.png)
Shared Voice by 10-42 Project, A First Responder Podcast
"Shared Voices"
The 10-42 Project is a faith-based resource and refuge organization dedicated to supporting first responders. We equip individuals with essential mental health tools, restore hope during times of crisis, and guide people toward a renewed purpose through the everlasting love of Jesus.
Shared Voice by 10-42 Project, A First Responder Podcast
The Healing Journey: From Suicidal Cop to Trauma Coach
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
The journey from trauma to healing isn't linear, especially for those who've served in uniform. In this deeply personal conversation, former law enforcement officer Jake reveals his harrowing battle with PTSD and the innovative path that led to his recovery.
After years of accumulated trauma in policing, Jake found himself trapped in a nightmare of panic attacks, sensory overload, and suicidal thoughts. Despite outward success in his new real estate career, he was silently crumbling behind closed doors—unable to enjoy family moments, startled by everyday sounds, and living in constant fear of losing control. His raw description of holding a gun to his head multiple times reveals the desperate reality many first responders face in silence.
Jake's breakthrough came through an unexpected source: ketamine-assisted therapy. With remarkable candor, he describes how this treatment quieted his hyperactive nervous system, allowing him to process traumatic memories without triggering panic. "I don't care that they're being loud," he recalls thinking about his children after treatment—a simple yet profound shift that signaled hope. The neuroplasticity promoted by ketamine helped rewire trauma responses that had seemed permanently hardwired into his brain.
Now working as a trauma recovery coach, Jake outlines his four-phase approach to healing: building community support, reconnecting with the body, removing external blockages, and creating sustainable recovery plans. His Guardian Rise online community offers free support to first responders walking similar paths. Jake's transformation from suicidal to supportive demonstrates that even the darkest trauma can become purposeful when channeled into helping others.
Ready to break free from trauma's grip? Connect with Jake through his link tree at linktr.ee/jakebelay or join his online community. Remember, as Jake emphasizes, "If you could have done it by now, you would have already done it." Sometimes the bravest act is reaching out for help.
If you or someone you know is in crisis and at risk of self-harm, please call or text 988, the suicide and crisis lifeline.
To contact us directly send an email to Dan@10-42project.org or call 515-350-6274
Visit our website! 10-42project.org
Check us out on social media!
Youtube: @1042project
Facebook: www.facebook.com/1042project
Instagram: 1042_project
I think we'll just dance for a while. What do you think?
Speaker 2You can do the dance and I'm not a dancer.
Welcome and Introduction
Speaker 1Dance with me, jake. Welcome back to another episode of the Shared Voices Podcast. This is Dan, the director and the founder of the 1042 Project. Shared Voices Podcast is a podcast for first responders, brought to you by first responders. We talk about healing, we talk about hope, we talk about our stories and hopes to point people towards healing and show people a path towards healing. We bring in our peers and we talk about real life, jake, and it's not always pretty. It's not always pretty, man. If you guys didn't listen to the last episode, jake was on the last episode. This is a two-part series. Who knows, maybe it'll be more. We're going to have Jake on in the future quite a bit. He's agreed to come on from time to time when we need him and help co-host with me sometimes. But on the first part if you guys didn't get a chance no-transcript Anniversary of that is this time of year and how he moved his law enforcement career over to West Des Moines where he got exposed to more trauma during 2000s.
Jake's Law Enforcement Exit
Speaker 1I'll let Jake do the talking. But, jake, thanks for coming back for another episode. I knew you and I were going to have a ton to talk about, so I wanted to do more than one, yeah glad to be here, one of them with you, but man, yeah so you're taking us through your story man, and so you're taking us through your story man, and so you're still policing back in the day, you end up going out. And what year did you go out? And what year did you end up hanging it up?
Speaker 22023, 2023, you're hanging up the day my second son was born, july 17th 2023 that enough's, enough's, enough, just burnout, struggling with PTSD, all of it. Yeah, yeah. Didn't realize it at the time but just knew I was done. Went on paternity leave. Never went back.
Speaker 1Like I said, so yeah that last episode kind of wraps up the how I, how I ended up where I was at, but all that pain, right, all that pain you went through, you know, and I know you've only shared you've only shared a one percent of your whole story um, yeah, but a lot of pain, but now you're using that pain for purpose. So let's see how we transition, how you transition from you dealing with all this pain and struggling and I know you're not perfect today just like I'm not, we're still right it's.
Speaker 1It's evan flow, we're, it's a process yeah, um so how did you get from that what? How did you go from I don't want to live, I don't want to be, don't want to do this stuff to no, I'm going to make sure I'm here to walk alongside other first responders and help coach them through their trauma, to get their life and hope back. What the heck happened.
Speaker 2Yeah, good question. So, leaving law enforcement, I got a real estate license and I started selling houses and that was a really good choice for me because I'm self-employed, so I didn't have a schedule, I didn't have a boss, and it gave me the freedom to eventually do what I needed to do to take care of myself.
