredible.

It was a really cathartic healing experience. We were like fighting fires, running medical calls, helping people out. And then at the station we were like helping each other and healing and growing and learning together and kind of becoming more whole as human beings. And I gotta tell you, it never ceased to amaze me that on the fire department as a culture, we were literally brave enough to run into burning buildings where people were running out but scared to investigate or share our feelings.

It was crazy. I didn't understand it. And. I had a pretty kick ass career in public safety for 15 years, four years on the police department and 11 years on the fire department. And then one day I was on shift in 2017 and we had just run a real basic medical call. We had helped an elderly lady out with a nosebleed and we were at a golf course and she and her husband had been golfing and we ended up transporting her by ambulance cuz we couldn't get her nose to stop bleeding.

And so my crew was talking to her husband, telling him where he needed to go to follow the ambulance and meet up with his wife at the hospital. And while all this was going on, my back was to them and I was kneeling down on the ground with our heart monitor, disinfecting it, and wrapping the cords up and putting it away and stuff.

And all of a sudden, one minute I was cleaning the heart monitor and the next minute this guy was on top of me, the patient's husband had tripped and fallen backwards onto me. And it was like, boom. the base of his golf bag landed on my head with all of his weight on top of it too. And all of a sudden I was like crumpled up underneath this guy and my neck was cranked and he was on top of it.

And my crew was like trying to pick him up and help him up off of me. And I just started seeing red with pain. I have a pretty high pain tolerance and this was bad. I was having like lightning bolts shooting down from the base of my neck to the tip of my fingers, and it was just really intense. And then as they got the guy off of me, my neck started like spasming visibly you could see it.

And my eyes that, you know, my eye spasms had been kept in check. They started spasming, but it was like much worse than it had ever been before. They weren't just twitches, now they were like visible spasms that were forcing my eyes shut and my neck was locked at a weird angle and it was just so painful.

And so I got sent home from the firetruck that day and I got an urgent appointment in there with my neurologist and he started giving me a whole bunch of extra Botox injections and then got me in for another M R I on my neck. And that whole week was just kind of a blur. It was intense physical pain and I couldn't see really well outta my eyes.

And then after around a week my work called and they told me I needed to give them a date of return so they could, you know, figure scheduling out and know that when I was getting back in service. And so, I got ahold of my neurologist and like I told you, he's such a cool, big hearted healer. He was like, Joe, I'm sorry.

I thought we were clear on this. I don't think you have a return to work date. You know, I shared with you that that dystonia, it's permanent and it's progressive and it doesn't go backwards. It it only stays the same or gets worse. And this new injury has really exacerbated your dystonia. And I can increase your injections and we can kind of put bandaids on these symptoms, but there's not really any going back from this.

And gosh, he even told me your eyes, they're going to continue to get worse as you get older. And you might even end up experiencing what they call functional blindness, which is where your eyesight is fine, but you can't see well enough to drive or do anything because your eyes are spasming shut so bad.

And I was like, Fuck shit , excuse my language. And uh, he continued, you know, and these bulged discs in your neck, they're now herniated and you have a severe case of stenosis, which means if you get hurt or you have another trauma to your neck, or even if you're just driving around and you get rear-ended, we could be talking about like paralysis in your arms or some other scary stuff.

And so part of my language, again, I was like, fuck, what the fuck? And physically, in retrospect, it makes sense. So symptoms were so bad and they've continued to be pretty bad over the last several years, but . I just was not really expecting that and it happened so suddenly. And so anyways, he was like, the combination of all of this.

Leads me to believe there's no way you're ever gonna be able to do your job safely again. I can get you a second opinion if you'd like. And I was like, yes, I want a second opinion. And so he sent me to this place called Barrows Neurological, which is this top-notch neurology place in Phoenix. And the doctor there said the exact same thing.

And so I had to contact my union rep at the fire department and let them know everything that had been going on and short story long. The fire department was super supportive of me, but I had no option. other than to take a medical retirement. And so that was that. It was so weird. And it was just crazy because I tell people I'm retired and they're like, oh, that's cool.

You're retired. And I'm like, no. And this case is not so cool, especially where I was at in my career. I had just busted my ass for three years to work to become a fire captain. And I had taken this really intense promotional exam and I was sitting in number one on the captain's promotional list, and there was another captain in the office who was just three months away from retiring.

And so when she retired, I was getting her spot and I was gonna be promoted. And in the meantime, the department had me acting full-time in that position. So I was getting paid as a fire captain. I had my own truck, I had my own crew that I was managing. I was in charge of a fire station taking command of house fires and stuff.

It was awesome. It was like literally the pinnacle of my career in public safety. And then it was just, Gone like in the blink of an eye, , pun unintended, but that's hilarious. So I'm leaving it in there. And so not only was I dealing with all of this physical pain and this sudden unexpected retirement, but like when you're a fireman, it's not just a career, it, it's a culture and it's a family.

And I got to spend 48 hours a week with my best friends on a firetruck doing superhero stuff. And then just all of a sudden that was gone. And my kids were so used to like coming to the fire station and visiting their superhero dad. And now like dad's just at home, but the kids don't understand what medical retirement is.

And like dad can't even pick him up right now cuz his neck hurts so bad. And I couldn't even like, Tune out and disassociate and watch Netflix because my eyes were spasming so bad. And so this huge sense of identity and connection was gone. And it was just really, really challenging it, it was painful on top of which I have to say I'm super thankful for the fire department and for my benefits and for this medical pension that I have, but I was not prepared financially for our income to literally be cut in half.

So on top of all this other stuff that I'm sharing with you, like the physical pain, the sudden retirement, the loss of my career, now the bills are starting to pile up too. And my family suffered this loss too. Like my wife loved being a fire wife and the kids loved coming to the station and you know, getting to check out the truck and stuff.

I mean, all of that was just like gone. , Within just a few short months, as if that wasn't bad enough. I just got crushed, man. My mom, who had already started having early onset dementia progressed to the point where she no longer recognized me or my kids anymore. And then two of my really good friends killed themselves.

And then my daughter, Sophie, my sweet little girl, she started having these violent, violent outbursts. Tantrums isn't the right word. I'm talking like two or three or four hours straight. Punching and kicking doors, biting and spitting. And one time she literally tried to stab me with a steak knife and she was beating the shit out of her little brother.

And she's like only six years old at this time. And then we would like get her calmed down and get her through it. And she would instantly flip a switch and go right from like rage monster to like deep shame and depression and telling us that she hated herself and that she wanted to die.  It was bad. Like just a few months prior, she was just like this happy, healthy, sweet little girl and all of a sudden everything changed. And then reasonably so my son started having major fear and anxiety because you know, everything in his world has changed, his dad's identity has changed, his dad's health has changed.

