One More Run: With Chris Moore

You’re gonna need a box of tissues, because this episode with Captain Chris Moore is equal parts gut-wrenching and soul-restoring.

Chris has over 30 years in the fire service—he’s seen it, lived it, and most importantly, survived it. From hurricanes to heartbreak, Lewis the legendary service dog to losing everything but finding himself—this isn’t just a story about calls and chaos. It’s a testimony of what happens when you finally stop trying to hold it all together and admit you’re falling apart. He walks us through the moment he hit rock bottom, the call he made that saved his life, and the healing that came with EMDR, journaling, Save A Warrior, and leaning into faith.

We talk grief, divorce, addiction, what it means to be a real leader, and why smashing the stigma might still be a little premature (but we’re coming for it). He also drops some serious wisdom about first responder mental health, writing to your new recruits, and what it means to actually be a good human being.

If you’ve ever questioned your strength or felt like maybe it was just you—you’re gonna want to hear what Chris has to say. Because he’s walking proof that sometimes "broken" people make the best builders.

🔥 Key Takeaways:

• You can carry trauma for decades and still heal.
• “I’m fine” is the biggest lie we tell each other.
• Asking for help is the bravest damn thing you can do.
• Safe people matter. The size of your circle doesn’t.
• Service animals save lives—in more ways than one.

DISCLAIMER:
After the Tones Drop has been presented and sponsored by Whole House Counseling. After the Tones Drop is for informational purposes only and does not constitute for medical or psychological advice. It is not a substitute for professional health care advice diagnosis or treatment. Please contact a local mental health professional in your area if you are in need of assistance. You can also visit our shows resources page for an abundance of helpful information.

ATTD Music Credits (Music from #Uppbeat):

• https://uppbeat.io/t/vens-adams/adventure-is-calling License code: ANJCYVHRMULSNKQR
• https://uppbeat.io/t/vens-adams/rise-of-the-hero License code: H4WTAGJZIXZCM8DM
• https://uppbeat.io/t/yeti-music/homewardLicense code: KO7FZAIJBAEAJLKE
• https://uppbeat.io/t/sonda/the-heart-grows License code: KAID0ITO96GJZAPS
• https://uppbeat.io/t/philip-anderson/achievement License code: XZ4PMCKHW94GUR74
• https://uppbeat.io/t/tobias-voigt/nexus
  License code: MVMDRGHKHTJRABVR
• https://uppbeat.io/t/paul-yudin/breakthrough
  License code: FYPM3OJF0NQ4OGTE

Transcript

EP106: One More Run

To connect with Chris or learn more about his advocacy work, reach out on social media or visit his LinkedIn.

For more resources and past episodes, visit afterthetonesdrop.com.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Erin: You're listening to After the Tones Drop, the mental health podcast for first responders. 

00:00:07 Cinnamon: We're your hosts. I'm Cinnamon, a first responder trauma therapist. 

00:00:11 Erin: And I'm Erin, a first responder integration coach. 

00:00:15 Cinnamon: Our show brings you stories from real first responders, the tools they've learned, and the lives they now get to live.

00:00:29 Cinnamon: All right, folks, get ready because we've got a powerhouse guest coming your way today. Chris Moore isn't just a seasoned firefighter. He's a man on a mission. With over 30 years in the fire service, starting as a wide-eyed volunteer, and working his way up to Captain with Chesapeake Fire, Chris has seen it all. He's been on the front lines of hurricanes, trained the next generation, and led from the trenches.

00:00:57 Cinnamon: But here's where it gets real. Chris isn't just fighting fires, he's fighting for first responder mental health. Diagnosed with PTS in 2018, he turned his struggle into a mission, traveling the country as a national speaker, published writer, and mental health advocate. You might've even seen him in Fire Engineering magazine, heard him on a podcast, or caught him in a documentary, PTSD911.

00:01:26 Cinnamon: He's got the medals, the commendations, and even a PTSD service dog named Lewis to prove he walks the walk. We're pumped to have Chris join us to talk about breaking the stigma, sharing his story, and making sure first responders everywhere know that help and hope is out there. Stay tuned for this one because it's gonna be good.

00:01:51 Chris: Hey ladies.

00:01:22 Erin: Chris Moore.

00:01:53 Cinnamon: Hi. Quotes and...

00:01:55 Erin: Yeah.

00:01:57 Chris: Yeah. My air quotes. Yeah.

00:02:01 Erin: It's taken a little bit of time to get you here, obviously. We got to reschedule and life happens. And next thing I knew it was March and here we are. So we finally made it.

00:02:09 Chris: Yeah. I'm glad we did.

00:02:12 Erin: And me too.

00:02:13 Cinnamon: Erin has been talking quite a bit recently. I feel like somehow, she has managed to weasel you into many conversations that we've had. Where can I fit Chris Moore into that? So yeah, she's been curious in the [inaudible].

00:02:28 Erin: I do know that. Obviously, I am pretty active on LinkedIn and I feel like I kind of get to know people on there, just not know them, but know their heart and what they're up to. I know that you have been traveling around doing all these speaking events. I know that you actually connected with one of our best friends, Chris Perry.

00:02:46 Chris: Oh, yeah. Chris, yeah.

00:02:48 Erin: Uh huh.

00:02:49 Cinnamon: He is a sister from another mister. 

00:02:51 Erin: Yeah. Which he was like talking about what a great person you are. And so we know that you've been up to a lot of things. And a lot of it is you've been in this fire service for a long time, and I'm sure you've seen horrific stuff. And we get that. And that's not really what's relevant to all of the things that you offer. We did a little bit of an intro before you hopped on just because it's easier and we don't leave anything out. But Cinnamon was really excited about learning about... you have a service dog. We don't really talk about that avenue.

00:03:25 Erin: We're excited about the fact that you've had the opportunity to work through some natural disasters and step into your leadership in that. And then of course, how you've turned your whole experience forward facing to help others, which mental health podcast, of course, we're so excited about that. So yeah, I don't know if you've listened to the show, but we're super loose. It's a bunch of friends talking. We just kind of are organic and go with the flow. We do have a few ideas of things that we would love to ask you and talk to you about, but other than that, that's where we are.

00:03:59 Cinnamon: Ideally, the goal is that at any given point, all three of us will have forgotten that we're being recorded and it will kind of flow. And following up on what Erin said, I said, I wonder what it's like to go from doing route calls where it's, all right, let's go pick up this old lady who fell out of her chair and put her back in it, to then getting called up and I'm dealing with these 10 feet waves and trying to get a screaming, crying woman with an infant off of her roof with a boat, which I don't know if that's what you've done but just that.

00:04:35 Cinnamon: We know that your day to day life is going to take your adrenaline up a notch. But then you even have adrenaline on steroids when you're going into those other situations. And what is it like to make that transition, especially probably more back, it might be easier to go to it than it is to come back from it? So yeah, we just need you to tell us everything about yourself and your life. Go ahead. Start now. 

00:05:00 Chris: Go.

00:05:02 Cinnamon: Yeah, yeah.

00:05:03 Chris: This is it. Okay.

00:05:04 Erin: We record automatically because we always miss really good stuff at the beginning when we're just shooting the shit. And then we're like, "No, we weren't recording." So we've learned I can edit out, but I can't edit in.

00:05:17 Chris: Okay. No, this is what I like. I have seen several of your episodes and one thing that I like about your podcast is exactly the way you said. You wanted to be as three friends sitting around just kind of shooting the breeze and discussing mental health and trying to help people. And one of the things, keywords that I like to use now, I know somebody else has coined it, I'm sure, but we're just being good human beings. That's what we are. I know the three of us all have something in common. Save a Warrior, we're brothers and sisters, alumni of that.

00:05:49 Chris: Those that aren't familiar with it won't get this, but the three of us and all of our alumni that listen to it will understand. We're just being whales. It's something that I truly appreciate when I do a lot of podcasts, and I've really been excited for joining the two of you on this. Occasionally you'll see, I kind of get on a rant. So feel free if I start just going on and on. Yeah, just say, “Chris, stop.” But first of all, I can't stress how happy I am to be here with you guys. Literally and physically, spiritually, emotionally, everything like that.

00:06:26 Chris: The introduction you gave when you're speaking about me. You talked about you never had anybody with a service animal before. I... Past tense— have a service animal. His name was Lewis, and went through a lot of red tape to get him. It's all the stuff, the hurdles, and bureaucracy, and everything that you have to go through for a disability of any kind. With a service dog, I'm still a career firefighter and I had to get approval to take him to the firehouse with me. And it was a long hurdle. I had to take a... get kind of emotional with this.

00:07:05 Cinnamon: I must be picking it up on you because literally, I am leaking out this eye and I don't know why yet. I'm waiting to find out why I'm already crying because you're about to. Yeah, something's happening here.

00:07:17 Chris: Had to get a law firm involved just to make sure all my I's were dotted and T's were crossed and everything, and just kind of the fight to get him. And I did win and got my accommodation granted and Lewis went with me to the firehouse. He went with me everywhere. He went out run on calls with me. He was a yellow lab and it was wonderful. It wasn't just a benefit. Actually, I don't even want to say it's a benefit. It was a necessity for me. It worked out very well for all of the firefighters, all my brothers and sisters in the firehouse.

00:07:48 Chris: When we had rough calls, Lewis picked up on it for everybody that was involved. They would come up and ask permission to pet Lewis. Absolutely I would grant that and let him love on them and everything. But unfortunately, Lewis started having seizures, and we tried treating Lewis with medication. They finally got the medication adjusted just right where it was stopping the seizures. But he was no longer on point that he needed to be to render the tasks at hand that were necessity for me. Retired as a service animal. And during that same time period, I was going through a divorce as well. Had to move out.

00:08:27 Chris: And I was moving into an apartment, going to be single again for the first time in almost 25 years. And with that being said, being firefighter, going 24 hours at a time, Lewis could no longer go to the firehouse with me since he wasn't a service animal. I looked into services that could come to my apartment and feed him during a 24 hour shift or whatever. And I found some that could provide some decent care. But I thought long and hard. And one of the things I learned through Save a Warrior is, and I know the male and female cohorts, we have a little bit different criteria that we learn. But one of the things that was taught to me is a difference between a boy and a man.

00:09:11 Cinnamon: I immediately thought you wanted to be a chuck three.

