I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the Behind the Shield podcast
that is Transcend.
Now for many of you listening, you are probably working the same brutal shifts that I did
for 14 years.
Suffering from sleep deprivation, body composition challenges, mental health challenges, libido,
hair loss, etc.
Now when it comes to the world of hormone replacement and peptide therapy, what I have
seen is a shift from doctors telling us that we were within normal limits, which was definitely
incorrect all the way to the other way now where men's clinics are popping up left,
right and center.
So I myself wanted to find a reputable company that would do an analysis of my physiology
and then offer supplementations without ramming, for example, hormone replacement therapy down
my throat.
Now I came across Transcend because they have an altruistic arm and they were a big reason
why the 7X project I was a part of was able to proceed because of their generous donations.
They also have the Transcend foundations where they are actually putting military and first
responders through some of their therapies at no cost to the individual.
So my own personal journey so far filled in the online form, went to Quest, got blood
drawn and a few days later I'm talking to one of their wellness professionals as they
guide me through my results and the supplementation that they suggest.
In my case specifically, because I transitioned out the fire service five years ago and been
very diligent with my health, my testosterone was actually in a good place.
So I went down the peptide route and some other supplements to try and maximize my physiology
knowing full well the damage that 14 years of shift work has done.
Now I also want to underline because I think this is very important that each of the therapies
they offer, they will talk about the pros and cons.
So for example, a lot of first responders in shift work, our testosterone will be low,
but sometimes nutrition, exercise and sleep can offset that on its own.
So this company is not going to try and push you down a path, especially if it's one that
you can't come back from.
So whether it's libido, brain fog, inflammation, gut health, performance, sleep, this is definitely
one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.
So to learn more, go to transcendcompany.com or listen to episode 808 of the Behind the
Shield podcast with founder Ernie Colling.
This episode is sponsored by InsideTracker.
And what makes me smile is before I even started my podcast seven years ago, when listening
to other wellness conversations, InsideTracker was always the company they recommended for
comprehensive blood work.
Well now in 2024, they have begun to offer a brand new first responder panel, which will
cover nine biomarkers hitting several of the pillars of health that affect us in uniform,
stress, heart health, metabolism and gut health.
Now after a very simple intake form, a blood draw, you will get the results sent to your
computer, smartwatch, phone, not only detailing where you are on the scale from poor to optimized,
but also tips on how you can improve each of these markers.
Now this panel is usually $310, but they are also offering first responders 30% off any
of their blood panels.
So that brings this specific panel down to only $217.
Now I myself went through their ultimate, which is their comprehensive blood work, which
also includes micronutrients, hormones and other areas of overall health.
And I have to say I was absolutely amazed at firstly how easy it was, but secondly,
the comprehensive information I got and the actionable information on how to improve each
of my own biomarkers.
Now as with all my sponsors, if you want to hear more about InsideTracker, you can hear
my conversation with senior sales executive Jonathan Levitt on episode 887 of the Behind
the Shield podcast.
So to sign up or simply learn more, go to insidetracker.com and for the first responder
panel, the easiest way is to Google InsideTracker first responder panel.
This episode is sponsored by a company I've used for well over a decade and that is 511.
I wore their uniforms back in Anaheim, California and have used their products ever since.
From their incredibly strong yet light footwear to their cut uniforms for both male and female
responders, I found them hands down the best workwear in all the departments that I've
worked for.
Outside of the fire service, I use their luggage for everything and I travel a lot and they
are also now sponsoring the 7X team as we embark around the world on the Human Performance
project.
We have Murph coming up in May and again I bought their plate carrier.
I ended up buying real ballistic plates rather than the fake weight plates and that has been
my ride or die through Murph the last few years as well.
One area I want to talk about that I haven't in previous sponsorship spots is their brick
and mortar element.
They were predominantly an online company up till more recently but now they are approaching
100 stores all over the US.
My local store is here in Gainesville Florida and I've been multiple times and the discounts
you see online are applied also in the stores.
So as I mentioned 511 is offering you 15% off every purchase that you make but I do
want to say more often than not they have an even deeper discount especially around
holiday times.
But if you use the code SHIELD15 you will get 15% off your order or in the stores every
time you make a purchase.
And if you want to hear more about 511, who they stand for and who works with them, listen
to episode 580 of Behind the Shield podcast with 511 regional director Will Ayers.
Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show EMT and the author of Becoming a Mental Health Warrior, Bruce Schutter.
Now in this conversation we discuss a host of topics from Bruce's journey into volunteer
rescue at a very early age, the impact of trauma on a young mind, his addiction journey
through both consumerism and alcohol, his arrests and psychiatric holds, the powerful
paradigm shift that he himself experienced, his journey of post-traumatic growth, how
he developed programs to help other people overcome their addictions and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredibly important and powerful conversation as I say every week
please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the
show, leave feedback and leave a rating.
Every single 5 star rating truly does elevate this podcast therefore making it easier for
others to find and this is a free library of almost 900 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said I introduce to you Bruce Schutter.
Enjoy.
Well Bruce I want to start by saying firstly thank you to your wife Lee who I think originally
reached out to kind of educate me on some of the stuff that you were doing, your story
and your books and secondly of course I want to welcome you to the Behind the Shield podcast
today.
Thank you very much and yes I do depend on her, she is very good at all the details,
she's a marketing manager so she hits all those details.
I always come up with the ideas so we work well together but thank you for working with
her to set all this up.
Yeah no I'm glad to have you.
So where on planet earth are we finding you today?
We are in Charlotte, North Carolina and it is actually cold today which is an anomaly.
Now I say that with a little bit of a chuckle because prior to this in the last year we
were out in Wisconsin where this wouldn't even be a blip on the radar, it would be like
let's go out in shorts but for North Carolina everybody's shutting down the schools and
it's cold.
Yeah, yeah I know we've got a cold band coming our way.
I think the windchill which is Florida so even further south is supposed to be like
15 degrees tonight.
So yeah I don't think people realize some of our warm states can get a little chilly
sometimes.
Exactly, exactly.
So I would have to start at the very beginning of your story.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings.
Okay, well I was born in Millsville, Pennsylvania so outside of Lancaster's really the biggest
town.
Mom and dad, mom was a nurse and worked in the medical field, different areas of being
a nurse at a hospital and different things.
My dad was a chemical engineer and worked at Armstrong actually in Millsville and have
a sister also and she's now a school teacher outside of Raleigh.
So we've somehow all managed and my parents retired on the western part of North Carolina
so somehow after traveling around and being in all these different states we all ended
up together in North Carolina now which is kind of interesting.
Really a kind of small town, raised up, this is going to be in the born in 67 so 60's,
70's really, going to high school there.
We moved in 6th grade and that was probably like a biggest life change and I say that
because we moved to north of Philly.
So went from this small rural area, lots of farms, very slow pace of life to a more hectic
pace of life but also a lot more opportunities and I think that's where all of us started
to do different things and explore different things which kind of I feel like I had my
early childhood where you start out and you're in first through 6th grade and then all of
a sudden everything is uprooted and you have to learn a new area, you face all these challenges
but at the same time the interesting part is throughout all of this I always felt like
there was something different going on.
I kind of always was swinging with my emotions, I was always anxious and nervous about a lot
of things but it's not that anybody is following, there wasn't even the information there is
today and it was just like you just thought maybe that's just the way the kid is for
now and it's just interesting because when I look back at so many things you realize
boy it was starting earlier, the mental health challenges, disorders that I have and at the
same time I don't think anybody in any of these areas really knew or had the information
we have today so it was a lot of guesswork, things like that.
So I want to get to other areas of your early life but while we're on the subject and obviously
your work now is completely involved when it comes to the mental health, I have been
educated to the power of elements of childhood trauma when it comes to people struggling
in adulthood and obviously a lot of people listening to this were wearing uniforms so
our struggles are attributed to our time deployed in whatever battle zone it was or our time
as a first responder or a police officer and we kind of forget about the formative years,
the first 18, 20, 25 whatever it was until we put that uniform on.
When you look back now, were there any elements of your upbringing that you think were precursors
to some of the struggles that you had later in life?
Oh absolutely, that's where I'm trying to, it's not a blame thing, it's looking back
in that introspection and there were things that you did as a kid in both places, I was
in Scouts and I got selected to be part of this honor guard with the Scouts and we would
present and carry in flags at the beginning of all these events for all these different
places, there's lots of camps and things and we made a mistake a couple times but to
me I was horrified and the reliving of that, the anxiety almost stopped me from wanting
to be part of things.
