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 TeamBuildr, yet another company that's doing great things
for the first responder community.
As a strength and conditioning coach myself, who also trains tactical athletes, dissemination
of wellness information is one of the biggest challenges.
Now TeamBuildr is the premier strength and conditioning software for tactical athletes.
And there are several features that really impressed me.
Firstly, there is a full exercise library.
So you, the personal trainer does not have to create that within your own department.
Secondly, you can send out programming, but also individualize, which I love.
So you blanket program for everyone.
Now you can tweak based on someone's injury, someone's need to maybe drop some body composition
rather than having to write a program for every single person on their own.
Team Builder also allows you to build custom questionnaires to collate health and wellness
data.
It integrates with wearables.
And I think one of the most important things is obviously it tracks.
To me, it's imperative that we as a profession start tracking our people from day one and
then over the full span of their career.
Therefore catching potential wellness issues and injuries before they happen.
Now if you want to try TeamBuildr, they are offering you, the audience of the Behind
the Shield podcast, a free 14 day trial to experience all of the features.
And if you want to take a deeper dive into Team Builder, listen to episode 1032 with
Melissa Mercado or go to teambuildr.com and I'll spell that to you because it's not as
you think.
T-E-A-M-B-U-I-L-D-R.com.
Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
My name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show
veteran firefighter and paramedic Keith Hanks.
Now in this conversation we discuss a host of topics from Keith's early life, entering
the fire service at a very young age, the loss of his first wife in a tragic car accident,
his powerful mental health story, post-traumatic growth, his book, Alan, a firefighter's journey
and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible 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 five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier
for others to find.
And this is a free library of over 1,000 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 Keith Hanks.
Well Keith, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time and coming
on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Awesome.
Thanks for having me James.
I appreciate it.
I'm looking forward to our conversation.
So where on planet earth are we finding you this afternoon?
This afternoon I am home in the little borough of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, which if you look
at a map and you look up the second most hiked mountain in the world, Mount Monadnock, I
live two miles from the base of it.
Is that something that you hike a lot yourself then?
I have not undertaken that task.
It is supposedly a very tough hike, which is why it's the second most hiked in the world.
I do hike mountains.
I do hike outdoor trails and stuff, but I have not undertaken that yet, but it is on
my to do list.
Gotcha.
All right.
Well, let's start at the very beginning of your timeline then.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings?
Awesome.
So to start with, I was born down in Massachusetts, not far from where I reside now.
In a smaller town, a medium sized town, probably about eight thousand people.
My family comes from a very long line of firefighting and military routes, in particular, my mother's
side, where I could trace back the firefighting routes to 1875.
So there's been a member of my, at least one member of my family on the job since then.
And then military goes back as far as civil war on both sides of my family.
So grew up as an only child upbringing was a little disciplined, to say the least, given
where the family came from.
I always joke that I was potty trained at gunpoint, which is funny to joke about now,
but it was pretty strict.
It wasn't a lot of emotion.
The dynamic was pretty, you know, pretty strong with, you know, kind of suck it up.
We don't cry.
You're a boy.
And my parents, my parents separated when I was very young.
They separated when I was about three, got divorced by the time I was five.
My dad was out of the picture by the time I was five and a half.
And my childhood was extremely rough and riddled with all forms of abuse, including sexual
abuse and psychological.
I got bullied in school a lot.
So I kind of kind of went through a lot as a kid in sort of a cliche broken home, if
you will, which sort of sets the stage for, you know, stuff later on in life.
Well before we dive into that, because I think this is an important conversation, you know,
what happened before we put the uniform on is a very under discussed element of first
responders mental health.
But huge when you've learned about the generations prior that were in the fire service, what
are some cool stories that you heard, whether it was the apparatus, the gear they wore,
the calls that they were on?
It was a, it was a lot of different stuff.
You know, when I, when I first, before I got on, leading up to the time I got on, you know,
most of the members of my family all had the long coats and the hip boots.
You know, they had their night, what they called night hitch at the time, because they
only wore it at night, the turnout pants.
But there was the department, my family was on all had the frontline engines were all
wrist up a true wrist up like on the tailboard, you know, canvas cover over your head in the
winter kind of shit.
And there was all sorts of stories.
It was me witnessing my family in particular, my uncle's, you know, riding off to a fire
on the back of these things.
Well, I still like his heroic without saying hero stories.
But I remember I remember growing up hearing a story of I had three uncles on my mother's
side.
One of my uncles, my oldest uncle Chuckie, who was on the job in the mid to late 70s
of a there was a mob related hit at one of the pizza shops in the town where they model
toft the joint because someone didn't pay the grocery bill or something.
I don't know.
And they were wearing hip boots at the time.
It was February.
It was very cold.
It was, you know, like subarticulars to England.
And he ended up getting water in his boot, which back then anyone who's ever wore hip
boots, those things could they could you could put a fish tank in them and they would retain
water as much as repel water from the outside.
And he ended up almost losing his leg because of it.
And I was always so just kind of blown away.
I don't know why.
Even to this day, I don't know why.
But it was always so blown away by like the story of like, hey, you went to fight a fire
and you're in your boot filled up with water and you almost lost your leg just fighting
the fire.
It was always one of those things that I held on to.
And then when I get on my front line gear was obviously bunker pants and a long coat.
But my secondary backup was a pair of hip boots.
And because I got on in 96 and the department was still using those.
And so I was always leery in the winter months when I had to wear those hip boots being like,
OK, don't get any fucking water in these boots.
Don't want to end up like the family.
You know, don't need to repeat that.
It's interesting.
I've touched on this a few times.
It's a very unpopular conversation.
But when you look at what we wear, especially the helmet, people will say, oh, it's fire
service tradition.
And I say, bullshit.
If you were truly embedded in tradition, then we'd still be using steamers pulled by horses
and you'd be wearing, you know, you just have a big beard and a brass helmet and you'd be
running it in your in your business suit.
If we're going that far back, there's a certain point where technology is in place, where
something else is just better.
And I think that some of the resistance to changing our gear really is a great example
of the same resistance when it comes to, for example, talking about mental health.
Right.
Yeah.
And you know, I'm someone who who always had, you know, that traditional leather helmet
when I was on the job.
You know, it was every one of my family did.
So I was kind of got it.
But as time went on, I realized that, you know, yeah, this you can be as traditional
as you want.
But at some point, you got to think about safety and functionality and everything else.
And now these days we have what we got all the car citizens they're putting in our in
our gear.
And it's just it's just crazy tradition.
Traditionalism going gets you so far.
And in this job, if you don't change and you're you're set this you're setting yourself up
for a failure.
Absolutely.
Well, I've said there's tradition and there's history.
And what we wear is clothing, it's PPE.
So that's not tradition.
There's nothing traditional about this type of helmet or these type of boots.
That's literally what you're wearing.
And you don't see the Navy SEALs wearing tin helmets.
There's a reason for that because they want to be the best at killing the enemy.
We want to be the best at killing the fire.
So to me, that kind of distorted mentality is stopping you from being a better firefighter.
Tradition is courage and teamwork and selflessness and camaraderie and service, though that's
tradition in the fire service.
The other things are clothes.
Exactly.
And I agree with that.
100% say all that was embedded in me from from birth, you know, you know, pacifier,
I went here and, you know, two and a half inch nozzle and the other it was it was grew
up around the firehouse and it was just all these stories of quote unquote tradition.
And and you know, like you said, the brotherhood and the camaraderie and all that was it was
the the good points of my childhood growing up was with all the stories and being around
the firehouse.
So I hold on to those.
Absolutely.
Well, what about with this 2024 lens that you have now, when you reflect back on some
of your family members that were in this profession, did you see either the physical impact of
the job and or the mental health impact?
There was both.
Yep.
There was alcoholism in both sides of my family, in particular the side and my mother's side
with the job.
And then, you know, you you pick up back then, you just kind of played it off as, oh, this
is just my family.
This is the dynamic, you know, whether it was the anger, whether it was a lack of emotions,
whether it was, you know, the overzealous discipline, whatever it was, you just as a
kid, you just play it off as this is just my life.
Every kid must go through this, even if their their family is in the fire service and the
fire department is in the fire department.
They must go through this.
Looking back on it, I know it was definitely different, but in particular, the physical
part took its toll on my family.
My one of my youngest uncle, who's only 10 years older than me, he was on the job for
just about 30 years and he ended up getting cancer twice, all job related.
And my other uncle ended up getting a form of emphysema caused by his time on the job
as well.
So just on and never mind, never mind the weight loss or gain or knee and back injuries
that everyone had.
Bad backs, bad shoulders and all that.
I mean, that that was just riddled through my family.
And you always just you always just attribute it to old age.
But then as you get on the job and you do it yourself and you hit 30 and you're like,
wow, I'm I'm a beaten horse and I'm in pretty good shape.
You realize that a lot of things that you weren't paying attention to as a kid that
you were like, holy crap, my family's a firefighters, you know, all this.
A lot of it was taken as toll, both mentally and especially, especially physically, but
both really.
Yeah, it's definitely amplified.
I've made this comment a lot.
You know, we had this conversation where it seems police fire EMS.
There's a pretty solid acknowledgement, even though there's been no real studies that a
lot of us will pass away within five years of retirement.
I think what makes that even more scary is if you think about the men and women that
stand on the grinder and on the drill ground the first day of whatever academy, arguably
at some of the most resilient fit men and women of your community.
So they should be living a lot longer.
They should be in much better health at 30 at 40 years old.
But the way that we work a lot of our first responders at the moment isn't looking at
performance, isn't looking at injury mitigation, isn't looking at resilience mentally and
physically.
Now, as we sit here, if you listen to a fitness conversation, it will be about just getting
firefighters moving.
If you listen to a nutrition conversation, just try and eat less fast food.
And you listen to go into a Delta team room and they're going to be strength and conditioning
and mobility and elite performance and nutrition and supplementation.
And we're so far from that, but both professions are held to the same standard.
Lives depend on us.
So that shouldn't be accepted.
The two divorces and alcoholism that we joke about, we've got to take a step back and go,
that's not right.
And at 30 years old, you shouldn't be falling apart.
No.
And that's something we shouldn't be handing down to the next generation.
And it is most of those, that meme that's out there with all those things, you should
have IBS, two divorces, all this other crap.
The only part of those, that list that's actually true is, yeah, you should have a pretty dark
sense of humor because we see some pretty dark shit.
But that's the only one that's probably not changeable.
All the rest are within your control if you actually take hold of it.
And going on what you were talking about with like, you know, the after retirement, dying
within a very short period of time.
One of the most interesting conversations I ever listened to was at a conference that
I was keynote at outside of Boston.
And there was a cardiologist that was there.
This was through first responder conferences with Sean Thomas.