00:09:15 Chris: Yeah, I absolutely want to be a chuck three. And it's just about doing the right thing. A boy does whatever the hell a boy wants to do while a man does what he has to do because it's the right thing. And that we don't build on our egos or anything like that. And I knew the best thing for Lewis was to see, first of all, if the service dog organization that granted him to me would take him back or find somebody to help me place him. And I called them up and it was Service Dogs of Virginia. And they understood exactly where I was coming from. And they graciously took him back.

00:09:51 Chris: It was a hard decision to make, but like I said, it was the right decision. And plus, my tools grew, my toolbox since I had first got him. And I actually no longer needed all of his services anyhow, because I was much better equipped after going through Save a Warrior therapy every other week to handle and to ground myself and to recognize things. So Lewis was actually placed with a... I believe it's an attorney that works with children and he doesn't have to do tasks or anything like that. He's just there more of a therapy dog now, and just there for when the children come into this attorney's office. So I know he's doing well and I'm good with that.

00:10:39 Erin: Oh my gosh.

00:10:41 Cinnamon: I am dying over here. Yeah.

00:10:44 Erin: She's not normally the crier.

00:10:45 Cinnamon: No, but it was like energetically. I was like, this is not gonna end the way I want it to.

00:10:51 Chris: He's alive. He didn't die from the seizures or anything.

00:10:54 Cinnamon: The bond that you develop. And we recently worked around a bunch of folks that were in the first-year fundamental health world. And one of them has a dog and he said, "She's my medical equipment but she's also so much more than that." And so the idea of developing this relationship and also being the catalyst for you actually improving, having a paw in you getting to another level where Lewis wasn't as necessary or essential. It's just... yeah. I'm okay now. We're - okay. Yep. We're good.

00:11:33 Chris: He'll always be a part of me and always a part of my recovery. And I'm forever grateful to Service Dogs of Virginia and every organization across the country that assists with placing service animals to our veterans and first responders and anybody else with medical necessities that could benefit from it. So I'm a huge advocate for that as well. Because I've experienced firsthand the benefits of it.

00:11:58 Erin: It's so beautiful. And the fact that you got to also help everybody at the firehouse or Lewis did and support them through that. And the first thing I thought was the immense loss. It was like a double duty loss of a marriage and your beloved friend and companion. And I was wondering, how did you navigate through that and transition into this new phase of life?

00:12:28 Erin: Because those are some pretty big things while still being able to maintain your mental health and everything at work, and be responsible for a crew, and all the things that you do. I think it's important. We talked so much about the stuff on the job, but often we don't talk about the real life things that happen to us and how do we actually get through those types of scenarios. And you don't have to get deep, but any strength and hope you have on that?

00:12:56 Chris: Yeah, I definitely don't mind getting deep. So nothing's off the table. Any questions that you guys want to ask or elaborate on anything that I say, please feel free to do so. Because I think that's the key to opening up to healing ourselves and helping to heal others and let them know that they're not alone.

00:13:13 Chris: But that time, that was 2022. And it was a very tumultuous time for me right then and there. You said Lewis was going through the seizures. I had to make the decision on him of what I was going to do and how I was going to proceed with that. I was going through a divorce that same time period. The third strike for me, which... and I know I just kind of laugh when I'm saying this with a smile and I don't take it lightly, but looking back on things now and where I was and where I am, I'm smiling because I'm happy about that, about everything.

00:13:46 Chris: I had a suicide attempt also, on March 16th of 2022. A lot of that is actually... I'll say all of it, put it out there, it was related to my job as a first responder, doing this for 30 years. And so many of us and listeners of your podcast know we deal with stuff on a regular basis. The average person is going to experience or be exposed to one to five traumas in a lifetime. And we can see that in one shift, half a shift. And you factor that into 20, 30, we got guys doing over 40 year careers in the fire.

00:14:27 Chris: Actually, I'm saying fire service because that's me. But all first responders are veterans. Many veterans have transitioned over to first responders, but, you know, our law enforcement, our sheriff, our corrections, our firefighters, our EMS, our emergency room nurses, and one of my favorite, that I know, they get forgotten all of the time – and I am a huge advocate. I see those fingers crossed. You know where I'm going with this – are dispatchers.

00:14:55 Cinnamon: Yeah.

00:14:56 Erin: Chris Moore for the win!

00:14:58 Chris: Yeah. I love our dispatchers. I am such a huge advocate for all first responders, but including dispatchers in that conversation also. They, to me and my heart, and I catch a lot of shit for this, but my heart, they are the true first responder. When that—

00:15:11 Erin: Absolutely.

00:15:12 Chris: Yeah. That citizen is having the roughest time of their life, no matter what it may be. They're having a bad day. So what do they do? They pick up the phone and they call 911. Their first point of communication is with that dispatcher.

00:15:25 Cinnamon: Yeah. They're not calling you directly at the police station or at the firehouse. And you guys have to navigate this potentially panicked individual. It's like you guys do need those skills, but it is the crux of what they do that these people can be manageable and able to help you once you get there. Because depending on whether or not they've had a good interaction in that first contact. And I always find it very confusing how like... if this is the first person having contact that's having the first response, why are we caught up on the language? Like literally. There's nobody before 911, but there is somebody before the other first responders.

00:16:13 Chris: So they're doing the interaction with that. If it's somebody that's in cardiac arrest, they're given the instructions, they're hearing the screams, whatever it may be that's going on out the chaos in the background. And all they got is just what they're hearing. And their mind is just imagining what's going on or just picturing something. But once we get on scene, they hang up and they go on to the next call. And they know the very beginning of the story. They don't know the middle or the end or anything. And we all know that we can allow the mind to play a lot of tricks on us.

00:16:43 Cinnamon: Can I just interject real quick? So that is the place that I think Erin and I can relate to, and why we are so adamant about the inclusion of dispatchers because that is our experience where all we have is the narrative of it. And when we're working with a client, we're having that visual. And so while you all that are actually going to be on the scene may minimize or dismiss or not think it's as significant when all you have is your imaginations. 

00:17:17 Cinnamon: Oh, at least you're not seeing it where Erin and I can speak directly to know sometimes what you imagine is worse or it leaves question marks that at least we might be able to follow up with our client who is there. Not that you guys usually know, but to then turn around and possibly in five seconds, take another call. It's mind boggling. So I love that you can appreciate that and speak into it.

00:17:45 Chris: Yeah. So yeah, I'm a huge proponent of our dispatchers as well. And just like some people don't always see it that way, but all I ask is that people be open-minded about it and just hear me out with what I have to say. And just everything that we just mentioned right there, how can you not hear that and not feel something and not be open-minded and change your mind about it? I forgot where the hell I was going with all this.

00:18:12 Erin: You were talking about how you, one, were a firefighter. You were speaking on your own behalf. And then you were talking about... you started bringing up the other different various responders and what you're up against every single day. And the traumas might only be... you might see five traumas in one morning. And then you started talking about the dispatchers.

00:18:32 Cinnamon: So comparing a civilian to what their exposure is versus what yours is.

00:18:38 Chris: Gotcha. Yeah. Sorry about that.

00:18:41 Cinnamon: No, welcome. This is our world.

00:18:45 Chris: But yeah. So, I mean, we get exposed, as you guys know, to tons of traumatic events. During my 30 years, I would keep everything inside. I don't know where it started or how it began with most first responders. I think a lot of it, ego does play into it, but we think that we have an S on our chest. And even if it's our brother or sister that's right next to us on the rig or sitting at the kitchen table where we solve all the world's problems at the fire service, we just think that we can't show any emotions because it's looked at as a weakness. And until we change that, that mindset, we're destined to continue to fail.

00:19:26 Chris: Historically with firefighters, we're losing over a hundred firefighters a year to line of duty death. That's not suicide. That's just line of duty death, whether or not it's a cardiac arrest, motor vehicle accident on the way to a call, another medical event at a call or succumbing to a fire. We're losing over a hundred historically. If you look at the numbers, there's many websites. I don't want to push or promote anything right now. I don't know how you guys are with that.

00:19:55 Cinnamon: There are a lot of different numbers depending on what your source is. Like we're very clear. We can go listen to speakers and I'm like, "That is not our statistic. We have a different one." So we know that they vary out there, but the general message is you guys are suffering and you have a lot more exposure.

00:20:16 Chris: Yeah. Couple of the website – and I'll bounce between them and just check them out, but we're losing actually more than that to suicide every year. And that's only worth about half of them actually reported and verified. So you can actually, probably double that number. We're losing that same amount. We're saying a hundred and that's only half of them actually verified, everything. So probably 200, at least 200, and that's just firefighters. The numbers for cops are doubled and our dispatchers, our EMS.

00:20:48 Chris: So one of the things that I found out, it was 2017. So that was 24 years of me being a first responder and never talking about anything. I would never bring anything home and discuss it. When I was married, I would come home from a 24 hour shift. We do a lot of cool stuff. And you would think I'd have a lot of stuff to say to my wife at the time, like, hey, we did this today. We did that or whatever. But it was just like, how was your shift? And that would just be like, it was the norm. It was okay.

00:21:20 Erin: Which means nothing to her. She's like, "I don't know what that means." The norm.

00:21:23 Cinnamon: If you didn't tell me what normal was like when you were doing it, I'm not going to know when you reference it now.

00:21:28 Chris: Yeah. And I said that I wouldn't bring work home. But I wouldn't bring words about work home. I would bring it home, and she told me she could see it all over my body. The Body Keeps The Score, I know you're familiar with that book. I didn't know about that beforehand, but after reading that, that's the God honest truth. Looking back at who I was then and everything, I would come home. She's... kind of tag team. She's going to work. I'm coming in. Just be like, yeah, it was the norm. She would go to work. I would take care of our son, getting him off to school. And I started drinking.

00:22:03 Chris: That was one of my big numbing devices right there was alcohol. I wasn't drinking to... at least I told myself this, I wasn't drinking to get drunk. I was just drinking to numb a lot of the feelings and the sensations and to forget a lot of the things back when in the olden days when newspapers used to be a thing before computers and all of that. I found myself and I didn't realize I was doing it. A lot of the fatalities that I ran, the pediatric ones are usually the ones that stick with us most.