I faced big crowds and you'd go to things like going to church or going to a youth group
and the size of the groups or sometimes the size of the congregation or something small,
I didn't realize it at the time but I was always on edge if you will, I was always that
nervousness but I combined it with, I was always growing up with people and people like
for example my mom was in the medical field and nurse so I got comfortable with learning
some of those lessons and hearing stories from working in a hospital or being in a hospital
and treating sick people.
So you learn a little bit but you weren't sure what to do with it and at the same time
I could see these things happening, I knew nothing but the emotional extremes.
Even once we moved I think I became more aware so 8th, 9th grade I'm seeing all I am is
completely happy and everything's perfect or I'm completely depressed even for no reason,
could have had the greatest weekend but then I turn on a dime and I'm depressed.
At that time I thought boy I am just really wired different.
Now there's some truth to it but I also didn't realize why or what I could do about it so
it was a bit debilitating I guess is what I'm trying to say and I started to see those
precursors where I'm like boy it's limiting some of the things I want to do but I'm also
still going after things.
So I'm pushing it and I'm actually fighting those things and I guess I'm building up my
own tools and solutions without realizing it but they're not very good ones at that
point.
Now did you have any acute events when you were early?
The reason I ask, it was funny I wrote a book about 3 years ago and as I did I literally
unlocked a little door in my mind that I had forgotten that I was in a house fire when
I was a little boy at 4 years old and my sister who was 8 basically got us out and as a fireman
now looking back we would have died in that fire, there's no question that she hadn't
got us out at that moment and so there was that event.
We discovered later that my parents marriage was far from idyllic so I'm sure there was
some subconscious stuff going there but I became a very anxious child when I look back
now I didn't realize at the time but I was a bed wearer until quite late.
I would have night terrors from hell, I'd wake up covered in plastic because I'd been
punching the angled ceiling because I was in the loft.
So now when I look back it's plain as day but I could definitely factor in some of those
that were probably when they were left unaddressed were haunting me and then obviously they became
a dress later in life.
Were there any acute events or was it more kind of death by a thousand cuts or what was
your perspective now?
No, no, no it's interesting you bring that up because you actually just triggered in
myself thinking about that that before we moved I always had trouble sleeping and I
did have these horrible night terrors not associating that with bipolar or even anxiety
and at the time it drove my parents almost crazy because they didn't know what to do
and it was almost at that point too a psychiatrist therapy was looked at a last resort and it
wasn't anybody doing it intentionally saying well we're going to send you to that it's
horrible but it wasn't treated like you could go there and get some help it was more
like the final resort so of course we didn't do it I viewed it more like a threat at the
time but you're right what happened was I had all these nightmares all these problems
sleeping and then the anxiety just kept building and by the time we moved and then I got into
like a middle school you're right I could definitely see it was shaping things and there
were a lot of events they were those small ones where you know when I'd get very depressed
or fly off the handle if you will the emotions just didn't have control so there were lots
of little fights that I got into with even friends sometimes and things where I just
never knew how to work through things and it would just spiral out of control you know
and I look back now and you're right these are definitely signs but at the time there
was nothing to look it up in you know I mean the closest we had and again even with my
mom being in the medical field you had the PDR the physician's desk reference book
there's about this big you know this thick and you could look something up then that
was a real secret if you knew somebody in the medical field whereas today you know you
could go online and get about a thousand pages information so yes it definitely affected
a lot of things but you're right I didn't see any of them in a total picture until much
later so what were you playing as far as sports or were there other things that you found
that were the kind of the healthy outlet for you as you were growing through the school
ages well then what I did was so I was in track and field I tried wrestling I love sports
but I tended to gravitate towards more the singular ones I played tennis but I also loved
a bike ride and I got into biking and throughout all of high school and then even into college
I got into the triathlons and biathlons so it was a great outlet because when I would
get so frustrated or so wired up I could go on a 20 mile bike ride I could use those sports
now they weren't a lot of the high school ones I tried some of the high school sports
and I did do like track and field obviously I was on a runner but I was doing the shot
put and doing some of the things like the high jump things like that but I used them
as the outlet not even realizing how important that was I just knew I really loved it and
found that peace and solitude doing that the reason I say that is that a lot of what you're
talking about it was like here I am at ninth grade going into tenth and that's when I
found somebody who was on the rescue squad and that's when I went and signed up and
joined so I was in first year of tenth grade and I went into this whole new world and it
was kind of like suddenly I have two worlds you know and I'm up here in this really professional
life and death type world and I'm in high school still in middle school and so I guess
the long answer I'm giving is I like to be involved I'm very interested in learning
things and doing things so I was involved in a million things and I never did anything
halfway and at the same time with my bipolar disorder anxiety they also didn't do things
halfway and they were always pushing me to that extreme too which sometimes was a good
push and sometimes wasn't.
So talk to me about that you're only 15 16 years old and you find yourself in the world
of the volunteer rescue service so firstly normally when you hear volunteer they say
fire service specifically so what did that role entail and then walk me through your
journey through the front door?
So I knew somebody that knew somebody else who was a year older so I'm in tenth grade
they knew somebody who was in eleventh and they were part of the volunteer rescue squad
now definitely you're right most places it's together it's the fire department and the
ambulance but in Yardley there were two separate groups and they were literally like three
streets away so there was the ambulance place it was a small building with about five ambulances
in total and then there's the fire department with all the fancy toys and all the bigger
equipment and I'm just saying as a joke because it was a big kind of competition always we
worked together but because we were literally separate I focused and I joined the rescue
squad and I started to know people there who are also in high school in some of the various
schools so at 16 I went in and I got certified with the basic first aid CPR and I started
riding as a tech so there'd be the EMT the driver and then two techs if you could to
have a full crew and so here I go I sign up I get all trained and it started out with
a bang and never slowed down for the next five years.
My first call we went out on and it was somebody I had a heart attack we had to do CPR and
to this day I can still remember the poor woman was in her 90s and I broke her rib and
this was my very first call very first experience and it was kind of like I was so worried about
hurting her and people had to remind me you're doing CPR to save her life a broken rib is
going to be the least of her concerns you know and as a kid or even starting this you're
like boy I really don't have the perspective but it was like it was so interesting and
so fascinating and so real and again I'm always looking for the experiences and always
looking to try things and I had some other friends as I got to know them that were all
in high school in the fire department and in the ambulance and sometimes on both so
you know how it is you get hooked into that group and the next thing you know your focus
is completely on that.
It was really interesting because I just kept learning and growing within that while at
the same time I'm going through high school and I'm living that dual world where I'm splitting
weekends or nights you know depending on if in the quote unquote real world or in the
high school world it was quite interesting.
Now what about the age it's funny I've just been doing some research for the book I'm
writing now and the age to enroll in the military in the UK is only 16 we graduate high school
in 16 and you know which I think is the only country in the world or maybe in the western
world that has it that low and then when you start to learn more and more about neurosciences
excuse me neuroscience we're realizing that these young brains even 18, 19, 20 are still
developing and therefore you know some of the trauma that we're exposed to can be more
detrimental to these young minds.
What's your perspective now on how old you were when you started being exposed to a lot
of these calls?