There was a cardiologist that I can't remember for the life of me what his name was, but
he was speaking about the studies and the research they were doing regarding police
officers and firefighters and dying after retirement after anything more than 15 years.
And basically what he said was cops were dying within two to four, they had about two to
four years, a window on average of when they were dropping after.
And firefighters were about three to five, not a huge window.
And the study they were doing, it wasn't the fat guy.
It wasn't the 300 pound guy that was dying.
Not all the time.
It's these disease, other markers in our cardiac system, apparently that aren't picked up on
on your normal.
They don't test for because of insurance reasons.
They don't check for when you go in for your routine checkups, when you get older and you
start having cardiac exams, they don't check for them because of something to do with insurance.
Well, these things are hidden in some of the most physically fit people.
And they're finding with this study that it isn't just, you know, Mr. 350 pounds, that's
no longer getting his, you know, 5000 steps a day at the firehouse.
It's the guy who's got a, you know, six percent body fat, who's been doing, you know, 400
pushups a day since he was 22.
That's dropping because of these markers that have a tie to, you know, the long term stress
we're being subjected to and not being taught how to correctly handle.
And it was just a very interesting conversation for life.
I wish I knew his name.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
But it just aligns with what I talk about a lot these days.
And I'm not saying that I'm an expert because I'm not.
I just interview the experts.
But when you listen to what happens when you don't sleep on everything, physical health,
mental health, you know, injury, all the things, it's everything.
So if you think about it, and I was, you know, the same and I'm sure you were too, you're
a driven firefighter.
So you know, you're working all these hours that they're putting us through, but you're
still making sure that you work out and you're still pulling hose and climbing the aerial
and doing extra classes on the side, you know, tech classes and VMR.
And that's that's that load that you're adding and adding to be the best first responder.
But you're not getting the rest and recovery that an athlete would have to offset that.
So this is like the, you know, the rock hammer and the Shawshank.
It's just slowly chipping away, chipping away, chipping away.
And this is why I always say firefighters don't die of one thing.
They die of everything.
Whatever that weak link is, it's the, you know, the susceptibility to cancer.
It's the mental health spiral down.
It's the catastrophic back injury, whatever it is that will get you.
So this is why, you know, they say, oh, it's always the fit people that get hurt.
Yes, there's science behind that.
If you take your job seriously and you train and you don't get the rest and recovery, ultimately
you will get hurt.
And you could even have some arrhythmia or some, you know, terminal event.
Exactly.
You know, and I think upon the mental health aspect that we're starting to chip away at
now, I think sleep is right up there, if not the most important subject that needs to be
spoken about in the first response was particularly fire DMS because we, we work longer shifts
and we sleep, quote unquote, sleep at the stations or whatnot.
They need the harp on it and they need to do better with these schedules and, and making
it so these men and women are recovering in between.
Absolutely.
Well, you mentioned about, you know, all the different abuse areas that you were exposed
to.
One of those, I touched on before, one of the things that's really sad is a lot of us,
when we get into the profession, they assume that we're a blank canvas and oh, you got
PTSD because you were on that call with that, you know, decapitated three year old or whatever
it was.
But so many people, I know, especially people that went through an extremely dark place,
there is a lot of trauma in their early life.
And when you start unpacking it, you know, if you've got sexual abuse or you just simply,
you know, one parent left, you know, when you were five and they were like, well, why
am I not good enough?
I mean, all these different areas that compound as an extremely important conversation when
it comes to anyone's mental health, especially in a profession where then you're going to
be exposed to shift work and trauma and all the things.
So when you look back now, what were the different kind of, you know, death by a thousand cuts,
what were the traumas as a vulnerable little child that started compounding and already
fracturing your foundation before you put the uniform on?
There was a lot, you know, there was a lot.
And when, you know, I ended up writing my book, Alan, I spent the first three chapters
before I even get to age 18 because it's just so much.
And I did that for a reason.
And you just touched on it, that so many of us in the first responder world have, you
know, unresolved, specifically childhood trauma that we carry until we get to the job.
And a lot of us end up on the job because we want to help the next person.
And it's not just, hey, I want to be a fighter because I want to help people.
We specifically want to help people because of what we went through and no one helped
us.
And for me, a lot of what I went through was a lot.
There was a lot of psychological warfare in my household, in particular with my with my
mother, who was very upset after my father left.
And when he left, he wasn't in the picture, didn't help out with child support.
So it was a very hard time.
I didn't realize it, you know, maybe then.
But obviously reflecting back, there was a lot of manipulation and almost like brainwashing
going on that that led to the mold that I became as a man, where where I was making
decisions based on the things that were done to me as a kid.
And a lot of this just added up.
I mean, we had, you know, the psychological warfare that I spoke about, there was the
physical abuse that was happening when I was going to school because I was just that kid
who was so beaten down from what I was going through at home that I was a target at school
to the sexual abuse and molestation and even rape that I went through by family members,
which compounded just everything, which led to such unresolved guilt and shame that I
carried to the job that, of course, when I get on the job and we don't have that outcome
that we all want, it amplifies that guilt and shame where so many of us find ourselves
falling into like a trap.
And a lot of that, not every time, but a lot of that comes back to what we go through as
a kid.
The unresolved stuff that we weren't allowed to talk about, that we never felt comfortable
approaching another adult in our life about that carries until we start putting on that
badge every day.
And then we start seeing this shit from a different perspective.
And it's compounding our traumas that are sitting back there and have gone nowhere.
Just festering, waiting for something to give us some gasoline.
And our job does that.
When you were going through those childhood years, when you look back, what were the coping
mechanisms that you were leaning into?
Were you just shoving it all down or were there any other things that when you reflect
back now, you're like, oh, okay, that was probably me trying to offload or trying to
feel secure during those vulnerable times?
The biggest thing for me was avoidance.
And none of the coping mechanisms I had as a kid were healthy.
It was the 80s.
We didn't know a lot about this shit.
No one was talking about it.
I avoided a lot of stuff.
And one of the ways I avoided was initially I would dive into comic books.
Imagination was my escape.
Comic books, video games, if I could escape it, yeah, I was stuffing it down.
I was stuffing it down hardcore.
But if I could escape it, I could make it through the next day.
Take some more, take a break, read some comics, whatever, escape.
But eventually as I went into my teenage years, and I think most teenagers eventually get
involved in alcohol, I think for the most part we all go to parties.
But I was drinking quite a bit as a 15 plus year old.
And I was doing it because it helped me not feel things.
It pushed the memories, it made the memories blurry.
So they weren't right here all the time causing me to have nightmares every single night.
When I drank as a teenager, 15, 18 or whatever, I was able to relax.
I was able to not be that abused kid for a night, for a couple nights.
So none of the coping was healthy.
I had a very small circle of friends to which when I was with, I knew I was safe.
A lot of that, especially again, those teenage years, they encouraged the drinking.
And obviously it wasn't for the best reasons, but it did give me a break during those years.
What about sports and exercise?
What were you playing and doing when you were in the school age?
I tried football.
And I say this as kind of a joke, but it was a little too touchy feely for me by the coaches.
There was a lot of ass grabbing that I didn't approve of.
And it kind of set me off because of what I had been through.
And so I didn't really do sports.
I wasn't a sports guy.
I was very tall.
I'm six, five.
I wasn't obviously this tall when I was in middle school, but I was probably top five
kids in my school for height.
And I was always, hey, play football, play basketball.
I was like, no, no.
And I was never encouraged from home to do it.
So I just stayed with my nerdy friends, so to speak, and buried my head in comics and
video games.
And once I was able to escape my house in a form of having friends with licenses or
me getting a license, that's what I did.
I just avoided being home in order to get away from it.
Now I know that the fire service wasn't your initial career goal.
So talk to me about the culinary world and what ignited that flame.
So I had my mother's mother was very much the food person in my family and my life because
I spent most of my time there.
And she could cook just about anything.
She was French Canadian and Native American for the most part.
So she had a lot of like traditional meals that she said, but I learned how to cook from
her from a very young age, like seven or eight.
And I just loved cooking.
I loved cooking.
And because of my family having such strong firefighting roots, we all could cook.
But it's the one up, the one up, one of the many probably that the fire service has on
the police forces that we can all cook.
And I just loved it.
And so when I was in high school, I wanted to go to like Johnson and Wales.
I wanted to be a I wanted to be a chef.
But I knew because of my family, I knew because nothing was ever really supported outside
of what everyone in the family had always done.
And it was strongly encouraged not to go too far from the nest that I knew I wasn't going
to be able to do it.
I wanted to be supported.
And so I never actually tried to do it.
And so I ended up going I got on the job while I was a senior in high school.
I got on the on call side.
And when I graduated, I went to a college for fire school and ended up getting my degree
and just kind of forgot about culinary school, but still was the guy who could cook on shift
and ended up learning to cook better anyway.
But yeah, I ended up not pursuing culinary school.
When I went to my first department, hi, Leah, there was a guy in my higher class that I
think I think he was a chef before.
And he was so good that we'd get calls and they'd leave him at the station to carry on
cooking.
I was like, All right, I'm going to make sure I can cook because I could cook a little bit.
But I'm never going to be so good that I miss a fire.
So there was a happy medium there.
Yeah, there's definitely a competition when it comes to meals to who can make the best
spaghetti sauce, who can make the best chicken, whatever, quarter, whatever, whatever it is,
there's always there's always a friendly at times competition once you can learn to cook
and it's known that you can cook between the shifts and the different whether it be the
different shifts that are different people on the shifts is always that competition,
which was fun.
Absolutely.
Well, then you've obviously got this multi generational exposure to the fire service.
Talk to me about the road into it yourself.
And were there any kind of aha moments at the front door?
Perception versus you actually experiencing it yourself?
Yeah, I mean, it was definitely a perception of the job.
But again, my family didn't sugarcoat shit.
I mean, they were they were as blunt as as I tend to be.
I'm just more honest.
And they they didn't hold back on what the job was.
But I definitely had this different view of what it was.
And so when I when I got on, I got on with two of my family members still on the job,
one of which ended up being one of my lieutenants.
And I definitely had this this idea of what it was.
And as soon as I started experiencing the job, you know, going in the fire is being
at medicals, seeing bad car wrecks, seeing the loss of life.
You know, firsthand myself, it was it wasn't so much a surprise as it was almost like a
filter was removed.
It was just taken down.
I was like, OK, so this this is how bad it really can be or how good it can be, depending
on what the scenario was.
And I just immediately fell in love with it.
And it sounds to those of us on the job, that doesn't sound weird at all.
But for for a lay person to be to sit there and be like, oh, so you started seeing people
dying and then losing everything they own and blood and carnage and you fell in love
with a job that has it.
And yes, yes, I did.
And a lot of that comes down to what I had already experienced as a kid.
I knew walking on that job.
I mean, I was a black cloud in the first six months I was on.
It was a lot of stuff that happened.