00:22:38 Chris: Well, I didn't realize I was doing it. I was cutting the obituaries out of the newspaper and just kind of tucking them away. I don't know why I was doing that or I didn't even really remember I was doing it. And one day, my wife found a lot of these obituaries and just called me out on it in a nice way, she did. But she said, "What's going on here?" And I didn't know what to say. So when kind of that Pandora's box really opened up for me and just... I literally – I thought I was crazy.

00:23:09 Chris: Just losing my mind off these flashbacks and images. If I smelled something burning, I would have flashbacks of a previous call that I had where somebody had perished in that. Driving past a bad motor vehicle accident, I'd have flashbacks to that just waking up during the night. And without even knowing what triggered me, I would wake up in a sweat, just images, just like I was right there in the middle of stuff.

00:23:36 Chris: Where I live here in Virginia Beach, we have the huge military population here. I believe we still have the largest naval installation in the world here. And I've always, at that point, had heard about post-traumatic stress, but I just thought it was something related to our veterans. I was like, yeah, it's those guys and girls that are defending our freedoms overseas and Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and so on. That's not something that I'm going through. I was like, I haven't served our country or gone overseas or been exposed to any of that.

00:24:12 Chris: And finally I did reach out and then that's a long story about that. I don't know how much time we got, but I finally had gotten a number for somebody, a therapist that works with first responders. And it took me several more months before I actually made the phone call to that person. I did. It was kind of like our introduction earlier today where it was just silence for a while. Because when I finally dialed that number and he answered the phone, it took forever for me to get words out of my mouth. It felt like it was an eternity when in reality, it was probably about 20 or 30 seconds of just silence where I couldn't get anything out of my mouth. And I finally just told him, I said, "Help me."

00:24:55 Chris: And probably scared the... actually, I know because I asked him about it later on. It did scare the shit out of him because he could hear me breathing. Then just heard me say, "Help me." He didn't know what state or condition I was in right away. And then he made sure I was okay. And then we went into a conversation, and shared with him who I was and what I was going through. And he got me in right away the next day to come in and see him. And we do a lot of tough stuff in this career path. And that was the hardest thing that I've ever had to do was dial those seven numbers and ask for help. But I am so glad that I did. And that was my introduction to therapy. 

00:25:36 Chris: And then showing up the next day, that was the second hardest thing I ever did was actually showing up. I'm not proud of it, but I had to numb myself to get that liquid courage to show up there. And I did. And I learned a lot then. The whole thing, I guess, I'm a little bit older, kind of dating myself now, but I remember growing up watching the old shows and the, I guess, late '70s and '80s and everything. And I just had in my mind that therapy was going to be, I'm walking in there and this dude's going to be sitting there by the roaring fireplace and he's got his pipe and smoking jacket and has me laying on this sofa.

00:26:13 Chris: And I'm going to start like boohooing and crying and sharing all the stuff that's happened to me throughout my entire life. And he's just going to be like, Oh shit, I'm out of here, man. This is bad. He's just going to push me off the couch and drag the couch and just walk out the door and say he quits. But it was nothing like that at all. It's exactly what we're doing right now. It was just two people. It was me and a safe person having a conversation, and just getting a lot of this stuff out that I was experiencing that I didn't know that I was suppressing for all those years inside. And we just did the talk therapy. He didn't expose me to anything else.

00:26:50 Cinnamon: I wanted to ask, was this a, what we call, the culturally competent clinician? And if so, or if not, whatever the answer is, how did you feel about that in terms of [inaudible] needs? Because I know, comes up a lot about whether or not a clinician knows what your life at work is, and that some people will use that as like an excuse to not share. And so, for someone who holds strength at a place of desperation, why or why not did that matter for you?

00:27:23 Chris: Yeah. So I got his number from a mentor of mine in the fire service, and came highly recommended that he's worked with a lot of firefighters. So he did have a basic background of what we do, or understanding of what we do and what we're exposed to and how to relate with us.

00:27:42 Chris: When I got in there and started seeing him, started seeing him on a regular basis, and he didn't just know the key words that people hear about us and start throwing those around without knowing what they mean. He, actually, he knew about it. He was still learning from each of us and then learning about me and about the job and everything. But he had a pretty good grasp on it and had a game plan of how to kind of help while he was helping himself by learning more about us, because we didn't have any, and still to this day, it's hard to find that competent therapist that can relate to first responders.

00:28:18 Chris: It is very in-demand and it is starting to grow. One thing I want to say to all the viewers out there is buyer beware. So because a lot of them will learn keywords or whatever, and they'll step up. I know a lot of organizations now are starting to embed clinicians within the public safety realm. And it just seems like a lot of those. And no offense to any of those listening out there that are embedded, but due to, I guess, working in local government, you don't make as much as you would in the private sector. You get what you pay for, and you might be getting somebody, and this is no knock on anybody. I know it's a lot of schooling, getting master's degrees and everything, but for your very first job out of school...

00:29:09 Cinnamon: You are not the ideal client to start with.

00:29:12 Chris: No.

00:29:13 Erin: No.

00:29:14 Cinnamon: This is several years in, like not out the gate.

00:29:17 Erin: I was going to say real quick, like we always talk about the fact that there's something about the personality and energy of a clinician who works with first responders. And my husband just had a session with a potential client for his side of his life, who is a first responder clinician. And we were talking about what makes her so special because she's a cop's wife. Yeah, she has all the schooling and all the letters behind her name, but her actual life gives it a different kind of ability to connect. And I think that we have lived our own version of hell in a lot of ways that allow us to be able to confidently work with folks like you. And I think that's what kind of sets it apart. And I don't just mean we, as in Cinnamon and myself, but the ones that actually get it, it's because they've been directly impacted in some way, shape, or form, or they've already lived their own hard knocks.

00:30:16 Erin: And I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I gotta ask a question because I don't wanna forget. When you were talking about the newspaper clippings, you didn't leave a message on our hotline about newspaper clippings, did you?

00:30:29 Chris: No.

00:30:31 Erin: We have a whole episode about this, gentleman, I think he was a firefighter, called and said, I don't know why I have these and my wife found them and I can't get rid of them. It is the identical thing to what you said. I was like, maybe it was - and we begged this person to reach back out to us and let us know if they found the episode helpful. And I was like, how weird? So you're not the only one, Chris. So much so that somebody was like, is this weird that I can't throw these away? And called and left a message on our hotline that we made into an episode. 

00:31:02 Chris: Oh wow. That's...

00:31:05 Erin: Yeah.

00:31:05 Cinnamon: Yeah.

00:31:06 Chris: Wow.

00:31:06 Cinnamon: And you said way back in the day with the newspapers, one of our friends, there was another run and that could have been disturbing. And I reached out to him to see how he was doing. And he said, fine. And then a couple of weeks later, he was like, so I thought I was fine because I wasn't in breakdown, but I was Googling the obituaries and the profile, like a social media profile of that person and their family. And I was going down these rabbit holes, but I was like emotionally still stoic, and it took him a little while to realize that might have changed his answer had he had that level of awareness.

00:31:46 Cinnamon: Like it wasn't, I'm a tearful mess, or I'm raging angry. I just have this curiosity about every part of their life, especially when you only see them at the time of the accident. And then you see a picture of them later of what they look like day to day in their real life.

00:32:02 Chris: Yeah. And then you start - when you read an obituary, and you see like, family, the person did this and this and all that. It's tough.

00:32:09 Erin: Well, and our most previous guest that we just - actually, he is this week and next week, Sean McCallum. His message, the tools that he's using, the way that he's teaching is very powerful. And we talked a lot about that grief, and the way that we're impacted is so much built around this loss of intention. Like our intention is broken. It kind of interrupts our schema.

00:32:35 Erin: And so it's like, when we have this thing to do, and then it doesn't happen the way that we expect it to happen, it's very hard to come to terms with. And so it's almost like you talking about those newspaper clippings, it's almost like a way for you to still have that connection and feel like maybe there could be some kind of closure. I don't know. But the fact that Sean is just talking about that on our most recent episode says that this is a common thing and how we actually deal with and process and most of the time don't integrate these traumatic experiences. We just try to like put them somewhere and numb out on booze or sex or whatever the thing is.

00:33:21 Chris: Yeah. And it was - it's tough. A lot of us were, I don't necessarily want to use the term control freaks, but-

00:33:30 Cinnamon: If it works.

00:33:31 Chris: It's what our job is. People want us to fix problems.

00:33:35 Cinnamon: Yeah.

00:33:35 Erin: Yeah.

00:33:36 Chris: And that's what they call us for. They're having something bad happening. So they call the law enforcement or the fire service or EMS. And we come out there and we solve their problem. It really sticks with you when you can't solve that problem. And I don't know. I never dove into it that much. Obviously stopped doing that because I didn't realize I was, but I don't know if cutting out those obituaries or whatever was one way to, Hey, I'm just going to put this on the back burner until I can figure out - I'm going to solve this problem. It didn't work out the way I want it, but I'm going to do something better to serve that. And that's one thing that I, like I said, I never really dove into got an exact answer from therapy or whatever why I was doing that. 

00:34:19 Erin: So you want us to help you find it?

00:34:20 Cinnamon: I was like, give me about 15 minutes and I'll find it. We have methods that sounds very like espionage-ish, but yeah, I love accessing parts of people's brains that they don't know is there or they've been stumped by something. And I'm like, here, hold this. And then they're like, holy shit, I had no idea that's what it was. 

00:34:46 Cinnamon: So I have now seven more questions. So when you said, when you were talking about like the divorce and the loss of the dog and all of that happening at the same time and having to move, you said it was because of work. And obviously we know that you all are kind of taught, don't bring this home and then there's not a lot more teaching about that. So in your mind, not bringing it home means not talking about it. And then like you just said, being a problem solver, I can imagine being a wife that is, you won't let me in your world, but then you push your way into mine when I'm trying to share with you and you want to solve it when I just want to vent.

00:35:35 Cinnamon: So all your shit is off limits. And yet I can't even just share with you and get a, "oh, honey, that sucks." That wanting to solve it that tends to be a problem. Do you want to vent, or do you want a solution? Do you want me to fix it? So when you say all of this was happening, and it boiled down to work, can you expand on what you mean by how your career and your doing this job, your profession, indoctrination, the culturalization of being a firefighter specifically contributed? Cause it wasn't cause I've been dragging around hoes, and my wife didn't like it and left me. There's it's bigger than that, but you are constantly in that front house of indoctrination over there.

