Shoulder to Shoulder Revisited: The First Conversations with Mark Naylor

For the next few weeks we're going right back to where Shoulder to Shoulder began over two years ago, revisiting the first six episodes of the podcast and the conversations that helped shape the series.

These early episodes introduced us to people speaking honestly about lived experience, mental health, recovery, and what peer support really looks like in everyday life.

Listening back now, they still feel just as relevant. The heart of the series has always been the same: people who have been through difficult experiences, sitting alongside others to remind them they are not alone.

In this second episode of Shoulder to Shoulder by With You, we revisit Mark's powerful story of surviving childhood abuse, living with the impact of trauma, and finding hope through recovery.

Mark speaks openly about the lasting effects abuse had on his mental health and the challenges he faced as he grew up. At the heart of the conversation is the role peer support played in his recovery, sometimes through formal support, but often through the understanding, compassion and encouragement of the people around him.

Now working in policing, Mark reflects on how his own lived experience helps him support others facing difficult times, showing how recovery can become a source of strength and connection.

As we look back on the first six episodes, Mark's story is a powerful reminder of why peer support matters and how lived experience can offer hope, understanding and the reassurance that no one has to face life's challenges alone.

Hosted by Cate Munro, Shoulder to Shoulder explores these conversations with peer supporters from all walks of life.

Please note: This episode contains discussions of historical child abuse, which some listeners may find distressing. Listener discretion is advised.

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With-you consultancy: www.with-you.co.uk

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Avia, asta se. Hi Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation with me today. I really appreciate it. Would you like to start by introducing yourself?

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Yeah, hi Kate. Thanks for having me on. My name is Mark. I am a police officer. I've been for 20 odd years. And I do some training in force and outside around shame, sexual abuse. I've got a lived experience of that and of mental health issues as a result of that. And I am a big advocate in getting people to talk, talk about things that have happened to them, to try and remove stigma, to try and remove shame, to try and get people to open up about the difficult things, because it's my experience personally and professionally that the things that we don't talk about are the things that really cause us harm.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Absolutely. I can also relate to that myself. And I've got to say at the outset, it's a real privilege having the opportunity like this to speak with people like yourself, you know, sharing in your lived experience an account of peer support and the power that embodies. So thank you. So Mark, in terms of peer support, how do you define it and what does it mean for you personally?

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Wow, that's a big question. Uh I would define it as somebody with uh a similar background or similar experiences who's able to use that uh commonality to provide any level really of support. And I think often that can be as simple as putting yourself in a position to listen to somebody. And it can be as simple as using a common experience, doesn't have to be the same, but a common experience, a similar experience, to provide somebody with space to open up about what's happened to them, often using something that you've you've experienced or something something that you own, something that you have, uh in order to give a little bit of yourself, which then often allows somebody to give a little bit back and and and open up a little bit about their own experience. Because it's really difficult, it can be really, really difficult to open up about things that are difficult for you, things that have happened, things that are shameful, things that have caused you pain or damage. And and the nub probably for me of peer support is allowing yourself to be somewhat vulnerable so that other people can then be somewhat vulnerable. Yeah. And I could probably talk for an hour, so I'll stop.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

No, I love that. That is such a beautiful definition. And to be honest with you, I find that the whole experience peer-like in a way. You know, we we talk about the power of story sharing and how that can radiate hope. I think hearing stories from people like yourself gives me hope, and hopefully, you know, people listening to this, and that is so powerful. What does it mean for you personally in terms of your own experiences?