His sister now beats the crap out of him. Like half the time it'd be like the middle of the night and we'd be sleeping and my daughter would go into a rage, sneak into his room, wake him up and start beating him up. And then my wife and I, like one of us would be like holding my daughter and telling her we love her and getting her to calm down while the other one was like throwing my son in the car at, you know, 10 o'clock at night or whatever.

And like taking him to the park or to get a McDonald's ice cream cone. And like trying to explain to him he's only four years old, like, what's going on? It was just fucking nuts. And then literally as those weeks went on, within two weeks of each other, both of my remaining dogs got diagnosed with terminal cancer.

And so at this time, in case you're not keeping up, my daughter is losing her mind. My son is having fear and anxiety. My finances are in the toilet. My physical health is in the toilet. My career is gone and now my dogs are dying. So my wife Leslie, has bipolar disorder, and I started dating her when I was 16.

So we've been together forever and you know, she's struggled, but she's always been able to keep it in check and it hasn't really affected her too much. And she's always used diet and exercise and counseling and stuff to kind of manage it. But in 20 17, 20 18, when all this was going on, understandably so, she started really becoming incapacitated with her emotions because it was a lot to take.

And so she started having severe mania followed by depression. And our life was just crumbling, man. And I don't know, to see my daughter having such shame and depression and violence and rage, and then my son to have. Fear was so hard. And then my wife just like struggling so much. And so we were like all going to different counselors, but we couldn't afford the counseling, the credit card bills were piling up and all of my daughter's practitioners kept telling us like, dude, with everything you got, well they didn't say dude, but with everything you guys have going on, she's most likely got complex grief and trauma and this is all understandable behavior and you kind of just gotta love her through it and do these exercises and modeled to her how to regulate her emotions by your, you know, regulating your emotions.

Which that was hard to do because my wife was struggling emotionally. And then my son, he just started having a lot of different behavioral issues and anxiety issues because of this.

And so, There's just death in mayhem around me and my kids who were just like six months ago were totally happy and healthy, and now we're all like a total mess. We can't go socialize because the kids are going so crazy. They're like getting kicked outta school. And I'm on a first name basis with every school counselor and administrator.

My wife is not available emotionally. She's severely depressed. My dogs are dying and I'm trying to take them to the oncologist, but I'm like having a hard time affording our vet bills and I'm like weighing surgical options and like shopping doctors, they're all telling me something different about my neck.

I'm getting these new injections from my neurologist. I still can't quite wrap my head around that. I have this. Permanent and progressive neurological disorder that might cause me to go blind in the future. My career is gone, like grief is just stacking up and stacking up. Even though prior to all this happening, like I had mentioned, I was really emotionally and mentally fit and well-rounded, every day there was just some new trauma or tragedy or debt or bill or psychological emergency in my house.

I mean, it was like fucking left, right, left. I was just getting the shit beat outta me. I just, I just woke up every day and I was just like drowning and hoping to survive the day so that I could make it to bed, and then hope that while I was sleeping in bed that some emergency didn't happen, which half the time it did, and it was just nuts.

It was so hard. And then one day, I kind of just went temporarily insane. I think I just hit a tipping point, and I just felt like I said, like I was suffocating or like I was drowning. I was hurting so bad and my son didn't feel safe in his house, and my daughter was just losing her mind, and I just felt like I was failing everybody.

I, the bills were stacking up. My wife was not doing well and like I had been like, like I said, a superhero just six months ago and now I'm just failing. My dogs are dying. Like I can't, it just, I just felt like, I don't know, like I was in so much mental and emotional pain and I don't know exactly what happened, but I left my house and I don't even remember the drive, but all of a sudden I was sitting in my Toyota 4runner.

And I was in this empty parking lot and I had my gun in my hand and my finger was on the trigger and I was just crying. And I gotta say like a sidebar here, I can't tell you how many people I've heard talk shit about people when they killed themselves. I heard it so much in my life from friends and firemen and people at church and just everywhere.

Oh man, I can't believe you do that so selfish. I don't know, man. I have a totally different spin on that for sure, because you could talk to anybody who knows me. I'm not selfish. I love being generous and giving my time and my emotions and my love, and my energy, and even my money when I have it. I'm, I'm willing to extend myself for almost anybody, but this was not a logical, rational decision.

It's not like I was like, oh, this is the easy way out. I want to do it. So I, if that's your mindset, I would just implore you to like reconsider that with more of an open-minded, empathetic perspective. So, anyway. I'm no psychologist and I'm sure everybody's experience who experiences this is different.

But for me, the thinking mind was no longer there. I was literally seeing red, like there's like a hue of red and my heart was fucking pounding. Like somebody was just repeatedly hitting me in the chest with a sledgehammer and my stomach was twisted into very painful knots and my breathing was like, I'm a 25 year meditator and I have all sorts of breath control techniques.

And no matter what I did, I couldn't control my breathing. I was like hyperventilating and. I don't know. It's so weird, but I just felt like I was in so much pain and I didn't want to die. That's for damn sure. I was struggling with this. I felt like I had to die. My police training and my fire department training, I'm a survivor, man.

I don't quit. I don't tap out. I don't die. I don't give up. But it felt like, I don't know if you could picture putting your face in your hand on a hot stove and then the need to pull your face in your hand off of that stove. That's what it felt like. Like I just felt like I couldn't endure anymore and I just, I needed to come up for air.

And as dysfunctional as this sounds, saying it out loud now, like putting a gun in my mouth and pulling the trigger was the only way to come up for air. And so I was almost like having. Weird out body experience. I had my gun in my hand and I was like bringing it close to my face and then putting it back down.

And I was wrestling with myself and I was crying because like, I felt like I had to kill myself, but I didn't want to kill myself. And it's really weird because as I say this to you now, this is like five years ago and I've gone through so much emotional resilience training and like I'm just so healthy now that I can't ever picture myself being in this position again, no matter what life throws at me.

And so it almost feels like I'm talking about an entirely different person, but at the same time, I can still, I can still feel it like it was yesterday. I mean, as I tell this to you, I'm like re-experiencing it. So it's really weird. So all of a sudden I lose this wrestling match and now the gun is in my mouth and I can still taste it, man.

And. I'm like crying and my finger is on the trigger and I'm starting to put pressure on the trigger. And I don't know what happened exactly, but I was trying so hard to break free and eventually I was just able to take one deep meditative breath, just, and this is why I love meditation so much. And I attribute my practice to literally saving my life.

So I was able to take that one breath and I was just for a minute able to step outside of my pain. And I was able to pull the gun outta my mouth and I threw it in my glove box like it was a stick of fucking dynamite, and I couldn't get away from it fast enough. I slammed my glove box shut. I opened up my car door and I like used my legs to propel myself outta my truck.