Speaker 2But it also created a lot of free time and a lot of downtime, which you don't have as a cop, and so I would find myself just sitting at home. You know, I'd get my work done for real estate relatively quick, and I'd just be sitting at home and I couldn't, I couldn't relax. Uh, I was always on edge, uh, I couldn't. I wasn't sleeping at all, um, and I was still having night terrors and I was still. You know, it very quickly became evident to me that something was wrong.
Speaker 2I started to get overwhelmed by the sound of my kids playing and the sound of my wife doing the dishes, like just sitting in my living room was so overwhelming I would have to go upstairs and hide in my room. I literally you know, I remember dozens of times five, 36 o'clock at night should be having dinner with the family. I'm upstairs under the covers just trying to figure out why everything's so uns, you know, so overstimulating, yep, and uh, I didn't really know what to do. I also had a couple of times where we'd we'd be in the car, whole family in the car, kids in the backseat screaming, you know, wife, on me about something traffic, you know, at a standstill, and that that scenario, same thing I I would have to get out of the car, um and I just knew that that wasn't right.
Speaker 2So naturally I I wanted to go and get some help. I went and looked for a therapist. I had some not so good experiences right away. I ended up, thankfully, finding a therapist I connected with relatively quickly. But it was not. It took a couple months and you know pretty much. Day one she said you have ADHD and you should try medication. And I said I know I have ADHD but I don't want to take medication. But anyway, she had a way of convincing me. So I went and set up a psychiatry appointment. I got prescribed medicine for ADHD and the first day I took it I went oh, like this is how people live.
Speaker 2This is how you're supposed to feel, like you know, because I, with ADHD, I've had it all my life. I remember being told I had it as a kid and so my, my existence is this is how I describe it to people. I usually have about three streams of thought going on at once in my mind and uh, and also a song stuck in my head, you know that's kind of just my baseline.
Speaker 2It's just a lot of noise and and obviously that can that can mean it doesn't take much external stimulation to feel over overstimulated. But I just never knew, I didn't know what. I didn't know until I took the medication. And then, and then it everything kind of quieted down to one stream of thought at a time and I thought, man, maybe there's something to this therapy and psychiatry stuff that they're talking about.
Speaker 1Maybe it's not all just you know, I just, I just had this mentality of it's.
Speaker 2It's not for me, it's for people weaker than me. I just need to try harder and push through harder and toughen up and um, so, yeah, anyways, I, I, that was a, again a kind of a honeymoon period, but I was starting to have panic attacks.
Speaker 2You know, you've called them episodes. I call them panic attacks, panic episodes where I would completely lose control of myself and at times I would become violent and destructive in ways that I would never choose to do. I scared my wife, I scared my kids, I scared myself. I was also. This led me to a very dark place, because what happens when you develop a panic disorder like that is you can start to panic about the possibility of panicking. Panicking, yeah, it's like this negative feedback loop that just goes over and over and over again. And this is really when things got dark.
Speaker 2I got to a point where I was very, very suicidal because I just couldn't see a way out and I just didn't believe that anyone could possibly understand what I was dealing with and I thought it was me against the world and I thought if anybody found out about it, I'd be locked up in the psych ward or, you know, people would be forced, you know, trying to push my wife to leave me. Like I thought I was going to lose my wife, kids, thought I was going to lose everything. I thought, just if someone found out what's going on with me, I'm going to lose everything. And so I tried my hardest to keep it behind closed doors, keep a lid on it. My wife knew and I I mean I remember even just begging with her like can we like give me an opportunity to figure this out before we go and tell everybody about it, because I don't know how they're going to react and just a real dark place to be.
Speaker 2And I, I, I was very, very suicidal. I several times left the house with the intention of killing myself. I several times grabbed one of my pistols and held onto it and looked at it, put it to my head a couple of times, thought about, thought very long and hard about doing it. Just never could do it. I just never could do it. I just never could do it, and I'm glad, glad for that. But I even beat myself up over that at times. You know I can't even do this right, you know really I do.
Speaker 1I have that thought too seriously yeah and uh.
Finding Help Through Therapy
Speaker 2One morning in particular, I woke up. I'm not, I'm not a big drinker I like I to have some beers. Don't get me wrong, I like whiskey and beer, but I'm not a get drunk all the time and everything revolves around liquor kind of guy Right.
Speaker 2But I started relying more and more on it and I woke up one night or one morning hungover and had a gun on my lap and I had no recollection of what I was doing. I mean, I know what I was doing, but that that just that kind of jolted me. But I say all this just to paint the picture of where I was at mentally. I didn't. I was hopeless, I was depressed, I was anxious. All the time. I was having panic attacks, night terrors, couldn't sleep, couldn't sit still, but somehow still managing to put this appearance out to the world that everything was fine. I actually won well, realtors win awards for just existing. So don't act. I'm not going to act like this is a cool, you know.
Speaker 1You got to have something to hang up in your office.