00:36:24 Chris: Yeah. So great question. It was like going back to how we were talking about the traumas that the average person, one to five, and we can see that in one shift. And if we don't have that healthy coping mechanism, with healthy being the key word, it's just going to make everything crumble. I was the biggest jerk of all, and I can't say I'm sorry enough to my ex-wife and to all of those that I was a jerk to.

00:36:54 Chris: I feel like this, the traumas and not processing them healthy, keeping stuff suppressed down inside. My body was just always tense. I was just - we always are - we have that hypervigilance anyhow. And then when you're dealing with all these things going on in your head that you just never processed and wasn't getting any therapy, wasn't talking to my brother and sister firefighters about, hey man, I'm feeling like this or feeling like that. Wasn't telling anything to my wife. I'm dealing with everything on my own, everything. And I know now that's the worst thing that anybody could do.

00:37:32 Chris: I felt like I was so alone at that moment that it was just a Chris Moore thing. It wasn't a fire service thing or a law enforcement thing or whatever. It was just something that I was going through, and I had to navigate the waters myself. I literally thought I was going crazy and I didn't want to deal with my ex-wife or anybody is, Oh my God, I think I'm going crazy. I'm seeing these things or seeing that. My family described it that they were walking on eggshells all of the time. Didn't know what father or husband was coming home. If it was the good, cool dad, or if it was the asshole dad. Because, like I said, I was just seeing stuff daily. Like I'm seeing real stuff daily on the calls, but then having these flashbacks and these memories, these intrusive thoughts, and everything. And just, I didn't know where to turn.

00:38:20 Chris: And so I know I mentioned alcohol, Erin, I believe just a little while ago, you mentioned about another numbing thing to sex. I did look for sex outside of my marriage. I'm not proud of any of this stuff now, but I was just looking to numb. And in my third, I had three vices. My third vice was I was shitty with finances. It made me feel good. If I took my guys out to the bar or whatever, and we all had the understanding that everybody was paying their own tab.

00:38:49 Chris: But you know what made me feel good, I was like I'll take care of the tab. And I picked everything up, and my guys were like, "Oh, hey, thanks, Captain." We appreciate that and everything. Well, I got that dopamine rush from that internal drug store there. And shortly after that goes away, but that bill never went away when it comes a month later. And so I was just doing everything I could to stay afloat. That would just make me feel good because I was feeling so bad from not properly dealing with the stuff that we are exposed to.

00:39:20 Chris: We just had a fire academy graduation last night that I attended. We just graduated 30 recruits. And one of the things that I do is compose a letter to my recruit that I'm going to get and just welcoming him to the fire service. I put family first, obviously, in our jobs, we put the citizens first as we should, but don't forget your family. They should still be before the fire service, and also your mental health. I did a nice paragraph. It was a lengthy, well-thought-out letter and a long part in there talking about his mental health and wellness, and everything too. And never to be afraid to open up to your brothers and sisters.

00:40:01 Chris: Don't be afraid as a new firefighter or an old firefighter, whatever, reaching out to your captain if something is hurting you or struggling in your life, be it whether it's from the job or in your personal relationship. We need to normalize a lot of this. That's one of the things since I did get my help and try and reach out. I don't have any of the schooling that you guys do. I apologize for saying you guys. I know I'm down in Virginia, but I don't say Y'all.

00:40:27 Cinnamon: No, you're fine. I'm just as guilty of it as the next person. So I definitely don't take offense.

00:40:34 Chris: But yeah, I just think we need to normalize it. And just I relate to people where they relate to me better when I travel around, and I speak on this, and I do offer some tools. I don't give a class on how to deal with this stuff or how to handle it. But what I do give is some tools, but a lot of hope. So many people come up to me after hearing my presentation, and they're just like, I was like the whole me too thing. They're like, I thought I was all alone. I thought I was going through all this stuff, and I was going crazy. And then just heard your story. And that's everything that I've been going through and everything I was doing and ruining my marriage and my relationships.

00:41:15 Erin: Isn't it interesting how you were working side by side with these folks and that you all, not even you all, we as human beings can convince ourselves that we are the only ones that have got to be suffering on the inside from the identical experiences. Now granted, everybody processes, and it affects everybody differently. But you're going on these runs and everything with these people and to think that we can get on our way so bad to convince ourselves that we're the only ones that are having these adverse results and effects from these experiences is wild. That we think that we're broken. And so when people are like, "oh my gosh, you told my story." Well, you can look at the guy to your left and your right, and they have that story. Just because they don't talk about it doesn't mean they don't have that story.

00:42:07 Erin: And I started tearing up when you were talking about the recruit and writing that letter, and you're like this 30-year Captain doing your stuff and opening up. I'm wondering what changed in your department specifically. You've been around some of these folks. I'm sure there's people that saw the a-hole side of you very clearly. How did you getting this help and stepping into this world of recovery and mental health, how has it created a ripple effect within your department and the folks that you were like really thinking they weren't going through it too?

00:42:40 Chris: So it has helped out a lot of people tremendously. They have heard my story. They see me. They see the difference for the people. I know you mentioned earlier about chuck three. They've seen my transformation, how I've just - I've totally evolved. I have my soul goggles on. Just things that that used to irritate me or aggravate me, or I wouldn't be as open to speak about, I'm just more open-minded with it, more understanding. If I do start to get irritated with something, I just kind of - I'll slow down, take a deep breath, and just think about it. I just tried to be that person that people want to get that diarrhea of the mouth and share all of their stuff, just open up on it. And I let my guys know.

00:43:34 Chris: And the letter there gave the kid my, which I give everybody, my personal cell phone number, but I was like, Hey, I go, you call me at any time. My phone is always on. If by chance you don't get me, it's because I'm in the middle of doing a podcast, or I'm on a call, or in church, or wherever it may be. But my phone is always on, leave me a message, shoot me a text. And I've had a lot of people, but I never thought would, within my agency. And we're almost 500 member of department.

00:44:05 Chris: And some guys that have been doing it for a long time, also big, tough, salty, crusty firefighters, that have seen some of my stuff and reached out to me in private. And they said the same thing, that they thanked me. Thank you for sharing that. And because it's really helped them and encouraged them to open up and to take that step to get help. I've had others, same thing, but they're like, Hey, where can I go to get the help? You mentioned that some therapists or whatever, can you help me? So that's where I'm at.

00:44:36 Chris: If people reach out, if I don't have the answer, one of the things that, that we are all good at is detecting bullshit. I'm not going to bullshit somebody because that can lead them down even worse road than they were already going down. So I'll tell them, no, I don't know, but I will find out and I'll find somebody, the two of you ladies or some of my contacts - I have contacts all across the country and have reached out and gotten people the help that they needed and pointed them in the right direction.

00:45:07 Chris: So, as a department, and we're doing a lot of proactive things. But in public safety in general nationwide, we haven't even scratched the surface on this. And one of the, you know, I mentioned about keywords before. One of the keywords that people use, and I absolutely, I hate it, is smashing the stick on it.

00:45:32 Chris: We're not smashing shit. We're not. We're scratching the surface on it. We're headed in the right direction, but we still we have such a long way to go. We really do. We're doing a lot of good things. We're doing a lot of good. We have a lot of good ideas, but it's baby steps, but we can't get discouraged by that. And one of the things that I've told somebody before that they really loved it is even baby steps are moving forward. We're still going forward, and which is the right direction, but we do have a long way to go.

00:46:07 Chris: And how I told you when I got my therapist for the first time, the gentleman that I was seeing, we were just doing talk therapy, and then he introduced me to journaling. And that was the only two genres, if you will, of therapy that I was experiencing with him at the time and was doing very well with both. I tell you, I can't stress. I'm not a big reader nor a writer, but the power. And this is one of the tools that I recommend to people, the power of pen to paper.

00:46:39 Chris: I wouldn't have thought that until he told me to start journaling and writing a lot of this stuff down. And if you step back and you open your mind up and you just think about pen to paper in general and how powerful that can be, the US Constitution, the Bible, the Magna Carta, all this stuff, some of the best books.

00:47:00 Chris: It's just powerful, and it made a very powerful impact to me. Well, unfortunately that therapist had a partner in the practice passed away unexpectedly, and they closed down shop. But fortunately, when one door closes, another door opens. The Chuck one of me, I would have just been pissed at the world. Why the hell did his partner have to die and that affected me and all? And that's who I was at that time. I was angry and upset over that.

00:47:30 Chris: But looking at it now, another door opened for me. It took a while to open another door. Like I said, we're in the largest military area. I would have thought that we would have had a lot of therapists here that know about post-traumatic stress, not necessarily about first responders, but post-traumatic stress. And it took forever. It was literally about five months before I could find another therapist that dealt with post-traumatic stress, was taking on new patients, and would take my insurance. She had minimal experience with first responders, though. I got in there to her.

00:48:08 Chris: First thing that I told her, my very first appointment, we got in there and I sat down and I just looked her in the eyes and I guess I was being a Chuck one then, this was all pre-soul. I just told her I was probably the biggest jerk for saying this, but hey, therapists are like a pair of shoes. You're not one size fits all. Yeah. If you can't help me, I'm not coming back.

00:48:30 Chris: And she looked at me, and she was from up North.

00:48:35 Cinnamon: Like Ohio or Canada or -

00:48:36 Chris: That's Midwest.

00:48:39 Cinnamon: We're also on the border of Canada.

00:48:42 Chris: New York, New Jersey kind of North.

00:48:51 Cinnamon: Yeah. Oh, so she handed your ass right back to you is what you're saying. She wasn't polite like we are.

00:48:52 Chris: She was polite with it. She was professional, but she told me, she said, yeah, she goes, my clients aren't one-size-fit-all either. I can promise you that if I can't help you, if this isn't the right fit, and we're not comfortable, I will get you the help that you need. I will get you to where you're comfortable and help you. And we just struck up the best relationship and bond during that time. And she's the one that introduced me to EMDR.

00:49:21 Cinnamon: Yeah.