And boom, I landed on my back hard onto the concrete, just so hard it knocked the wind outta me. And then all of a sudden I just rolled over onto my hands and knees and I just started throwing up, like violently throwing up. And I was puking and I was sobbing. And I later learned that that's part of what the body does.

It's purging all of that pain and emotions and stuff. It was a physiological response. But anyways. I'm like on my hands and knees throwing up, and I, I finished that. I, there was just nothing else that could come up and I, I have like tears and snot on my face and I'm just laying on my back in my own mess in this parking lot.

And I don't know how. I just knew, I fucking knew I would never come close to doing that again. I will never kill myself for damn sure I knew it deeper than I've ever known anything. I survived it and I was never gonna get close again. But what I didn't know was how, because none of the circumstances had changed in my life.

In fact, all that throwing up really just like that w retching hurt my neck. And so my neck just hurt so bad. And. I just started praying and it wasn't like this pious long-winded like our father and da da da, da. It was like, help me, help me. God. I surrender. Help me. Please help me, help me. God. I surrender.

I give up. I can't do this anymore, but I know I can't quit. So help me. Please help me. And I just kept saying, help me. Please help me. And I don't know how long I was down there doing that, but eventually I collected myself. I got back in my car and. I immediately called one of my best friends and I told him exactly what had happened and I told him that gun is repulsive to me and I don't think I'll ever go near it again, but I want to give it to you just in case.

So I met up with him, I gave him my firearm, and I drove home and I don't really know what happened that day or over the subsequent days, like, to be honest with you, I'm sure somehow I put on a face and got back to my family cuz the mess was still going on there. But I, it's all kind of a blur and I don't really remember the specifics about how exactly I picked up the pieces immediately following that.

But I just knew like, I needed to survive and I needed to get well, and I needed to like lead and guide my family, like my son and my daughter were struggling, my wife was struggling, and I had such a limited time left with my puppies. I wanted to spend it with them, you know? And so I just started doing an even deeper dive into meditation, and I got back with my counselor and I thought I had been doing the work before, but I started going balls to the wall on the work.

Man. I was, I'll spare you the specific details because this is already a long episode and a lot of it is the stuff I'm gonna teach anyways as the podcast goes on. But I started doing these masterclass on mindfulness, aba, and meditation based approaches to pain reduction and stress reduction. I literally started meditating like sometimes over an hour a day, which sounds crazy, but I'm telling you, man, it's the.

And I started doing all these emotional exercises and these workbooks and these expressive writing journaling exercises, and I basically just started nerding out about human psychology and post-traumatic growth and suicide recovery and my emotions and my kids' emotions and. Over time, I ended up not only recovering from that, but getting super healthy and learning how to find inner peace and stillness and emotional regulation.

And even though we were dealing with such hard stuff, I was able to manage my physical pain and all of our emotional difficulties without having depression. I was able to climb out of depression and it was really pretty amazing. And as time went on, my wife, I'm so proud of her, she realized that she was floundering and that all of her normal things that she had done her whole life were just not powerful enough to get her wellness and her emotions in.

So she asked me if I would support her, if she checked herself into an outpatient facility. And I'm like, you fucking ain't right. I support you. I was, I was so proud of her and it was not an easy decision and not an easy realization for her to come to that she needed to do it. And you know, I was so thankful.

I no longer had to try to help fix her. She's going to take that off of my plate, you know, and she's gonna heal herself. And so in the summer of 2020, she checked into this outpatient mental health facility and. I had already been doing all of the work that I had described to you for the last, you know, couple of years at this stage of the story.

And so while my physical health remained pretty rough and our life circumstances hadn't really gotten much better with our kiddos and my sweet puppy, Ruby had passed away. But I was still just continuing despite all of that, to just get more emotionally healthy, more resilient, more inner peace. I was learning how to cope with all of this stuff and deal with the debt and the mayhem and the disability and the loss of the career, and just learning how to process complex grief and trauma.

And basically after that day in my car, when I survived that, what I started doing was. I started viewing my mental and my emotional health the way some of my family members and close friends who are addicts view their addiction. They don't go to bars and they don't miss Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and.

They don't miss sharing at those meetings and all that stuff. Well, I started treating my near miss with suicide the same way, and to this day, I still, I don't miss a day of my journaling exercises or my meditation or my gratitude practice . I'm serious. I fucking defend my wellness practices so hard because let me tell you, people, there is nothing selfish about self-care.

I know we've all heard, like on the airplane, you gotta put the oxygen mask on first before you can help your kids or anybody else on the plane. Or for me, a better analogy is on the fire department. If you don't check off your air tank at the beginning of your shift and then you go to a house fire and you run out of air and you pass out, instead of becoming one of the rescuers, now you're becoming part of the problem.

And now the other firemen have to try to focus on. You know, saving any victims, putting out the fire, and now they're in a mayday situation trying to rescue another firefighter. So the same applies here. When I was on the firetruck, I always made sure my gear was on tight and I was ready for the job and I was never gonna become part of the problem.

I keep my fucking oxygen mask on because I like helping other people and I don't ever want to be in trauma like that. And so in the early summer of 2020, my wife did the most amazing, beautiful thing that she could have done for herself and for our family. And sometimes the best decisions that you need to make the right decisions are the hardest ones.

And that's what she did here. And she checked herself. To this outpatient mental health facility. And so she was gone like eight or nine hours a day doing really, really often painful and very deep psychological work, learning emotional processing and expression and communication, unpacking some very deep-seated childhood trauma and a whole bunch of other stuff like that.

And so while she was gone, as I kind of mentioned, we had already been doing a lot of emotional work with our kiddos. I learned how to become kind of almost like the freaking Buddha man meditation and all my counseling and everything taught me how to soften up because I had explosive people in my house.

And our natural inclination is to fight fire with fire. But when you have somebody who's hurting and they're melting down even when they're being aggressive with you, if you can be calm and loving and soften up, you know, sometimes. The bravest,  hardest thing to do is to actually love somebody through a fight rather than fighting with them.

And so I had been already learning how to do that quite a bit and  we had already been doing a lot of emotional work with my kiddos. We were doing counseling, we were doing art therapy, we were doing music therapy, we were doing play therapy, we were doing workbooks at home.

working on regulating our own emotions so that we could model what it really looks like to teach them, you know, how to go from a heightened state of fight or flight to calm and collected. And we had really just been putting a lot of that into practice with them. And so I kind of doubled down on that while my wife was gone in her outpatient facility.

She would be away from home for like eight or nine hours a day, and I would split that time up. Like half the time I would just be hanging out with my kiddos and. We watched all the Marvel movies, all the Star Wars movies. A lot of times we couldn't even get halfway through a movie without somebody having a meltdown or having a tantrum or having a fistfight or something crazy.