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Um I suppose uh a little bit of context. I was abused by a family member when I was eight, and and that went on for over several years, and it was in a place where I was I was removed from my family, so I was staying with uh him and his wife in another country, uh just me. So I was in a particularly vulnerable place, both because of my age, but because of where I was. So that's just a little bit of the context. In coming back, I didn't make any disclosures about what happened to me for for many years. When I did, I was forced into it by a family situation whereby my sister wanted to go and stay with him and and I was concerned about the impact that that would have. So that's just a little bit of the context. So in terms of peerness, in terms of peer support, I don't think I had any, or I don't think I was able to access any when I was a teenager, but I think I recognised that I needed to do that, I needed that support. I recognised that I I had a pretty difficult middle bit in my teens where this was kind of all coming out. And I think that my my first experience was probably trying to use that to help other people, like a lot of people who are damaged, who've experienced trauma, my instinct was to try and do something positive with that, but really didn't have any clue how to do that and was was very much fumbling about. But I would be drawn, I think, to people who I recognised as similarly damaged and try and fix them as a way, probably of trying to access that for myself, but not really understanding that that's what the process was. In retrospect, that's what I'm I'm sure I was doing. So I think I was trying to be a peer for people, but not in a very good way, not in a very accomplished way, and and I hadn't dealt with my own stuff, and that's that's always I think a dangerous prospect when you try and fix other people or provide support for other people when actually what you're doing is deferring your own problems, your own issues, and that's definitely what I was doing, and I think I probably did that for many years really. And then later on, I suppose my first healthy experience of it would be well with my wife, in terms of she's always been the one person, and we've been together since we were teenagers, she's always been the one person I've been able to be properly vulnerable with, and and she's experienced the difficulties of talking about what happened. So she's my peer, she's my age, we have lots of common interests. She fortunately hasn't experienced abuse, but she's still very much provided me with a huge amount of peer support over the years. And then later on in life, as I started my police career, I was able to use my experiences without being particularly adept at it at the beginning and getting better at it, I think, as I worked through my own trauma and getting better and better at it. But I mean, again, for context, I reported this guy a few years after I joined the police and it went to trial uh in in the foreign country where it happened, and I was able to get uh a tremendous amount of exposure as a result of that and and started to begin the process of getting better. And I think that a few years after that I started to have an interest in or a need to do something with the experiences I'd had, and so I wrote a presentation around shame and sexual abuse and started delivering it in force and then externally and I delivered it to various partner agencies and different groups, and I I think that's where it really started to click for me around peer support because I take a lot of questions at the end, and that's been really that's been fascinating, that's been the really interesting bit of it, because that's been where people have been people coming from all different perspectives, but often people who have clearly experienced similar things to me, whether that be abuse or just there's lots of forms of trauma, and I think people with trauma are often very understanding of or recognise trauma in other people, and so yeah, I get a lot of questions around that and how I dealt with it, and I often get people coming up afterwards and making disclosures or wanting to have a conversation or just really understanding that that something in what I've said sparks interest or conversation, and so that process really led me into a more a deeper understanding of it, I think. And then I also do some work in force around traumatic incident debriefs, and that's that's all based around peer support principles, so that's when people undergo a really, really difficult traumatic situation, which obviously people in the emergency services do on a daily basis, weekly basis. And so that's a relatively new thing, you know, that's less than less than five or six years old, I would say. And that's also been really great, seeing really great examples of people coming together in a group and hearing one colleague talk about what it was like when they turned up at the the horrendous accident on the motorway, and then it starts off quite surface level around facts, and then it very quickly people are get that little bit of understanding that it's okay to be vulnerable or the colleagues are vulnerable, and so during and it happens time and time again, people often come in a little bit cynical because that's what we're like, and then you know, half an hour later you've got barley cops who are crying their eyes out quite rightly and getting it off the chest.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

So yeah, that that's been almost like being given permission to let it out.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Being that it's okay, but it's it's a difficult process that because you can't I don't think you can really explain it to people. I I think you can only really experience it, you can only really trust the trust it by by enter entering into it. And I've lost count of the number of people who've been sent there and it is a voluntary process, but people can get sent there. And at the beginning, I used to think that was a really terrible idea, but actually nobody should be forced, and that's made very clear. But there's something about the people who most need support often finding it the hardest to access it, or the more reluctant to access it, and that would be my experience personally, very much so. The times when I've needed support the most have been the times when I've been least likely to seek out.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Me too. Mark, one of the many things that you've said which I've found interesting, is when you were starting to come to terms with what had happened as a teenager, which let's face it, is when things can start to bubble to the surface. There was no peer support as such available that you were aware of. Do you think this is something that would have helped at that point? And is these peer support perhaps worth exploring?