00:49:22 Chris: That's another tool that I speak of when it's done properly. It's not going to work for everybody. But a lot of people, majority of people have a lot of good results. Both of you can attest to have a lot of good results with that. And I'm one of those persons, and a lot of people think it's some kind of voodoo brainwashing stuff or whatever. And I tried to dumb a lot of this stuff down for first responders. I don't know if you've seen some of my videos. Actually did one where I talked about EMDR.

00:49:52 Chris: One of the things that I find that most of us hate is when we go to training symposiums or conferences or whatever it may be, and there's somebody there, it can actually be a first responder, but usually a clinician, therapist, doctor, whatever, and they're speaking way over our head, and we're just sitting there like a bunch of dumb monkeys just scratching our heads.

00:50:17 Erin: I'm sorry, I laugh because – I'm just only laughing because for a while I was like, Cinnamon, nobody understands what you're saying. We got to recreate our presentations as if we're talking to a fifth grader.

00:50:30 Chris: That's us. 

00:50:31 Erin: So that they'll understand because they don't care how smart you are. They want to know how they can be impacted by the information you have. And if they can't understand, it's not going to work. And we are a lot of fun when we present, and definitely get it. It's a lot more fun now, too, when we don't have to be all clinical. 00:50:49 Erin: Anyway, sorry.

00:50:50 Cinnamon: It's also you have to learn a new way. I learned how to talk about these certain things one way. And so, it's almost like you have to run it through some kind of machine and spit out a different way to talk about it. And Erin, honestly, has been my machine because she is kind of like in that middle spot where I can talk to you about your cingulate cortex and what happens with error detection and all of that. She is, so basically this is the part of your brain that makes you become an asshole. 

00:51:28 Cinnamon: But she's absolutely right. I have found that the cultural competency part is often way easier than learning how to communicate my stuff to you. I had the luxury of spending eight months in a firehouse, like basically undetected by my actual employer and so that is very uncommon. That was much easier for me than trying to figure out how to speak on something that I felt was so critical that you all needed to know in a way that you actually could then walk away saying that you knew it. But I didn't have the other language available until Erin came along.

00:52:10 Chris: It's like you said when you said a fifth grader. That's it. Fifth grader, do small words. 

00:52:15 Erin: Pictures.

00:52:16 Chris: Yeah, pictures.

00:52:17 Erin: We do pictures.

00:52:19 Chris: Yeah. Keep it simple, stupid, the [inaudible] technique and all. So it doesn't lose our attention span or whatever. So we're like, "Oh, look, a squirrel,” or whatever with ADHD. But like with EMDR, the way I do it, when I try and tell my guys about it is just think of our brain. I know you guys are probably going to laugh at this, be like, "That's the dumbest, stupidest thing I ever heard." But when I can relate to it this way, when I tell my guys and all, they're like, "Oh, okay. Our brain is a filing cabinet." All of the terrible stuff that we see when we're having the issues with the post-traumatic stress, it's in the front of the filing cabinet.

00:52:57 Chris: I don't know if it's actually on the frontal lobe or wherever. I don't know what the other cortex is and all that stuff, but it's in the front of the filing cabinet. When you do EMDR, it just reprocesses that and it just refiles it to the back of the filing cabinet. How things get lost in the back of filing cabinets and everything like that. That's all it does. It doesn't erase it. It doesn't brainwash you. It just moves it so it's in another spot there where you can handle it and understand it and deal with it better.

00:53:27 Cinnamon: And it's not here every day.

00:53:29 Chris: Yeah. It's not right in your face or the memory doesn't get completely washed away or anything like that.

00:53:35 Erin: It's not the men in black flashy thingy–

00:53:38 Chris: Yeah.

00:53:38 Erin: What we tell people. 

00:53:39 Chris: A lot of the stuff is this voodoo stuff and it's not. It's science. But we don't understand, most of us in my field, the science. So we just kind of dumb it down a little bit. And when they're like that, they're like, "'Oh, and that worked for you, Captain?" I was like, "Absolutely, it worked for me."

00:53:57 Erin: All it is replicating REM sleep.

00:53:58 Chris: Yeah.

00:53:59 Erin: Which is when you normally process… Yeah. So–

00:54:03 Chris: And we already know our REM sleep is horrible.

00:54:06 Erin: Yeah, thumbs down.

00:54:07 Chris: We get the worst sleep habits, all first responders, but predominantly firefighters. Issues with our sleep and with cardiovascular disease and everything like that from where we do try to get sleep and if you're at a busy firehouse or whatever, and the tones go off in the middle of the night, when you had just gotten to sleep, or even if you got into REM, you're going from zero to a million miles an hour at the drop of a dime. And that's not good for you either.

00:54:34 Chris: But back to that other therapist there that introduced me to EMDR and she was amazing. We did a lot of good stuff, got everything processed and as new things would come in, we would process it through EMDR. I'm still doing journaling and I did make a mistake with her. I won't say anything bad about her because I think she is an amazing woman, but we got to the point where we started backing off from going every other week to, "Hey, why don't we do once a month?" It was her suggestion. And we would get to once a month and then she's a little, "Let's go every other month."

00:55:09 Chris: Well, eventually it got to the point she suggested. It's like, "How about we go to as needed basis?" And I agreed to that, "Yeah." Never ever again I agreed to going to as needed basis and totally had forgotten that the beginning of my journey back in 2017, that the hardest thing I ever did was reaching out and making that initial phone call. And now all of a sudden we're in the end of 2021. And when she suggested that and I'm like, "Yeah, okay." I forgot all about how hard it was. I thought I'd be able to pick up the phone and make a phone call again when things got hard. And I didn't.

00:55:49 Chris: And now we get into 2022. I'm coming up on the one year anniversary of a traumatic call that I was on. It was a… I'm not going to get into it. I don't want to trigger anybody else. It was a pediatric call that wasn't successful. The one year anniversary of it.

I started having it. Her and I had processed it back in March of 2021 and thought everything was good. But as we were nearing that anniversary, it just started rearing its ugly head again. I started reverting back to drinking, being a jerk again, and all sorts of just horrible things.

00:56:25 Chris: And I had just come back from speaking about this, going over it and talking about all this stuff. I had the divorce that was coming up. I got off work one morning at the firehouse. And it was March 16th. I got off after a 24 hour shift and I went home and I tried to take my life that morning. And I was just tired of everything. Like I said, leading up to all of that. I wasn't strong enough to reach back out to her to get the help. I didn't have the EMDR or any of that stuff. I didn't think I was strong enough at that time.

00:56:55 Cinnamon: There you go.

00:56:56 Chris: I was, and I am strong enough, but I wanted things to stop. But another, like I said, it's soul goggles here. This is all still pre-soul. This is what led me to Save a Warrior. But looking back on that now, as horrific as that was, I tried to end my life by taking pills. And I think it was about 30 Xanax and a fifth of bourbon. 

00:57:23 Cinnamon: That’ll do it.

00:57:24 Chris: Yeah. It didn't. Thank God. Thank you. 

00:57:27 Cinnamon: It has the ability to whether or not it did.

00:57:32 Chris: So, out of all of that, a lot of good things happened and it sucks that it took that to happen. The first and foremost that really opened my mind up is when I finally – when I woke up in the hospital, I was hooked up to the machines and everything like that. When I first opened my eyes up, I saw my wife or ex-wife now, and I saw her and my son right there by my side. And I realized, in that moment, when I did everything, I wanted to stop my life, to stop the pain and everything that I was going through. But when I saw them there, I realized in that moment that all it was going to do was stop my life. It wasn't stopping the pain. It was just passing that pain onto them.

00:58:22 Chris: I saw the pain and the hurt and everything that I caused them. And I told myself as incoherent as I was right then, I was still able to pick up on that. And understand that there was the thought that went through my mind. And I just told myself, "I said, never again." I'm going to do everything I have to do to get the help that I need to be a better husband, if I could at the time or in the future, wherever it may be – to be a better dad, to just be a better human being like I talked about earlier. To be the best me that I can be and to get myself straight. And then I want to help others. 

00:59:02 Chris: And I ended up that – that bought me over a week in the hospital. And when I got discharged, that's when the whole shame and guilt came. I had people that I thought were friends that just shunned me. And I don't blame them. I think with our culture and everything now, people just don't know what to say. Sometimes the best thing we could do is don't say anything. Let's come over. Let's watch a baseball game on TV or whatever it may be to spend time, spend quality time together. We don't have to talk about it. If I'm ready, I'll talk about it. If you're not comfortable, you don't, whatever. But I think one of the worst things you can do is shun somebody that's going through something like that.

00:59:43 Cinnamon: It's better to ignore the elephant in the room than to never walk back into the room with somebody that you care about or believe that you cared about them.

00:59:52 Chris: I love that. I love that. Thank you. I think that's a great way to put that. And yeah, I had a lot of people who just didn't want to walk back into the room. They not only ignored the elephant, but they ignored the whole damn room and everything. That's a horrible feeling. Somebody that's going through all of that. And I had the shame, the guilt and the denial of everything.

01:00:11 Cinnamon: Well, so what you just said is my inability to come up with knowing what to say translated to you as I think that you're less than for what you tried. Right? Like when there is that lack of communication, we end up in your position creating all kinds of narratives that are most oftentimes very just wrong. And the person who may not want to walk back in that room isn't always judging but they're afraid of getting judged about saying the wrong thing. And when there is that lack of communication, everybody goes back to their corners and makes up their own stories. 

01:01:01 Cinnamon: So even if you're in that situation, the best thing at a bare minimum is, "Dude, I don't know what to fucking say to you. This is super awkward, but will you come over and watch the Nuggets game with me?" Like even just that whole like walking on eggshells and not knowing the right thing to say at that point damn you’re saying anything can be a little bit better. So I say that for our listeners that have, we'll find themselves in this situation. It's okay to just say, "I don't know how to have a conversation right now. So I'm just going to talk to you about the weather."

01:01:35 Chris: Yeah.

01:01:36 Erin: But I'm going to be here. I'm going be–

01:01:39 Chris: Be present. Some people, they told me how – what I did was selfish and horrible. And that I was a horrible person because of it. And that hurt. That struck a chord hearing that from some people that were in my circle. And one of the things – I can't remember who it was, but I'd heard, saw this before that suicide is it's the end result of not getting the proper help and treatment that we need like death is the end result of most cancers or some cancers.