And I knew seeing this stuff, seeing seeing even classmates that had died in car accidents.
Like I knew that this job wasn't going to have anything that I had already been on.
There was nothing this job could hand me that could top the horror of my childhood.
I knew that some in the back of my head.
I knew it.
And now, like reflecting, you know, 20, I know we're in 2025, but 2024, 2025, I've
talked to other men and women who who have been on the job and who are open about their
PTSD and their traumas, who are also open about their childhood.
And they're like, yeah, yeah, no, I knew I didn't care if I was going to die.
I was going to die.
If I was going to see this, I was going to see it.
But it had nothing on my childhood.
And a lot of that is how I kept going.
Because that lens was removed and I was seeing the shit firsthand at times, a lot of it.
And I didn't think it was affecting me at the time.
Looking back, it was breaking me down pretty hardcore.
And it was starting to set the stage for what was coming, you know, into my 20s and 30s
and all the other stuff that was I was lined up to to receive.
When you look back now, I said 2024, I totally forgot we're in 25 now with this lens.
I just had some conversations with people recently.
I got into the fire service when I was 26, I think I was.
So a little bit later.
And you look at law enforcement, usually is 21.
What is your perception now of a 16, 17, 18 year old going into the fire service versus
maybe wait until they're 21, have a little bit more life experience, allow that brain
to develop a little bit more?
I think it's a big deal.
I know scientifically, they say that especially men that we don't stop maturing or growing,
you know, and developing into what like 25.
And it is.
It's like a double edged sword.
We already have issues with staffing, right?
We already have issues getting people in the door.
And I don't ever, at least not anytime soon, foresee the fire service changing from allowing
18 year olds in some areas, you know, 16 to be on the job.
However, having been an 18 year old and having to go to a fatal fire and then the next day
sit in the math class and take a test and try to focus on, I can tell you right now,
that shit fucks you up.
And you you you do it, you get through it.
And I'm not saying that people can't endure and show resilience in the moment, but you
don't acknowledge you don't quite understand what it's doing to you as a young kid, especially
a kid who is engaged in kid activities like school, starting college, still living at
home with mom and dad, whatever it is, it affects you in ways.
And I truly do believe that, yes, if there was a possible way to keep staffing at the
level it needs to be at, they should push to make it so you're older before you can
get on any of the first responder jobs, EMS, fire, police dispatch is one of those things
that is sort of a gray area with the age.
But really any of the pillars, you need to be a little bit older, a little bit more mature,
you need to be sure of what is happening to you.
When you start having these things that you have no control over them happening to you
that the exposure you're getting, you need to be a little bit more sure yourself as a
man or woman.
You need to be more sure yourself and we're not at 18 or 16.
Well, this is what's exciting about this crisis that we're in at the moment is we can turn
it around.
Obviously, I mean, there's no question now.
It's just concrete evidence that it's not the job, it's the working conditions that
young people don't want to work under because they now, you know, like when we were working
when I got first hired, which is a few years after you, you know, it was just, you know,
sooty faces and saving babies and, you know, all the things.
Well now it's divorces and cancers and suicides and overdoses as well as all the hero shit.
But what you're realizing is the hero shit is the job.
The other stuff is whether someone in the government building decides that you are worthy
of being taken care of or just being driven into the ground.
And obviously we've chosen option B almost everywhere and this is the result.
So but if you look at 20 years ago, how many people tested for this position, a lot of
people weren't getting hired until 21 because they wanted you to have life experience.
They wanted you maybe to volunteer or, you know, just do some other areas first and then
kind of build that resume and then, okay, now, now, as you said, you're a more well-rounded
man or woman.
You've worked on your physical fitness and you've, you know, done some extra fire classes,
whatever it is.
And now, you know, clearly you want to be a firefighter.
It wasn't just what am I going to do when I leave high school?
So by fixing the fire service and putting that bar up again where it should be, I think
that then when you've got thousands of people testing, you can say 21, you know, but right
now people are scraping the bottom of the barrel and I'm not throwing shade in anyone
that's getting hired today, but the percentages that are being accepted are completely different
than 20 years ago.
So an exciting thing would be if we want to really make a dent on the mental health side
is one of the long-term plans to be like, all right, as a profession, we're going to
make it 21 like PD so that we can have these people ready because it's not fair on them
as a child because I was a black cloud too, to first, you know, first day have one of
my shifts that I have with three different people die in that same day and horrifically.
And that's an 18 year olds welcome to the fire service fucker.
So, so yeah, so we, it's a responsibility to the profession to groom these young people
to make sure they are ready and set them up for success.
Yeah.
And that all comes down to educating, you know, education when it comes to what we do
for work to turn a blind eye and say, this job doesn't affect you in some way is stupidity.
This is, this is not, it's not true.
I mean, it affects everyone to some degree, but it affects others who may be predisposed
for whatever reasons it affects them monumentally.
And we, as a career, as a, as a culture, as a community, as a career path, we have to
take care of the people who are coming in the door, who aren't on the door yet, who
are been in on the job for 20 years.
We owe it to all of them to ourselves, to, to create longevity, to create that applicant
pool, to create that drive that used to be there of, of people who want to do this job,
because it is a great job to have those waiting lists again.
Absolutely.
I don't think waiting lists exist anymore.
I don't think there is a waiting list for in the fire service anywhere.
No, there's fricking hiring bonuses now thousands of thousands of dollars per person, you know,
so the money is there.
I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole because I talk about all the time, but if
you look at the overtime budget alone of an understaffed department, there is your money
for the rest of the shift that you need.
It's just that simple.
So another thing I think there's been interested in to get your take on that.
I think we do a huge disservice.
We have the MMPI, which is that bullshit, you know, bubble psychological tests that
we have to take to get in.
And I've had many, many people from the psychological and psychiatry world that have said that was
never meant to be a standalone test on its own.
It's forensic psychology and use it with a gamut of other tests to create a profile of
someone and certainly not for a first responder.
So where I think we have a great opportunity to turn those, as you said, that unaddressed
trauma into resilience into post-traumatic growth is to put counseling sessions in with
probation at the front door.
And you can talk about the weather, you know, you don't have to dive deeply, but normalize
that mental health conversation so you can start processing some of your earlier stuff
so that you're not walking in with your bag half full already.
Which is the case.
And honestly, it should be so encouraged to discuss, you know, your mental health, your
past, whatever it is, because in no way do I feel that anyone who's already got a bag,
you know, half full, three quarters full of trauma rocks, you know, they carry it around
when they walk in that firehouse door or whatever, in no way do I feel that person isn't competent
to do the job.
Matter of fact, in some ways, some of us may be a little bit more competent than others,
because our resilience has already been tested.
You know, and we've obviously shined through because we're here, you know, and I think
it could be such a strengthening tool to allow the conversations to happen right from walking
in the door.
You know, where have you been?
What have you been through?
What is it that makes you tick?
What ticks you off?
You know, what is it?
And we open that dialogue and we start talking about, like we talk about, you know, what
used to be referred to as the C word, cancer.
We never used to speak about it.
We never used to speak about the risk factors with it.
And now it's just, it just, we talk about it all the time.
We're having pre-screenings.
Why aren't we pre-screening for mental health?
Why aren't we given the tools and the resources that are out there?
By the way, the resources have been out there for like 30 or 40 years, but the first responder
community just hasn't been using them.
And now there's so many more, there's so many different modalities.
Why aren't we like showing these people and making these opportunities available to them
so they can strengthen their career, their self, their soul, their mental and physical
health right from the get-go from age 21 or 18 or 25, whatever it is.
Why can't we make these available?
That should be like priority number one.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And screening not to eliminate someone, screening to discover where you can help them grow.
Yeah.
Where are your strengths?
Because in some ways trauma can be a strength.
I know it's always this taboo thing.
You see the memes where trauma didn't make me stronger.
That's bullshit.
Trauma did make me stronger.
It made me able to handle so many things that I didn't realize I was handling until I got
a handle on it.
And then I used my trauma against itself.
You know?
Absolutely.
Well, an interesting kind of observation that one of my friends made who had childhood sexual
abuse went into the military first and went into the fire service.
But he said the busyness of the job kept his mind away from thinking about the things.
And so when the job became less interesting around the 10-year mark was when he had his
relapse yet again.
It was a very, very deep one that almost cost him his life.
Talk to me about this journey in.
Did the excitement, the adrenaline, the hours of the fire service kind of act as a buffer
for what was simmering underneath?
For sure.
And I think I worked for the fire department I was on was a smaller department in the scheme
of calls per day, we'll say.
But I always worked in privatized EMS in bigger cities where I do 20 to 30 calls in a 24-hour
period of time.
And the chaos was medicine.
It was actually my junk.
It was my heroin, my whatever.
I was pumping into my veins, if you will, to get through.
And it worked well for a long time.
And it wasn't until I hit about 30, which would have been about 12 years in, that the
chaos, the addiction to the chaos, started to not work as well.
And that's when I really I fell back into using alcohol or finding other means to create
chaos that wasn't existing in my personal life, especially, but even on the job.
Risk taking, doing things on the job that aren't necessary to the job or the task at
hand that put me in danger because it gave me that chaos, gave me that threat that I
thrived in because I was starting to lose it from the routine shit on the job where
like going out the door 15 times a day just wasn't cutting the mustard anymore.
It wasn't enough anymore.
And I needed something.
And it was around that time that, you know, I started thinking more of an escape.
And I had already had a few suicide attempts up to that point.
But I realized around 30, my mind was pretty much staying right there, that if something
didn't change, if I didn't get some sort of fix with this chaos, if I didn't if I couldn't
keep the chaos coming because I didn't know there was help, I didn't know I could fix
this, if I couldn't keep the chaos coming, I was going to have to leave.
I was going to have to check out, I was going to have to punch my own ticket again.
I was going to have to try to.
And that right around age 30 is when that really started to happen.
And that was like 12 years in.
One of my military guests made a point a while ago now and it was really interesting, like
some of those heroic actions that you hear at war, was that blatant courage or was it
someone that got to that point where they perceived the value of their own life to be
extremely low and so it made the decision, I don't care if I get hit by these bullets,
I'm just going anyway.
And in some of those incidences, they were successful as far as killing the enemy.
And I thought that was really interesting because at times I'm sure it's just blatant
courage and the person was terrified and they did it anyway.
But if you are at that point where you just don't value your own life anymore, that could
also be seen as an act of courage, though really it's a mental health crisis.
It is.
And it was definitely specifically the EMS jobs I worked in some of the inner cities
up here in Massachusetts were pretty dangerous.
One city in particular was known for a lot of gang violence and there was definitely
times as this chaos was thinning out that I would put myself, I was getting myself into
situations that I could have been killed.
And it wasn't even that I didn't care, but it gave me that.
It gave me that that pump of adrenaline and gave me that that drive to stick around another
day.