Well I like to so I started at 16 and within a year I knew I wanted to become an EMT and
in Pennsylvania had to be 18 but we were right on the border literally the river that divides
New Jersey and Pennsylvania was the end of the street and so you could be certified as
an EMT in New Jersey at 17 so myself and two others went over there because we knew we
kept reciprocity to then be an EMT on the squad at 17 so I thought well this would be
fantastic literally did I not realize I am jumping full on into this what I call the
deep end of the life pool and yes I was completely unprepared and the funny thing was now looking
back but even then people that were older in their 20s and 30s doing this or had a more
stable base even you know we're still developing and all of that I just realized how ill prepared
we all were and especially even at that time and it was like we focused on and I guess
it was kind of correlated to the military stuff they teach you all the skills and you
focus on all the skills and you focus on handling the scenes you focus on all those pieces but
nobody even thought to talk about what you do afterwards the emotions you know or how
to handle the outcome of that call all that mattered was you know was it successful did
you do the skills right could you save the person and looking back I'm like it's that
fantastic experience but the missing piece was I didn't know what to do with those life
lessons and I would imagine that some of the same stuff you find you know you stick somebody
out there at 16 going into real life events that a lot of people may not even run into
it not only are you ill prepared but sometimes it I don't want to say it alienated but it
made it tough to talk to my peers or friends because they had no base of this experience
you know I'm over here on this plane and I'm up here doing things that when I try to talk
to them about it even when I went to college you know there are people that literally never
saw somebody pass away and die and I'm like wow that happened a lot in my hands you know
and I can give you excuse me all these stories and they're just like oh my god this is the
first time I left home to go to school you know I feel like what happens is it kind of
puts you on a path that can be kind of lonely and in a way it's very hard even then to figure
out who you can talk to and what level you can talk about it those are all those lessons
I mean it's it's I guess it's you have the experiences again why you bond with the people
with the fire department and the rescue squad because once you share that experience well
then you can talk to them you know it's it's like no holds barred so that was my safety
net at the same time and I'm talking to people of all ages and I'm getting super involved
with it and it was it was fantastic experience but my goal kind of today based on all that
was to see how many people are not prepared you know for these things in life with their
mental health and handling emotions sorry that's that's the long-winded to your to
your short question but um it it just like you said it it has all these positives and
then there were these negatives and it was so challenging but it was so rewarding but
the biggest thing is without direction and that's what kind of started me on this whole
path is I feel people they have so much information these days and they get thrown into so many
situations and again with the internet and all of the information available you've got
people self-diagnosing themselves people figuring out all these problems at ages you know 13
14 15 years old and that might be good and helpful but you still need some direction
on what to do with it you know what to make of it one thing that a lot of us in the municipal
uh career fire departments I think don't experience as much as volunteer is running on people
we know or living in the same community that we served so I've moved you know from obviously
the UK to Orlando did my training first department in Miami area second in California third um
and fourth around the Orlando area but the last one was around theme parks so constantly
moving usually lived about an hour and 15 minutes away from where I worked you know
like a lot of firefighters can't afford to live where they work um and so the upside
though is you're not you're not running on people I've never I've never ever run a call
on someone that I know um and if I go to those cities of course I'm like okay there's where
we found that person there's where that pedestrian was was killed you know etc etc etc but it's
not in my hometown so what you know are there any calls that really kind of stuck out as
far as that element of being in the volunteer fire service and working in your own area
yeah it's interesting we're in this small town but we're north of Philly so there's
a lot of towns around us they were growing all the time they've grown even more since
we've left so we absolutely saw all these things you wouldn't expect first off in the
town we saw accidents because route 95 ran right into Philly and cut through our town
so there were accident scenes on on a major interstate we had all of the scenes where
you're going to places around the friends you know your friend's house is right down
the street you're going to a call that they may know things like that but you're right
there were there were some calls that were so impactful and again we would also see the
people after the calls or maybe see some of the people that didn't make it through the
calls the family members and things so it definitely was quite interesting um there
were definitely two that were one being a very positive and that was in the middle of
town there was a little lake it was called afton pond and it was one of those lakes gets
water in from rainwater but basically has no water flowing through it so it builds up
there's streets going around builds up about five feet of mud and so a lot of times people
lose control and they drive into this lake or this pond and it would happen once a year
or so and i remember the call going in there and it was people we knew you know and we
go in and we're of course jumping in with the fire department because again there weren't
a lot of lines drawn like we would go in and help out everybody respected each other so
we're all out there attending to the patient we're trying to stabilize the car and it's
sinking and at the same time we know the people inside and we're trying to keep calm and
you're trying to do your professional but you're also realizing the car is sinking
in that mud and your feet are underneath and at one point we were like we got to watch
out for ourselves even because it keeps sinking slowly slowly we don't get anybody stuck
and again the interesting part that i'm trying to say on the story is it wasn't just the
people in the car we knew i knew all these people that volunteered and were part of the
fire department and the ambulance company and also all the police force we all became
friends and we all knew each other and a lot of these people are in high school with me
or a lot of these people are going to neighboring schools but we're all in the high school level
or you know then you have people that are in careers and things so it's like everything
you did was with people you know and it was it was quite an odd situation now that one
was fine because we get them out you know we had to they had to cut some of the car
apart and we we get them out we rescue it you know and everybody can share that experience
that was a good one now on the flip side the one that i wanted to talk about was there's
a neighboring high school and so we have the main high school i'm in and this neighboring
one and in between the towns there's a crossroads in this out of the way place where there's
a lot of rural towns and i'm there on a two o'clock in the morning on a saturday night
call because i always did like saturday you'd be at the shift from seven to seven in the
morning you know volunteering and we get called out and it's two cars that ran ahead on into
each other and the one car was filled with four kids my exact age from the neighboring
high school and there was some drinking involved and there was a head-on and they you know
out two in the morning you can kind of do the math on what happened and everybody's
all across the street and some came got thrown out of the car we're trying to do cpr trying
to rescue them and sorry it still affects me because it was it was like seeing a mirror
of what could be because these are what could have been me driving on that road it could
have been and it literally the same age and a neighboring high school and you're seeing
this and what happened was we were we did cpr on two of them the other two had gotten
thrown from the car none of them made it was the long story of it the result of it but
the the story was that it affected our whole crew because on that call on the first ambulance
none of us were over 18 and we were all basically seeing the mirror of what could be on a typical
friday night when we had been hanging out with our high school friends and it was it
was devastating it was a life lesson that hit you in the chest and and made it hard
to breathe and didn't know what to do you know even talk about today it still brings
us up where i still remember after the call going back to the squad in utter silence and
sitting there for hours this table we had outside not knowing what to say not even know
how to process it let alone that but not even know what to say to each other and i think
we walked away that morning basically having experienced that with like the most deepest
bond and connection we ever had and at the same time and understanding that you know
there's some hard life lessons and we tried to make sense of them now we personally i
made sense of some of them that you want to go out and live life but i also took it from
life is short and can be tragically ended and maybe maybe we shouldn't fight so hard
and we should just go and just experience things and not worry at all which is not a
good lesson you know it fed into the bipolar and the anxiety disorder and everything and
it just it gave me an attitude that was said go after things but i almost didn't care
and i stopped caring about myself because i got so affected by calls like that that
it just really like you said it traumatized me it it did a number and it only took me
it took me till 20 years later till i started taking care of this and starting this whole
mental health warrior program and learning about myself to even finally figure out the
lessons on that and the thing i take from it today is that experience is not something
to be wiped away it's something to be built on and today i want to help people who go
through things like that or you know experience this and show them what it can do if you don't
take care of your mental health and you don't process the emotions and how you can do it
and still take the good lessons so there were absolutely calls that were again up on the
high of a good one and some of the ones that were to this day still haunt me type things
i mean it's i think i was just telling uh having a conversation with the police officer yesterday
greg grogan from the overwatch collective and we were talking about this because one
of his specialties in law enforcement is a major scene invest or crash scene investigation
i think exactly but traffic accidents and when i was reading your book you've got some
statistics kind of towards the beginning and i think it was that suicide is the second
leading cause of death i think it was especially i think he said males or just people from
10 till i want to say it was like 30 35 um and i'm assuming the first one is traffic
accidents traumatic death and so this is what's so heartbreaking is and i've talked about
this a lot you know we have done nothing to change elements of driver safety we'll put
speed bumps up we'll put signs we'll obviously have numerous memorials for all the people
that are dead but you know when it comes to education again maybe even the age but understanding
the danger on the roads i mean of course alcohol is going to be another element but that in