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Really good question. I don't have a ready answer because my initial thought was I was in such a bad state that I'm not sure that a peer would have been the right outlet for me at that stage. But as I say that, I don't know if that's true or not. You have to be resilient, don't you, to be effective as a as somebody who's there as a peer. And whilst I tried to do that, I didn't have the skills or the emotional stability to do it, and I wonder how many people who had those experiences would be at that age, and I suspect not a lot. I don't know whether that's a good idea or not. I certainly needed some support. I certainly needed the ability of somebody to help me unpack what had happened, as I think anybody in that situation does. I am that old that this was all pre-internet, so I I suspect I would have been able to perhaps research things a little bit more easily. Although it's an interesting point, because one of the things that I firmly deeply believe is that the ability to talk through traumatic things is what makes it easier. You know, it's the things we don't talk about that really hurt us, in my experience. But at that stage, and for many years really, I wouldn't have been able to talk about it. Like I couldn't even really think about it. So yes, the act of talking about it would have been helpful, but I'm not sure that that would have ever really certainly in my in my mid-teens, I'm not sure that would have ever really been possible, to be honest. Later on, interestingly, probably as I my older teens and early twenties, I had a real impulse to talk about it, which I recognise now as being a healthy thing, but I didn't understand at all, and I didn't have the correct words to know how to start those conversations. So at that point, it would have been massively helpful, I think, to have been able to talk about it in a peer setting. Yeah. I don't think it would have been useful for me as a 15-year-old. I think it would have been extremely useful for me as a 20-year-old.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Do you think it perhaps should be available to younger people as another tool they can use in coping effectively with mental health challenges?

SPEAKER_01 12:55

I think that it could be really useful, but I think on reflection, I can foresee a danger of putting a lot of vulnerable younger teenagers together to talk about traumatic events because I think that could have something of a reinforcing impact. That's my gut instinct. I don't know that that's true, but that's my instinct. I think probably if you had somebody who had processed it and kind of come out of the other side and was emotionally resilient enough to be there and had some of the skills around active listening and and and being able to respect boundaries, then I think it could be really, really useful. Absolutely. My suspicion is that everybody, no matter what you experience as a trauma, as a 15-year-old, life's pretty complicated. And anyway, I I don't know how easy that would be to facilitate, really.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

Yeah, I get that. I mean at 15 I hadn't even begun to unpack it all. I was only just starting to realise that something wasn't quite right. So, you know, I don't believe it would help me in that situation, but I get that with everything, different approaches suit different people at different times. So Mark, can you tell me a bit about how peer support has impacted your journey of personal growth and recovery or discovery, however you prefer to term it?

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Yeah. So as I've thought about before, my wife's been present throughout, and so is my greatest peer supporter. But then there are parts of my journey because of our relationship, and I suppose my innate need to protect her that it's not impossible to really discuss. And also I think there's something about being able to say difficult things to people who you know are resilient enough to deal with them because they've dealt with them for themselves. So there's something about that element of it, isn't there? I think trauma sometimes speaks to trauma. I have been fortunate over the years to have a couple of friends who are not broken but say badly bent out of shape or have been at times and have kind of come through that. And sometimes the conversation has been in one direction because they've needed support, and sometimes it's been in the other direction. I've got a few friends like that. Probably as I've got older and more au fair with my process and and what's happened, those relationships have become much more level. I'm involved in negotiating as well, so crisis negotiation. So yeah, I spend a lot of time speaking to people who are at the point of suicide or just before the point of suicide. And I think one of the things that I always try and encourage people to think about is that we do get better. And I think the hopelessness that can come from feeling that this is who I am and this is how I'm going to remain for the rest of my life is absolutely devastating for people, and that's another really good example of peer support. And I think I've always been quite reluctant to use my experiences in the police directly with people, but sometimes given a little bit of my experience, not making it about me, because you've always got to be very mindful of that, but given a little bit of an understanding of this is where you are, but it's not necessarily not likely to be where you're going to remain for the rest of your life. That's really powerful. It can be really powerful.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

That's so powerful, isn't it? Because if you don't have hope, you don't have anything.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and that you know, that brilliant Pat Degan Peace, Conspiracy of Hope, the idea that somebody's been through that journey or a similar journey and can come out the end, and you just when you're in a crisis, the idea that someone can say to you in the right way, listen, I've experienced, I think, something similar to what you've experienced, and felt the hopelessness that you're describing to me, but here I am ten years, twenty years later, and I've got a lovely family, and you know, my life's gone in the right direction. I think that can be really, really helpful. Somebody to kind of say there is a way out of this maze, or there can be a way out of this maze. I found my way out of it, and I think that's that can be a really powerful thing.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

Indeed. So, Mark, you deliver your presentation, essentially, your training within the police force and beyond. Thinking about the police specifically, how do you go about building the trust and rapport needed to deliver it effectively?