But I was not only putting myself in danger, I was I was possibly putting my partner in
danger, patients, you know, other bystander, whatever it would be.
And yeah, you know, there are times of heroism short, just, you know, you're scared, stiff,
but you do it anyway.
But I believe just from my own journey and what I've talked about with other people over
the last whatever many years that we do, we push that envelope and we take those chances
to get that that fix that we need to give us the reason to stay here when it starts
to wear off in the regular routine ways.
Absolutely.
I mean, I saw that even in myself and not so much a kind of mental health spiral, but
the you know, the chasing chasing the adrenaline definitely.
You know, you start off as a rookie and you get a mattress fire and you're losing your
mind.
Oh my god, this is amazing.
And then, you know, 10 years later, you're like, if it's not a fully involved building
that you have to fight your way even to get to the front door, it was like, I wasn't really
a fire.
And it was my time.
Yeah.
And you know, but it's not like I was complacent as much, but it just it's kind of like the
heroin, you know, it takes a higher dose each time to feel like it's valid, like, oh, yeah,
that was a fire worth talking about.
Whereas, you know, room and contents fire as a rookie would have blown your mind and
it's still a fire and that situation you get to save the rest of the house.
But no, I need to fight my way there and make entry.
And it's, you know, my my eyes are burning through my mask.
So that was a real fire.
But no, no, no.
Now you're starting to dance a little bit too far on the other side.
Yeah.
And I think it happens.
And I think the more people that start talking about this and more we're going to hear that
people can concur with what I just said.
Absolutely.
Well, I want to kind of roll time back a little bit because I heard you talking on the hope
behind the badge podcast.
I think it was an Irish host in America.
Great conversation.
Great podcast, by the way.
But you mentioned about is it losing a girlfriend in a car crash when you when you my first
wife, my first wife.
OK, so I mean, again, huge trauma.
So talk to me about that event and then the ripple effect of that.
Yeah.
So that that happened when I was I was 24 when my first wife died in a car accident,
which I was driving.
I was driving the vehicle at that time.
We had another couple with us and both me and the other.
My friend who was him and his wife in the car.
We were both in the job, obviously.
And the you know, you have you have the trauma of losing your wife.
And we had me and me and Heather was her name.
We had two young children.
My son at the time was two and his sister was 10 months old.
So you have you have the trauma of the accident.
You have the trauma of losing your wife.
You have the trauma of trying to become a single father and trying to explain to your
kids where their mother is or isn't.
But then you have the twisted part that people didn't think about.
And it never got taken into the equation initially with some of my early on therapy is the association
between that incident and what I do for work and how every time for four years, I would
show up not just a car accident, but mainly car accidents with a with a predisposition
mentally of what I felt was going to happen or what I felt needed to happen or the association
I made to my own life event.
And it changed my let's say both sympathy and empathy quite a bit after that night because
I wasn't getting the help I needed, even though I went to a grief counselor and and got referred
to a group grief session, which was a big mistake, by the way, because I walked into
a room and it was a bunch of 80 year old men who just lost their wives because old age
and I walk in at 24 and they're like, well, fuck.
I wasn't getting that all the pieces weren't being put together.
It was you lost your wife.
You're sad.
We're going to talk about that.
It wasn't you lost your wife.
You were in a traumatic event.
You possibly have a TBI.
You're trying to explain the two small children.
You know, you have a friend who also survived the accident who's dealing with their stuff,
you know, and you're you're a firefighter in the empty and you're still going out the
door 15, 20 times a day to accidents.
None of that was taken into consideration.
It was just you lost your wife.
You're sad.
Death is bad.
And that was what was focused on.
And so all of that, like just built this sort of trauma pyramid.
And it just it molded me.
It caused me to lose a lot of love for the job pretty early on and at a very young age.
And it just kind of continued that way.
And I realized later in life, you know, just how much by the way, at times I was acting
or not acting.
When you look back now, as far as your children, what were the things that you did well or
worked as far as helping them over the years navigate the grief of losing their mother?
And then were there any things that when you look back now, you would do differently?
The biggest thing that I always say I did well was keeping her memory alive and keeping
her her spirit and her outlook on life as involved in theirs without her being there
as I could, because she was very much a free spirit.
These days, she would probably be considered a hippie.
And she was just an amazing person.
I did my absolute best to try to keep that alive and in our house.
But right after she died, I spiraled into a lot of drug and alcohol abuse.
I used a lot of pills and I made a lot of decisions just to try to get by that, you
know, cost them time with me, you know, cost them eventually, you know, cost them the father
they deserved.
And that would be one thing.
And again, it comes down to the support that wasn't there, the knowledge that, you know,
wasn't even being asked for.
But I also wasn't sharing regarding like my past and everything that was coming together.
That's the biggest thing I wish.
I think back on a lot that I was like, man, I really wish I had gotten the help I needed
so I could have been the father these two kids needed and deserved because I wasn't.
And eventually, years later, I would end up losing custody of my kids because of, you
know, some of the shittier decisions I was making coupled with other reasons.
But they deserve the better father.
And my biggest wish would be for there to have been support to have helped me be that
that father they needed.
One of the common denominators has risen his head over and over and over again.
And it breaks my heart because you never really hear it mentioned in the you know, the general
public first responder mental health conversations is so many people have come on the show, you
know, have been right there either stopped by a phone call, a dog, whatever it was, or
went through with their suicide attempt.
And they and they stayed lived, you know, and they're smashed up or they're in a wheelchair
now but they lived.
And pretty much every single one of them mentioned how they felt like they were a burden to the
ones that they loved.
And this totally reframes what you and I were raised on, which is suicide is cowardly and
selfish and how could you and think of the kids and you realize that through this perfect
storm which you've illustrated perfectly of all these traumas, some micro some macro,
the brain becomes miswired.
Just like you said, you know, the the the young boy that grew up in your household,
that's your baseline, that's your reality, that's normal to you, you know, the kid that
grew up in the mansion, that's normal to him, the kid who grew up on some rubbish tip in
the Philippines, that's normal to them.
You know, the brain slowly starts being miswired and distorted.
And this reality, this voice is convincing them to their heart that they are the problem.
And if they just weren't here anymore, their family would be happier, their wife, their
husband, their children, whatever it was.
Talk to me if you had that about that voice over the few years and the suicide attempts.
Yeah, no, that was definitely that voice was there.
And a lot of a lot of the burden perspective comes from the guilt and shame that any any
any man or woman who's gone through childhood trauma that is that is laid upon you and it
and it's quote unquote inadvertently done.
But at other times, it's almost like with abuse, collective abuse, sometimes almost
like a cultish mentality, it's like brainwashing when when when what you have been through
and what has happened to you is your fault is being told it's your fault.
And so you take that and it grows.
And then you then you then you end up meeting more adversity as you go through your life
and either don't handle it right or you end up doing whatever it is that causes you to
to get this childhood, if you will, but previous guilt and shame to come up and say, of course
I'm a burden.
Of course, of course, everything that I do, I keep reacting incorrectly.
I have to be a burden.
Why would anyone care about where I'm at?
I have to because at one point I was told this is my fault.
This happened because of you.
So I'm going to carry that. And so I'm going to have this mentality that I'm going to be
a burden and my family will be better off if I'm not here because I'm causing so much
pain and causing so much misery, stress in my family.
They're constantly worried about me or they just they don't want anything to do with me.
So maybe if I'm not here, I won't be a burden to them.
And maybe they'll get along better without me.
And you think this and you get convinced of this.
And it isn't what the misnomer used to be that this is you know, you don't think of
anyone but yourself and that you're selfish if you end your life.
Because I can tell you, at least the last time, my last attempt, all I thought about
was my children and my wife.
It's the only thing that flashed in my head.
Was them being better off without me.
And it's a big misnomer. And once we can conquer that hurdle and start getting people
to feel comfortable about talking about how guilty and how shameful they feel over what
they're going through and allowing them to know that they're not alone in that, that
that is like the mindset that leads to suicide attempts.
Once we can start getting over that hurdle is when we really start saving lives.
When we open that dialogue where it's not just hey, reach out if you're sad, it's hey,
I know I can reach out when I'm sad.
Not being told to reach out.
I know I can.
Absolutely.
Well, I mean, thank you for sharing that because this is to me the big red flag.
This needs to be front and center on the posters and in the conversations.
Because like you said, oh, there's a number on the poster.
Just go call it if you're having problems or my door was always open or call me if you
need me, bro.
But the reality is, I think if you could get people to realize that when that voice starts
chirping away that you're a burden, that is your sign because you think about what people
say, well, think about your wife, think about your kids.
That's just kind of driving the nail into the coffin if they're in that mindset at that
moment.
But getting people to look in the mirror and go, shit, I'm at this point they talked about
where my brain's starting to kind of lie to me.
I do need to pick up the phone.
I do need to ask for help.
And I think for us in conversation around the firehouse table, in your family home,
whatever it is, do you feel like a burden?
Are you guilty about, do you feel like you're hurting your family?
Whatever it is, that's a huge question that will bring that flag up.
And this is pre-crisis, hopefully.
So they're just entering this realm and you can grab them before they get to that point
that we've heard so many times where they're in some forest somewhere with a pistol or
the edge of their bed with a bottle of pills or whatever the scenario is.
But it's so often, I think actually, if I'm not mistaken, Boston just had a firefighter
suicide.
It's always hard because you've got to figure out the wording, like was this a suicide?
Usually when they died suddenly, as we all know, it's an OD or a suicide.
So I believe that's what it was.
Yeah.
And I think once we get that dialogue where the education's in place, where we're like,
hey, these are the warning signs of whatever, and this is quote unquote normal when you've
been through traumas to have guilt and shame, once you start considering yourself a burden,
this is what needs to happen.
And if people know that they're like, hey, I'm starting to feel like I'm a burden, this
guilt and shame is getting unbearable.
I know I can reach out to this person or I know I can tell my captain, I can tell my
chief, I can tell human resource, whatever it is, I know I can do it.
That's when we're going to start saving lives.
And it's not going to happen while everyone's going around chanting, please reach out.
We have to change it.
We have to change this to this normal conversation because mental health is everyone's health.
Absolutely.
It is.
Everyone has mental health.
I can tell you that because people think I have a mental health podcast.
I don't.
I have a podcast.
It's just that everyone that I talk to and they could be, you know, I've had people like
Dan John's a good example, strength and conditioning coach.
So we thought we were going to talk about bench press and deadlift and 45 minutes we
talked about the multi-generational trauma in his family because he's a human being first
and a strength coach at second.
So everyone has mental health, as you said, we're all human.
And that's something even as first responders, we need to realize, and we have to put that
up front as we are all human.
We are just as susceptible to the shit we go and respond to ourselves.
Everyone we go and help, we can go through that.
Some of us are, you know, we need to acknowledge that we're human first.