01:02:30 Chris: So I know it's kind of a stretch of an analogy, but it's pretty damn similar. It's not – nobody just wakes up one day, says, "You know what? I think I want to take my life." No, I was dealing with all sorts of mental health issues related to the job. And I wasn't treating it properly and that I was succumbing to my mental illness is what that was.

01:02:56 Cinnamon: It can be terminal disorders, PTS, depression. They can be terminal disorders.

01:03:05 Chris: Yeah. So I had a friend that was, still is, in my circle. He's, you guys. I know, you know, Michael. Yeah. Another one of our alumnus.

01:03:15 Erin: We love him.

01:03:16 Chris: Yeah. I love him too.

01:03:18 Cinnamon: Who's trying to smash the stigma.

01:03:20 Chris: I know I give him shit over that.

01:03:23 Cinnamon: I was like, "Does he know? He has to know Michael because–”

01:03:27 Chris: Michael's one who introduced me to a Save a Warrior right after my suicide attempt. He reached out to me as soon as I got out of the hospital and we had a good long talk. We were just – a week before my suicide attempt, him and I were together in Chicago at a conference out there. But he filled me in on Save a Warrior. And just, “Dude,” he goes, “You gotta,” he goes, "Just try. Just go here, submit." So I did that. And I've never looked back totally. Without letting a whole lot of things out of the bag for people that are thinking about doing it, just do it. I'm not going to tell you how it's going to transform your life. But I promise you if you're open minded and you're open and you're honest and you lean in, it will change your life. I'm living proof of that. So I'd gotten into Save a Warrior. It was the very last week of April 1st, part of May of 2022, when I attended that.

01:04:26 Cinnamon: What cohort number were you?

01:04:28 Chris: 0180. And I'm still doing the work to this day, daily meditations on my insight timer and everything. One of the things that my shepherd related to me and asked me if I would be open to doing. I was doing the big blue book and I never knew anything about that – you hear the snide remarks. Sometimes people make as a joke about AA. I was in belief and I still am that I wasn't an alcoholic, but he's, "Hey, just try it because I've had a lot of people that I've sponsored that said the same thing." And by the time we started it or got to the end, they're like, “You know what? think I am an alcoholic.'"

01:05:09 Chris: And he had other people that thought that they had a very serious drinking problem. We're an alcoholic. They started it, went through it and they're like, "No, I didn't have a problem." But some key takeaways from that, I agreed to do it. And we were, we went through all the steps together. And then when we did the first step, he asked me my thoughts after that. And my mind was just totally blown. I never realized that AA was faith-based.

01:05:36 Chris: Then he shared with me also, which I really loved the faith-based aspect of it, but he's like, "You can replace the word alcohol with anything and incorporate this into your daily life." I was like, "That's what I want to do.” He goes, “Do you want to continue on with the rest of the steps?" It’s like, "Absolutely. I want to go through this journey and see what this is all about." And we completed the whole program and I incorporate that into my daily life to this day.

01:06:04 Chris: I incorporate it into my work at the firehouse. One of the – doing amends, making amends, doing a moral inventory of your life in AA and then making amends for all that, I do that daily now. I've done my entire life and I tried to clean my side of the street up, with things. And once I've taken care of all of that, now I do it daily. And I just think – lay my head down at night, I was like thinking, "I might not have come across the right way when I spoke to this person here, I might've been a little aggressive to this person or whatever it may be." And I try and go back and I fixed that.

01:06:43 Chris: And it's amazing to be able to do that and have that mindset and how receptive it is. They hold me – I couldn’t have cared less if I pissed somebody off. I'll call, pick up the phone at 11 o'clock, text or call somebody. One of my friends where I feel like I might've said something wrong and they'll tell me like, "We appreciate you reaching out, but nah. Everything's okay." And I was like, "All right, I just want to be sure. I think I said it for this reason and I didn't mean it to come out the way that it did.” And that's just been amazing.

01:07:10 Chris: And then the whole, not necessarily a moral inventory, but I'll do just a regular inventory of my day when I'm at the firehouse. When we get a chance to – after dinner, when we clean up the firehouse and get our own downtime. When I go into my bunk room, I'll start processing doing an inventory of the calls that I've ran that day and how they affected me. I know another friend of ours, Allison, she does the neck up, checkups and those are awesome. I do the full kind of body scan, just recognize how I'm feeling up here and just kind of accept that and work all the way through it. So when I'm thinking about these calls during the day, when I'm processing those, I think about and I'll think, "Okay, well, how am I feeling with this call?" And just kind of start thinking about it and just running through it and dealing with it. And then I'm–

01:08:07 Cinnamon: Like the body scan?

01:08:08 Chris: Yeah.

01:08:09 Cinnamon: Like, including the body scan– 

01:08:11 Chris: Including that whole body scan until my body is just no stress or no tension. We're always just shoulders up and hypervigilant and all that. But yeah, I just – my body feels good. And then I'll say a brief prayer. I don't know where people are, if they’re faith-based, trying to incorporate that in mind. Then I go into, usually it's uninterrupted, but I do my 20 minute meditation before I go to bed at the firehouse. That's been an amazing transformation.

01:08:38 Cinnamon: Sounds like it. Oh, right. 

01:08:41 Chris: One other thing that has happened since then, since I had been at this point about eight months, since I had gone to as needed basis with my therapist that I was seeing, I could not get back into her. But she found me another practice with a therapist she knew and I got in with them. This new therapist, she still does EMDR. And I told her from the get go that I'm never going to go less than every other week. Even if I feel like I don't have anything to process or nothing to talk about, that's bothering me in my life. I'm still going to go there every time I do. And when I show up and I think nothing is going on within five minutes, like, "Oh shit. This did happen." Let's talk about this. And before an hour has gone by and I've just had five things came out that have been going on in my life. 

01:09:34 Chris: So like I said, I think every door opens, everything happens for a reason in this life. It might not always be the best reasons a lot of times and people are weak in their faith. I know that I was one of those church goers that would go, probably at least maybe once a month. I was a little bit better than the people that would go twice a year to church for Easter and Christmas service. And I'm not talking bad, it doesn't matter if you go to church or you don't, but I'm just talking about me personally. I had started going to church more often and then Easter right before I went to SAW, it was April 22nd. No, I think it was April 23rd, 2022. That was Easter Sunday service.

01:10:20 Chris: And I was there in church. And like I said, I was going through the motions all of my life, just going to church, but I never fully accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. But something during that service came over me. And it was in that moment that I decided to strongly change my life and started living my life, just dedicating it to Jesus and just how freeing that was amazing. And that's another one of these things within our first responder community. We actually, you know what, it's not just our [inaudible], Within – what are the two things that we say you shouldn't talk about when you have Thanksgiving dinner with your family?

01:10:57 Erin: Politics.

01:10:58 Chris: Politics or Religion.

01:11:01 Cinnamon: Religion. 

01:11:00 Erin: Right.

01:11:02 Chris: Why? Politics, I understand. But religion, there's not a whole lot of different sides of the aisle or whatever that you can be on. But I just think for me, it's been so good to be in my life when I made that transformation and continue to. It has just been freeing and humbling is actually a good word to use for that. But we don't talk about it. It's taboo to talk about our faith. And I have without being overwhelming with it – I do. Like we're talking about it right now. I incorporate that when I go around the country and I talk to first responders.

01:11:45 Chris: And I just have them think about that question. Why can't we talk about it? And I let them know what it has done for me and how it has helped me in my life. It continues to. Beforehand, I was always questioning God as like, “Why God, why would you do this? Why would you have this three year old die right here in my arms? Why?" I was so angry. But now I'm just – the only question I do is, "What are you teaching me?" Because I am being taught something.

01:12:13 Cinnamon: I love that idea because what I wrote down when you were talking earlier about apologies are amends and the flip of strength and weakness, like the mindset change that what was strength previously is now weakness and what was weakness now is strength. And talking about AA or it being a faith-based program, I don't know if you know enough of our story, but Erin and I met in AA like 14 plus years ago.

01:12:42 Cinnamon: And I remember my experience walking in there was, "Oh, I had left all elements of religion as a rebellion to my parents.” So to go in there and they said, "You'll need a higher power and you can make whatever it needs to be." I took a build a bear approach, right? And basically I built what I wanted as an actual parent that was missing in my life. And I also was able to feel that relief of I don't have to be in charge anymore, because I keep screwing stuff up. And then being a spiritual program, it could be anything. Like for you, it went right to Christianity. And for – I knew atheists in there.

01:13:32 Cinnamon: For me, it was a higher power of my understanding that may not have matched up, but it was still being able to turn it over to something that gave you that freedom and that ability to say, "You know, everything that I thought was weakness before is actually strength now, whether that's asking for help, talking about it, apologizing or making amends." I mean, I always thought if you have to apologize, then you are opening yourself up to be attacked or be judged or like you're saying to somebody, "There's a chink in my armor."

01:14:14 Cinnamon: And now, do I love apologizing all the time? In theory, no, but I do love the feeling that I get where I'm like, "Oh my gosh, yeah. I was wrong. And now I can see how that may have come across or, oh yeah, that wasn't my intention at all." And I think that not only does that make me feel like I'm doing a better job at humaning, but I think it makes me more likable and relatable when I can be like, "Oh yeah, I'm deeply flawed."

01:14:44 Chris: Yeah. Me too.

01:14:45 Cinnamon: Deeply.

01:14:46 Chris: Let me ask you a question.

01:14:47 Erin: Me too. 

01:14:48 Chris: So, when you went through all this, when everybody has a story, how big was your circle compared to how it is now?

01:14:57 Erin: I didn't have a circle. They were just running buddies.

01:15:02 Cinnamon: Drinking buddies. Yeah.

01:15:03 Chris: That was your circle.

01:15:04 Cinnamon: Yeah. My circle was contingent on – If that was a moment of drinking or driving, that's when my people came out–

01:15:13 Erin: Or if you can do something for me–

01:15:13 Chris: And even people that you, be it family or friends that you thought were in your circle or whatever, did any of that change?

01:15:21 Cinnamon: Oh, my family wasn't in my circle.

01:15:23 Chris: At all? Nope?

01:15:24 Cinnamon: My family didn't want anything to do with me. And I will tell you if right now, I am sitting in my nephew's house in Denver and I'm visiting nine of my family members because they want me here now.

01:15:37 Chris: Good.