But we were trying. And the other half of that time, I was at the table with them doing these anxiety workbooks with my son. Well, we would all do it together as a team, but these emotional regulation workbooks for my daughter, anxiety and anger workbooks for my son, doing all of these exercises and just lots of different, really amazing growth mindset and emotional work with my kids.

And they were working hard. They were hitting the books together. I was hitting the books with them and we were all learning about our feelings and our emotions and just really working together. And I learned so much from these workbooks with my kiddos and from my wife, from her outpatient facility. And it's just fascinating how much crossover there is because.

Really just the human experience and the mind and the emotions are so universal. I mean, a lot of it really is unique to the individual and their temperament and their experiences in life. But also so much of it is the same, regardless of your age or your demographic or anything like that. Grief is grief.

And sadness is sadness. And fear is fear. And anxiety is anxiety. And we all have these feelings and we all need healthy ways to process and experience them. And when we are in crisis, I think it's relatively common for a lot of people to get the help they need, or at least to know that there's somebody out there, there's suicide hotlines, there's counselors, there's therapists.

But a lot of these building blocks and these exercises that we were all learning as a family, they really are like physical fitness. You can get fit and address and evaluate these lagging skills and  again, like physical fitness, you don't have to wait until you're sick and you have the heart attack or you have  diabetes or whatever.

You can walk and you can run and you can eat clean, and you can lift weights and do yoga. There's so much stuff that you can do for your mental and your emotional fitness and your mental and your emotional processing and communication. And very often what I'm finding is the more I teach on this and talk to people about this, the more they look at me like I'm either strange or I'm speaking a foreign language.

I just think this isn't quite common yet in our way of thinking and a lot of times, People think they have a really good grasp on their feelings and their emotions when I ask them at first. But . Then in reality, when I start digging a little bit deeper, they maybe only have a loose idea or they subconsciously believe that not having a good grasp or not having control over your emotional regulation is just kind of normal because it's their baseline.

Like a question I often ask is, do you lose your temper in traffic ? And nine out of 10 times people are like, yes, I lose my temper in traffic a lot. Or yes, I snap at my kids a lot and then I regret it and I'm just like, oh man, no judgment here. But you can fix that for sure, or at least mitigate it a little bit.

And you can put plans in place and you can change habits and change your communication and. Change your inner monologue and improve your way of thinking. Or they're like, yeah, I got pretty sad when my dad passed away, or something like that. And I'll dig in, like, what did you do to process that? And I just get like a blank look.

You know, a lot of times we kind of just shove it down and move past it. And the reality is the body and the mind keeps the score and all of that trauma and all of these rough emotions, they gotta go somewhere and they manifest in behaviors or feelings or external harm or violence or whatever. And so there's just tons of information and easily doable exercises that I really want to share with everybody.

And sometimes you definitely need professional help. I am not saying that that is not the case, but a lot of times these exercises and this information, You can apply it at home, particularly if you don't want to go to a counselor cuz you're not comfortable with that or you can't afford it or whatever.

But a lot of this information, like for me, I found it from meditation apps and meditation courses and the yoga studio. And I don't even wanna count how much money we spent on counseling with my kiddos and workbooks with my kiddos and my wife did this whole intensive inpatient and all this stuff and books I read.

And so it's like all out there. But I haven't really found it cohesively put together, particularly with like easily doable and actionable building blocks that kind of stack on top of each other to create comprehensive inner peace, happiness, and emotional wellness and regulation. And so that's what I'm trying to do here.

So back to my story. I kind of led you down a train wreck of a trauma road here and. This is where everything starts getting really magical and amazing and beautiful, like so many puzzle pieces just started clicking together. And we learned how to cope and how to climb out of depression and how to fight stress and anxiety and how to become extremely emotionally fit and aware and regulated as a team and as a family so that we could thrive when times were going well and that so we could also endure and process and survive the difficult times.

And personally for me, I had just hit this crazy place of like zen and inner peace and I had just kind of accepted that this was my situation in life  it was the hand I was dealt and I was gonna play it to the best of my ability. And I had a real positive outlook on it. I had really just climbed out of any sort of negativity or any sort of inner monologue about it at all.

But then very rapidly, External circumstances in my life and my family's wellness and wellbeing started rapidly improving and all of a sudden, after several years, we started having really good life circumstances, and then we had super fit and healthy minds and emotions, and that is where the amazingness started happening.

Serious joy, happiness, just like amazingness. So my wife graduated her outpatient facility. She got a new psychiatrist, she got her medication dialed in, and she just now has such a broad growth mindset, huge level of accountability and ownership over her mind and her emotions. And she's just like on the track to becoming like so radically well.

And like I said, I had just nerded out on my own mental fitness and wellbeing. And then one day one of my daughter's therapists asked us if we had ever looked into sensory processing disorder. And at this time we had gotten like 10 different diagnoses from several different practitioners on what was going on with her.

It's situational, it's trauma, it's grief, it's oppositional disorder, it's a d h. I mean, it seemed like every doctor or therapist had a different opinion until this one said she had noticed some neurological signs going on and had kind of put the puzzle pieces together that a lot of my daughter's outbursts had to do with the fire alarm going off or her brother being in her face or food or just all these different things, clothing and a lot of stuff that, you know, when you're in it, you think you know what's going on.

I mean, I would've considered myself an expert on my daughter's body language and behavior. I mean, it was my mission to get her well. But this therapist had seen a lot of things that, these patterns that once she said it, I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I missed all that. So we started looking into it and we got her assessed for that and it was like, boom.

She meets 10 out of the 10 criteria. It's so clear she has this hyper responsiveness to senses and we were explaining that it's part of her brain. She might develop out of it. She might not. And then all of these things started making sense, like fire alarm or loud announcement at school, she's hissing, biting, spitting, trying to run away from school, fist fighting.

Brother's in her face a lot cuz he's hyperactive and he's, you know, he's a little boy and so she's raging on him. Shower water is too hot or too cold. Well it turns out like food is gross to us, like broccoli or whatever. Well to her it's so disgusting you can't even imagine it. And when we thought maybe, gosh, why does clothing set her off and she doesn't want to go to school because she says her socks are too tight.

Well, the seams in her socks are like nails scraping on her and just touch, sight, taste, smell and sound are just hypersensitive to her and it's so amplified. And so we started learning how to accommodate her simple things. They have seamless underwear and socks and earphones at school and just different stuff.

Like the teachers would give her advanced notice on the fire alarm and stuff like that. And all of a sudden, Dude, after four years of us just hurting for her and because of her behavior, even though it wasn't her fault, it turns out we were sending her into fight, flight, or freeze. And that's why she was having all of this rage.