100%.
Well, then walk me through, you know, you mentioned that you would up to about 30, you
were doing okay.
So what did what did this spiral down look like?
And when was your first attempt or even, you know, ideation?
So my first attempt was when I was 13.
Oh, wow.
Way back.
That was way back.
And then I never had another one after that until after, you know, my first wife died
when I was 24.
I had a few incidents with overdoses via pills and then I was I was kind of I even keeled
I sort of status quo and made it until 30.
And then I started showing sort of signs of, you know, the two jobs I was working 80 90
I was a week trying to balance raising my kids with now my parents.
We all decided to move in.
So now I'm moving.
I'm living back with my parents again, which is something I don't advise anyone to do once
you hit 30.
And you know, so there's a lot of different opinions on how to raise kids.
And I'm trying to balance everything.
I'm going to medical school and doing all these crazy things.
And I'm just overloading myself because that chaos thing, right?
Trying to get it all there, trying to trying to just, you know, keep the head above water.
And I just started breaking down.
And then, you know, things happen where, you know, I was deemed unfit as a parent.
I lost custody of my kids.
And that was just 2010 to 2011 when I was about 31, 32.
I just I hit what I would call part of my first rock bottom.
And just I lost sort of that drive to keep pushing for whatever the reasons were.
And I had had I ended up having two more suicide attempts involving drugs and overdosing, and
one of which I ended up having to be my own department responded to.
So I had people I had been on the job with who had a deal with me being unconscious on
my own bathroom floor.
And once you once you have that happen, the cat kind of comes out of the bag.
And a lot of things change.
You know, I started getting treated differently because of it, because we weren't talking
about trauma, we weren't talking about PTSD in the fire service.
And that didn't help because then I started getting limited with what I was doing.
I started getting removed from positions I was in, i.e. I was a training officer and
I started getting being less involved with trainings.
And all this just kind of, you know, chipped away.
And eventually I left that department, went to a different department, stayed work in
private MS and just try to keep my head out of water while trying to see my my two older
kids and and trying to fix my life.
This is a sea where so much damage was done, especially, you know, the back in the day.
And I think some of those toxic departments that still hanging on to that old mentality
are still doing it today.
If you had a guy that you hired, who was an absolute shit bag from day one, and 10, 15,
20 years, he's a shit bag.
You know, OK, you know, again, if you're really being compassionate, then obviously he's got
some stuff going on from his early life.
But maybe he wasn't meant to be in the fire department in the first place, or at least
at that point.
But more often than not, you get someone who was a great firefighter the first five, ten
years, and then they start spiraling down.
And you know, what you've done is you put this uniform on and you've sworn allegiance
to this tribe and you've sworn selfless service to this community.
And then you start spiraling downwards.
You have your own struggles.
The most detrimental thing that tribe can do is turn their back on that person.
And if you look at it anthropologically, you know, out in ancient man times, if our tribe
expelled us and that meant death, you know, I mean, you're vulnerable.
You're probably not going to be able to hunt and forage enough for yourself.
And that's it.
You're done.
So, you know, in our very DNA, that tribal rejection is absolutely horrendous.
And so whether you're a police officer that got hurt in the job and then just discarded
or whether you're, you know, whatever the situation is, that organizational betrayal
is another kind of elephant in the room of this conversation.
If you have someone who's acting a certain way, we've got to view it with compassion
and empathy to a point.
I understand the results of certain behaviors, but an envelop that person and be like, how
can we get them back to where they were or a new version of who they are because they
were so good for so long.
This is just this, this incident now.
But, you know, if you look at the track history of the first responder professions, a lot
of people, it's, it's a downward line.
It really is, you know, they start off this bright eyed young, you know, young man or
woman that's madly in love with their partner and they get married and now they're getting
divorced and now they're drinking.
And the next thing they've got a DUI and you know, the next thing they're being fired.
Now they've been cast off.
And then we wonder why a lot of those then end up taking their lives because we're doing
the wrong thing.
You've got, even if they don't end up carrying on as a profession, cause they did something
that you just simply can't turn your head from.
It doesn't mean that the family within the fire service discards them too.
Which does happen, you know, a lot.
And you know, once I, after 21 years, when I left both fire and EMS, I mean, that's essentially
what happened.
A lot of, a lot of the job, both people and the profession did an about face.
And that still happens quite a bit.
Things gotten better, I feel.
But when I, when I got off the job after my time, that was happening a lot.
There was a lot of people I knew were leaving the job for similar reasons.
Even if it was like an injury.
And it was like after that glory moment leaves of like helping them with their groceries
or helping them with their life.
After you get over that hero part of helping that person, it fades away pretty quickly.
The camaraderie goes away and that person isn't here anymore.
They're not, we don't owe it to them anymore, whatever it is.
And that needs to stop because a lot of what is happening is because of what the job is
done and how we haven't done a good job at resolving these things.
And once that person is part of this lifestyle, this job, this career, once they're an employee,
we owe it to help them become stronger and resolve all their issues, whether they have
something to do with the job or not, because the job is going to manifest them and make
them make them worse.
We owe it to that person to help them heal.
And hopefully at some point that turns around and starts happening.
Absolutely.
I've said this a lot.
There's no VA for the first responders, even though the VA isn't your particular army unit,
for example, it's still part of that family that says, we'll take care of you after your
service.
The problem is in our profession, the Bay door closes down behind you the last time.
I've said this a lot.
If I have a heart attack in the parking lot, I don't even factor in the statistics as a
firefighter anymore.
So when they say, oh, we lost 80 firefighters this year to suicide, like, no, you didn't.
We probably lost 10, 20, 30 times that, but all the retirees where it's really going to
manifest, you don't even care enough to see if they're still doing okay.
That's a huge problem.
Once you're gone, you're gone.
Yeah.
Well, we talked about the burdensome element.
It was interesting in the hope behind the badge conversation.
You had talked about the equal and opposite resistance to suicide that you experienced
a lot.
It was intriguing because it's something that I've kind of hinted at that beneath all of
that distorted, miswired mind is still that voice of truth, that one that pushes you away
from the edge of the building when you're standing too close.
So talk to me about that because I thought that was a beautiful analogy of that desire
to live trying so hard to pull you back.
Yeah, I think there's the voice of burden, right?
And I think there's also the voice of, I guess we'll call it reason that happens and is in
your head when you're someone who has been dealt a hand of trauma and it then ends up
spending a significant portion of their day to day and suicidal thoughts or ideation or
even just a not wanting to exist mindset.
And there is this sort of mindset where it's, yeah, I don't want to exist.
I'm a burden.
But then there's this, but even though in my case, even though I have attempted and
it hasn't worked, I am here.
And it makes you question in the darkest hour when you're like trying to convince yourself
that you need to go, that you need to end your life, there comes this other voice that's
like, but you've come so far.
You've made it through this.
Remember what you told yourself when you were 18 that nothing was going to be worse than
what you went through as a kid?
That voice pops up and it tells you that.
And I think people have a misnomer that someone thinks suicide once and that's when they have
their attempt.
Oh, I need to end my life attempt.
It isn't how it works.
For most of us, anyone who's had any suicide attempt, more than one, whatever it is, is
usually a buildup, is usually a bunch of times sitting by yourself contemplating doing this
where that other voice kicks in and gets you not to do it.
And there could be a plethora of reasons why you didn't.
It may not be the same one every time, it may be, but that voice pops up and it tells
you and at some point you have to hold on to that voice because that voice is what will
keep you from having more attempts, from getting to the point where you're sitting 70, 80 hours
a week thinking about not existing anymore.
That voice is your resilience.
That voice is what will keep you here, which is where we all should be.
And it's hard when there isn't a support network, when we're not talking about this, when we're
not, oh, don't say suicide, they may do it, whatever it is, when we're not having these
discussions, it's hard for someone to hold on to that voice and see that voice as their
strength when no one else is talking about it, when we're not encouraging, learning more
about how a suicidal mind works, where it's just like people commit suicide because they
think one day they're going to kill themselves.
And that's the mindset and that's not true.
And anyone who has anything to do with psychology knows that's not true.
And we need to bring that to our job.
We shouldn't be learning more about psychology anyway, because we're a people business.
We should learn more about this.
We need to learn this not only for what our jobs and our duties require, but all of us
are humans.
All of us are coworkers, our administrators, town and city hall.
We're all humans.
We need to understand this better.
Absolutely.
100%.
We know one thing that really makes me sad as well, and I use the analogy of when I was
younger, you know, there will be, you go to a nightclub and you drink and you end up,
you know, kissing or more a girl who had you been stone cold sober, you probably never
would have done that with, or you get into a fight because you think you're a superhero
and then, you know, you get your ass kicked, whatever it is.
But you know, that's the kind of tongue in cheek scenario.
But what's sad is I feel like alcohol quietens that voice of reason, which is why so often,
you know, it's the precursor to some of these suicides, because I think if they were stone
cold sober, maybe that voice would have still won that night.
So that being a red flag, too.
I mean, if you're in this kind of spiraling behavior, don't reach for the bottle, reach
for the phone.
And I go again, we're talking about near crisis now, but I feel like, you know, the amplifier
of the voice of burden is alcohol, you know, the same way as it distorts your attraction
to a woman or your perception of your own masculinity and ability to fight everything,
everything.
And it's so encouraged.
I mean, when I grew up in the fire service, the sun kiss button on the sewing machine
was a Budweiser.
When I got on the fighter pilot, that was still the case.
When we were rolling holes, you drank or smoked a butt.
You know, it was always encouraged and it's so hard when it was so generationally pushed
to drink to deal with the job is hard to break that it's still there and pretty heavy pockets.
I mean, what do guys do off shift?
We're union parties at bars, bars and union and union halls.
You know, it's such a huge influencer of how to deal with what we go through both on the
job and what ends up happening at home.
It is go have a beer, go have sex, you know, and, and a lot of the ways to deal with a
lot of the things we are, we are dealing with and, and not healing from so many holistic
things can can sort these out.
And none of most of the things that you need to do to sort out and heal from your trauma
aren't very invasive.
Most of them can be done yourself.
Most of them can be done in the middle of conversations with people.
And those are the things that are tools that need to be brought into these fire and police
stations and, you know, EMS bays and everything and be taught to people be like, Hey, just
like we're going to teach someone how to correctly bench press, we're going to teach you how
to do breathing, yoga, mindfulness, whatever it is, you know, what is out there from with
Alex, all that stuff needs to be pushed because it just makes sense that to give the tools
for success and longevity to an employee and a coworker, I mean, that's just death to a
career not to at this point.
Well, speaking of that as a good segue, you find yourself in this, this most recent suicide
attempt.
What was, what was the change?
What was some of the tools that you started accumulating that work for you specifically?