Speaker 2Yeah, I got my you know my 2024 last year. This was, this was the worst year. The whole year was full of all of these symptoms and uh. But at the same time I I got an award for for producing six figures in gross commission income in my first full years of licensed real estate agent. So I was like putting on this facade for the outside world and then, behind closed doors, only my wife and I knew what was going on and so just got stuck in that that loop, you know, and I was.
Speaker 2I was wanting to find solutions, I was wanting to find support. I had the therapist, I had the psychiatrist, but it just I couldn't. I just got stuck. I didn't know what to do, I couldn't find a solution and I got eventually got turned on to a trauma recovery coach of my own. Her name is Shannon Myers. She is well known in this world of trauma coaching Um, local, local, iowa, or she's in Des Moines, and but she, she's nationwide, known nationally in this, in this world. Um, and I, I didn't even have very many appointments with her, only a handful of appointments. But what I got?
Speaker 1out again what's that?
Speaker 2say her name again shannon myers, m-y-e-r-s. Um, what she did for me in those you know this handful of appointments that we had was she gave me direction and she gave me hope that I could recover, and the way she did that was just telling me what treatments work and how to find them and then what to expect from them. She also introduced me into the world of somatic experiencing or somatic processing, which is all about identifying where in your body the trauma is coming from, because trauma is stored in the body.
Speaker 1Right.
Speaker 2And if you have PTSD or if you struggle with trauma responses or panic episodes, chances are you have. You have met, by the time you have an episode, you have missed several early warning signs in your body, and so she gave me the ability to widen the gap between when I felt the trigger and when I snapped and went off into these episodes and it just I.
Speaker 2I just started building on that momentum, um, and she didn't. You know, she didn't fix everything overnight, and I and and, and I only talked to her a handful of times, but she reignited my drive to live and my belief that I could get better. A couple other things happened there. During a particularly rough night, my wife called her mom to come over to the house and I thought that was it. I thought that we're getting divorced, losing the kids, I'm just going to be a loser forever. And I thought her mom's going to show up and see what's going on here and and we're done.
Speaker 2But but what happened was the exact opposite. Her mom showed up, listened to us, listened to me, uh, really heard me, and and really, really supported me and said I wish you would have told me about this sooner so I could have helped. And she offered and really, really supported me and said I wish you would have told me about this sooner so I could have helped. And she offered you know, if you need a different place to stay, you can come to our house. If you need help with anything at all, uh, let us know. You don't have to. Basically, you don't have to live like this, and you don't have to be alone, and it just blew my mind.
Speaker 1Love like you can't even explain From my mother-in-law. Here's all this fear you had. God steps in and says no, that fear was all fake In fact. How about all this love? They just start loving on you. Was it weird at first? Honestly, it's weird. Some people know for us first responders, we don't like praise. Sometimes we don't like to be loved on, especially when we don't like praise.
Speaker 2Sometimes we don't like to be loved on, especially when we haven't been loved on for a while.
Speaker 1That had to be a little weird at first.
Speaker 2It was very weird. It was very weird to be that vulnerable for someone who's not in my inner inner circle. Actually, the next day after that, because that was kind of a crisis night. At the end of the night I decided I'd go stay in an Airbnb and then they could stay at the house, because it was kind of this question of like should we leave you all alone together, or could something bad happen?
Speaker 2And we all kind of agreed that it'd be better for me to go somewhere else. So I went and stayed in an Airbnb and the next day I called my mother-in-law and her husband and we talked for like two and a half three hours on the phone and I just kind of told them everything.
Speaker 2told them everything that had been happening. I mean there were signs. You know, like to this day I'm missing doors in my house because I've destroyed them and I haven't replaced them yet, but they were, you know, obviously scared to hear what was going on but glad to have been brought in.
Speaker 2And it I found this sense of relief, of letting it go, like letting it be known and not having to hide it anymore. That also built the momentum and so, as I started to feel better, I started to just have this desire to help other people expedite this process, because initially I didn't know what was wrong with me. It took me a long time to figure out what was wrong with me, and then I got a diagnosis of ADHD and PTSD and then I didn't know what to do to get better it took a long time to start getting better.
Speaker 2And it wasn't for a lack of a desire to get better. I wanted to that whole time. I just couldn't find a community of support, couldn't find the right treatments on my own.
Speaker 2And I just felt like I was left with nothing to do but just guess and check, trial and error. So I tried a bunch of different things and some of them helped a little, but really nothing. Nothing helped a ton until, um, I got introduced to the, to the world of psychedelics, um, psilocybin, mushrooms, and then ketamine.
The Psychedelic Breakthrough
Speaker 2Ketamine is not technically classified as a psychedelic drug, but it acts similarly, and what those drugs did for me therapeutically was give me a completely different perspective on my life and this is one of the things that Shannon advocates for is the use of psychedelics in conjunction with traditional treatments for PTSD. And it gave me just a completely different outlook on my life and it made me realize that, uh, I'm not separate from everything else in the world, I'm part of everything else in the world and I can't do things alone. And also that, like, uh, I don't need to feel so much shame and guilt for having a disorder, and it just it continued to build that hope, and so I did a couple of different psilocybin trips. That helped quite a bit. And then I got connected with a clinic to do ketamine therapy and I still do ketamine therapy once a week and ketamine ketamine therapy once a week.