itself could also be attributed to education on alcohol mental health but it really it's
i struggle with the fact that we lose so many people usually young people on the roads and
yet you hardly ever hear that conversation at all and it's the first responders out there
that have to see this horror and it reminds them of their own children but you know it's
the whole insanity piece it's doing doing the same thing expecting different results
you know oh we'll you know we'll we'll have apps so it turns off the cell phones and things
like that yeah that's absolutely a tool but what are we doing wrong that's not educating
our drivers to the level that they should be where they understand the danger of this
we're always going to lose some people but we lose 40 000 people die hundreds of thousands
you know maimed every year every single year and we just kind of shrug our shoulders and
go oh well well the first responders of the world it's not oh well because every single
one of those horrendous wrecks lives rent rent free in our minds yeah absolutely and
thing is it teaches you that lesson and so you become hyper aware you become very cautious
you try and explain that to friends and family and people you try to tell them you know the
things with the phones and you see people putting their phone in front of a steering
wheel while they're texting so they can drive and text and you're saying it is not that
important you know back then it wasn't even that and that's what threw me i completely
agree it's almost it parallels what happens with mental health disorders because i feel
like the word isn't out about how serious some of these can be and people kind of shrug
them off maybe they see it on tv and they're like oh well isn't that quirky person's bipolar
and they don't realize the struggle they go through that it throws you into depression
three quarters of the time and it's much like seeing stuff like this you kind of uncover
the truths of what can happen because as i was mentioning with the the experience and
i don't know if it's because i threw a lot of time into it i mean i put in hundreds i
put in over thousands of hours each year volunteering there because we were so gung-ho about it
and so in turn i would spend a friday night doing high school stuff and every saturday
night i spent 12 hours on calls and sometimes we had back-to-back calls and you would think
a little town but there was a lot of tragedy a lot of accidents and i saw things like you
said there were major scenes on 95 where you had to pull out the triage tags and you had
to make those decisions and today i think oh my god you know i i did them but it was
almost like a robot because you have to protect yourself but then when you walk away you can't
protect yourself it's kind of like with the mental health challenges you can go and get
help and there's all sorts of professional help and things but i always like to say both
the emt and the mental health at two in the morning when you wake up and you're in your
house or you're sitting in a chair somewhere and you're all by yourself that's where you
have to learn to handle it because you just can't there's nobody to call there's nobody
to go to at that point you know and that's the piece that's it's not being tragic it's
just saying there will be a time in your life where you have to be by yourself and you're
on your own and again if we can make sense of the lessons from things first responders
see and all the people but also same with mental health there's times if you can be
empowered i guess is what i'm trying to say hence the whole idea of the warrior project
and program is to empower people and not view all these as negatives i mean it's like what
you're saying you see all the accidents and you want to educate people but you also know
they're only going to listen so much and sometimes it's really sad because you know there's lessons
that you wish people had learned or seen you know and then you see the results with the
accidents or with the situations or even the tragedies that happen out of the blue you
know in some of these calls where things would strike and occur and it was almost like you
tend to think and this is a little bit of humor a little bit not but you tend to think
like accidents you think well it's on the street or something you know or there was
a car wreck well it's on the street or somebody gets sick maybe they're at home but i have
this list of tales of things that occurred in the most unusual places and it wakes you
up to that life doesn't protect you if you're out somewhere else you know i just find that
interesting that sometimes people don't realize probably too what first responders see and
where they have to go sometimes you know and what i'm referencing on that one is and it
was a good call because we saved the person but somebody had a heart attack on the golf
course at the yardley country club now not a super fancy place but a big golf course
on the fifth hole and in order to get them fast and to help them we had to drive the
ambulance across the golf course and then we had to cut through and cut through their
shrubs that were blocking it to the next street in order to get to the hospital fastest and
it was kind of like yeah we know we're going to take some grief for all this and yes we're
driving an ambulance up and down a golf course but for the greater good you know it was it
was one of those interesting kind of mind-blowing experiences and you're like it kind of shows
you that life will life will occur wherever you're at and i always find that interesting
absolutely i think where i saw that frustration manifest was in you know a version of road
rage to be honest you know when i was on shift and so tired so sleep deprived you know possibly
having come off you know one of many horrendous wrecks and then you see someone driving like
an a-hole in your own town and i mean i would just get so angry i didn't ever do this but
i would want to literally put my fist through their window and drag them out the car and
beat them until they would listen and then you know put them back in their car now again
that's a kind of macabre fantasy but when you have seen the result when you know that
the person who caused these accidents almost never dies they're almost unscathed and that
family is completely decimated you know it's it's a hard emotion to to harbor you know
and it takes a lot of diligent practice to turn that frustration and disgust into okay
how can i move the needle without coming across like a complete raving psychopath right right
i mean we we had an experience like that that that showed me that we were responding to
a call and there was a full crew and at that point i was in the back there was another
emt and the driver and somebody wouldn't pull over and we're flying along this one road
where you get up to about 50 60 because it's a long road and that person wouldn't pull
over and i was in the back with this other woman and we're gathering the gear and i hear
from the front oh my god hang on because we smashed into that car because they kept weaving
a wooden pull away for the ambulance to move past they just didn't want to let us go by
and we ended up hitting them so hard we tore the axon of their car but then in the back
as you know with the ambulance of all the equipment this stuff started flying and we're
talking oxygen bottles flying around and we had one of these huge ones that came out of
the cabinet that it's the giant tank and i grabbed the other woman we grabbed her because
i was in the seat where i could pull her away from it you know we almost all got killed
in that accident and the ambulance was totaled and then we get another ambulance to bring
us to the hospital you know and so we have to be on the patient side now and we're in
these rooms next to each other and like you said we're listening to the guy screaming
yell about why we didn't get out of his way and how he's going to sue us and it was so
crazy you're sitting there and you're trying to tend your own wounds and you're trying
to put some thing in like thinking well there was a second crew sent out i hope they're
okay to get to the next person because that's where we were headed and you're listening
this person rant and rave about it it was insane like you were saying and at the same
time we were just stunned because we couldn't imagine why somebody wouldn't get out of the
way it wasn't like they couldn't pull back into the street you know i'm sure you've experienced
that you think what were they doing that they literally fought us i mean they apparently
we back and forth so much that when they hit them that's why we hit them and tore the axle
out because they came around the angle to us but it's just a crazy circumstance but
it also gave me a look into the other side you know of dealing with some people that
just didn't get it like you're saying and you just wonder what they're thinking and
why they don't see what people are trying to do you know or trying to pay attention
more that type of thing i was driving when i was still in the mt i was driving a pediatric
code we was one of those calls or if i'm remembering right we were literally handed you know a
limp baby at the door and sadly i think that ended up being a child abuse call all my all
my infant deaths were all child abuse which is heartbreaking but so you know my medic's
in the back now i'm driving code three and there's one area in orlando where it's single
single lane where it kind of the road splits and it comes together again and there's this
white car just will not yield and we're you know again pediatric cardiac arrest in the
back and anyway when i passed them they finally you know gets to two lanes it says orange
county fire prevention so it was one of our own fire prevention people wouldn't get out
of the way and it wasn't you know even a low acuity call it was a pediatric cardiac arrest
we're trying to get to the children's hospital there so you know i mean but it's that it's
that community and that selflessness versus a selfishness and i think there's a lot of
selfishness on the roads you know in in society at the moment i think people are inherently
good but the way that we're uh you know some of the messaging they're getting from politicians
and other things it's it's fertilizing that selfishness and that manifests even in life-saving
you know yeah stories that we're talking about that selfishness and that driver almost killed
all of you and was detrimental to who you were responding to and the selfishness of
the woman that i was behind you know would we have saved that child's life you know probably
not but could we have possibly and she may well have been the person that was between
that child living and that child dying right and people are so distracted i mean i i saw
it a lot with the rescue squad and things like that and eventually i got to drive the
ambulance when i was 18 and experienced it from behind the wheel like you're saying but
also with all those bike rides and all the bike racing i can't tell you the number of
times that i would be clipped by a pickup truck's mirror and be flipped right on the
side of the river road there was a boundary it went down to the river and three or four
times i got clipped because the road was a little narrow but nobody paid attention it
was like bikes were invisible you know and again anybody in the first responder stuff
kind of knows a lot of stories with motorcycles and stuff that's the biggest thing but on
bicycles too and it always drove me crazy because i'm like how can you not be aware
when you're in these cars how can you be so unaware of seeing people and you're you're
clipping people and knocking them off bikes and uh yeah it really is something that hasn't
changed you know it's only gotten worse with all the distractions we have in the cars and
all sorts of things that are beeping and wanting our attention you would think it would make
it safer maybe some of it does but a lot of it is do people pay attention and it's amazing
how people don't and a lot of that though i think sometimes i also found maybe it feels