And then when she would come out of it, she would be back to herself, see the damage she did. And no matter what we said or how we loved her through it, she had shame and depression, and sometimes she would hate herself and wanna harm herself, and she felt like she was causing harm to her family. And so all of a sudden we started making sure the shower temperature was just right.

We got her these socks and these underwear, these earplugs, all this stuff. And it wasn't gradual. It was like instantly, like four years of pain and chaos were just gone. And that was in 2021 and my wife had graduated in 2020 and started to really get healthy over those subsequent months. So even though.

In the very beginning of 2021, we had a couple more losses. my last puppy Bella died and my step father-in-law died of Covid. And those were so hard, but they were also great tests for us because we were able to like sustain those losses and grieve properly in a super healthy way and come through those losses as a team with our wellness intact.

And so it was hard, I hate those losses, but they tested our newfound armor and grit and resiliency and it didn't even really rock our boat aside from the normal sadness and grief process. And so my daughter gets this diagnosis and all of a sudden, like I said, four years of like pain and chaos, and here's a side.

She would have these meltdowns for like four hours straight and they would be ugly. Man. She was mother effing us. She tried to stab me. She was biting, spitting, and I learned that mirror neurons, which is like why a sneeze is contagious, is really the best way to help model and teach a youngster like that.

Or even like my mom with dementia, or even my wife when she was dysregulated, somebody whose emotions are amped up, you can't meet them logically. You have to connect with them emotionally and model with your mind and your body and your tone of voice, love and softness and kindness. And so she would rage up and I would hug her tight because I had to restrain her and she hated that.

But I would be like doing it as tight as I had to to keep us in her safe, but as soft as possible too. And I would just be rocking her or. Playing some music that she liked or just, well, she's screaming and mother after me and saying, I hate you. And I'll just be whispering in her ear like, I love you.

You're safe. This isn't your fault. It's okay. You're safe. She's gonna get on this podcast by her own volition. I, I advise against it, but she's adamant she wants to get on here and share because she has visceral memories of me doing that. And now that she's, you know, accommodated and quote unquote normalized, she wants to tell parents and kids what her experience was like and how she's talked to some of her friends and how their parents don't see their meltdowns as like a need that needs to be met and how I kind of balance logical consequences and boundaries with like deep love and connection while she was hurting.

And she wants to share that. And I didn't ever expect anything like that, but when I hear her talk about it, it's like the greatest reward ever from all of that hard work. But anyways, she starts. Kind of be coming back to herself that I hadn't seen in several years. She's, she's like, daddy, thank you so much and mommy, for these earplugs, it feels so good.

And, you know, thank you for getting the teacher to, you know, let me know about the fire alarms and all this stuff. And I'm, she's saying thank you. And I'm like, I'm telling her, no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Took us so long and we missed this. And like, I can't believe you were stuck living with this, you know, for four years.

But anyways, now all of this emotional work that we had been doing with. It like became her superpower because it wasn't, it wasn't her emotions in her mind that needed the improvement, but she did all the hard work and so now her senses are back to normal. And now she's like more emotionally mature and regulated than most adults that I know.

It's just incredible. And my wife went from being like emotionally deficient to having these superpowers because she went to like the most intensive training in therapy that you can have. And now I have these emotional superpowers. And my son too, he's still struggling with his anxiety, but he's so self-aware and growth mindset oriented, and his inner monologue is positive.

And it was just crazy. It wasn't gradual. All of this stuff that like came on suddenly and then lasted for four years and then like all of a sudden  everything is back to good in my house. And it's almost like it's beautiful, but it's kind of jarring. I'm like, is this really happening? And it's 2021 and.

Stuff that a lot of people take for granted, but like we are watching TV as a family. We're sitting around the dinner table, we are going on vacation and we're just like going out to dinner at restaurants and stuff. That literally didn't happen for us for four straight years  like some of our friends would want to hang out and be like, Hey, I haven't seen you and the kids in a while.

And it's like, how do I explain like, no, sorry man. My wife is struggling with her emotions and she's at an outpatient facility and I almost killed myself and my son is biting his fingernails down in the freaking bone. And if we get our kids together, my daughter might blow up and try and attack your son if we hang out.

Like you can't say that stuff. And so we were like hermits for a while and now we're like back to socializing and hanging out with our friends and it's just like, it's so awesome. Like, okay, so my wife likes to tease me a little bit about when I first got glasses, like, I don't know, four or five years. I was like two or three years too late.

My eyesight had been, you know, deteriorating, but I had put putting it off, and so all of a sudden I got glasses. And if you're old enough to remember when TVs first came out in high definition, I was like walking around with these new glasses on and I'm like, it's like the world is in high definition.

It's so amazing. Look at the trees, look at the clouds. And my wife is like, all right, tone it down a little bit. Well, that's how it was for me, having my family intact and being able to hang out with friends again and grow to the movies and watch TV and just get through a meal together or like a whole entire Marvel movie or whatever.

It's just hard to explain. It was so beautiful. And even just getting together in the backyard and playing Frisbee with the kids, or I don't know, taking my daughter to a yoga class with me. Just so much stuff that you would normally be doing, just having fun and living and things that we haven't done for a long time because everything was so sideways.

So around that same time, I get an email from my favorite musician, Michael Frante, and I just love his music. I, I've been obsessed with music ever since I was a little kid.  music is really how I process life and emotions and stuff. It's, it's my medicine and I have a group of friends from the fire department and we always just go to concerts together.

And they love Michael Frante too, but they know that that is like my jam because. If you've never heard his music, do yourself a favor and check it out. It's like kind of an eclectic mix of hip hop, rock and roll reggae and , it just makes you want to dance. But his lyrics are like super deep and he sings about big feelings and processing your experience.

And if you know me, it's just like everything that I love combined all into one thing and it's just totally my jam. And I've used his music as my therapy a lot throughout the years. And coincidentally, I never really pushed this on my daughter, but she hears his music and stuff and one time during one of her terrible bouts of depression, She said, daddy, can I listen to Michael Frante right now?

And I was like, of course. Anything, you know, we're desperately trying to help her. And you know, like the preacher's kid never wants to go to church. You know, I never wanted to push my music on my kiddos cuz I didn't wanna push them away from it. So I never pushed us on her and I never told her that I used his music for feeling the fields and stuff, but she just asked.

And then it just kind of became her go-to like his music, just like her daddy was better than counseling, better than therapy. Like she always used it as a tool to kind of get back a semblance of a normal emotional state or to like find some happiness and positivity during the dark times. And so I love this guy, I love his music.

And I get an email that, you know, COVID is not over, but concerts are coming back and stuff. And so I get this email that says he's coming back to tour and he's going to the Red Rocks amphitheater in Colorado. And my buddy Steve texts me like, Hey dude, did you get that email and do you want to go? And right out the gate I was like, yeah, that would be amazing, but no hard pass.