Speaker 2And ketamine, ketamine was had the biggest impact on me of anything.
Speaker 1Yeah, walk us through that, like a lot of people. For some of our listeners, especially law enforcement, you're in these terms or EMS is fire Anybody. You're in these terms like ketamine, mushrooms, right, things that we were, we were told when we were a kid or you know those horrible stuff. But now psychedelics are being proven to be very helpful for PTSD. I mean very commonly known now to help. But for some of you it may throw you back in your seat a little bit, but these are actual things that people. It's changing people's lives. I want to give you guys all the different perspectives of ways to getting help, and one of them is this for some people. So have an open mind to what he's saying, because it works. Um, so walk us through, jake, like why, what made you think to go down this route of ketamine trying shrooms? Basically, because everything else failed yeah, I, I had done.
Speaker 2I had done lots of different types of traditional therapies that they'll help, but it's a very slow process and I just had this sense of urgency because my wife was going to leave me if I continued to have panic episodes that scared her to death. She just was going to leave, and in my mind she should, and rightfully so. Uh, because these are episodes where I can't control myself, and so how can?
Speaker 2I guarantee I'm not going to do something terrible. Um, and so I had this really real sense of urgency, like I have to figure this out before my family falls apart, and so it just led to this level of desperation that was actually turned out to be the best gift I've ever been given, that gift of desperation, and so I did the psilocybin thing. I was too. I didn't have a guide. I would say, if you're going to go down the road of psilocybin, have a guide. I'd be happy to talk to you about what I know about it. But because I didn't have a guide, I didn't want to go too far with it, meaning I didn't want to take. I probably really didn't want to take as big a dose as I probably should have.
Speaker 2So I was kind of just half in on it. But I was feeling, I felt some, some solid relief and some solid shifts. But it wasn't. It wasn't like everything was good, it just was like another step in the right direction. So then I started reading about ketamine therapy. Like any cop, I'm like I don't want to go and get myself doped up with strangers. I don't know what they're going to do to me. I don't know what. You know, I like I just was too paranoid. I talked myself out of it a million times and when I say strangers, I'm talking about a physician's assistant, a PA, you know, like a medical professional, and I, in my mind, I'm like I'm going to get doped up and they're going to steal all my stuff and take funny pictures of me or something. I don't know what I thought was going to happen.
Speaker 1Your car's going to be sitting on blocks in the dry.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, and so I talked myself out of it so many times, but then what ended up?
Speaker 2happening is my, my wife and sister are both nurses and they work in the in the ER downtown Um and uh, they ended up, uh, connecting with this PA that works, that does some work, some shifts down there too. Her name is Amanda and she also at the time was working at this clinic, uh, doing ketamine therapy kind of doing that for the most part, and then she'd pick up shifts here and there in the ER and they just happened to cross paths and happened to talk about it, and so my wife connects me with her in a text thread and says here Amanda does get my wife. At this point it's basically like will you do something? You know she's like here's Amanda, she does ketamine, you need to go do. That is basically the message I got.
Speaker 2And so I was like okay, I got somebody I can trust, personal connection. I'll go give it a shot and I wish I'd have done it sooner. The experience of doing ketamine is very intense. I say doing ketamine, it sounds like I'm at a party, but when they give you the medicine, the method that I've used is called it's called spravato. It's a nasally administered form of ketamine and the process looks like this you go and you have a consult and decide if it's right for you and you want to try it, and obviously I decided it was right for me, and so there's the.
Speaker 2It comes in a box with three different containers, three different nasal spray containers. You do a shot in each nostril, wait five minutes, another shot in each nostril, wait five minutes, third shot in each nostril and from there you kind of get I call it. You kind of get launched into this place. Call it, you kind of get launched into this place. You don't completely disconnect from reality, but you do dissociate from your body and you do kind of have an altered state of consciousness. And it call it just. It just calms your body and your nervous system in a way that's hard to describe, and what it gave me the ability to do was, uh, process some of these memories, uh, without my body reacting, because you're still very conscious and alert.
Speaker 1My processing sound. Can you hear that? Sorry, go ahead can you hear the buttons I'm pushing? I can't, I can't.
Speaker 2Yeah, all right, sorry, I'm like I'm a child no, no, no, that that's all right, I don't know. Do whatever you need to do. Make some silence.
Speaker 1No, I was just making like mystical you were going into your trip.
Speaker 2Yeah, oh yeah, it is a little mystical and what it gave me the ability to do was mentally go back to some of these places, like the officer involved shooting incident or some of I can probably point to nine or ten incidents on duty that had a really big impact on me.