Well, at that point, my last suicide attempt, which was December of 2019, it was right after
the birth of my last child and I had, I'd been in appropriate trauma therapy for a while
at that point, about four years.
And so I was already learning what I needed to learn years before about everything that
I had been through.
And after that attempt, I spent two months inpatient dealing with this.
It was like, it was okay.
This is, this can't happen because I went from having all my attempts being, you know,
going drugs to this last one involving a gun.
And it, after, after it happened, it was like a light went off.
It was like, okay, so now we've upped the ante.
We are no longer just, just taking a handful of pills.
We're taking a firearm and we're putting it against our head.
We have to stop this.
And once I realized, and it was the first time in my life I'd ever done it.
Once I sat with my therapist and we talked out the fact that now six times I have tried
to end my life and none of them had worked.
Nevermind all the shit I had been through in life where I shouldn't be here anyway.
You know, the stuff from the job, whatever it is, I'm obviously meant to be here.
And it sounds cliche.
It sounds corny, but it worked.
I actually told myself I'm obviously meant to be here.
And I, until that point, I had never said it out loud.
I had never said to myself, I'm meant to be here.
And at some point when you're living this life of just down a spiral all the time, when
you feel like you're a burden or you don't feel, you don't be here.
If you can find a person or a situation where you can sit and be like, I'm meant to be here.
It can be life altering.
And ever since that day, I have been going on an uphill slope to just the things that
I can do now and the things that I can get through without having to defer to past habits
and behavior of self harm or even like self pity or going down a very dark path where
I end up feeling that burden, quote unquote, has just been astronomical.
And it's been because I finally sat and looked in the mirror and was like, I'm supposed to
be here.
What was missing having done four years of trauma, having just had another child and
still finding yourself at that crisis point?
It was acknowledgement of things that I refused to acknowledge.
It was up until that point, I hadn't really delved into my childhood trauma.
I had never said the word rape pertaining to myself.
And I hadn't acknowledged other abusive parts of my life.
Once I had that attempt and I realized that all bets are off at this point.
I got to do something I acknowledged specifically the sexual abuse of my childhood.
And once I did, once that was out, like out of my mouth, verbalized it, in some cases
wrote stuff down.
That was the catalyst that was, hey, this happened to me, but I'm here.
I made it through it.
It was horrifying and it's pretty dark, but I made it through it.
Did it get reframed as well?
Because I heard this is the same guy I was talking about earlier.
For so long, they felt guilt and shame.
They felt like in some way it was their fault.
And then the counselor literally helped them reframe to know you were a victim.
That is it.
You were a victim of a predator.
Yeah, that was a big portion of it.
That was easily 75% of it was reframing the verbiage that had been in my head for at that
point 30 plus years, almost 40 years of it's your fault.
You did this.
You did that.
You asked for it, whatever it is.
Changing that verbiage to you were a kid.
You were helpless.
No one helped you.
Once that shifted, I got the upper hand on at least that trauma.
And that was a game changer.
And it was all because the therapist changed the dialogue or helped me change the dialogue.
So you're obviously having these talk therapy sessions with the counselor.
Were there any other of these many tools that you hear about EMDR, psychedelics?
I mean, the whole vast toolbox that we have today available.
I did do some EMDR, which for a few incidents did help due to the complexity of my PTSD.
It hasn't always been advised just because of the way EMDR works.
But later on, the biggest thing for me was mindfulness and meditation.
That was the biggest thing for me was sitting and being like, wow, I can do almost all this
myself.
Breath work, all of it.
All of that ancient shit that gets played down as hocus pocus and hippie stuff was monumental
and being able for me to be like, OK, I need to be in the now because I'm somewhere 30
years from now or 30 years before now.
I can't be there.
I need to be here now.
And the mindfulness, the meditation, the breath work.
That is what does it for me.
And I've used it for, you know, at this point, three and a half years and I'm trying to hone
it and that's my go to when it comes to things because I do it.
I do it anywhere and I push it.
I talk about it and I do it with other people who appreciate it.
And I think the fire service in particular could could really benefit from mindfulness
and meditation approach to what we do for our job and becoming more aware of what our
body is doing, trying to stay more in the now.
And that's really one of the biggest tools I use.
You know, it's funny, I've talked about this a lot and I've had, you know, like breath
experts on the show as well.
We are one of the only professions on planet Earth where the only air we have access to
is strapped to our back in an idealized environment.
And yet there's never any conversation of mental state breath work.
There's a resistance to cardiovascular standards because there's no fitness standards in the
fire service, not that I'm aware of, like punitive actual real fitness standards.
So everything that it takes to have a calm mind and an efficient breath is is discarded
or even a post, which is insanity.
Because would you do that as a diver?
No, of course you wouldn't.
No, no.
And it's amazing what it does.
Because a lot of people don't understand like why does breath work?
Well, you got to breathe through it.
It causes physiological things that you have no control over.
That's the greatest thing with any sort of breath exercises.
You don't get to decide that it's going to reset your program.
You're going to do it if you do it correctly, and it's going to reset it for you.
And that's one of the things I loved about it is that it took as much as control of the
big thing with me.
It took the control out of it for me where it was like, it's going to happen anyway.
If I do this, it's going to happen anyway.
And now I just do it and it resets my my program.
So it's funny you said about the hippie word.
If you look now, you know, versus when we were little, I mean, when you were little,
you talk about organic food, like, oh, you know, what are you a hippie?
It's like, basically you're saying what you don't like the people that grow your food
to be in hazmat suits.
Yeah, actually, I don't.
I was like, I don't mind worm wormholes in my apples is fine.
That means that it's not, you know, poison.
And it's the same with acupuncture and chiropractic and all these other things, you know, the
Chinese herbs, there's a reason that they've been used for a really fucking long time is
because they work, you know, and so now it's nice to see this kind of full circle where
people are going and I hate it.
And they go, oh, now we've got research to back it up.
You don't need your fucking research.
We know it works because it's maintained through these generations, the same as ayahuasca and
some of these other things that now people are realizing are incredibly powerful.
Well, these, you know, especially the Central and South American tribes have been using
it for millennia.
So there's your forever.
But you know, having the humility to say ancient wisdom is ancient wisdom, you know, finally,
rather than poo poo by science.
I think it's a it's a renaissance and it's amazing because like you said, what really
works doesn't even cost anything.
Breathwork sleep.
I mean, all these things that we've, you know, vilified for so long, that's the real superpower.
Yeah.
And you'd be surprised who does it.
And I learned my mindfulness and meditation from a three tour Marine, who is one of my
closest friends, you know, and, you know, this man has taken shots of the human beings
and he is the one who got me to meditate.
And it's not it's not the people you think that are that are doing the things they need
to to cope and to heal correctly long term.
It's the people you may you may disregard as the ones doing it, because we've been there.
We've been to the brink and we know now what works.
And it really needs that knowledge needs to be shared because there's generations coming
onto the job, generations that are on it now that didn't need these tools.
And we should be passing this on.
Well, even from the performance point of view, and this is a good hook for the naysayers
of the breathwork and the mindfulness.
I had a athlete coach, Logan Gelbrick, on the show and he was a pro baseball player
and he was talking about this flow state moment that he'd had and he's unpacked what you need
for flow state.
He said, you've got your 10,000 reps, you know, you need your stress and then you need
a calm mind.
Well, you think about the fire service, you know, as obviously progress through the fire
service, your reps get more and more.
Your stress is certainly there.
But if you don't have that calm mind, you're not going to be able to really get in that
flow for a primary search for an extrication for, you know, tying the right knots in a
in a in a RPM system for a rope rescue, whatever it is.
So if you want to be a better firefighter, you need to fight for the rest and recovery
in the sleep and the shifts that actually support you.
And you need to use mindfulness and breathwork because on the way to that pediatric cardiac
arrest, you need to get your alarm state down so that you can critically think and hopefully
do the right things for the baby.
Yeah, you know what?
And I think back now and that, you know, the 2025 brain that we're talking about, and I
think back to a class I took God, probably 14 years ago now through the fire academy.
And it was this like rescue breathing for like when you run low on your tank, if you're
trapped or something like that, how to reserve.
And it was I forget what the name was.
But anyway, the instructor was like, all right, so before we even go out to the drill, yeah,
before we leave this classroom, we're all going to do this breathing technique.
And this was, you know, 2010.
You know, maybe even before that, before we were even talking about it.
It was in a trauma class.
It was we're going to get ourselves right here right now.
We're going to baseline ourselves.
And I always think back to that with now what I do and remembering what I felt like when
I did this for the first time I ever did a breathing technique for a fire class on how
to survive.
If you ever become trapped with minimal air in a tank, I think back now with what I do
every single day, multiple times a day, sometimes 10, 12 times a day, I do what this instructor
was teaching us to do to get us to a spot where we could control our breathing to survive.
And you have to breathe to survive.
And it can be applied to mental health, overall physical health, all of it.
And because I do it now, it's allowed me to stay here.
The now not, you know, ruminate in the past or try to escape to the future.
The now and so many first responders need that tool.
They need to be here now.
Not the past call, not home with the, you know, the soon to be ex wife or whatever,
whatever it is, they need to be in the now.
And that's one of those tools that can do it.
Absolutely.
Well, I've said this a lot on the show recently.
And it's funny because on my Facebook memories, it popped up.
I started a Facebook page eight years ago called the dark side project.
And what I wanted to do was just start the conversations, whether you were doing fine,
if you're doing fine, then you know, what are the tools that you're using, if you're
struggling and I had people literally in tears on their bed, you know, they didn't even get
out of bed that day and they did a video.
So it was, it was amazing.
And everyone, you know, the people that put videos up were extremely courageous.
But I start, the very first one was me and I said, and I have PTSD.
Now that was what we called everything back then.
Now fast forward, what I realized is I have, you know, more pieces of moral injury, absolutely
throughout my career, but PTSD, no.
But where I feel like the conversation is kind of caught its trousers leg, if you like,
is on the whole smash the stigma conversation.
And it's a very do me gloomy kind of chat.
A lot of times where I think there's so much value is the hope of post-traumatic growth.
And as you mentioned earlier in this conversation, the trauma that a lot of us have experienced
the struggles when we were younger, if processed, I truly believe becomes strength.
It becomes resilience.
It forges empathy.
It's shared suffering.
So talk to me about, as you're going on this healing journey, did you start to kind of
formulate a, you know, a 2.0 version of yourself on the other end of the kind of crucible?
Yeah.
I mean, that's essentially what ended up happening was that once, once I specifically after that
attempt and opened up about my, my childhood and realized, you know, I'm meant to be here
and that I survived this and that it wasn't my fault.
Once I got the upper hand on my trauma and I realized that I could take it and use it
as a strength.
That's exactly what I did.
I used the fact that I have been, no, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't harp on it in a way of,
Oh, you know, sadness and dark stuff.
Like I've been through this, I've been through this, I've been through this, it's all been
bad.