SPEAKER_01 16:59

Well, I'm a negotiator, and trust and rapport are two of the stages on what the um behaviour change stay away. So we're always trying to get up towards um behavior change, which is at the top, and rapport is down at the bottom, and then trust a bit further up, and and we're always trying to move people towards that. Now, that's often to do with getting them to come away from the edge of a bridge or come back off a top of a car park or whatever, put the knife down and stop hurting themselves. But it's applicable in lots of other situations, and I would say if I can get somebody to sit still long enough, which is a problem sometimes in the emergency services, but if I can get somebody to sit still long enough to start that conversation, then we use active listening in exactly the same way in crisis management and crisis negotiation as we do in the peer support debriefing. And it's about giving people the opportunity, giving people the space, making sure that they understand that you're engaged with them. And that naturally develops that rapport and then it develops trust. And then the behaviour change side of it in terms of the peer support, the behaviour change side of it comes from people who are reluctant to speak, who who don't think they should be there, who don't need any of this. I don't need to talk about this. I've been doing this for 20 years, nothing's ever affected me, which is a massive red flag, obviously. The people who least want to be there are often the people who most need to be there. And so it's about leading people towards allowing themselves to be that little bit vulnerable. Clearly, you can never and should never force people towards it, but but leading them towards it effectively.

SPEAKER_00 18:30

So difficult though, isn't it, Mark? Yeah. It's so difficult trying to get people to be vulnerable. I know from my own experience I find it incredibly hard.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

It it it is, although I've had a lot more success with what you might think of as what I think of perhaps as the passive way of doing it, which is the active listening, which isn't isn't actually that passive, but can feel a bit passive. I've had a lot more success with that than ever I have by the direct, you know, the problem solving. Just doesn't work. It doesn't you can't force people to talk about stuff, nor should you ever really try. But by setting a space up correctly, by giving people the autonomy to choose what they say and how they say it, by holding yourself in check. One of the most important things we've got is effective silence, allowing people to have space to talk.

SPEAKER_00 19:15

For sure. Mark, we talked previously when we had a discussion before this podcast about the way that success is measured in the police force from the point of view of the victim. And uh you've got some really interesting thoughts on this. Would you uh would you care to share those with us?

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Yeah, so uh my own experience of going through the criminal justice system uh reinforces what I've seen as a detective, which is that from a victim's point of view, um success isn't measured by the number of years that an offender gets in prison. And I think that's how we as the police, sometimes as the wider public, that's how we view and define success. So was the person convicted and were they sent away for a long time? And it's not it's not a very useful measure of success in my view. It's not very useful because we often can't influence how that's gonna go. We can do our best to investigate well, but we can't make our jury find somebody guilty and we can't determine what the sentencing guidelines are or how a judge is going to view that particular case. But what we can do, what we can always do as police officers, is use empathy and communication skills to make sure that somebody feels valued and heard. And I think that single point about ensuring a victim has an opportunity to have their say, that's probably the single biggest thing we can do. And I think if we looked at success much more in terms of at the end of the conversation, at the end of the interview with the police officer, at the end of the criminal justice process, whether that be somebody's charged or not charged or or they're found not guilty, or however that goes, if the victim feels like they've had their opportunity to be, then I think that's probably as close to success as you can get in what is often horrific circumstances. It sometimes feels like a lose-life situation because you have to get a victim to talk through what's happened to them, which is in itself can be traumatic, but y it is traumatic. With historic abuse, you've got to often get victims to go through things that have been either suppressed for many years or decades often, or are playing through in their mind on a daily basis, and it's you know that is extremely traumatic by definition. Any victim abuse has by definition lost control, and we have to find ways as as police officers to try and return elements of that control to victims. So I I am really keen to try and get us to to look at what we value as success, and I think often we we leak that towards victims as well. We we can sometimes put it in terms of success and failure, that's whether somebody is charged or convicted. And I and I don't think that's a very good measure of success.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