I can't do it. And I started thinking, I don't know why is it a no? Because I said no to him out of default. I was just so used to saying no to everything. But I started thinking, I don't know, my wife is doing pretty good in. For the first time in years and years and years, maybe in a decade, she just left and went on a little staycation or a vacation to Palm Springs and she got to visit her aunt, which was really important to her.

And she got to stay in a hotel by herself with no kids, no husband, no dog, just her room service and stuff. And while she was gone for like four days, I stayed with the kids and we had a blast. We were going to froyo and playing Mario Card on the Nintendo. We, there was no meltdowns and stuff. And so I'm like, gosh, everybody's doing good.

And she's been encouraging me to go do a little vacation like that myself, cuz we all kind of need to decompress and recover from the last several years. And literally that same day, my dad, he's been retired for several years, he emails me like, Hey, I know you guys really don't travel right now, but I have these corporate airline miles and they're about to expire.

Is there by any chance, you know, any way that you could use these? And like literally, before I could even respond to him, I go to another email from Michael Franti's, you know, PR people or whatever saying, Hey, Fyi, he's giving away tickets to first responders to this Red Rocks concert. And I'm like, oh my gosh, are you kidding me?

Like, God, are you giving me a message here? So I told Leslie, Hey Michael FTE's giving away free tickets to first responders. Steve and I have been desperate to go to Red Rocks. It's like a bucket list thing for us. And my dad has given me free airline miles. I'd really like to go, what are your thoughts on this?

And she was like, fuck yes, do it. Go. And I'm like, oh my gosh. I text Steve, Hey man, I know I just told you no this morning, but maybe I could swing this. Are you still down? And he's like, oh, yeah, I wanna make this happen. So I call my other two fireman friends, Wes and Brandley, and we go to concerts together.

And these guys are two of the guys who I kind of just stayed in touch with during my four really rough years. , they were kind of with me when I got hurt on the firetruck. They know everything that's going on with Leslie because. They don't judge her. They freaking love her. And you know, they just want us to all be, well, they know everything that's going on with my kids.

And so I just text them, Hey man, I know it's a lot to swing, but Steve and I are gonna fly to Colorado and go to the Red Rocks to see Michael Frante. Do you guys want to go? And they're both like f Yes, their wives are supportive. We're taking a boys trip to Colorado. Like they want to go and they love concerts, but the reality is, is they know I was coming out of this and , they're such good friends and they wanted to support me.

And so this is happening. My wife and the kids drop me off at Sky Harbor Airport. I get on the airplane. And I'm flying to Colorado. I've never been to Colorado. I haven't traveled in five years. I've never been to Red Rocks. I can't, I just can't believe all this is happening. My family is healthy at home and we're excited.

And right when I get off the plane, I meet up with the guys and the vibe is just ridiculousness. Like we're laughing and we're telling dirty jokes, and we're just like being idiots. We're literally laughing until we're crying and here's what happened. It had. Quite hit me until that moment. But I had gotten so grounded and so calm and still and stoic, and I could totally surrender to my chaotic external circumstances and I could cope with chronic pain without letting it bother me.

And I never really got sad or de well, I got sad, but I never got depressed when, you know, my family was having such a hard time, I was able to hold it together and find, you know, equanimity. But what I didn't realize, I think until that minute that I got off that plane, I don't think I had genuinely smiled or laughed in like a couple of years.

And like, it just hit me like joy, happiness, like hailed friends, welcome back. You know, this feels so good because my natural state is like being a super bubbly, happy dude. And that had been totally shut down for a few years. And so, I just really have such a hard time describing. It was like the best drug you could ever imagine.

And so we get to the Red Rocks amphitheater and the concert's just amazing. It's really this incredible spiritual healing experience like it is every time this guy puts on a show because it's just all about feeling the feels and connection and good music. It's just beautiful. And my wife is texting me pictures of she and the kids just like having fun and doing well and it's just amazing.

And so we get back from Colorado and like my cup is filled to the brim and my family's doing well. And literally a month later in around August, I get another email from the same artist, you know, Michael Frante and spearhead letting me know that they're having a concert in Mesa, Arizona, which is just like 20 minutes away from our house.

So obviously this is my favorite artist. I told you about feeling the feels. I told you about how he's really held my daughter so much, but Sophie has not been able to go to concerts for a long time. But now we have earplugs and we know about her sensory stuff. So I ask her like, do you want to give live music a try?

I know it's loud. And she's like, what? Michael Frante? Yes. And so we set out just a month or two later to go to another one of this guy's concerts, which like for me, I could go to this guy's concerts every week and it wouldn't bother me . And so I call up the same group of guys and their wives and their kids are in on it.

So this time it's a family affair. All the wives and the kids are meeting up out there and we get to Mesa Amphitheater and. It's just amazing, like to be socializing with the firemen and the fire wives and the kids. And my friend Wes is there, and my son and his son, I don't think they caught any of the concert.

There's like this giant grass hill in Mesa amphitheater and the whole time they were just like repeatedly rolling down this hill and like running around like total maniacs, which coming out of Covid, that's exactly what those little boys needed. And so right before the show starts, Sophie asks me, daddy, can we break away and go up close?

And I'm like, yeah, you better believe it. We can go up close. That's where I like to be anyways, you know? So she and I kind of break away from our friends and our family and we start walking up close to the stage and I just haven't seen her. Sorry guys, I'm gonna cry here. I just haven't seen her excited in so long.

And then Michael Frante takes a stage and. She has, the only way I can describe it is like a 1960s era Beatlemania meltdown. She passes out and she's just like, you know, full system meltdown. Just so excited, like overwhelmed with excitement. And she's telling me stuff like in between her excitement, she's like, daddy, I can't believe I'm at my first rock and roll concert.

Daddy, I can't believe it's Michael Frante and I'm here. I can't believe I'm here with you. And she and I are just dancing and I'm trying to hold back the tears because I haven't seen her happy in so long and I missed it. And I'm, I'm just so grateful and overwhelmed with joy. And he starts singing this song.

It's called Lay It All Down. It's just one of my favorite songs. I just love it. It really kind of, it ever since his album came out, it really describes my experience. And so when I listen to it, I feel all the feels. And there's like a zillion people there, and he always goes out into the crowd and sings with the audience and stuff, but he just kind of steps off the stage and he like, makes a beeline right to me.

And Sophie we're the first people he stops to, to, you know, like interact with. And he throws his arm around me and he offers me the mic. And I'm like, is this freaking happening? Like, I'm here singing with my favorite singer. My daughter is just like, she's back, you know? And I look down at her and just sheer joy.

Like, I can't even explain the palpable, it's, it's the personification of the emotion, excitement and happiness and joy. Like just sheer joy radiating off of her, like emanating off of her. And it just swept me away. Like it, I just got lost in it. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I mean, I, I don't know.