I've been like, I've made it through this.
I've made it through this, this, this, this.
And that was the catalyst for the strength building with, with this whole thing was, was,
okay, well now I'm on the side where I can look back and be like, I made it through it.
I didn't die.
I didn't, I didn't cease to exist.
I had some bad days.
I refused to get out of bed for a week.
You know, whatever it is, I didn't sleep or it slept too much, whatever, what it was,
I'm human.
And once I acknowledged I'm human and that I know is that a lot of the things that happened
were out of my control and weren't my fault.
All this became a strength and I realized that, you know, something life until, until
the day I punch my last card, until the day that I ended up in a wooden box, six feet
in the ground or whatever it's going to be, I'm going to have to get through shit.
Life's not going to stop throwing me curve balls.
It doesn't get any easier as you get older.
As I'm finding now in my mid forties, it gets harder.
You know, there's all sorts of fun stuff that happens as you get older and it's not going
to stop.
You have to bank on that resilience.
You have to tap into the shit you got through the strengths that you are developing because
you continue to get through it and you refuse to give up.
Even if there's times where you're like, yeah, I just don't want to do this.
You're still not giving up.
You're still here.
If you're, if you're sitting here listening to this right now, you haven't given up.
You have to bank on that.
You have to use that as a strength because that's what's going to continue to get through
life as it continues to throw shit balls at you.
Cause that's what's going to happen.
It's never going to stop.
We have to get through it.
There was a sign on a CrossFit gym.
I did CrossFit for a long time.
And this one gym had a sign that said it never gets easier.
And I love that because you're getting faster and stronger and fitter and hopefully more
mobile.
So you are getting better, but you're constantly pushing that a little bit more.
And then, you know, obviously if you really want to break it down, there's high intensity
days and low intensity days and rest days, but you know that we get the principle, but
I think this is kind of underlines what you just said is that you're navigating that journey.
And I've had friends that have just been through so much.
One of my good friends, Dustin Hawkins.
I mean his fucking life story is catapults of shit have been thrown at him and his wife,
you know, the last couple of decades, but he's also a beacon of light for a lot of people.
He's still carrying on.
So I think that's it is not expecting some Disney utopia when you emerge the other side,
just realizing that now there's an armor that serves you, not one that you've built around
that you're hiding inside, but you've got scars.
And I always talk about, you know, the, the analogy of the Japanese pottery with the gold
glue.
Yes, that's exactly it.
You know, you are this, this, you know, this more resilient version of yourself.
Talk to me about the beacon of light element though, because I hear so many people when
they've been through this journey and they are able to talk about, you know, again, as
they emerge, how many people come out the woodwork saying I've been hurting too people
that they thought were doing so fucking well, because we had wear this mask of, um, you
know, fake stoicism, if you like.
Yeah.
When I, when I first came out, so, uh, it would have been right around 2015.
I started to go in public with having, uh, what I got diagnosed with PTSD and then all
the other elements of trauma, I started to get becoming very vocal, which back then there
wasn't a lot of us being public with it.
And so you grow that, you know, you transition at this point, almost 10 years, uh, and over
the years, um, when you start getting people who on their own approach you and they're
like, Hey man, I really appreciate that your giant ass is out there saying that you have,
you've had struggles, um, and that you haven't always made the right decisions and that you've
lost a lot and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And once you start hearing other people, it causes you, yeah, sure.
There's the beacon of hope thing.
And you're like, okay, I'm a lighthouse for people.
That's great.
Um, but then for me, there was, there was moments where I was like, man, I've given
these people what I wish I had years ago, that other voice that, that, Hey, there's
other people going through this.
And that for me is what drives me to keep doing this.
They keep doing the peer support to keep doing the advocate and the speaking, the, whatever
it is I do is that, and as humble as I can say it way, I'm giving people what I wish
I had since I was a kid, that, that voice of it's okay, you're not alone.
And I do use my disposition and my size because not a lot of six foot five, 240 pound men
get up on stage and say, I was raped as a child and I made it through it.
And now I do this.
I do use that to my advantage because other people need to hear it.
Other big guys need to hear it.
Other normal size women need to hear it, whatever it is.
Everyone needs to hear this and all the other speakers and all the other advocates and all
the other podcasts and everyone else who talks about this needs to keep talking about it
because we're building what we talked about earlier of normalizing this conversation where
people will be like, okay, I need help.
I can reach out.
And that is for me, that is that beacon of hope.
And that is not just me.
I'm not just the beacon of hope.
We're collectively doing this as a community.
You me, people like Mike's to grew people like, you know, Travis house, all these people
who are out there being like, I sucked at life at one point and this is why, and talking
about it, we are all that beacon of hope that the people out there that are still in the
suck are looking towards.
And we need to keep doing this and growing this community of people who are willing to
get out there and talk about this because it's working.
It's very slow because the fire service or the, you know, first first respond to world
and we're pretty, pretty slow with our progression.
But but it's working.
You know, now what about the other side of it?
I've heard so many people say that when they were able to start helping people and obviously
you don't want to do that too soon.
You need to be at a certain point before you start doing exactly what you're talking about.
But so many of them have said that in itself was also healing for them.
Yes, the whole journey has been very cathartic when it comes to putting my stuff out there
and being able to help people.
The biggest thing that was cathartic was right in the book, getting putting written words
to what I had been through and sharing them.
What was was hugely cathartic.
It was one of the one of the biggest things.
And there is there's that moment where, you know, once you hit a couple phone calls where
people are like, you know, thanks for talking me off the edge or thanks for just sharing
what you should whatever it is, doesn't have to be anything, you know, super dramatic.
Once you get a few of those, even like the first one or two where people like, thanks,
man.
I tell you, it just it drives you to want to keep doing better for yourself.
The self care that hey, this is why I meditate.
This is why I continue to go to therapy.
This is why I eat well.
This is why I push myself to sleep every night.
This is why I try when I'm in public, which is hard for me because I am not someone who
smiles a lot, I try to smile at the random person in the grocery store or whatever it
is, because all these things matter.
And when you have these conversations, when you're trying to advocate and trying to help
and you and you hear these things, you hear the.
You can't help but drive that and put that back into your own self care and your own
healing.
It just I feel it happens naturally.
Also, if you think about purpose, you know, that's what sent us into uniform in the first
place, but you get a lot of people that, you know, that they retire or they get fired or,
you know, they just step away from the profession because, you know, they're being worked 80
plus hours a week and they value their own health, whatever it is.
And that identity becomes very dangerous if you just see yourself as a firefighter.
And we were never just a firefighter.
You were a human being that cared enough to put on a uniform.
But the mission stays the same.
So what I see is commonalities of a lot of these people, the transition out of first
responders and military professions that are speaking about this, for example, is I think
it's putting that purpose back.
But, oh, I'm still trying to save lives.
I'm still trying to improve lives.
I'm still trying to help relationships, whatever I did in uniform.
But it's just a different, different costume now.
So it show it kind of again, the helmet was just a helmet.
You know, I'm still able to to move the needle on the community's well-being from, you know,
writing a book or sitting behind a microphone.
So I think refinding that purpose as part of the post-traumatic growth is a powerful
tool.
I think it's also redefining what that purpose is.
I think we put we put this, you know, whatever it is, perspective on what our purpose is
when we when we're younger, that, you know, where our purpose is to help people by being
a firefighter.
Maybe it isn't.
Maybe it's you're going to be a firefighter and you're going to help people because you
can have a side job building wheelchair ramps, you know, whatever it is.
Redefining what that purpose can look like can be huge because I know I never had any
not desire, but no idea that this is how I was going to help people.
This is going to be my current contribution to humanity.
I never thought that I never thought that my traumas in my past and the shit that I
had survived was going to help people.
I thought it was going to be a death of me.
And it hasn't been.
And I have been able to take the purpose of what I thought was going to be riding the
firetruck off to the hero shit and taking it and be like, OK, so it doesn't have to
be hero shit.
There's no keep flapping in the breeze.
We're helping people by using what we've been through.
We're sharing the wealth.
We're sharing the how to we're given the guide.
You know, we're lighting the path, whatever you want to do.
And we have to kind of redefine what that purpose may be because we have this maybe
false idea of what that is at a younger age.
And sometimes life changes what that purpose is going to be.
And all you got to do is just redefine it.
There's always a purpose there.
Yeah.
Well, I even see that in in as we touched on earlier.
Oh, I've got to wear this helmet.
I need to look this certain way.
And like, we'll time out.
Take a step back.
Think about that.
You need to look a certain way.
Is that service or is that about you now and your bushy mustache and your leather helmet?
You know what I mean?
Where is that line?
You know, it's like that kind of social media thing.
Oh, I'm going to film myself giving this homeless guy five dollars so I can get a hundred dollars
on the Internet.
Is that service?
No, it's not.
It's it's taken advantage of someone's situation.
But if you put your phone down, never record it and go give someone five dollars so they
can get something to eat.
Totally different conversation.
So I think it's it's it's a dangerous place to lean into that identity.
And if you feel the need to tell everyone what a hero you are, maybe maybe there's some
work that needs to be done there, too.
Ego is a tricky thing.
It is.
And we all have it.
And at some point you need to take it and you need to kind of put it on the back shelf
so you can do what is the right thing without ego influencing it.
Absolutely.
Well, you mentioned the book already.
Talk to me about the film and you know what that journey was like for you.
So that's a pretty interesting series of events.
Back in the end of twenty twenty one, I had me and my another first responder that was
we were running a peer support group.
We had both just experienced a collection of like six first responders suicides in our
area and we were like, what the fuck?
Like we need to do something.
So I reached out to a friend that I went to high school with who ended up out in Hollywood.
He had gotten to the football.
He was a coach at UCLA for a while, but he had gotten into some minor acting.
I'm like, hey, maybe this guy can help me.
Maybe we can like make an infomercial.
I don't know.
Like something that's like, hey, you know, if you're a firefighter, I don't know.
I had a very small idea at first.
So I reached out to this this this guy is named Scott.
And I'm like, hey, listen.
So we end up on a phone call and he's like, hey, you know, I've been following you on
Facebook for a while.
Haven't you been through a bunch of shit?
And I'm like, yeah, some.
And he's like, what are your thoughts?
And you're writing a book.
And I'm like, yeah, trying to.
And he's like, what are your thoughts on like putting together a film?
And I'm like, well, I don't act.
And he's like, no, I mean, like a story, like a documentary or something.
So I went from this idea of making like a 30 second commercial trying to get firefighters
to, you know, acknowledge mental health.
Excuse me to creating a feature length documentary centered around my life, interviewing 12 of
the people from different parts of my life with them sharing their perspective.
We had law enforcement.
We had EMTs, firefighters.
We had a bunch of different military backgrounds in it.
We had spouses.
My wife was also in the film.