way sometimes it's like they just don't know what to do and that's that's kind of a big
thing with mental health and even my own family with the struggles i went through people just
didn't know even my own wife had trouble you know when i'm in the throes of alcoholism
and using that as my short-term solution to deal with all this trauma all these emotions
i do not want to face including stuff like the bipolar depression and i didn't realize
at the time because when you're in the middle of it you think well sure why didn't they
just talk to me and it wasn't they didn't want to but nobody knew how and and that's
why a lot of why i'm started too is to just stand up and talk kind of like you're raising
awareness now on certain topics and it's so important because sometimes the most obvious
is there but we need somebody to state it or point it out you know and then then you
can get more awareness you can get some people to take action 100 well you touched on alcoholism
obviously so there was a you know a downward spiral of sorts what made you transition out
of ems and then walk me through again if i'm understanding the book the kind of pursuit
of finance that followed that well so i i kept doing this through high school and then
i also worked at an ambulance company at the same time there were several other people
were emts so in summers and fall and things like that spring breaks i worked at an ambulance
company so it was non-emergency calls so i was always involved with that went to college
was thinking of going to the medical field honestly my attention and different things
i didn't have the aptitude to make it through medical school with the paying attention in
school i could do a lot better today but i didn't then and so i transitioned i was looking
for answers i at one point started studying religion at the school i was at then i found
i needed more structure i went to information technology i liked the idea of finding solutions
so i graduated that degree go through all sorts of things at college and what i did
then was threw myself into an it career but it was all sorts of i had jobs but they were
always somewhat fringe jobs they kind of fit me i worked for unisys and i was a contractor
but i was on a coast guard base and so i started out my first it job living down on a shore
on the jersey shore and working on a coast guard base and going and setting up computer
systems and doing support on all these travel around the country visit all the bases things
like that so again i think it's kind of just me i always look for those situations so i
transitioned out of the emt and all of that just looking for the next adventure if you
will i never wasn't so much i thought like i'm going to give this up because i couldn't
handle it it was more i just sort of started falling like i need to move on with a career
with the college and it and things like that and then what happened was i feel like as
i got to be more and more involved in things i like to write in the books i had more adventures
and more things i was interested in and maybe even the funds to do some of these which led
to greater misadventures and so yes i got into the to workforce but then i was pulling
stunts that really were horrible and i have all these problems in the background and a
lot of it is what's happening is i'm letting my challenges so i'm i'm there at this point
diagnosed with anxiety disorder i'm definitely using alcohol to treat it all the time and
to treat some of the past trauma and again i'm just trying to like make my way through
and i'm letting it kind of tell me what to do you know work some weird jobs work weird
hours is that the best for me i'm not really sure but i love the adventure of it keep going
keep pushing so i'm succeeding but i'm falling apart in the background and so i think whichever
course i took i would have still been doing that moving up just like we do with the rescue
squad keep moving up getting more and more in depth and things and what happened was
i get to a point where on the surface i should have felt like a great success and i'm married
we have a house we got into real estate and rental properties you know this is 2008 everybody's
doing that they have the ability to buy cars i thought you needed multiple cars in order
to be happy you know i went full on into consumerism and the reason i say that and i laugh about
today is because all of these things were really driven by my challenges because when
i was in the throes of depression and bipolar depression which i didn't even still know
i had i would try to buy my way out of it so you want to you want to not be depressed
you go out and get something you go out and buy some crazy stereo system or do something
and i feel like i was sort of setting the direction but a lot of what i did was dictated
by my challenges by my past experiences by these mental health challenges and and that's
where they start taking control i mean i had relinquished so much control at that point
that my ordinary experiences were things that should have stopped and would have stopped
most people you know i'm spending time while i'm working a professional job and traveling
around the country and then i'm spending a weekend in jail because i let alcohol take
over you know i'm i'm at points where people are calling the police and here i am on the
other side and i'm getting committed for 72 hour holds because i they don't know what
is going on with me and i don't know what's going on and and that's where this went on
and literally one of the things i like to tell is it went on for like 20 years and i'm
building all these successes on the surface and and the behind that is completely a mess
and i have relinquished so much control to me that this is normal you know it's almost
like i go back to once you've been and done some of the stuff at the emt you're not thrown
by the first time you see an accident the next time it becomes a little more normal
a little more normal and it's a good thing because you can protect yourself but you also
have to be careful that you don't become so detached you know and so clinical about it
that you forget there's an emotional angle and and that's where like we're talking at
that point i'm struggling i'm full-blown alcoholic i'm drinking all the time i have these undiagnosed
problems some diagnosed and i got to the point where i didn't want to be part of this world
anymore and you get to that point like you talked about i'd had enough i didn't think
there was any hope at all and i just rolled the dice one day and i just drank and took
pills and i said if i wake up then maybe there was something out of this maybe there was
a reason and i literally rolled the dice which i can't even you know today i say that and
like oh it's not nonchalant it is like wow i that was at the point i was at there was
that cry for help even to myself and when i got a second chance that's when i've changed
and turned my whole life in a different direction and that's why today when we're talking about
it it's like sometimes i go over the top and people tell me to calm down because i'm so
passionate about it because i have rescued myself found direction found this this thing
i want to talk about with everybody you know want to share all these experiences i'm okay
with telling these people this because again when i start talking and this is one of the
most amazing things you know all these places i run into so many conversations i can't believe
that are happening and i'm sure you find that too i mean you you get guests on or but then
you might be talking to somebody about a show somewhere and then all of a sudden they open
up and i think that's the amazing part of being able to talk about all this whether
it's the first responder stuff or even again talking about emotions you know even the people
like what my wife went through on the outside of these things you know and understanding
her emotions and trying to put all that together to help people i want to get to the consumerism
in a second before we progress through to to the solutions that you found um but before
we do and i i always like to ask this anyone who's been in that dark place who's who's
basically planned their own you know suicide and i've had people on here that have executed
it and survived and a lot of people that were almost there um or i mean like yourself you
mean you did execute and you survived yep when we were all younger there was a very
judgmental look at suicide it's cowardly it's selfish how can you do that to your family
etc etc and what i've realized as i've become this you know perpetual student now of all
all these things including mental health and hearing these first-hand accounts is that
you cannot understand a broken mind with a healthy mind trying to understand that is
like trying to think you know oh i wonder what it's like to break my femur when your
leg isn't broken you know what i mean you can't you can't put your mind there and so
when you listen to these men and women and children i mean i had you know a young high
school student on here um you realize that at that moment their brain is telling them
this this is the end to the pain but also i think this is not really um discussed is
for almost all of them there's also a feeling of being a burden so when they say oh think
about your loved ones like they are they feel like they are the problem to their children
their their spouse whatever it is and so in their mind it's a selfless act it's a terrifying
act but they're doing it for the greater good with that broken mind and i say broken with
with compassion you know it's something that's happened to them when you got to that point
two decades of battling with your mental health and then ultimately addiction was there an
element of that in your perception yeah there was it was i mean i can remember to this day
it wasn't it was more like it occurred it was like one of those thoughts you have in
the back of your head for years and you start to think you know i'm not getting anywhere
this is all it's ever going to be you know i can't control anything and i still remember
that day i was working remote and i just like snapped i just had enough and it was almost
like it's kind of one of those quirky sayings but it was almost like the pain of living
was too great and the pain of not living seemed better which is that like you're saying it's
that broken mind thinking but it's i reached a point where i thought rolling the dice a
cry for help and and the thing that i remember though was it was in my case i was executing
i was going through it i mean i i took the pills and enough that if somebody hadn't
come but i made a phone call at the same time and i i tried to rescue myself at the same
time and i was i was so conflicted you know i i just i knew i didn't want to do it but
i knew i didn't want to be alive and at the same time what i found was that i just didn't
know how to process anything anymore you know the emotions are what broke me and it's funny
because today i will tell you the number one thing that has saved me is the emotions and
being able to handle our emotions and that's hence the whole mental health but it's funny
it it wasn't a specific event it wasn't even sometimes the thoughts it was just that feeling
like you're describing that there is no better solution you know and and again you're right
it's not viewed as a positive you're not you know you you don't think it doesn't stop you
because you know things i mean at that point i'd already if you will embarrass myself i'd
already done so many horrible things being under the influence of alcohol drinking all
the time i'd pull some outrageous stunts you know things like that i i had lost all self-worth
i had lost that direction and that was i think that was really what drove me to this and
what i see in a lot of people when i talk to them about this and people that have fought
about it in that is you lose two things a sense of control and you lose a sense of direction
and without those two things it's like saying you can manage your emotions you know be positive
all the time but if you don't have a reason to be positive for if you're not going somewhere