Speaker 2Yeah, um, and I knew, affected me strongly and plus all the little, you know, all the little hammer incidents like you talk about, just um, but I can go during these ketamine sessions. I can go there in my mind and I can relive it and I can analyze it and process it without my body getting agitated and working up and I just don't have, just wouldn't have, a reaction, and so it's like starting to help me process some of these things. Um, and then the best part about it is, between sessions, my body just isn't. It just isn't reactive. It's not like it's completely unreactive. I I've still had a couple of panic episodes since I started ketamine, but it it it went from, went from daily to I mean, I'm really the last several months has been about maybe one a month and the severity of it is so much lower and I have the ability to like, get myself out of it and so I'm just stuck in it until I get exhausted.
Speaker 2So that's the best of benefit for me, leaving the very first appointment. You have to have someone drop you off and pick you up, and so my wife picked me up. The boys are in the back seat and we were going straight to Ankeny, to her mom's house to celebrate somebody's birthday. I forget whose birthday it was.
Speaker 2But this is like a scenario for me where it's like, okay, we're going to be in the car in traffic. Also, it's hot for some reason. I haven't figured out why, but being hot is a big trigger for me. I don't know why.
Speaker 1You mentioned that yesterday and I wondered. I was kind of sitting on that.
Speaker 2I haven't put the pieces together on that.
Speaker 1Well, I hope you get there someday.
Speaker 2But anyway, I'm just painting the picture here. This is a situation where I've had panic multiple times. I was nervous about getting in the car with my family and driving to Ankeny. That's the state I was in at this time. But I get in the car and I'm still a little loopy and I sit there and like the boys are going crazy in the back seat already like my kids are just like me. They're nuts. They never stop talking, they never stop moving and I'm sitting there.
Speaker 1I'm like I don't.
Speaker 2like it's the weirdest thing. I don't. I don't care. Like I don't care that they're being loud, like it's not bothering, and I just thought, well you, the drug's still active. Like I'm not going to get my hopes up yet, like I just left, like of course, like I'm doped up, like of course I'm not going to react, but we get up to Ankeny, bumper to bumper, rush hour traffic and we're just stuck.
Speaker 2And this is another thing that really gets me is being stuck in traffic. And again I'm like I don't, like I don't care that I'm stuck in traffic I don't know how to describe this kept telling my wife and she's like okay, you know, all right, whatever, like who cares. Like I'm like I'm like my wife's name is reen, like brie, I don't like the boys are being loud and I don't care. We're stuck in traffic and I don't care. And she's just like okay, good and congratulations. And next thing that happens is I can hear a siren behind us and I look in the mirror and there's a fire. There's a fire truck and an ambulance trying to come through the get their way through traffic. And it was. It's that kind of I mean, you've you've run an emergency vehicle yourself too. It's.
Ketamine Therapy Experience
Speaker 2It's one of those situations where, like, the cars are basically just having to slowly part to go off onto either shoulder just to make just enough room for the emergency vehicles to get through and they're going so slow. And so I'm like you know, obviously a siren and lights is a trigger for someone with ptsd related to being a cop. Yeah, and to me, still to this day, when I hear a siren, it it stops me, you know it, kind of stops me and takes my mind there it doesn't cause the same kind of reaction that it used to.
Speaker 2but I, I was just bracing, like in this front seat, just kind of like okay, like don't, don't worry about it, it's going to be fine. You know, like trying to prep myself because this ambulance it's coming, it's going to go right by us and soon enough it ends up right next to our car to where I could reach out and touch it. You know, I can reach out the window and touch this and the sirens just going and the lights are going and same thing. I'm like I don't care, like I don't know how to describe this.
Speaker 2I don't like it doesn't bother me, none of this bothered me and I'm just, yeah, I'm just blown away by the fact that I went and did this random drug that I snorted in my nose and now like, yeah, yeah, now, now I'm like, I'm like having hope that I'm not going to get triggered by all these things that have been triggering me. And so we get, we get, you know, the, the vehicles get through and we get through traffic and we get to the house. And here's another scenario where the like little kids, they get around their grandparents and they go to next level, like they. You know, there's no rules at grandma's house, kind of thing, and so they're going extra crazy. My in-laws don't believe in air conditioning and so it's hot oh my gosh Hot in their house. They hate air conditioning. And you know, just being around them and just being around all that stimulation in particular, was difficult, had been difficult, and it wasn't. It just wasn't. Every one of those things that had been bothering me every single time didn't bother me at all, and that's when I knew ketamine was for real.
Speaker 2I have I learned with my trauma coach that my early warning sign for a trauma activation or a panic response is a knot in my stomach and it feels like right below the bottom of my rib cage, in the middle. It feels like if someone could somehow stick their hand in there and just grab what's ever right there and just squeeze it. It just feels like literally just just a big, just a big knot. And I didn't have that Like that. That was a feeling I had gotten so used to, feeling that I didn't even know it was abnormal. And so then when I started having these, these, these events happen that would cause that I, I was like bracing for it and it never had would cause that I, I was like bracing for it and it never had never showed up this day. You know, I used to have that knot in my stomach dozens of times a day.