It runs a lot deeper than that sometimes for the victim, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_01 21:57

It does. And it's not something we have ultimately. Control over whereas we can control whether or not a victim is kept up to date, which is for me, in my experience in the criminal justice system, was the single biggest, most impactive thing. I felt completely well, I was completely out of control when I didn't know what the outcome of a particular investigation was. And it and it doesn't even have to be that complicated, it doesn't have to be that complicated for me. It could be if I had been given a date when I was going to be contacted, and it didn't matter what that contact was about, it could be something really, really simple, like I'm gonna ring you next week because I'm gonna go and speak to a a witness or I'm gonna ring you next week because he's being charged. It didn't make any difference what the context was. Until that officer spoke to me, I found it very difficult to function. I would often just end up in bed with a duvet over my head and have these horrible cyclical thoughts because I had lost control, and the way that I wanted the control to be returned to me was by being kept informed. You know, I've experienced that many times with victims. So the way that we can show that people are being treated fairly and uh valued from a police officer's point of view is around keeping victims updated and making sure that they feel heard.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

That's incredible because you're literally putting your lived experience into action there. So, how are you going about ensuring that this change in culture actually takes place? Are you delivering training, for example? And how far reaching is that?

SPEAKER_01 23:19

So in my force, I deliver a lot of training to new officers, and all new officers get my presentation and sort of try and embed that. I've done a lot of CPD for detectives in my own force, and I've been asked to do it in other forces as well. Um and then I get invited to other other agencies. So I've the NHS sometimes asks me to come and give some stuff, and the fire brigade have, and I've spoken to some magistrates, and it's a privilege to be able to do that. I don't want to make it a crusade because I don't feel like I'm not a crusader. I don't feel like it's my job to change the world at all. But I think and I've got a day job, a lot of my energy goes into my day job, and I wouldn't want to change that. But where I can, where I am able to um to deliver the training where I'm asked, then I will.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

I mean that in itself, Mark, is a kind of peerness, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 24:11

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, I suppose so. Using my experience to try and influence others, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

And how's it received? Are people receptive to what you're trying to do?

SPEAKER_01 24:19

Yeah, I get some um I get some lovely feedback.

SPEAKER_00 24:22

Because as I've been having these conversations, we've often talked about the power of the ripple effect. You know, um you do something, it has a positive impact on people, they then run with it, and so it continues.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

Yeah, y you never know what the impact is uh of of actions are gonna be, do you? So, you know, word of mouth is powerful. I get asked to go to places sometimes and deliver, and I think that shows that what I'm doing is is useful. It's interesting, when I first started doing this, I found it very, very difficult the idea that it would have any benefit to me. I really it was dead distasteful. And like a lot of stuff, when I talk about my own experiences with trauma and things, a lot of it doesn't make any sense once you've been through it. You know, when you're looking at things in retrospect and you think, I can't relate to that now, that seems ridiculous. Because actually this the process of me delivering this presentation and in particular the questions that I get at the end of it, the process of doing that has been massively, massively beneficial to me. I didn't know that it was going to be at the outset, and the idea that it would be useful to me was was very hard to stomach. And I'm not quite sure where that was now, but but as with a lot of things, you know, I've come to terms with that as I've gone through the process of doing it. I think the idea of digging into the recesses of my mind, the difficult, traumatic bits that are hidden behind everything else, the questions that I get, which are sometimes really pointed and really, you know, sometimes the the room goes like they can't believe people who ask that. But I love those questions. They're the really, really useful bits for me.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

You talked about the power of peer support within the pleas, um, in terms of changing the culture around the way that mental health is perceived and challenged. How far reaching do you think this type of training should be, Mark? Because there are so many services I can think of who benefit from this education, health, emergency services, as you alluded to earlier.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