So he hands me the mic like that. And, I don't sing a single word. I, I'll lose the moment. I lose him, I lose the mic. It's just me and my daughter and she's happy again. And oh, so beautiful. And so he moves on to the next person who's like able to sing and  and, you know, I'll leave a a, a picture of this in the show notes, but my buddy Wes, he's such a good friend and he's so fast, he was watching all of this take place and instead of like enjoying the concert himself, he had the foresight.

He pulled out his phone and he snapped a picture and it's the most beautiful moment of my life maybe. And he caught it just perfectly. And so I'm so grateful to him for that. And we finished the concert up. Needless to say, it's like an amazing experience and we kind of get back to life. We're having fun as a family.

We're kind of catching up on life and you know, like I said, just watching Netflix and eating dinner around the table and going out to birthday parties and just doing all the stuff that we missed. I mean, everybody's missed it for the last year or two, but we've missed it for like four years. And then I get another email.

Obviously there's a theme here with this Michael Frante in spearhead, and he's putting a cruise together, a cruise from Miami to The Bahamas, and instead of like, The normal stuff that you do on a cruise ship, like bingo or whatever during the day. It's meditation, yoga, trauma, healing, all these different things.

And during the evening it's concerts. Like there's a rested development and fits in the tantrums. And one of my favorite bands, Tropi Delic, and of course Michael Frante and spearhead. So it's like concerts in the evening and healing stuff during the daytime, which like for me, it's my total jam. And six months ago I would've just deleted that email.

Like there's just no way any of that was ever gonna happen. But all this magical stuff has been happening with this band and with my family and with our travels.  so I run it by my wife. I'm like, I feel like I should try to go to this. And we're not. Ready to go travel as a family yet. So we're doing these little one-on-one trips where like I'm giving her a break and she's heading out and vice versa and stuff.

So I tell her like, Hey, I know I just got the last one, but I really want to see if me and the guys can go on this cruise. What do you think? And again, my wife, she's awesome. She's like, fuck yes. And so again, kind of deja vu. I hit the guys up thinking like, I know this is a lot to ask. You went to Colorado with me on this one, but like, are you guys interested in going on a cruise and doing this?

And boom, same thing. These guys, they're willing to drop everything and their wives are willing to support it and everything. So we plan another guy's trip. It's only been a few months and we're heading on a cruise. And so this trip is happening and like at this point, my life is just too good to be true.

And just a few weeks before the cruise takes off, I get an email cuz they're giving us updates on like the different events that are gonna be there and the different concerts and stuff, and. This one is called Fab X. There's gonna be a Fab X talk and they're looking for three people. They've had like a hundreds of people put in for this, but they're selecting three people to share a triumph over trauma story.

And you have to be willing to publicly speak and share with authenticity and vulnerability about a triumph over trauma story in your life. And I put in for it and I get selected and I get trained up by this gal, Colleen. She runs this company called Fab X. It's like a TEDx style public speaking training company.

And she's doing Zoom meetings with the three of us and you know, teaching us how to like obviously in case you're hanging with me on this podcast, we're like an hour and a half in, I'm long-winded and it has to be like a 15 minute talk. So she's teaching us how. To edit ourselves down and tell a powerful story within 15 minutes and all this stuff.

And so as everybody's prepping for this cruise, I'm thinking like, I'm excited, but why did I sign up for this? I'm about to go share all of this stuff because what I'm telling you right now, I've told this story like a hundred times, but at this place in the story, which is October of 2021, I had never shared this stuff out loud.

And now I'm like gonna go share it with hundreds of people in a public speaking forum. Like public speaking is the thing most people are afraid of. And this is what I'm doing on a vacation. I don't know, I'm kind of having second thoughts about it. so anyways, everything goes seamless. We do the training, we get the talk written, we fly to Miami, we get on the cruise ship, it's amazing.

And on the second day of the cruise, they take us to this auditorium where they do like the big Broadway plays on stuff. It's huge. And it's at capacity. And Colleen tells us like, there's 500 people here. And I'm like, oh my God, holy shit. What'd I get myself into? And these two incredible ladies who I've since become friends with Dawn and Leslie, Don is a special needs mom.

She's a warrior, and Leslie literally saved her brother's life by donating a kidney. So they go out there before me and they just totally are rock stars. They just tell their stories. They share their, you know, like I said, their triumphs and their trauma. Everybody's applauding. It's crazy. And then it's like the sound guy's there, he's putting a microphone in my ear and it's my turn, and I'm just like, all right, here we go.

I take a breath, I pull the curtain back, and I walk out on stage and I just open up man in front of 500 strangers. I. Chair that I almost killed myself and that we had all these difficulties and basically a condensed version of everything you just heard. And I also was able to tell Michael Frante cuz he was in the audience, like, thank you.

I got to tell about that moment with Sophie and how he's healed her. And he owns a huge piece of my heart for that. And my friends were in the audience. I got to tell them thank you. And it was just beautiful. It was incredible. And the talk went well and everybody clapped and everything was nice. And I don't know, something really, really unexpected happened though.

I signed up to give this talk for like kind of selfish reasons. I thought it would be cathartic for me. Like God had carried me through this and like now I've triumphed and I'm no longer in the trauma stage and like maybe this will help me heal and I can give gratitude to Michael Frante and my friends and my tribe.

But I didn't know that sharing my story. It's like Brene Brown, that book, I think it's called The Power of Vulnerability, but like obviously this is a thing that I didn't know so much about cuz I'd been like sheltered for the last four years. It's transformational and so, After I gave that talk, I couldn't go anywhere on the boat without somebody wanting to talk to me about how the talk impacted them.

And it wasn't just like, Hey, you did a great job and I'm getting attaboys. That feel good. I mean, it was that too, but like, no, it was like people pulling me to the side and being like, can I share something with you? And I'm like, yeah, of course. I just shared with you. And we'd start having these like amazing human connection, transformational healing discussions.

And I'm telling you, there were 500 people at that talk. I bet at least half of them talked to me. I talked to hundreds of people on that boat and dozens more were like in my inbox on Facebook when I got back. I've made like the most beautiful friendships I never expected, and I'm so thankful for, and obviously I don't have time to talk about all of 'em, but I do want to share three specific interactions that I had after I gave that talk on the cruise ship, because they were just like, seriously, life changing.

And I gotta warn you, I'm probably gonna cry while I tell these. So the first guy pulled me aside and he said, Hey man, I saw your talk. Can I talk to you for a minute? And I'm like, yeah, what's up? I'm Joe, you know? And he tells me this story. So he says, Hey, my best friend and his son are firefighters. And my best friend's son was 24 and last year he killed himself.