Speaker 2I just thought it was like part of being a human. I don't know. It's kind of like what I talked about with the Adderall and ADHD. I just thought that's how everybody felt Right. But it doesn't. It just doesn't happen. It doesn't happen that way anymore. And it's ketamine has taken me from daily panic episodes, daily suicidal thoughts and ideations that you know coping with alcohol, coping with whatever I can. It's taken me to, uh, maybe in a panic episode once a month. I don't have any suicidal thoughts or ideations at all. Every now and then, I mean, I I'll always have that first responder brain of like that kind of like cynical tendency where if something dumb happens, it's you know. Every now and then I'll have a fleeting thought of like I could just, I could just opt out of this, you know right, but it's not real.
Speaker 1It's not like I want to.
Speaker 2It's like just that fleeting thought praise god man, that's.
Speaker 1That's great like it's given me, it's given me freedom yeah, and some people may not like that I say this, but I give god the glory for that. I mean, god uses people, he uses his creations. He's using medicine that's here on earth to help fix people and again, a lot of people poo poo on it and there's a stigma attached with it. But praise god for that being there to be able to help you Absolutely. And there's psychedelics, there's ketamine, there's Ibogaine, I think is what it's called. We talked about it the other day.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1I'm not opposed to these, jake, I'm not. I'm not one of those people that's like no, you have to do it this way, yeah, so why do you have to? So why do you have to keep going back then? So it's more than you. Don't just go once and then you're done.
Speaker 2There's an acute phase where you do it two or three times a week and it's because I'm going to butcher the explanations because I'm not a scientist but ketamine promotes neuroplasticity, which is just a rewiring of the brain, and what happens in your brain when you have these trauma responses is there's a neural pathway that will form and it basically makes it so that there's an automatic, nearly automatic response from trigger to reaction and the ketamine, through whatever mechanisms that I don't, I can't explain it, but it promotes rewiring of those, it changes those neural pathways and I mean it can be documented, it can be witnessed you know, like scientists I don't know how they do that but, um, the during the acute phases is kind of like the loading phase and it's like you really want to, basically really just attacking it.
Speaker 2You're exposing the brain to these, this chemical, these substances, often so that you can have these dramatic shifts quickly, and then it goes into a maintenance phase and you don't. It's it's still so new that there's not even like a set protocol, there's not a set number of of treatments that you need to do or should do. It's just, basically, it's based on how a patient feels, and so I've. I've shifted from twice a week to once a week, and I just had this conversation yesterday with my provider about how here in the near future, I probably am going to go to every other week. Okay, and it's just. I think my understanding is that early on you're you're in a crisis point and you really want to get your brain to start functioning better quickly.
Speaker 2so you do a lot of it at once, and then you start to spread it out so that you can still continue to reap the benefits of the drug without having to, you know, go so often and expose yourself to it so often. And then, over time, those neural pathways in the rewiring of your brain, it's, it's real and it just gets solidified and then you don't need the treatment as much anymore.
Speaker 1Yeah, and I'm not a doctor or anything like that, either I were. I'm just a dude who knows a few things from some experience and from talking to people, but it's like they used to think that the brain was, was basically concrete, it would form itself and it would have these pathways that it would form and that you couldn't change those pathways. It is what it is. We've learned with neuroplasticity that that's not true. You can actually change those pathways. If you walk out to the mail every day and you walk through your yard over time, there's a track where you've seen somebody, where you've walked all those times. It's like that in our mind where you don't have to keep walking down that same trail of that path, you can actually teach your brain and your brain will grow in a new way and I'm sure I'm messing this all up too where you can actually teach your brain and your brain will grow in a new way and I'm sure I'm messing this all up too where you can have a new thought that can take you in a different path.
Speaker 1Yeah, that goes with it and this medicine helps with that. Is that correct?
Speaker 2Yeah, and it does. It's similar to you, know, psychedelics. It does expand your consciousness a little bit, you don't.
Speaker 1You don't trip, know you don't hallucinate really with ketamine, like you do with some of those other substances.
Speaker 2So there's no disco ball and you're not spinning in circles and no, but you, I mean, if you let yourself go with it and, in particular, if you use an eye mask and kind of block some of your senses and listen to, um, the right kind of music, I like it, you can, you can go somewhere in your mind that you wouldn't go without the drug. I remember, remember one of one of the sessions in particular. Um, like I said I in the last episode, I kind of have a strained relationship with my parents and and my family in general, and one of these treatment sessions it was the first time I used an eye mask and I found a playlist on Spotify for ketamine treatment and it's just music, but it's just kind of music meant to go with that experience, I had this just vivid vision all in my mind. It's not like I didn't see anything, like you know it doesn't change reality that much.
Speaker 2But it was vivid vision of where I just was kind of lifting. I was just kind of lifting up off the face of the earth and flying around and it was. It felt like I was flying around like in real time to where, like to where my parents were. I knew at the time that they were, they were on a camping trip in somewhere like maybe the upper peninsula, michigan or something like that, the upper peninsula, michigan or something like that. I had this vision of like seeing where they were and then like seeing where my sister was and like going back, almost going back in time, and seeing where my, my grandparents raised my mom and just it was just kind of this interesting vision to put it all together and it's kind of gave me the perspective of like the generational trauma the impacts of different generations and the impacts of the things that have affected my family and my lineage and my bloodline over time, and it just gave me this perspective of like my parents are doing their best.