in your life if you can't tie it into something you know in your life to bring that happiness
each day it's kind of like hollow advice so yeah it was it was a it was uh it was something
it's very hard to understand but it's also much like mental health or being part of these
challenges and things or these experience being first responder the amazing part is
is if somebody else has been through it you have that unspoken language and you can talk
about it so openly that i think sometimes i stun people around me who don't have that
and you're talking to somebody else in the middle of anywhere you know in the middle
of line at the grocery store and you start talking about something like being bipolar
or being an alcoholic and people are just stunned because you just don't hear that conversation
but the two of you are speaking the same language and you're totally okay with it which is i
think a testament to the power of bringing all this stuff out into the light i was listening
to an interview that i did with a fire chief pat kenney and we just did a third episode
and so i listened to the first one that we did and it was something that i hadn't really
brought up again recently but he's a you know he has a devout faith and it made me realize
that this is how strong this miswiring becomes in our mind how many people who are deeply
embedded in their faith and their particular text tells them that suicide is a sin ultimately
you're going to go to hell and they still do it if there's no better example of that
miswiring and how strong that pull is the wrong way that you would still make that decision
even though you might in your mind in your belief be you know experiencing eternal damnation
or whatever it is so i think that was a powerful kind of way looking at it too i mean this
is we you know conversely there's a lot of judgment shame and guilt around mental health
around suicide but these holy texts i would argue talk about kindness and compassion which
is actually what we need to apply to these men and women that are suffering absolutely
and that's that's the other side that's interesting you bring that up because after after i tried
to do that and then i'm trying to rebuild my life basically the direction and a lot
of what doctors are saying and people are saying was to get back to normal you know
get back to work that'll give you a purpose go back to things and nobody wanted to even
ask if it was right you know nobody wanted to ask is this the right direction for your
life or have you dealt with any of those things it was like let's just restore things back
to that normal again and it's it's kind of like what you're saying i mean it's like
there are certain lines you think once you've done something under the influence and you've
you've caused some you've been sent to jail for a weekend you would think that'd be enough
to wake you up and stop you but by monday or tuesday you're already thinking well i
can get that escape again with another drink or again you're thinking my god my life is
so horrible here's an out and even if it violates what you believe in faith even if you think
maybe this is going to help everybody that misguided idea but then even and this is interesting
even the people that have tried and then you're told to get back to normal and again it's
to me it's the opposite you need to explore you need to get in touch with what caused
it you need to be able to talk about it because otherwise you're going to end up going back
towards it absolutely well just one more area before we talk about the becoming a mental
health warrior let's check my notes out for a second consumerism this is another area
i mean there's no better example than the u.s and don't get me wrong you know capitalism
has its place of course a lot of us enjoy the creature comforts that we have and would
be a hypocrite unless i was living off the grid somewhere to say otherwise we're literally
having a conversation through a computer now but that being said i remember coming from
england and after a couple of years i found myself working for a fire department in california
and when i got there as you were just alluding to it was pre 2008 everyone was paying i mean
just insane amounts for their houses everyone had winnebago's jet skis you know motocross
bikes all the toys and one of the guests i had on recently said that particular area
orange county there's a lot of that kind of keeping up with the jones's philosophy in
in that area in general but when i look at it too there was a lot of overtime at the
time a lot of forced overtime in my class and the class after me were the ones that
kind of finally filled all the seats so that they were able to work more even though it
was detrimental to their health but again it was so much i mean it was something that
you know 20 years prior we only would have seen on mtv cribs you know the basketball
players and the rappers and everything and now firefighters are doing it and then fast
forward a few years a lot of those guys lost the house the winnebago the truck you know
everything they lost almost everything because of the crash but you know whether it's children
that grew up in the ghetto that ended up becoming mma fighters or football players and then
are persuaded by the consumerist world that you need this diamond jewelry and you need
this bentley and etc etc or whether it's you know the the the person who's a lawyer who's
also being persuaded that you need the bentley and you know what i mean all of us are being
told that we never have enough you know when it comes to buying things and i think now
with amazon and things it's so easy just to click just like the qvc used to be addicted
to some people you know 20 plus years ago so what is your perspective of that need to
fill a void with purchasing because i think most of us if we put our hand on our heart
would say that we do get a little dopamine hit whether it's a ten dollar amazon purchase
or you know a twenty thousand dollar car but each of those are temporary i don't think
there's anyone five years later still just you know buzzing about their new car purchase
right and and that's i will wholeheartedly admit i threw myself into that and i took
us into that where at one point there's just my wife and i so there's we don't have any
kids there's some pets but they're not driving and uh we had five cars because you need a
choice every morning and various cars you know you need a you need a high-end car you
need a rough and ready suv of course you need all these things then we got into the real
estate investing and we had several rental properties all around and so we have all this
stuff and then the house we had had seven acres and you've got to have a huge lawn
to cut you know and make it all look nice and an extra space and we kept buying bigger
so first of all i'll just come clean i'm completely guilty of falling into that trap
the reason and i think that's so detrimental and the reason that is even part of what i'm
doing today is to recognize that is because a lot of people use that to fill the gaps
like i did when you fall into a depression or you fall into anxiety or something you
can use things to fill those gaps and you can also use things to fill the gaps when
you don't have the self-confidence because maybe you're anxious about everything and
you're you're doing a good job but you don't recognize it because you're so fearful all
the time and so i think consumerism is that quick i call them the short-term answers the
short-term solutions i liken it to i always knew i could go and get a drink and instantly
be transported to you know life's a lot better after a few drinks and all of a sudden
everything looks prettier well you go out and look out and your yard's bigger and your
house is big and all these things what i didn't realize was how much it was costing me and
today i see that completely and it's funny one of the things that happened was we did lose
that house of cards you know we had every house stacked on the next one to get all these
rentals and the cars we had them but we certainly couldn't afford them you know and we couldn't
do us so again they started falling apart and we ended up having to declare bankruptcy
and we lost the whole house of dominoes and we were down to things but today we are making
choices that my old self would have scoffed at wouldn't even be in the room to listen to
you know we have one car and we make it work because we like to do things and we like to
do things together and then when we're out we might go and do things at a park like a
workout and we might meet other people there you obviously don't care what car you bring
to the park when you're doing a workout you know or if you're going on a trip somewhere
and taking a little trip again i've changed this whole perspective and i think when people
realize why they were using it or what they think it might have brought to them i think
that's when you poke the holes in the consumerism and you start to realize and my biggest thing
is and i'm not trying to tout it but one of the books was i wrote this book called one
bag life because that premise suddenly hit me as i was getting better mental health was
what if everything that made me happy could fit in one bag and i said really it's about
less stuff more experiences and i say that because that had a huge impact on my mental
health and it also helped me kind of stop the nonsense and deal with some of those past
traumas deal with some of the situations and realize you know i was actually causing a
lot of it you know some of it was genetic some of it's certain conditions i had but
by having all these requirements are always needing more i was putting myself on a hamster
wheel of anxiety and stress and if i didn't have them like you said then i must be doing
something wrong you know everybody else is succeeding and yet it's really just like
ours was a facade and it turns out you know when you just become a real person and you
do with real life experiences and you start to connect with others again and do those
things it's amazing it's like seeing the other side of like wow how could we be so
wrong and i do see because i'm giving some talks these days and stuff and i it's funny
when i talk to teenagers and things like that they're so caught up in it because like you
said it's everywhere on on all the social media sites and it's like if you don't have
all these things you're not doing something right and i'm like you can have all those
and it won't bring any of that happiness you have to like make them aware and show them
hey think about what you really do when you hang out with your friends it's about hanging
out with your friends nobody really cares what car you came in or where you know how
you got there it's the experience it's a it's an interesting quirky concept but you know
it it's like i look at the way we live today and everything has a little purpose because
most of the time we spend doing things we're engaging in life and before it was all about
you know if you're going on a trip it has to be so over the top and yet today you can
take the simplest trip or the simplest experience and it becomes i like to call extraordinary
you know i can go out in the morning and get coffee and actually have time to have coffee
where i'm not running frantic or recovering from all my mistakes from the night before
and i'm like i am so over the top for that 15 minutes i can't believe i missed it all
these years and today i'm like this is fantastic so i agree 100 i traveled around the world
with a backpack and a guitar and a girlfriend at the time around 2000 and it was amazing
because it was eventually i got hired and ended up working in japan so then i had a
little apartment i'd start buying things again but for months and months and months it was
everything was in that backpack and you realize what you can get by with a couple pairs of
shoes or pair of shoes and pair of flip flops and a couple pairs of jeans shorts and a hoodie
you know and then a guitar and so you know you go into places and hostels and you start