01:15:38 Cinnamon: Like I didn't have that 14 years ago. And so I got my family back and I definitely was able to build a community. And now even when I left Columbus, where I was with Erin to move where I am now, it downsized, right? But I had the skills and the tools and the open mindedness to rebuild versus just shutting myself down. Oh, yeah. Community is very different.

01:16:09 Erin: Yeah. My family, my father's in recovery. My family was – the ones that were still alive were there. In fact, my entire family, most of them are gone now, but is in recovery. So it was a gift. Like I knew exactly where to go. So that part of my circle didn't change.

01:16:28 Chris: What about friends?

01:16:30 Erin: My friends were like, you needed – this was like, you needed to get sober and while we see each other on social and things like that, we went completely different paths. And now the quality of the friends that I have is so different. I can tell really quickly if this is going to be a relationship that's meant to be. And it's such a gift. 

00:16:57 Chris: Yeah. And that's what I was getting at with that is my circle went from like this to like that. And that's a gift. That's the exact word that I use because as we know, it should be all about having safe people. And a lot of the people that I had in my circle weren't necessarily safe people. And we have in the fire service, we talk about there's telephone, Tell-a-Firefighter.

01:17:26 Erin: Yeah. That was one of the first things that I was taught. That and fine. Yes.

01:17:31 Chris: The world- [crosstalk]. Another great thing for me is just making that circle smaller and just having safe men and women in there. When we feel like we're being pulled back and this is another corny analogy or whatever, just remember that before an arrow goes forward, it's pulled back and then it shot forward. And I'm just, I'm still in that forward trajectory for my life and always will be. Is it always a struggle? Is always going to be a challenge? Yeah. I necessarily wouldn't say struggle. That's probably the wrong word, but it's challenging.

01:18:08 Chris: It's a task, but it's a fun task. It's a good task. It's a great journey. It's a great story. And I just look at, like I said, I've done what I had to do to make amends with those that I hurt. My ex wife, my son, he's going to turn twenty years old. I've cleaned up my son in the street, whether or not they fully want it to accept it. My son has... He still struggles at times. My ex-wife, I don't know. We're civil.

01:18:35 Erin: I see that happen so often where like the other person after the epiphany and the change, the other person, "Okay, let's work on this." And they're like, "I've been working on it for 20 years and you weren't interested, and I am done." And so, I always wonder what is it like to then stand back and watch the person that I wanted to be in existence now that the paperwork has been filed, but still have all of those feelings of resentment and frustration.

01:19:10 Cinnamon: And how does that feel on your side to be like, would I have liked to have gotten it together before and saved this? Or what's it like to watch this man profess his recovery when all I would have liked him to do was to come home and say, "I had a couple of bad runs and I'm going to go to the basement and just meditate for a minute before I try to talk." That is the one thing that I feel is as a clinician, that feels hard to speak to because that's such a personal experience.

01:19:40 Chris: Yeah. And that's… Gosh, you've done this a time or two, haven't you? 

01:19:45 Cinnamon: Three, three now. We're up to three. 

01:19:48 Chris: Cause that's exactly what I envision and experience and everything. And cause I... I really.. After I came over in Save a Warrior, I really wanted to work on myself to work on that. I wanted to be the husband and the father and everything that I wasn't for all of those years. I totally get, and I understand she said exactly everything you just said. You haven't been present for all this time and the damage that I did was in her eye. And I’m understanding everything- everywhere she was coming from, it was irreparable, the adultery and everything like that. 

01:20:23 Chris: And I didn't like it. Didn't have to agree with it or whatever. I understood where she was coming from and it was the right thing. And I'm not happy about that, but I am happy to say how I mentioned when one door closes, another one opens. I wasn't looking for anything. I just wanted to be single and work on myself, but I actually am engaged now, getting married and then, I think it's 55 more days now, getting married.

01:20:56 Erin: Wow. Congratulations.

01:20:59 Chris: And she's actually a SAW alumni and from you guys, neck of the woods. So, I got drug her down here to the beach.

01:21:07 Cinnamon: I mean, I wouldn't mind if somebody wanted to drag me from Ohio to a beach.

01:21:11 Chris: Yeah. She wasn't necessarily kicking and screaming. She's a great woman who's been through the same stuff that the three of us have, obviously. And we all have our stories. And as with SAW, one of the main things is having safe people, but holding each other accountable and doing the work. And her and I, we do the work together and we hold each other accountable. And when we see that we're slipping or if we're starting to revert back or we're doing something different. Yeah. We start drifting. We mention it and there's no repercussions. It's just, "Hey, did you get your meditation in today or did you do this or did you do that?" Then we're like, "Oh, damn, I did forget. I'm sorry. I just got busy and I missed it yesterday or whatever." 

01:21:57 Erin: Yeah.

01:21:58 Cinnamon: So, this morning when I was leaving my sister's house to come to my nephew's house, I was kind of running out the door and being like on vacation and living out of a suitcase. Things are kind of all over the place. And right before I left, I took my ADHD medication. And I was like, "If I don't remember to do this, I'm going to get in front of Erin on the screen and within 30 seconds, she's going to be like, go take your pill." Like that is the level of accountability that knowing that I will have that is always a good reinforcement. Like don't get yourself in that pickle. Just go take it.

01:22:39 Cinnamon: So, I'm like carrying this bottle around before I can find water to make sure that it doesn't slip my mind because I can also do that. So yes, I think we are very lucky in the sense that we've been best friends for over a decade. Now we get to do this work together and we can go back and forth between the friendship and the business partner piece. But that friendship is holding each other accountable and being okay when it happens.

01:23:08 Chris: Yeah.

01:23:09 Cinnamon: What do you mean did I take my meds bleh bleh? That's not what's happening.

01:23:13 Chris: Yeah. That sounds like another show. ADHD and me. 

01:23:21 Cinnamon: So, we've been doing this whole adverse childhood experiences with first responders for several years now and it keeps going and it's kind of like our signature like presentation or whatever. But I have been dying for about two years. I'm ready to break open the first responders and ADHD and how PTSD and ADHD overlap. And they look very similar because whether it's – I think I've always had it or I just got diagnosed with it. They look so similar that we don't – but they just have very different origins. But that is as much as adverse childhood experiences is common so is neurodiversity.

01:24:02 Chris: Yeah, I would love to do when we have more time. And I'm not trying to get off our outkeeper. I told I'll talk all day. I don't know.

01:24:10 Cinnamon: Well, I got to go to the mountains today. Actually, where I'm headed is the South Park, the city that South Park is based in. It's called Fairplay and it's in the mountains, which is why I have six layers of shirts on right now.

01:24:22 Chris: That's awesome. Well, no, not that you got six layers of shirts on, but also that you can get out. That's cool. I wanna hear more about what you guys have found about the ACEs in the first responder community. I have yet to see and if you can point me in the right direction, I would love to see it. The direct study that shows what our numbers are. I've seen like some smaller ones and heard things. The number that I'm getting for first responders is that we're on average about 6.5. I don't know if you can validate that number, if it's too high. If it's too low, if it's about what you're, you guys are coming up with.

01:25:02 Chris: I want to do… Are you familiar with.. You might do this. I haven't seen your presentations. I missed you last year at the [inaudible] conference. I was supposed to be there. I would do the wrestling conference, but I had a-

01:25:14 Erin: Well, you're there this year, aren't you?

01:25:16 Chris: I am.

01:25:17 Cinnamon: Okay. Alright.

01:25:18 Erin: Oh, well then, we're going to have a lot of fun throwing axes and talking about ACEs.

01:25:22 Chris: Yeah.

01:25:23 Cinnamon: Oh yeah. We throw axes when we go to [inaudible].

01:25:25 Erin: We did last week – last year.

01:25:26 Chris: I wanna do Menti that you can incorporate into your like PowerPoint. I think it's called Menti.

01:25:32 Erin: Yes. We had at FOP Wellness Summit a couple of weeks ago, a gentleman used that and it was so incredible. I'm like, "I don't know why we're not using this." I mean, we have a whole different shtick because we're not doing a lot of polling and things like that, but it's awesome.

01:25:50 Chris: Yeah. I was thinking of trying to figure out a way to include Menti into doing the 10 questions. Cause it's all anonymous. I'm not going to know whose phone it came from and just see if we can – if every conference I go to and I present it, if I can come up with the average number of the room with people that participate. So that might be something you guys might want to do, but then how –

01:26:11 Erin: We have like 1300. 

01:26:24 Chris: So what number are you coming up with? Then, what's your average for first responders? 

01:26:16 Cinnamon: So, I would say that we're looking at almost a 100% as at least one ACE. And then when we're looking at clinically significant, which is a four or above, we're looking more into the 70s, but there have been tests or other studies that show fire is at 86%. Jet pop is 64% and law enforcement is 68%. So, we're assuming that fire is more representative of what police would look like if we took out some of the possible costs of being honest on those. But yeah, maybe Erin can speak more to the average score, but usually what we're looking at is at least one clinically significant seven or above. Those are the three marking points.

01:27:01 Erin: Yeah. And here's what I can tell you because we're allowed to, we realized we get to ask permission because we have results from 1300 different ACEs studies from first responder conferences and everything else. But when we did FOP Wellness Summit and all these people that participated said that we could use their information, 100% of the law enforcement in that room had at least one and 70% had four or more, but it was closer to six, the average of six. So why that is important is because like Cinnamon said, law enforcement is gonna... maybe not be honest about it because of concerns of having special [crosstalk]

Right. Fire is..

01:27:57 Cinnamon: What are they gonna do? Take your hose?

01:27:58 Erin: But we know for a fact, it's parallel at minimum and it's equal because this has been what we've been living and breathing for years. So we will happily sit down and talk to you all day long about numbers and we can show you, I just can't. I'm not gonna announce it on air because we didn't ask permission, darn it.

01:28:20 Cinnamon: Wait. Hang on, time out. I need to leave to go do the thing. We have people waiting for us in the mountains. But I wanted to say one thing before we got off here, because I think it is so critical. You spoke into it, but I want to give like the clinician side of it. When you went to as needed, part of what goes into that is you've been told that you've been a success story and that our interpretation is I'm healed. I'm good. And so, even though we're like, yeah, yeah, let me go. I can go live my life. I can do it. And if it gets sticky again, I'll call back. But that is basically saying I am not good anymore. I was good. And then, I couldn't handle it on my own. 