I think the principles of peer support should probably be embedded from school age, and I think they should probably form part of HR understanding because it's proven time and time again in setting after setting that that is one of the most effective ways of minimising harm, stopping the development of PTSD. There's practical examples around keeping people in work who may otherwise have to go off sick. And I'm not talking about forcing people to be in work when they shouldn't be in work. I'm talking about mitigating the impacts of people feeling alone, for example, or feeling like they've got nobody that they can talk to about something difficult. Peer support does all of those things or can do all of those things, and I think it should be business as usual to a large extent. And I think we make it we mystify it as well, we make it really complicated, and I don't think it has to be very complicated. I think there's some really simple fundamental principles that are often just about being a genuinely decent human being, that we mystify it to an extent that it feels inoperable for people. And I don't know, don't really know why we do that. Debriefing is a really interesting one. In my job, getting your staff together after a horrible incident and just saying, right, tell me what happened, that seems fundamental to me. That seems like that's just good supervision. And it's good supervision in the police, it's good supervision in the NHS, it's good supervision in the school, it's good supervision everywhere. And yet, even in my organisation, unfortunately, there are lots of times when it doesn't happen, and I think a lot of that's about we mystify it, we we make it complicated, we think you have to go on a course in order to get people to talk about what's just happened, and it it really couldn't it seems to me like it couldn't be simpler. A lot of the time it's about confidence, I think. A lot of the time it's about a supervisor feeling like they don't have the power or the experience, or they're worried about opening that box, they're worried about asking somebody because oh, what happens if they melt into a puddle of jelly in front of me? What am I going to do then? I've been called in on rest days to debrief people after a difficult incident. And I'm not talking about a formal debrief, I'm talking about getting people in a room to say what's just happened. Now we've moved on quite a bit from then, but that's an illustration of where people lack a lot of confidence around really simple basic communication skills, and that's all that it is. Because I would say peer support and active listening and debriefing are all very simple. I mean they can be immensely complicated, of course, but they're very simple in principle and they should be embedded everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

Sometimes I think when we've become so shackled by admin rules and regulations, we kind of lose that.

SPEAKER_01 28:50

Yeah, we can. And clearly, peer support in a mental health setting is rather than only important and needs to be very well structured and very well understood, and training's really written, and supervision are massively important. But peer support goes from that end of the spectrum to the very, very simple end of the spectrum of simple things that I say to people. If you're gonna ask your colleague, are they okay? don't do it in a room full of cops. Because it doesn't matter how they feel, they're gonna tell you that they're okay, and that's just you know, historically, bad supervision looks like walking into the parade room and saying, Is everybody alright after that horrible thing we dealt with last night? You know, the person who's collapsing in the corner having a mental health crisis is gonna tell you that they're okay. And it's a very simple thing to just check in with people one-to-one, but it's often overlooked.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

100%, Mark. 100%. I've got a final few questions for you today, if you don't mind. Um and the first one is this where would you be now in your life without peer support?

SPEAKER_01 29:45

That's quite a difficult question to answer. It's woven so tightly throughout my life, particularly the last ten years or fifteen years, that I don't know that I would be the person who I am had it not been for peer support. So it's very difficult for me to understand that. If I take it back further, if I include my wife, who I think is my greatest peer supporter, then I'm pretty confident I wouldn't be alive. I I'm pretty confident I'd I'd have taken my own life. I can say with a fair amount of certainty, I'd have probably wouldn't be here. So yeah, on on that level, peer support is I'm gonna sound melodramatic. If I'm gonna sound so melodramatic, I'm not even gonna say it, but peer support is is uh integral to my life.

SPEAKER_00 30:23

Nothing melodramatic about it. I think it's incredible. So what's your biggest achievement, Mark?

SPEAKER_01 30:29

I think my greatest achievement is probably um dragging myself with help, but dragging myself from somebody who felt like I was broken and should remove myself from this world into a functioning husband and then father and then police officer who gets to help people and and investigate the most horrendous things and that makes victims feel valued. And I've got a folder of emails that I keep, and you know, if I'm ever having a really bad day, I go and have a look at the victim who says, you know, thanks for the work that you've done, and then relates it to their personal experience. That's probably my greatest achievement, is is going from that person who who I felt very strongly shouldn't be around to being able to have that kind of an influence.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

That is an amazing achievement. Mind-blowing. And I really mean that on a personal level from me to you. Gotta get quite emotional doing this. Okay, Mark, final question for today. Who's your biggest inspiration?

SPEAKER_01 31:35

Oh, I've got a doubt. Yeah, I mean I could go on all day, but it's a dead simple answer now.