jamming with other people and it was it was really eye-opening how little we need and
then when i was in california i when i moved to the u.s i bought a nissan centra for cash
um little stick shift which made it all the way from florida to california when i was
there they used to call it my cream puff and they all had all the big trucks and everything
but then you know a few years later i ended up having to move back to the east coast drove
it all the way back and and traded it in with 309 000 miles on the clock still working yeah
but no car payments and it got me from a to b the same as all these other vehicles that
these guys had so despite the resistance and the push to get on the property ladder and
all the things because i was fortunate enough to have that baseline and that kind of firstly
growing up on a farm and not being exposed to a lot of you know materialism but then
this kind of humbling journey with a backpack it really did help calibrate and give you
a little bit more strength to push against this bombardment of you don't have enough
and kind of have this well i don't care you know i don't i just i don't care so you go
buy your stuff but i'm happy and then like you said then you have the funds to travel
and you have the ability to be a little bit more present which i think is so much more
valuable than stuff to the point where there's people that have you know storage units full
of stuff and the house like that's really a red flag just in itself right absolutely
and then we moved out of the house down to tennessee my wife got a job there and we were
going to an apartment after being in a house for 20 years and then having all this stuff
and at first i thought it was the end of the world and after a few weekends there we'd
go out bike riding over at this park and we'd do some rock climbing bike bike riding and
i realized every house we drove by somebody's out doing yard work raking the leaves taking
out the trash you know taking things and taking care of the house and i'm like that's what
we used to be we would never have time to do this you know it suddenly struck me i'm
like this is one of the greatest things like you said taking a chance moving to an apartment
and suddenly finding i don't have all those responsibilities when there's something wrong
you call somebody and it was like at first that sounds terrible because you don't own
it but then you own your time and i was able to do we were able to do so much and have
in the last years then too it's it's like the weekends don't become chore time and task
time they become time to do the things you really value i had a divorce and then ultimately
that led to a foreclosure and a bankruptcy um you know the house that we bought was going
to be a two-income house you know the family dynamic changed actually got the mortgage
kind of reconfigured and still ended up losing it which was a shame but i did at least get
some equity in that house um but then we went to an apartment so firstly i had to tell my
family that i'd failed that we were losing the house um and then that we downsized to
an apartment just like you said once you shirk off those useless emotions of shame and guilt
it was awesome it was liberating we got rid of the stuff that we didn't need we got back
down and we did end up you know going then six months later and buying a house again
but it was around the corner from a little strip mall um you know the the boys had to
share a room but it also made you realize that when you think the world is collapsing
when the world is ending again it's a reminder like you just need clothes you need shelter
and you need your family that's it everything else is fluff and so just like you coming
back down and being forced to a two-bedroom apartment for a while with a german shepherd
um you know for six months we ended up really enjoying it and we look back fondly at that
and i love where i live now we did get a you know a home with a little bit more space again
but um but yeah i think it's it's terrifying at first but it's actually liberating once
you let some of those superfluous emotions just come and go yeah absolutely and we did
it and we've gone through some struggles in the last years and we've moved to several
states like i mentioned uh with my wife working remote and all that and at one point we had
the two cars and we sold one and we were fully intending we'd do it as a short-term fix and
now we're like no we can do one car and the funny thing is you tell people about they
first get a little quizzical and then they start asking how do you do it you know how
does that work and then what you go out on the weekends and do stuff too you know how
do you not have all these like you said all these other responsibilities that didn't help
me so i find it interesting too because there's a lot of people that are um intrigued by it
and sometimes you wouldn't expect that you know here you're like we're talking about
something we thought was terrible we find it great but what i also find interesting
is other people are asking us about it now and i'm hoping we can tune them into some
of these ideas you know and help them with some of these ideas that maybe will change
and help their mental health you know it helps you being able to feel different about things
absolutely well speaking of mental health then you kind of left us you know 20 years
deep a um a suicide attempt that thank goodness you survived so walk me through your kind
of um metamorphosis from that and how you came up with the concept of the mental health
warrior so i i knew at that point and this is what's interesting so we we have the attempted
suicide and we have this new bruce coming out but he didn't come out right away i even
went back to some old habits and i just couldn't make anything stick and it was at that point
i realized you know okay you've been through all of this and nothing's changing and that
was when i came to this realization because what happened was i wanted to help people
so i got certified as a personal trainer you know i didn't want to go back to corporate
day school as i'm saying and i we had like a small antiques business and i'm going to
get personal trainer then a health coach then i got into became a nutrition coach and i'm
thinking i'm going to help people on that but all along i realized and i realized by
looking at myself and all the challenges that the emotions were what stopped me all in the
past what it caused all these problems not being able to handle fearing my own emotions
and i suddenly realized well these other things are all good it's still emotions because emotions
and like to challenge people you know it's involved in every aspect of life you can't
think of anything you do in a day where you don't have emotions involved and sometimes
they'll propel you you know to be able to do them but sometimes they just come with
the basic like i'm saying getting a cup of coffee and the emotions of contentment and
your emotions of i'm enjoying this landing on that is what started all this and i realized
mental health is to me is the most powerful thing out there and it had the power to take
me down all those years which meant if it is that powerful it has the power to do amazing
things for people when we learn to manage it and then what do you do with that i kind
of go back to when i was the emt and learning all this stuff as a kid the first thing you
go in is manage the scene and the first thing you do is don't rush in either you know because
you don't end up being another wreck on a wreck or something but you have to manage
the scene and i'm like that means a little structure so i came up with this idea of the
mental health warrior because rather than just say hey we're gonna take care of our
mental health and have that associated it's kind of a weakness like you were saying it's
looked down upon all that i'm like let's break the stigma we're gonna be warriors and we're
gonna be mental health warriors and that right alone says to people hey we're gonna take
this in a positive direction in a powerful direction and it just started snowballing
because i started saying well how can i help people and what i need to do is create a program
which gives people some elements of what a warrior is and so i created there's four
components of it and i took all those 20 years of lessons and even other lessons and poured
them in and the four components match up to a lot of what we've been talking about you
have a creed which is bend not break and so you say right away i'm not going to let life
just break me just like when you're on a scene you know you can't break because then you
can't help somebody if they're struggling and then i said well values everybody talks
about mental health and take care of your emotions but again if you don't set your values
and what's important and pick your direction for your life you won't go in the right place
and you will just be unhappy and i found this because at one point i'm trying to get sober
and i think i wrote about in the book in that first one where i switched over i said well
i'll take some value to calm my nerves you know i'll just take pills and you can get
them online it's no big deal and next thing i know i'm not drinking and i've achieved
my goal but all i've done is switch to another addiction all i've done is bring in more problems
so i said values have to be an important part and it tells you how do you want to live and
what are you trying to go after in life and that's going to play a huge role in your mental
health which like we were saying the one bag life is part of that values it's part of less
stuff more experiences and that has that positive mental health and then the last two pieces
were mindset rules and mental health warrior tools and mindset rules are certain truths
i see out there we need to remind ourselves on and there are guidance they're the things
that can keep us out of trouble and keep us get us out of trouble and i put all that together
with a series of tools and all these things that i believe we can do so much throughout
the day without disrupting our life to take care of mental health and the warriors is to position
it as we always know there's the advanced help you know there's the doctors and the medicines
and things but what can you do every day you know what are the powerful things you can do
and so that's kind of the how it came together and then today it's it just keeps spinning into
more things um you know additional books and trying to bring this message out to people
so from your personal journey of you end up you know uh teaching with these tools that you use
but what was your personal experience how are you able to apply this to yourself so so i had to look
and decide things like what did what makes up bruce shooter you know what what does he want to
stand for do i want to go after something or fall back and just you know go back to what i had before
do i want to work in it again do i want to try and help people and do all this stuff and my journey
was i kind of went back to like we started this whole conversation back when i was 16 17 18 being
an emt and seeing the value and and the power of helping people in a life or death situation
well i want to bring my experiences and help people because i've changed i view things
completely different you know the the bruce has come around in those 20 years and found
themselves again if you will and i'm back to wanting to do something that has that meaning
and i also want to stand up and make that mark with mental health and alcoholism and suicide
awareness and all those things because i just feel like somebody needs to talk about those things
and it has become it has become my passion obsession you know like like you do on any good
career or anything and it has changed who i am which has changed how i act and changed well how
i view success or how i view the day and and i just find it i don't know how to describe it
sometimes in words but i find it it's a amazing new path where i find myself so in awe of some
of the things in life you know because i'm actually living life today is the best way i can describe