And we just we just tore the bandaid off.
You know, and excuse me.
And we just bluntly told what happens with unresolved trauma in the first responder world,
the drinking, the drug and the infidelity, the the the whatever the suicide attempts,
all of it, all the things that people try to put makeup on and make look pretty.
We just told it like it was.
And we ended up getting it to, you know, a distributor and get it out on streaming apps
and got a lot of people to watch it.
And honestly, the biggest thing for me was just the experience of being there with all
these people from different parts of my life that I have so much respect for, for a bunch
of different reasons up until that point.
But now so many more reasons and hearing them share.
You know, stuff about this this fight them in, you know, trying to help others realize
they're not alone.
And then now being part of it and trying to break this down and being part of this amazing
project, it was just such a really cool experience that a lot of people don't get in life to
a make a movie, but be make a movie about their life and then and then see a movie about
what they're trying to do these days, a movie that's hopefully going to, you know, allow
more people to not feel so alone.
And for me, from what I've heard, I know that is helping a lot of people who have seen this
that they know they're not alone and that a lot of us struggle.
You mentioned the catharsis from writing with I'm just thinking all these different people
from all these different elements of your life, you know, being asked questions, maybe
certain things coming out that you hadn't heard them say before.
What was the catharsis element of the moviemaking experience?
It was it was mind blowing in the sense that the things that some of the people shared,
I mean, I had handpicked everyone who was interviewed, you know, and I had handpicked
the locations we filmed that and.
The the biggest thing, the biggest thing was hearing what I didn't expect.
I mean, I knew these I picked these people for a reason.
But they went so far above expectations with what they shared and how they shared that
I was like, wow, like this is already helping people.
It's already it's already helping all of us.
And just like cast and crew, if you will, there was like 10 people who ended up reaching
out for help in the cast and crew, like who started seeing therapists, who started doing
more.
And they were all like, wow, just being in this in this moment in front of the camera
and sharing this, I realized I needed to get more help and I started doing this or whatever.
And me and my wife are going to couples, whatever it is in that.
That was just like, wow, this is this.
This is the why.
This is why.
Even if this even if 10, 10 people end up watching this movie when it gets released,
I don't care.
This is why.
And it just gave me such a deeper drive to do to do more and to do just reach more people.
Beautiful.
So tell people what the documentary is called and where they can watch that particular film.
So the documentary is First Responders in Crisis.
It's on most of the bigger streaming apps and like, you know, Comcast and Spectrum TV
and whatnot.
It's free on Tubi.
It's free on YouTube.
It's also on Hulu.
And you can get it at most of those sites.
It's a shorter.
It's a feature like documentary at 71 minutes.
It is very raw.
It is at times hard to to watch in one sitting, I've been told.
But it is it is the truth.
And it's it's gotten I've gotten quite a bit of feedback on it and people have said it's
helped them.
So I recommend anyone first responder and beyond to watch, especially spouses.
Beautiful.
And then what about the book?
Where can people find that?
So the book is out on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Walmart online is currently in paperback
and the Kindle.
There is hope to do an audio book, as you know, I have audio books are I mean, I talk
all the time and I've been told I have a good voice for it, but it wasn't it wasn't initially
on my radar.
But I have an approach to do it because a lot of people these days, apparently listen
to audio books.
It's a thing.
I don't do it.
But there is hopes in 2025, probably early on in 2025 to get an audio version out as
well on those, you know, get Amazon and all those different platforms.
I read my first one, which was a nonfiction and it was kind of almost like short stories
from my career.
It's not a biography and each chapter there's a takeaway.
So then it goes to sleep deprivation or, you know, obesity, whatever the topic is.
The second one I just wrote is a really like almost like a historical fiction.
The character, the main characters are fictional, but everything you're witnessing is pretty
much true.
And what I didn't realize is just, you know, when you are reading these stories, and I'm
sure it'd be the same with you, there is so much value because the listener ultimately
is going to hear the emotion in your voice, but it's really fucking hard to actually do.
And you talk about imposter syndrome the whole time.
I'm just thinking I sound like an absolute twat reading.
No one's been glad to do accents in the story in the second one.
French and Polish and, you know, male, female, young, old.
But like you said, you know, it's you're putting out in these different formats.
So if someone digests audio books, and Mitch, you know, a lot of people have since I put
it out and he went out on right before New Year's Day, you know, like a few hours before
then fantastic, you know, so to me it was even though it was like pulling teeth doing
it, like you said, now it gets that story to the people that wouldn't hear it if it
was just on paper, but now they're going to listen to it on their drive and they'll actually
be able to digest it.
And I, you know, Josh Brolin just released his book and he said it was it was brutal
and he was in a funk for a few weeks after he narrated his own book.
So you know, when you write it down as cathartic, I would almost argue that when you then read
it, it has the opposite effect, but it's good.
You're still getting it out.
But you know, you're you're really having to relive it when when you're narrating it.
So so yeah, pick the right time when you're feeling good.
It will absolutely be worth it.
And you know, it is I don't think people listening realize just how hard it is to narrate something
so raw that you've written yourself.
Yeah, for sure.
And that is the plan.
And that's talking to other people, you know, yourself included, who have narrated their
books.
It's it's a task that you have to be in the right spot for.
And because the emotions get the better of you.
But it also includes it also makes us so the emotions are part of that audio version.
I think that's that's that's important.
Absolutely.
Well, we've talked about your book and your film.
Most of the closing questions.
Is there a book written by someone else that you love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion or completely unrelated.
So one of the books that got me on to my journey of using mindfulness and meditation, which
I swear by is breaking the habit of being yourself, which is by a Dr. Joe Dispenza.
And he basically breaks down how to meditate and why it works.
And for me, I'm a logical thinker.
I like to know how things work.
And once I read that book, which was also recommended to me by the person, the three
tour marine, once I read this book, I was like, OK, now I understand how this can work.
So that would be my first book recommendation for anyone trying to like find like a holistic
approach to, you know, grounding themselves in healing, you know, trying to process their
trauma would be learning how to be mindful and learning how meditation works.
Beautiful.
And what about other movies and documentaries?
So one of the other documentaries that I always try to push is the PTSD 911 by Conrad Weaver,
which is gone.
They've got it.
They've brought it nationally around to different conferences and what not and shown to a lot
of responders.
It is it is also a very powerful and straight documentary.
The other one that I was actually part of and was interviewed on was residual and that's
by Doug Haynes.
That's also out there.
You can find that pretty much anywhere on the on the interweb.
And that's another good collection of different speakers.
You got Mike screws and that Chris Moore's and that and myself and along with about 20
other first responders.
And again, another another raw look at first responder both in the end, it's not just trauma
and PTSD, it's moral injury, compassion, fatigue, burnout.
It's all discussed in this.
And I think it's all really important to to look at.
Beautiful.
I'm actually interviewing Conrad.
I'm just on his show and I'm interviewing him.
I think it's the next week or the week after.
So I'm going to be watching the movie right before.
So it's fresh in my mind.
Yeah, great guy.
I've been on a show twice.
Really, really just a amazing guy who was wasn't our first responder, who's doing so
much for the first responder community and mental health and as a whole.
Just that'll be that'll be a great show for sure.
Absolutely.
Well, speaking of great people, is there a person that you recommend to come on this
podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military or associated professions of the
world?
I would honestly recommend and I will talk to him for you would be the gentleman Steve
Holmes, who got me into meditation.
He is a three tour, like I said, a three tour Marine.
He is currently a lieutenant on a fight up on my neck of the woods.
He's been on the job about 15 years and he is just an amazing, resilient human being
who just cares so much for human life and the healing journey.
He would be just an amazing person to have on your show.
Beautiful.
Let's make it happen.
I'd love to have him on.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, then the very last question before we make sure everyone knows where to find you.
What do you do to decompress these days?
The biggest thing is taking me time.
And a lot of people think you have to do something.
You have to read.
You have to go to the gym.
You have to do whatever you have to do breath work.
The biggest thing for me that I realized I value is the quiet.
I love the quiet and I never thought I could because I couldn't deal with the quiet before.
I always had to have music on.
I always had to have some commotion.
So the biggest thing I do to decompress is I find a time, a space, which when a young
child tends to be later at night, I find quiet.
It doesn't have to be completely quiet, but just nothing going on.
There's no task to be done.
There's no expectation.
Just the quiet.
Maybe it's 15 minutes, maybe it's an hour.
And my go to is my chair by my big window in the front of my house.
And I just sit there and I do nothing.
It's simple.
Love it.
And I think that's the main barometer, I think if you can't sit and be quiet, that tells
you that your mind is very busy because I found that normally I'm driving and obviously
I'm prepping for a podcast and things like Zitri today on the way to Jujitsu.
I was listening to you on that podcast I mentioned, but the ability to also do that drive without
music, without a podcast and be okay.
I think that's a huge barometer of where you are mentally.
If you've constantly got to have something so you're thinking or reading or listening
and you don't have to, then I think that's a big red flag as well.
But maybe putting headspace on your phone or whatever meditation or breath work that
you would lean into and even Newcom, amazing technology.
And if you ever heard of that, any of those just to down regulate because as you said,
it works.
Meditation works.
And it's amazing how two weeks of headspace, for example, and then you're like, oh, I just
sat here with my coffee for 30 minutes and I didn't actually do anything.
I just listened to the birds and watched my dog take a shit in the garden and it was amazing.
Yeah, right.
And it's a test of your self control as well.
If you can decide consciously decidedly, I'm just going to sit here.
You'd be amazed how much you can build self control over and that can translate into like
control of your emotions, control of your reactions, whatever.
If you can sit and do nothing, start small, you'd be amazed what that could do to the
rest of your life.
Absolutely.
All right.
And for people listening, we talked about where to find the book and the film.
Where else can people find you either online or on social media?
So I'm all over all the socials, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever it is now,
and Instagram.
I have a website which is currently down.
Unfortunately, back in July, my web guy died suddenly and he took all the passwords with
them.
So we're in the process of trying to get my website up, which has a pretty amazing blog.
But also the big thing on my website was a resources tab, resources and modalities for
both first responders and general public.
So that website tentatively will still be KeithHanks.com if I still am able to own that
website.
So we're trying to get that back up and running because the biggest thing is the resources
and having people have access to the healthy modalities that everyone deserves.
Brilliant.
Well, Keith, I want to thank you so much.
I mean, like I've said to a lot of people on the show, when people are going back and
revisiting some of this, obviously it's pulling the bandaid off a little bit, but there's
just so much power for other people to listen to someone's courageous vulnerability, talking
about their struggles, being open as a man to talk about sexual abuse, and then infuse
the hope of healing, of post-traumatic growth.
So I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
Yeah, man, it was a pleasure.
It was an awesome conversation.
I really enjoyed talking with you today.
And thanks for letting me share.
I'm going to be good.