01:29:10 Cinnamon: And now, I have to pick up this thousand pound phone again. And so, the thing that I do because therapists like to say, "I don't want you to be with me because we want to make you…" Well, like you don't want to be the person as a therapist that's known, my clients are with me for seven, eight years. But in all honesty, you guys aren't done. So why wouldn't you maintain that therapeutic relationship? And the furthest, the longest I will let anyone go is 60 days. And it is with the understanding that is on a permanent schedule, like your next appointment 60 days away is already on the books. 

01:29:48 Cinnamon: So to me, I go into that safety net role. So, it doesn't land on you to have to pick up the phone. It's just it's already on there and you're going to see me. And maybe when you retire, we don't have to do this anymore. But until we can guarantee that you're not possibly picking up dead bodies and brains and children off the road, you might need me again. And so I will maintain that relationship.

01:30:14 Cinnamon: So I would not want to put somebody in the position to have to come back and in their mind, the narrative is "I got well, I was left to my own devices and I failed." So I have people that don't necessarily still go every other week like you're talking about, although I think that's great, but I definitely will not – I don't do more than 60 days just because you're still doing the job.

01:30:41 Chris: Yeah. And a lot of it, even without the job. Just regular family stuff too.

01:30:46 Cinnamon: Yes.

01:30:46 Erin: Thank you. Chris, it was so wonderful. I can't wait till…. now, I'm excited for October for a whole another reason because we'll get to hang out then. So, and get ready. Like we are really bad axe throwers, but we are a really good time.

01:30:58 Chris: Bring your equipment and everything. We can do the podcast there. I know I talked to Jim about it. We were all bullshitting. I guess it was two years ago. Jim, James, [Garon], Brendan was there.

01:21:09 Cinnamon: Nick? Okay.

01:31:11 Chris: We're all just sitting around after dinner in the conference room. This is when he did it at the hotel. Well, yeah, you guys weren't in the hotel last year. Well, we were in there and I ended up telling Jim, I was like, "Damn, we should have had the microphone out now to just record the conversation that we were having." So we've been joking about doing Beaver Creek After Dark. So after we got a dinner that night, you guys need to bring this stuff, do Beaver Creek After Dark and just have a round table discussion.

01:31:36 Erin: Yeah.

01:31:37 Cinnamon: Yes. That sounds..

01:31:39 Erin: We'll do it. I've been really... Cinnamon, you can go. I've been really apprehensive about... Bye, sweetie. Have fun. Doing anything live because I don't have – I know the equipment I need to get to actually make quality be okay. But I'm also like, it took me all these years to get to a place to be able to do what we do now. It took us a year to get the podcast started after it was an idea because I've had to learn everything. So, I say all that to say, now that you've said it, I will rip off the band-aid and get the appropriate things and bring the equipment.

01:32:14 Chris: Well, check with Jim first.

01:32:16 Erin: Yeah.

01:32:16 Chris: Well, actually, hell, it's your own thing. It doesn't matter with him.

01:32:19 Erin: I'm like, I just talked to Jim. Well, yeah. And we're really excited. We love that conference. We love the people. It's too bad you couldn't be there with your bestie Michael last year. 

01:32:32 Chris: Jim's my real bestie, though. 

01:32:34 Erin: Oh. Okay. Sorry, Michael. But we had a lot of fun. It's such a great crowd. So, I'm really excited to hang out with you in real life. But I do wanna say, and mainly because I get to wrap up as well, start getting ready for the kids to come home. Is there anything that you feel like we didn't touch on today? And it always goes a different direction than we originally anticipate, but it's always the most beautiful direction.

01:33:01 Chris: Yeah. Man, I could talk to you guys for a couple more hours, but just to imagine for my firefighter friends out there, this is a firefighter analogy. We talk about the tools and everything that are given to us by therapy. I talked about pen to paper, EMDR, meditation, whatever it may be where we're getting the tools. I know I mentioned about the.. We just graduated 30 recruits last night.

01:33:31 Chris: And so, imagine that recruit, his first day when he reports to me at the firehouse. If I just, I give him a set of what we use in the fire service of irons, flathead ax and a halogen tool and just say he hadn't been in the academy. They didn't train him right or whatever it may be, but just his very first day in the academy and somebody just gives him a set of tools and says, "Hey, go force that door. Go for a window." You're giving them the tools, but you're not giving him the know how and the know when to use the tools.

01:34:05 Chris: So when we talk behavioral health as therapists and clinicians and doctors, and even just peer support and dumb firefighters like myself are talking about it, don't just tell them the things that they can do, but elaborate on it. Let them know how it can benefit them. Let them know when they should look into using it, how to use it. Give them the resources, but the know how to use those resources, this key thing and just normalize the stuff. We have some of the greatest conversations in the world. I don't know if you've had the opportunity, how often you have had the opportunity to be around kitchen table at the firehouse. That's where we solve the world's problems.

01:24:50 Chris: And two things that we hate in the fire service is change and for things to stay the same, but it's time for a change. And we are, like we've talked about, we're starting to head that way. But I just, I challenge everybody out there that's listening and watched us for the past hour or so, be open minded. For so long, I had been closed minded and everything. Just know that everybody out there has gone through some type of a battle that many of us know nothing about. The two biggest words, the biggest lie in the world, two words. It's not the I do. But it's the I'm fine.

01:35:30 Chris: I was one of those guys. We wear a good mask. So, when you see your brother or sister out there on the hallway at headquarters or the firehouse around in public, wherever it may be. And when you ask them and they say that they're fine, take a second, slow down, take a breath, look them in the eye and just say, "Hey, how are you really doing?" That shows that you truly do. You are open to them. You care about them. You are vested in their wellbeing. And that makes a difference. Almost 100% of the time that I do that with somebody, their answer changes. It's the opening spark of a great conversation when you just show that good human being side that you truly care about their wellbeing. 

01:36:19 Chris: And, I mentioned before, we're great at sniffing out bullshit. Don't bullshit somebody. If you don't care about somebody, if you don't have the time for somebody, dDon't just say, "Hey, how you doing today?" Mean it. Be a good human being. Make the time. We have time. If you go into your phone or your computers and you look at how much time you spend on a daily basis on Facebook or TikTok or whatever social media platform, people are spending hours upon hours out there. Use that time and have human interaction. That's my soap box right there.

01:36:52 Erin: It's a beautiful soap box.

01:36:53 Chris: I started in 2020. I'm sure you're aware. Hopefully most of your listeners are, if not, then they're going to be aware right now. And I'm just going to close with this. I'm not keeping you. But in 2020, I had a crazy idea when I first did my first presentation, it was in the Dallas, Texas area that I wanted to give my personal cellphone number out there to anybody. And I was going to do it at the conference, but I was going to start doing it on my social media. People told me I was crazy for doing that. That people… cause we're pranksters as first responders.

01:37:29 Chris: So, if I'm giving my personal cellphone number out there to first responders, they're going to be prankcalling me or whatever it may be. And I just, I thought about it long and hard and I was like, "I don't care." I was like, "If I can reach,” and this is the Jake Clark thing, and this is before I even knew who Jake was. “What if I could just reach and help make a difference with one person? I would take all the prank calls in the world to help that one person.”

01:37:54 Chris: Now I'm happy to say that I have never been prankcalled by that. That's not an open challenge to anybody. But on the flip side, I've had almost, we're at five years now, have had just shy of 2,500 people reach out to me. I'm getting numerous people on a daily basis, texting me, calling me. Not all of them are struggling or going through stuff. Sometimes people are just calling to pick my brain. Sometimes people just call and just say, "Hey, thanks for what you're doing."

01:38:31 Chris: I had some people in crisis, but I give my disclaimer to everybody when I put my personal number out there, not a clinician, not a therapist, not a doctor. I'm just another first responder that's living. Been through a lot. I'm still living through a lot and I'm prospering. And if I don't have the right answers, whatever, I'll help find the right answers and resources for you.

01:38:54 Chris: And we don't always need to have the right things to say. Sometimes people just need to be heard. And that's the big thing is when people reach out to me, and they're heard, and their feelings are validated, and they know they're not alone. Just know I will always listen til my last breath. I'm always going to be there for each and every one of you. If anybody out there gets my number, reaches out to me, call me. I can relate to you. I'll help in any way that I can. I'd much rather we talk about – I've seen memes or whatever, that when people do pass away, if I would have been successful on March 16th, 2022 and took my life, there would have been so many people there lifting me up and picking me up, my casket up to carry me to my resting spot.

01:39:41 Erin: Yeah.

01:39:42 Chris: Don't wait for that. Be there, be that person that picks up another human being. And I'm not going to say a fellow first responder or whatever, just any human being. It could be a stranger. Just be a good human being. We're all broken. We're all going through something. I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to be on your podcast. I'm just glad to be living life and being a part of other people's lives right now. So, I am extremely, extremely blessed to be able to do what I do each and every day. And thank you. Thank you and Cinnamon.

01:40:19 Erin: Well, you are such a gift to the world and I know that you're making a difference and I'm seeing it out there. And I've also seen your phone number on your posts. So I've watched you walk that walk. And I'm so thankful. I know, I think when you reached out, I said, "You've been on my list for a while now to come on the show." And I'm so glad we finally made it happen. No matter how you got here and please keep doing what you're doing. And obviously your higher power had much bigger plans for you.

01:40:48 Chris: Yeah.

01:40:49 Erin: Yeah. And you're doing it. So I know that we'll, obviously, we're gonna be in contact before October, but I know you're a hugger. So you're getting a hug. So thank you so much.

01:41:08 Erin: Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of After the Tones Drop. We've been bringing you some real mental health insights and we'd love to hear what you think. If you're enjoying this show, take a minute and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. And don't forget, share this podcast with someone who might benefit from it. A big thank you to Whole House Counseling and Novus Home Mortgage for sponsoring today's episode. And a special shout out to Rob Maccabee for writing and producing our show's music.

01:41:37 Erin: Just a quick reminder, After The Tones Drop is here for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for medical or psychological advice. If you're in need of help, please reach out to a mental health professional in your area. For more resources, head over to afterthetonesdrop.com and check out our resources tab. We really appreciate you being a part of this community. Thanks for listening and sharing.