Speaker 2I'm two generations. My grandma grew up in a house with a dirt floor in rural Iowa. I'm two generations away from a dirt floor.
Speaker 1Yep.
Speaker 2So my parents were doing the best with what they, what they had, and um, so you can. You can have experiences like that, but it's mostly. It's mostly just about calming your nervous system down and and it stops these ruminating thoughts like the suicidal ideation or the depressive cycle or whatever, and there's something that has something to do with glutamate levels in the brain. Uh, I don't know, not a scientist.
Speaker 2You can ask chat, gpt or something to explain it better than me, but yeah it works, that's all I'm saying is it works and I would highly recommend it to anyone dealing with depression or PTSD.
Speaker 1Great to hear. I love hearing people's testimonies of what they've tried, what works, what works for them. So, and we talked about this yesterday, but if I want to have your, your ketamine doctor on sometime, if you don't mind, on the podcast, because I want to hear some more about it from it's, it's a her right from her. Yeah, amanda, yeah. And then so if people are thinking about and again, jake doesn't work for a ketamine clinic or anything like that, but if somebody was wanting to look into that, there's, that's something, that's that's available here in Iowa the ketamine treatment yeah, there's a clinic.
Speaker 2I don't. I would guess there's more than just one clinic, but the one that I've been going to is called Focused Life Clinic in West Des Moines.
Speaker 1Focused Life Clinic in West Des Moines no-transcript than one there didn't used to be any.
Coaching Philosophy and Trauma Cycle
Speaker 1I remember a few years ago I was over in illinois when I first heard about it and yeah it really threw me back in my seat, like what, and then I've done a lot of research on it. Now I'm fine with it. Um, I'm probably gonna to do it myself. I think it'll help. I'm not opposed to trying it whatsoever. You're coaching now. You're using all that pain for purpose, man. We got a lot of first responders that are Jake, they need some coaching. Man, they just need somebody to throw their arm around them and say, hey, it's okay what you're going through. I want to help you get to the next step. I want to help you get to the next step. I want to help you get your life back, your joy back, your happiness. Um, how can they get ahold of you? How can you? How can they get ahold of you and get this process started? Get, get some. You have a free like consultation, or how's that work?
Speaker 2Yeah, I do free consultations for coaching. Uh, I also have a an online community I call Guardian Rise. I sent you earlier. I don't know if you still have it. I have a link tree. I put it in the chat here. If you go to my link tree, if you're familiar with link tree, it's easy to find, but it's dot E-E slash Jake Bile. That has a link to all of my social media profiles. You can contact me on social media. It also has a link to book a free consultation with me and a link to join my free community online. So it's a one-stop shop. You can reach out to me through any of those methods. You don't have to book a consultation. You could just send me a message on Instagram or Facebook or whatever. However, I uh in the near future we'll have a phone number available, but I'm I'm working on.
Speaker 1He doesn't want to use a cell phone number and I don't blame him.
Speaker 2Yeah, I don't. I just don't want that to be out there, because I I can't be everything to everybody all the time, and so I want to have a little bit of control of access to me.
Speaker 1Good for you. That's what got us in this situation to begin with. We did that in our law enforcement careers. We had to be it for everybody. We had to be at everything, do our best. I mean it was yeah.
Speaker 2Yeah, and that's, and that's the thing about coaching. You've heard that, everyone's heard the phrase you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. As a coach, I view myself as a guide. I guide you through your trauma ptsd recovery journey. I introduce you to the resources that I am familiar with. I share my own experience and uh, but it's up to you to do the work.
Speaker 2It's up to you to go and do the things that I, I, I know work and uh, I don't know if you want to get into this now uh, like my philosophy on on how I coach or not.
Speaker 1Yeah, go ahead, we can go. Let's try to wrap it up in like four more minutes. Can you do it there?
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, so I, I I view the trauma cycle in in as a four phase cycle survival, numbing, crash, repeat. That's the cycle we get stuck in with trauma. It's a cycle I have been stuck in many times. You were in it. Anybody who's dealt with trauma, ptsd can relate, I guarantee it. And survival means we just live in survival mode. We do the bare minimum to get by, to function, and that's excruciating. And so sooner or later, we're going to start numbing.
Speaker 2Whether that's with alcohol and drugs or scrolling on your phone, overexercising, overeating there's a million ways to numb out. And so we start numbing and what we do is we fail to address the root cause of why we even want to numb and everything builds and builds and builds to a crash and it will crash. Everyone has a crash, whether it's a panic attack, whether it's a suicide attempt, everyone has a crash. And if you don't address these stuff, the stuff and typically what I see is at that crash point I see this in myself too that's the only time in the cycle where you get willing to do something. It's a critical period and in my opinion, that's where I want to catch somebody, because I'm going to say this is what you need to do. This will work and they will do it.