He was struggling with depression and P T S D and stuff. And I just wanna tell you, I'm, I'm glad you made it. I'm glad you survived, and thank you for sharing all that. And I want to give you something. And he goes to hand me this challenge coin, which for those of you who aren't in public safety or the military or whatever, challenge coins are really special.

Like they only get made one time for different special events and stuff. And some guys keep 'em, like you get 'em throughout your career. Some guys trade 'em and stuff. But like, this was one. From this young man's funeral, they made, his fire department made a challenge coin and like this gentleman had no idea he was gonna be listening to a firefighter talk about suicide.

He carried this with him onto the boat.  It obviously  you know, gives him comfort and it's so special and important. And also like, you know, there's so much pain and trauma associated with it. And he's like handing it to me and I'm like, I can't, I can't take this. I'm like trying to push it away from him.

I'm like, I'm honored, but I can't take this from you. And he's like, I insist you need to have this, I want, I want to give this to you. So I take it from him. And fast forward when I got home from the boat, my department's awesome. They gave me their most recent challenge, coins from their most recent special event.

And I was able to reconnect with this gentleman from the boat and mail him one and mail the dad one as well. But the next one was this lady. And she was a doctor a little bit older than me. And same thing, she said, Hey, I saw your talk, you did great. Can I, can I talk to you? And I said, yeah. And she kind of pulled me aside and.

She said, oh my gosh, I don't know if I can get through this. She said, I want to share with you that I came from an abusive family and I was able to break that cycle with my kiddos, and I'm still dealing with the trauma from that. And I wanted to tell you two things. One that I wish my daddy would've, sorry,

I wish my daddy would've loved me the way that you love your daughter. And two, I hope you're so proud of the way you're parenting because I'm so proud of you. And she gave me this huge hug and oh my gosh, talk about feeling the feels. I was not expecting this , and I mean, I was expecting it now, but on the boat it was like, oh my gosh.

And then the third one, this one's gonna be hard for me to get, get through too. They were a couple, a little bit older than me and oh my gosh, they pulled me aside. Same thing. This was like, this happened like. 50 times or more, I'm not exaggerating, but these were probably the three most impactful ones. And oh my gosh, I dunno if I can get through this.

They said, our son committed suicide. And we just want to tell you how thankful we are that you survived and how grateful we are that you were brave enough to open up and to share that. And more people need to do that and we need to create awareness about this. And there was just tears and hugs and like, I don't know, a little bit of guilt, survivor's guilt I guess.

But so I kind of felt. I was just getting bounced around almost like a pinball on that boat. Like somebody, I, I didn't, I guess in retrospect it's dumb, but I didn't know that my talk was going to impact other people. Like I thought I was doing this for me, but it really had a big effect on people. And so, so I started realizing the power of opening up and sharing about this stuff, and I'm like, my goodness, this is like my new mission in life.

And then a little added bonus on the very last day of the cruise, there's like the biggest headline event is the Michael Frante concert, and there's like 1500 people out there. And right in the middle of that, concert, he picks me outta the audience and calls me up to redo that song that I missed with my daughter.

And I've never even done karaoke. I don't know how to sing. I'm pretty much tone deaf, but it was just so much fun. We sang the whole song together and I was like high fiving people in the crowd. It was so cool. So I get home from that cruise and  I remember flying home and I'm trying to like process and catch up.

Like not only am I like where I'm at now and now, like I'm relieved the talk is over, but I didn't expect to have made these beautiful friendships and to have had this magical healing, human connection experience.  I'm just kind of reeling from it, trying to process it all. , I have an energy that I haven't had in years. Like I am amped up, I am invigorated, I have passion. I don't know what I'm gonna do with this energy and this experience, but I'm gonna do something with it. I know that. And so for the timeline, this is November of 2021, just like eight months prior to me recording this right now.

And so I get home, I catch my wife up on everything cuz there's like no wifi and stuff, you know, we haven't even talked. So like we're up all night till like three or four in the morning with me trying to share with her everything that happened and like all these interactions I had in this power and all this stuff.

And so the last several months have just been kind of a blur. I started putting together a book and I started planning and mapping out this podcast, which is exactly what you're hearing here. I got in contact. Some fire department and first responders, suicide prevention organizations. You know, I've learned some staggering statistics.

I never really looked into this prior to all this. I'm kind of horrified actually. But this is like a big part of my mission. I wanna reduce the stigma for mental health issues and suicidal ideations and stuff because on the fire department  there's a C D C call to action right now because first responders are two to three times more likely to die by their own hand than by any on-the-job injury.

And I can tell you that in 15 years of public safety, we trained on every type of, on-the-job injury scenario, from roof collapses to whatever shootings, to fires, all sorts of stuff. You know how many times we train on emotions? Zero. We don't talk about it at all. And it's like the biggest killer. So, and even in our country, like suicide is the 10th leading cause of death.

And like again, I know we talk about like when you're in crisis and there's suicide prevention hotlines,  but what about keeping people fit? Like we have physical education in school. Like why don't we have mental and emotional fitness? That's why I'm doing this here. And I mean suicide and mass shootings and self-harm and violence, these are the obvious extreme end of the spectrum on mental and emotional dysregulation.

And you know, I don't want to oversimplify this. There's obviously mental illness and so many other factors at play here, but I'll tell you this, we're human beings and we were not designed to live like this in a state of fear and anxiety or pain and sadness. Rushing through our days, honking our horns, flipping each other off, yelling at our kids and filled with worries or regrets.

We were meant to endure hardships, and that's gonna happen, but at the end of the day, we're meant to shine bright, and we're meant to process emotions and we're meant to live in community and to love and to connect and to have pride and satisfaction in the way we engage with the world and each other, and to have a level of inner peace and gratitude and happiness.

And so that's what I really intend and hope to do for you here on this show. And so that's my story.  certainly wasn't always pretty, but it sure feels beautiful to me, and I've really learned how to embrace the suck and how to turn all of my pain into purpose and convert my obstacles into opportunities for growth and for love and for healing and connection.

And I've learned how to be super mentally and emotionally fit. And everything in my experience had to unfold in the way that it did for all of us to have the skillsets and the strengths and the perspective that we have now. Because after all, pain is almost always what gives birth to change. And it's really hard to appreciate the light without the darkness.

So if you stayed with me throughout all of that, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you.  Before you head out the door entirely, I have a really big favor I'd like to ask of you.

Please subscribe and review this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really is the best way to help us reach people who can use this content and to help us grow our show. And in order to incentivize you to do so, because who doesn't love free stuff, I've created some super dope stickers.

 Thanks for listening. This has been Grit, growth, and Gratitude with Joe Specter, your source for mental and emotional fitness. Just because you're struggling doesn't mean you are failing. Remember that.