it before i was just going through life you know and and that's something makes me want to share
it with everybody well earlier you touched on kind of not being aware and no one really having the
conversations when it came to the bipolar the anxiety depression when when did you have a
realization that that was actually you know a mental health diagnosis and again how have you been
able to to stabilize the extremes that you were experiencing before so i didn't get diagnosed with
the bipolar until i was 40 so i got diagnosed early on the anxiety disorders social anxiety
the anxiety disorders social anxiety generalized anxiety the alcohol problem was kind of unknown
you know and when i finally went and ended up in a facility for this outpatient treatment after
trying to kill myself the doctor came and told me hey you ever heard of word bipolar boy you fit this
to a t you know after talking with him and i said oh my god that was a turning point because what he
gave me was information and gave me a starting point and it was like it was like the the doors
opened up and i was like oh my god i can put a name to it now i can learn about it and what it
helped me do then was to take action and not feel like i have zero control you know you're going to
go talk to specialists you're going to talk to a therapist and i took the tact of working together
with them and trying to work with them it really changed how i wanted to stabilize everything
because i i worked with all the traditional routes but i ran into so many problems that i got to the
point where i wanted to show people you can do yourself i'm not saying meds didn't play a role
they helped get me some clarity of thought but there were so many side effects in my case and so
many problems and i switched through like 20 30 meds never getting one to really work and then i
found there were so many lifestyle changes and so many things i could do as this mental health
warrior that i found i could actually move forward that way you know i could i could find other
routes i i'm not saying i wouldn't go back and need help at times um but it opens the door because
you're not limited anymore and you're not limited to just here's all you can do about it you know
here's the only choice that you have it's there's some people that have had good experiences with
meds but i would argue they're few and far between at least the people that come on the show and it
it makes perfect sense to me if there's purely some sort of neurochemical imbalance and that is it so
for example it seems like schizophrenia is one that tends to be more reliant on meds but it the
rest of us the other 90 whatever percent it's about the traumas you know it's about you know the
the nucleus the the kind of p beneath all the mattresses as it were and so if you just simply
medicate in someone you're never addressing the origin the same way as you know people that do
psilocybin or ketamine but there's no council or no shaman along with them and they don't have a
very good response it's because you haven't unpacked the things that you need to unpack so
you know then you add in the side effects as you said and sometimes you know suicide ideation is
one of the side effects um i hope that the more holistic um tools whether it's you know your
program and all the other ones are out there everything from emdr to the good psychedelic
therapies um the one day you know meds will be in that toolbox but there'll be just one small piece
of a much bigger puzzle because i don't think people realize how many options are available to
them but the thing is as you said there's that quick fix element which i think psych meds more
often than not fit you know ritalin and all these other things that we throw at our men women and
children and you know i think you have to ask yourself am i actually getting to the root cause
of my problem whether it's a blood pressure med or a psych med am i fixing the thing that caused
us in the first place yeah absolutely and i went through that with i was such a wreck physically
from the drinking and from all the bad behaviors that i was pre-diabetic overweight having all
these blood pressure issues and i went to the doctor and they were like you got to go on
statins you got to go on all these other meds and i said no i'm gonna do lifestyle changes and i
guess they don't hear that a lot so i fought with them for a while and we made a deal six months i
get to prove it if it doesn't work then i'll take your choice i proved it to them i never even had
to go on the meds i fixed all these things with lifestyle and i started thinking well wait what
about all these lifestyle things you can do for your mental health and that's where i'm trying to
take some of my background and i've one of the books out now is the three food rules for mental
health because again the foods we eat have a correlation to our mental health they they affect
the physiological part of our body which in turn affects our mental health the processing of things
how well your blood's flowing is going to affect how well you're thinking and clarity you know and
if you're feeding it it was sugar all the time and i kept them simple but they're all simple
lifestyle changes that have so many powerful you know results that i just love exploring that with
people and that's that's where things like we're talking about you have things like the one bag
life which is like a mindset and that is a mental health benefit we have these three food rules as
part of the program to help people see you know because i'm as guilty as especially back when
you're a first responder and stuff everything's on the go and you grab whatever you can and then
you leave it and come back to it you know 20 times over but it's just amazing what you can do and i'd
like to see that i'd like to see more people take ownership of what they can do knowing that you have
these advanced things if you need them you know knowing that if you need to go in for some therapy
my hope is that then you take your ownership with you and you go in and work with a therapist as
opposed to going in and saying i don't know what to do and i have no ownership again you know because
that'll bring you back to where i felt at that day i have no choices i have no forward momentum i
can't go anywhere so what's the point and i'm just really hoping we can keep inspiring people
showing them what they can do yeah well i mean it's a very unique perspective that you have as well
so i would love to kind of educate people on you know the books and then obviously the the site as
well so so tell people the the spectrum of books that you have out there and where are the best
places to find them and the courses so everything is centered right now the website is bruce shooter
dot com and that's kind of the kickoff point because what we have is we've got nine books out
so we've got the one book that talks about how it's it's i triumphed over bipolar alcoholism
and anxiety disorders by coming a mental health warrior and it lays out my story that we've been
talking about and lays out those four components then there's the other eight books that really
get into taking action in specific areas and you can find all these with the website and then they're
all up on amazon so you can get the ebooks and the you know we're trying to get them up on some other
sites each of the books it's got my quirky writing style you're not going to find textbooks you're
not going to find a lot of super complicated discussions even in the food areas i created that
one for for example with three food rules because i got so tired of trying to follow some of the
diets that can help you out there but are so restrictive there's no way to sustain them you
know and i tried to keep things simple but real some of the other books there's a journal there's
a journal there's also one that came a big part from my emt experience and the whole experience
it's called euphoria of today and what it is is its mindfulness of today practice of mindfulness
of today i call it and the idea was when you have wreckage of the past whether it's mental health
issues or other things and you also then have a fear of the future what if we focus on today
what if we really live in today because that's the only place we really have control and yet
everything you do today if you take control and manage those emotions well you just build a great
tomorrow because you don't bring any problems into it and if you're doing things different today like
i am i put to rest all those mistakes yes i can talk openly yes we had a whole bunch of houses in
these cars and yes i was an idiot but i'm also not really sad they're all gone and i can talk about
it so you'll find a bunch of different books like that you'll find there's with those mindset rules
there's 53 of them and they're little one-off things that will help remind you and keep you
on a straight and narrow and what i did then was one of the biggest things i saw and was missing
out there is you need something to be able to carry with you all the time how do you stay motivated
throughout the day sometimes you know sometimes you just by yourself and so i created a mental
health warrior challenge coin and people in the service you know they're familiar with that it
commemorates like a place you've served or an event you've been through and so i created this
challenge coin and funny enough like the one coin on the back has mindset rule two which is learn to
respond not react to life's challenges which can save you all the time and we've handed them out
we're selling to people and they're finding it so useful so again i'm trying to have the books but
also have some daily things because i know when i was in like any of the self-help groups you know
you need some of that reassurance something to carry with you that's in your hand you may not even
want to talk to other people about it but you can you know you can have those things so you'll find
all that stuff there and i'll just throw one last thing because i i just wore it but i because i was
doing the designs and all that stuff i threw them on clothing and the reason being is i do it mostly
for us but it kick starts the conversation and whether you have the book or the coin or one of
the clothing you can kick start a conversation anywhere and like we've talked i've gotten into
so many interesting conversations it's like i encourage people to open that door it's scary
you don't want to admit you have any problems you don't want to admit you're struggling but boy when
you open up man people open up around you because they've been waiting for somebody to say that so
it's pretty neat it's definitely exciting absolutely well i want to thank you so much like i said it's
a very unique perspective you've got a very interesting journey and again are very courageously
vulnerable on on your highs your lows and this journey has taken you through but i urge people
to go to the site and look at some of the books thank you again for sending me the the first book
that you wrote and yeah i think it's it's it's again it's that immersive element i think people
can dive in and see there's so many different things and find the thing that really resonates
with them you know and then move forward with it so i want to thank you so so much for being
so generous and coming on the behind the shield podcast today no thank you and thanks for being
so open to talk about this stuff you know i wasn't quite sure how far to go on some of my stories
and as you know sometimes you're a little wary on some of these but um i appreciate and it's
cathartic if you will but being able to share that story about that experience with the neighboring
high school kids and all of that because it reinforces in me today and i hope other people
take from that that we can learn and to celebrate every day and to put our effort into today you
know that's i feel like what we owe when we see people that we've lost and and it's kind of a
neat perspective that you could take any time you don't have to be a first responder but
it's one of those life lessons that today i just hold tightly to you know it took me
20 years to learn it but i hold tightly to it today