Speaker 2But if you miss, that window of opportunity starts all the way back over, you go back to survival mode, start numbing, crash, repeats. That's the cycle that you stay stuck in until you choose to address your trauma. And so, with coaching, the first thing I recommend is everybody get a therapist. Get a therapist or a psychiatrist, or both.
Speaker 1Yeah, you're not there to replace them, are you?
Speaker 2Coaching is not a replacement and I don't do therapy. This is not a therapeutic thing, but my coaching philosophy is also for four phases. Phase one is building a community of support, because you cannot recover from PTSD alone. You can't do this in the darkness. You need good people around you, you need good professionals and you need good personal contacts. That's why I started the Guardian Rise online community because it's free to join. You go right in there. You got access to dozens of people who understand that. Build your community online or you find people in your personal life that that work for that, that role. Phase two is reconnecting with your body. In nature, trauma is absolutely stored in the body and that's why that's phase two. You have to reconnect with your body and you have to learn to tame your nervous system before you can ever really start thinking through this stuff, because, because otherwise you think about it, your body reacts, your mind shuts down and you're in panic. You have to reconnect with your body, and I include nature just because of how beneficial it is.
Speaker 2We as humans in this day and age think we are somehow separate from nature. But we're not, and there is a ton of benefit from getting outside, touching the ground, feeling the breeze, feeling the sunlight. It just centers you, it just does, it just works. Phase three is all about identifying blockages, and when I say blockages I mean you don't have enough money or you're stuck in a toxic relationship or you are in a job that is sucking the life out of you, like these. Are they're blockages that would prevent you from healing, even if you're putting a hundred percent effort into healing? Are they're blockages that would prevent you from healing even if you're putting a hundred percent effort into healing? They're typically mostly like external blockages. And then phase four is coming up with a plan for long-term success and healing. And the cool thing about this process is, if you do phases one through three right, there's really nothing much more to be done in phase four. It it's just keep doing what you figured, it out, what you figured out.
Speaker 2But in my opinion, it helps to document it, write it all down and find a way to keep tracking track of it so that if you do get off track, you can go back and say this is what happened. So that's the approach I take. Um, I love it. In order to get out of that cycle, I think all four of those phases need to happen.
Speaker 1And you need a coach. Guys, you need a coach. If you could have done it by now, you would have already done it, right? I mean, let's be real, you need a coach and that's okay. Tiger Woods needed a coach. They all had coaches. Reach out. We had a coach on last week with Neil from New York. We had a coach on now Reach um with neil from from from new york. I'm gonna coach on now. Reach out to these people, man, they can help yeah, you can help.
Speaker 2I can tell you, I was very skeptical of working with a coach myself and I gotta tell you, if you look up shannon, uh, she's not cheap. Uh, I paid her 185 a session out of pocket and I I was very skeptical, thinking like what's a coach? And like there's no, you know, there's no formal credential. It's cost a lot of money. Is this? Could this just be hocus pocus, hoity, toity, you know like, is this nonsense? But I got to that point of desperation. I paid for it and I it was the. It was the best thing that I've I've done for myself in my recovery. Well worth investing in myself now so that I can have a life that I enjoy living again.
Speaker 1Love it, love it, love it. Send me the link, the tree or whatever you said you have, and I'll get that. When I post it, guys, I'll put it on. It'll be in the link or it'll be in the description of the podcast episode. You'll be able to find his information, a hold of him, get a consultation, at least hear him out. He'll tell you. He'll be the first to tell you if he's not a good fit for you?
Speaker 1yeah, and I'll let you know. He now he doesn't bring on everybody, he doesn't take in everybody, um, but if he's not, if he's not a good fit, he could probably give you recommendations and maybe somebody who can but reach out, have the conversation.
Speaker 2And I think we touched on this earlier. I don't want anybody to think like I have fixed and cured my PTSD and everything's perfect and there's nothing but rainbows and butterflies in my life. It's not. It's not like that. Not every day is good. I still have challenges, but I have come a long way from where I was and I've done it quickly. A lot of people struggle with this in a real serious way for years or decades.
Speaker 2So I found it years for me 20 years. I dealt with it. I've found what works, I found it quick and I've got it all in one place where I can give it to you.
Speaker 1I love it and, jake, I'll have you back on again. Buddy, I'll probably have you on as a regular if you're cool with it.
Speaker 2Yeah absolutely.
Episode Wrap-Up
Speaker 1I love the conversation and that'll wrap up this week. Jake, you've been a blessing buddy Appreciate it have a good week and I'll hit the button to send us off here. And that wraps up another episode from the 1042 project shared voices podcast.
Speaker 1Thank you for tuning in and just a reminder we are a 501c3. If you guys can support us, you can go to our website. Or if you know an organization or a company or your church may want to get involved in supporting 1042 projects's mission of equipping, restoring and repurposing our first responders, please reach out to us at 10-42projectorg. There is a giving page on there. We need your help. We need your support. If you can't give financially, please be willing to share the word of our podcast, of our organization and the work that God's doing. Thank you and have a blessed week.